Chapter 59. Rocks in my Hand

In 1987, the Association of Adventist Forums (AAF) advertised a three-week geology field trip through the classic geology landscapes of the West. The red-rock country of Utah, the Green River Basin in Wyoming, Yellowstone National Park, Colorado. I wanted to go. But, of course, it was impossible. It would cost a lot of money. It would be selfish to take a three week vacation and leave Karin home with the kids.

 

The people leading the field trip included the scientists whose work I had read in Spectrum, an independent journal published by Adventist intellectuals. These scientists were infamous for their questioning of the church’s belief in a recent creation. Looking at the rocks under their tutelage was not calculated to increase my confidence in a short chronology. But I was already in too deep. I needed to continue exploring geology. I had to examine more evidence. Rocks were a siren beckoning irresistibly. I was lashed to the mast of Adventist orthodoxy by my unshakeable conviction that I had been called into the ministry by God. But the siren call of the rocks was a soul-bending lure. Besides, a trip to the Intermountain West was a tantalizing draw. I loved the West as much as I loved the City. I finally mentioned my interest to Karin.

 

“Do you really want to go?” She asked.

“Yeah. I would.”

“Then I think you should go.”

Her encouragement surprised me. “Well, I don’t know. It costs a lot. And what would you do with the kids?”

“We’ll figure something out. I’ll see if Mama can come up and stay with me while you are gone.”

 

Mama and Papa agreed to come, so I registered for the trip. A few weeks later, one of the trip organizers called and asked if I would consider car-pooling with a Japanese family. Mark was a physicist. He would be bringing his wife and eight-year-old son. They would be flying in from Tokyo and couldn’t afford the additional cost of renting a car for three weeks. It sounded like a great idea. I imagined engaging conversations as we drove.

 

I picked up Mark and Keiko Abe and their eight-year-old son at JFK, and we headed west, driving non-stop, trading off driving. Our conversations were slow and halting. Mark’s English was good enough for reading scientific journals in his field but barely adequate for conversation. His wife’s English was less. My Japanese was, of course, zero. We joined the AAF group in Green River, Utah, for the launch of the tour.

 

Days were spent examining evidence in the field. Evenings occasionally included lectures. The presenters included the stars of liberal Adventist thinking on earth history–Richard Ritland, Ed Hare, Ed Lugenbeal–laughingly referred as the GRI alumni.

 

The Geological Research Institute (GRI), is a church-funded office devoted to cataloging and disseminating scientific evidence in support of the Church’s views on earth history. Ritland, Hare and Lugenbeal were some of the first scientists hired. According to others on the trip, the original mission of GRI included a mandate to help the Church honestly examine the scientific evidence. Their research increasingly compelled these men to question a recent creation. There was a change in the presidency of the Church. The new president wanted support for the official teachings of the Church not questions. Ritland, Hare and Lugenbeal were forced out. Hare became a leading researcher in amino acid racemization dating. He had begun his research thinking this dating method would provide evidence of a recent creation. It didn’t. Lugenbeal moved into college administration where his views on earth history could be hidden. Ritland retired. They remained the darlings of Adventist intellectuals.

 

None of the then-current scientists at GRI was on the trip. According to the organizers, they had been invited, but had been pressured by their superiors not to lend legitimacy to the trip by their presence.

 

The GRI alumni and others lectured on the evidence that was inconsistent with a recent creation. There were conglomerates that included fossils in shale cobbles within the conglomerate. This meant that erosion had to lay down a layer of silt. Then animals or plants had to die and get buried in the silt. Then the silt had to turn into stone (shale beds). Then the shale beds had to be uplifted so they could be eroded into small round stones. These small round stones then had to be gathered into a basin and cemented together into conglomerate.

 

The dominant view among Recent Creationists was that all significant geologic activity–the formation of the great fossiliferous sedimentary layers–happened during the one year of Noah’s flood. How could we fit the processes required to form fossils inside cobbles inside layers of conglomerate into a single year?

 

On the other side of coin were fossil fish. Nowhere in the world do we observe fish becoming fossils. When a fish dies, scavengers and bacteria reduce it to a disarticulated skeleton within a matter of days. But in the Green River Formation there are tens of thousands, maybe millions of beautifully-preserved fossil fish. How could these fish have been preserved if they were buried in the normal process of siltation in a lake. Long before they were buried–much less indurated–their flesh would have been scavenged and their bones scattered.

 

We visited an outcrop of the Green River Formation where we were guided by Paul Bucheim, an Adventist graduate student doing research in the formation. The fish in the Green River Formation are cited by Creationists as evidence against long ages. There is no contemporary example of fish turning into fossils. Turning millions of fish into fossils was evidence that something unusual happened. Maybe that something was Noah’s Flood.

 

One reason Green River fish fossils are so famous is the ease of finding them. The fish are found in rock composed of thin layers of fine-grained sandstone, marlstone and shale. When the rock is split along these layers, often you find fish perfectly displayed on the plane that separates two layers. Standard geology interpreted these layers as varves–annual layers of sediment deposited in a lake by the ebb and flow of the seasons.

 

Creationists argue these layers were deposited by the Flood. Bucheim and his colleagues had identified over one thousand layers. Many of these layers displayed not only fossils of dead fish, but also bird tracks and other distinctive marks left by birds feeding in the mud. There was even fossilized bird poop. How could there have been time during the flood to deposit a layer carbonate-rich mud, have birds come and walk around and feed and poop, then wash in another layer of mud and repeat the whole process–a thousand times over? Even if each layer did not represent a full year, even if a new layer was deposited every day, it just didn't make sense in the context of Noah's flood.

 

The Green River Formation covers an area of more than 25,000 square miles and averages about 2000 feet in thickness. The massive scale of the formation lends itself to pictures of a world-wide flood sweeping the continent. But the fossilized bird tracks, bird poop and eggshell fragments are far better explained by less catastrophic models. Then there was the fact that beneath the Green River Formation was another 25,000 feet of sedimentary rock, all of which would have had to be deposited during Noah’s flood before the Green River fish could begin their process of turning into fossils.

 

We faced similar arguments in connection with the “fossil forest” of Yellowstone National Park. In Yellowstone, petrified trees are preserved in layers of volcanic ash. Conventional geological interpretation saw each layer as a life surface. An ash layer would be deposited. Over time the surface of this layer would be populated by trees. Eventually, another ash layer would be deposited. This would kill the trees growing on the layer below and the process would begin all over again. You could calculate the total age of the formation by adding together the age of the oldest trees in each layer. And some of the trees were huge and old. Using this dendrochronology, the formation was determined to be about 40,000 years old. It seemed like a straight-forward approach to dating. Clearly it did not fit into a six-thousand-year earth history.

 

However, before the trip I had read an article by Harold Coffin. He argued the layers did not represent growth horizons, but instead had been transported into place by water. Unlike many Creationists, he had done actual research, spending a couple of seasons in the field. His article included photographs of very large trees rising through several ash layers. If, in fact, the layers were growth horizons, this would mean these tree had remained alive for thousands of years through catastrophic volcanic eruptions. They continued to grow even after their trunks had been engulfed in many feet of superheated volcanic ash. No tree that we know of today could live in such circumstances. Coffin examined root structure on the fossil trees and the putative soil horizons surrounding them. He studied patterns of breakage, orientation of the long axes of trees that weren’t round, the plant detritus preserved around the trees. He even conducted lab tests on trees to see if uprooted trees would float vertically or horizontally if they spent weeks or months floating in flood waters.

 

Coffin made a strong case against the conventional interpretation. These trees had not grown here over a 40,000-year period. Rather they had been transported by mudflows or floods.

 

On our trip, Ritland poked fun at Coffin because on a field trip sponsored by GRI, Coffin had dragged participants great distances to show them two or three trees that penetrated multiple layers of rock. Most visible trees were contained in a single layer, Ritland said. Why traipse all over creation to find the few anomalous cases. But I couldn’t help thinking that science was advanced precisely by observing exceptional cases that did not fit current orthodoxy. Keen observation of anomalies forced the reexamination of theories. Why mock a scientist who highlighted data that did not fit the current explanatory model?

 

It seemed to me Ritland was doing exactly what Creationists accused most scientists of doing: ignoring the data that did not fit his model. I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a former student of Ritland. She described the interaction between Ritland and a younger scientist in a seminar on origins. Ritland had talked in broad, general terms about the weight of evidence against a recent creation. The other scientist cited specific articles and particular data that countered Ritland’s broad assertions. Sure there was evidence for a long history of life. But there was counter evidence as well. It seemed to her the younger geologist was more honestly confronting the data.

 

If Ritland, and other scientists on the tour were overwhelmingly biased, then perhaps I could take their assertions with a grain of salt. Maybe I could hold on to what the Bible said about six thousand years – maybe stretch it to perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 or even 10,000. But certainly I didn’t have to believe life had existed on earth for hundreds of millions of years.

 

One incontrovertible fact was the geographic distribution of animals. Most of the marsupials (animals with pouches) in the world today live in Australia–kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, wombats, koalas. If all animals in the world descended from ancestors that rode Noah’s Ark, why did almost all the marsupials head straight to Australia? If there was only one pair of marsupials on the Ark, how could those two have possibly ramified into all the species extant in Australia today in less than 4000 years?

 

It seemed far easier to explain the geographic distribution of living animals and fossils on the basis of conventional paleontology than by the story of all animals coming off a single boat 4000 years ago. (Which reminds me of a conversation I had once with a GRI scientist about this issue. I asked if GRI had considered the notion that perhaps there were other “Arks.” Noah's just happened to be the only one mentioned in Genesis. He got excited and dragged me into another office to repeat my suggestion to someone with more knowledge of the biblical/theological side of the debate. I was flattered to be taken seriously. I also thought his reaction was a measure of how challenging biogeography is to young earth creationism.)

As we were hammered with more and more evidence of problems in the standard Creationist model of origins, Mark became increasingly agitated. When he had joined “an obscure Protestant sect” as a teenager, his parents were deeply offended. In the face of their objections he had resolutely followed the teachings of the Bible, especially regarding the Sabbath. All the way through college and graduate school he had maintained his confidence in the literal historicity of Genesis. Now he was listening to Adventist scientists and even Adventist theologians question the very bed rock of his faith. I talked about it to Dr. Ritland. Why had they encouraged people like Mark to come? It was disturbing enough for people like me, but at least I had been reading Spectrum for years. I knew Adventist scientists had questions. I knew what I was going to hear on this trip. But Mark had come expecting to hear the standard Adventist defense of a recent creation. Instead he was losing his faith.

 

Dr. Ritland told me Mark had insisted on coming. They had cautioned him he would hear controversial content. Still he insisted. He said he was a scientist. He needed to examine the evidence for himself.

We visited a moraine in southern Colorado. It was easy to imagine its history. We could see the mountain valley the glacier had descended. When the climate had been colder or wetter (or both) a glacier had pushed down out of the mountains and left a perfectly shaped crescent terminal moraine. We hiked over to where a stream cut through the moraine and Dr. Ritland described what we were seeing. Instead of a single moraine, we could see two very distinct layers. Dr. Ritland explained that these layers represented two different advances of the glacier. And he pointed out that there was enough time between the deposition of these two depositions that the granite cobbles in them had weathered very differently. In the top layer, the cobbles were smooth and hard. You could see their round shapes protruding from the opposite bank where the stream had eroded away the softer matrix surrounding them.

 

The lower layer was dramatically different. While some large rocks stuck out from the stream-cut bank, many other rocks, six to twelve inches in diameter looked like they had been cut off flush with the bank. Dr. Ritland said this difference in appearance was because the granite cobbles in the lower level were rotten. They were so soft that when stream cut down through the moraine, it cut through the small boulders instead of cutting around them. That sounded crazy to me. Granite rotting? From where we were standing, it did look like some of the granite cobbles had been cut, but others were clearly sticking out from the bank. I climbed down into the stream bed, hopped across the creek and poked at rocks. The stream had carved a vertical twenty-foot tall bank. The line between the two morainal deposits was distinct. And to my amazement many of the granite cobbles in the lower deposit were so soft I could crumble them with my fingers. All of the cobbles in the upper bank were round and hard.

 

My head spun. How long did it take granite to rot? How much time must have passed between the deposition of these two layers so that in one the granite cobbles were smooth and hard and in the other they were gritty and crumbly? Manhattan was full of granite. Granite facades on buildings. Granite steps on the front of grand buildings, granite paving stones on cobble stone streets. I thought of the steps of the post office on Eight Avenue. The edges on the steps were worn in places, but there was no hint of rot. In places in New York granite treads had been in place for maybe two hundred years. The millions of footsteps had worn it, eroded it, in two hundred years there was not a hint of rot!

 

I had heard Creationist theories that allowed for a short ice age immediately following Noah’s flood–maybe a couple hundred years at the most. But this did not make sense as I stood there crumbling rotten granite with my fingers. The difference between solid and rotten granite was not complicated like radiometric dating. It did not require me to trust anyone else's word about where it had been found or how old it was. I had pulled it from its matrix myself. I had observed its stratigraphic situation with my own eyes. This granite breaking into sharp, angular fragments in my own hands screamed more time, more time.

Our tour ended in Yellowstone National Park with a weekend of worship and lectures in the village of West Yellowstone. Friday afternoon I went out to eat with a young biologist. He ordered a hamburger, I ordered an avocado and sprouts sandwich. When the food came, he grabbed his hamburger and began to wolf it down. I paused, offered a silent prayer then attacked my sandwich with similar vigor. After we had eaten a few bites, I looked at him and said, “Bill you forgot the human part of eating your sandwich.”

 

“What do you mean, the ‘human part’ of eating. God made cows for people to eat.”

 

I laughed. “I’m not talking about what you’re eating. I’m talking about how you’re eating. There’s no difference between your approach to that sandwich and my dog’s approach.”

 

He did not understand what I was getting at, but since I was laughing, he was not yet offended. “The human part of eating is stopping to say grace. That’s what turns food, metabolic input, into a meal, into communion, even.”

 

He grunted through another bite, and nodded, grudgingly conceding my point.

The worship Friday night and Sabbath morning felt thin and dry to me. It seemed to me Adventist liberals had a diminished capacity for wonder and delight. They were so cerebral, so polemical they appeared incapable of rich spiritual experience. Articles by Stephen J. Gould, the Harvard evolutionary biologist, often evinced a warmer, more human engagement with the magic of nature than did the writing of these Adventist academics. Whatever the actual age of the fossils, full-orbed human life required gifts and capacities not very evident at this conference. There was some music but it was all rather cool classical music. There was no fire. No temptation to dance.

 

Then came Sabbath afternoon. Richard Hammill, a retired president of Andrews University, spoke. He talked of his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. He had noted at the time, the similarity between the order of creation in Genesis One and the language of Psalm 104. He knew–because he was an Adventist–that Genesis One had been written by Moses about 1450 B.C. and that the Psalms were written later. But in the years since he had retired he had had opportunity to go back and study further. And he had come to the conclusion that the similarities between these two passages was best explained by the view that Psalm 104 was written first. Whoever wrote Genesis One (and it certainly was not Moses) had obviously been influenced by Psalm 104. Genesis One, far from being a rational, scientific history was a poetic, worshipful celebration of the God of creation. Using Genesis One as textbook of geology was missing the pint entirely.

 

As he reached the climax of his presentation he choked up. The atmosphere in the room was electric. The audience was astonished by his confession. They admired his courage in publicly breaking with the official church position. But there was anger as well. Many in the room had either lost jobs or had friends who lost jobs in purges of the University faculty while Hammill had been president. They could understand Hammill not publicly voicing his skepticism about Genesis One as geology. But as president, he could have worked to shield his faculty from the zeal of the reactionary church president. Instead, he had given every appearance of full cooperation.

 

It was the one time in the entire conference when genuine emotion showed itself. I was not overly impressed with Hammill’s arguments regarding the dating of Genesis. It was back to the “assured results of scholarship” which in textual criticism usually means venerated scholarly conjecture. Textual criticism is often a brilliant, logical superstructure erected on the tiniest shreds of evidence. The fact is we don’t have any documentary evidence for the Hebrew scripture before the Babylonian captivity. There are elaborate theories about how the Bible text must have developed over time. But they are like theories of pre-biotic evolution–strong assertions in the absence of physical evidence. These assertions are supported by appeals to authority not data. Believe it because we [the community of experts] have told you so. This scholarly hubris is safe because no data is available to challenge it. Even in the face of a deeply emotional confession by a notable church scholar and administrator, I was not willing to resist ecclesiastical authority merely to yield compliantly to the academy.

The conference continued on Sunday, but I had had enough. I wanted to get home. We left Saturday night and drove straight through to New York.

 

The long hours driving were filled with bewilderment. The scientific evidence was compelling. The rocks spoke of much more time than could be accommodated by any appeal to ancient textual variants. Sure, there were all sorts of problems in conventional geology. And maybe some day someone investigating those problems would find a new scientific explanation of the cosmos that was congruent with a literal reading of the Bible. But right now, the evidence for long ages seemed irrefutable. The only way to believe in a young earth was to consciously disregard the preponderance of evidence.

 

How could I continue as an Adventist preacher when I no longer truly believed the teachings of my church. Oh, to be sure, if I were interrogated about my beliefs, I could honestly say I did not believe life was hundreds of millions of years old. That is I wasn’t absolutely certain life was old–not in the way that as a fifteen year old I had been certain life was only six thousand years old. I still hoped somewhere, some time evidence would be found that would overturn the entire edifice of conventional geology. But I strongly suspected the only reason I did not believe standard geochronology was because I was a leader in a community where that idea was unbelievable.

In one respect, the trip had been very disappointing. I had hoped for time to visit the scientists whose articles I had read in Spectrum magazine. I envisioned sitting around at meals talking about my questions and my bewilderment with people who would understand. But the group did not eat meals together. Most of the people on the trip were old friends. I was younger by ten years than most and a stranger. I found connecting socially very difficult.

 

I did manage to get an hour in a van with Peter Hare while Mark drove my car. Dr. Hare was a leading authority on one method of dating rocks with fossils in them (amino acid racemization). His research documented millions of years of fossil history. But he was also the head elder of his local congregation. When I heard him pray publicly, it did not sound like an act or mere, empty formality. He was genuinely devout, even though he was hopelessly heterodox when it came to geochronology. I was eager to talk with him about my perplexity.

 

It didn’t work. There were others in the car. I was an intruder. Dr. Hare and I talked briefly, superficially, in the small spaces between other conversations. At the next stop I transferred back to my car. Disappointed.

 

But I took with me a vivid picture of a man in whom faith and science lived quite happily together–even though he was fully persuaded life was hundreds of millions of years old and his church taught six thousand years. If he could be happily at home in the church, perhaps there was room for me, too.