Chapter 58. Geology in the Library

[Note that chapter 57 was published out of order. It should have immediately preceded this post.]

I usually commuted into Manhattan on the bus, then walked from the Port Authority Bus Terminal on the West Side over to Lexington Ave. to catch the subway up to 87^th. The midtown branch of the New York Public Library was only a block off my route and sometimes I stopped in. This branch was across the street from the grand, classic building with the lions out front. Because of this proximity and the fame of the New York City Public library I envisioned floors and floors of thousands of books. It turned out the library was just the fourth floor of the building, but their magazine collection included a couple of scientific journals published by the Geological Society of America. 

 

Among Adventists who respected science, conventional wisdom had it that radiometric dating was the greatest challenge to the church’s traditional understanding of earth history. We could work with stratigraphy and paleontology. Biology was on our side. But radiometric dating posed utterly unanswerable questions. Even Robert Brown, a physicist and the Adventist expert on radiometric dating, essentially said there were no plausible young earth creationist explanations of the available evidence from radioisotopes. He was sure that some day we would find a way to harmonize the scientific data with the Bible’s story of a six-day creation six thousand years ago. But so far, he had not found it and did not know where to look for it. But his skepticism was exceptional. Generally, Adventists who addressed the issue assured us that the scientific consensus regarding radiometric dating was largely a result of academic group-think, anti-God bias and circular reasoning. Scientists needed “deep time” to accommodate evolution. Fossil assemblages were used to assign putative ages to formations. Then those ages were used to correlate radiometric data with ages in years. Then radiometric data was used to assign putative ages to other rocks and fossils. There were huge questions about when and how radiometric “clocks” were set to zero. And contamination of samples was a constant problem. So really, we who believed in a recent creation had no need to be intimidated by the apparently scientific certainty of radiometric dating.

At first, my reading in geology journals confirmed the Adventist cavils about radiometric dating. Making sense of the scientific jargon, math and charts in articles on radiometric dating was a challenge, but one thing was perfectly clear: The authors of these scientific articles strongly disagreed with each other. They derived widely varying ages for the same formation. Different teams of geologists disputed the conclusions of other teams and questioned their sampling techniques. They argued that divergent dates were the result of contamination of samples or erroneous assumptions about when the atomic clocks were reset. There were long discussions of how the initial data was “corrected” to yield a plausible date.

It was all just as I had read in Creationist literature. Given the enormous amount of manipulation required to convert initial data into a “date,” I could easily imagine how systematic philosophical bias could affect the outcomes. The complicated, convoluted processes of deriving putative dates from radioactive decay in the rocks stood in stark contrast to the simple, elegant work of Gentry. (See Chapter 38.) Still, the longer I read, the more a nagging question intruded. Were all these scientists really just be playing a game in support of a pre-established dating system? Were they dishonestly committed to a system that distorted earth history? Was their belief in the great antiquity of the fossil record merely a device to shield themselves from moral constraint and a sense of accountability to God? Were they all deluded? Did their work actually tell them nothing about earth history?

One striking difference between scientific and creationist literature jumped out at me: In creationist literature, all the problems were on “the other side.” Creationists had tidy, coherent explanations. They presented their conclusions as “no-brainer” deductions from unambiguous evidence. Creationists constantly cited the disagreement among scientists as evidence of the weakness of the conventional scientific conclusions.

In scientific literature, however, the scientist themselves pointed out problems within their field. Geologists argued with each other. They disputed the dates published by competing research teams, questioned methods of data collection and analysis. Given the constant ferment among scientists, I didn’t see how they could maintain an illusory system forever, especially a system that required collusion across all kinds of fields of study.

Sure, scientists worked within a system. Everything interlocked—stratigraphic relationships and radiometric dates, protein racemization and dendrochronology, ice cores and varves. At first glance, the arguments among scientists resembled the arguments of theologians. But there were two huge differences: The scientists did not threaten each other with damnation. Vastly more significant, their arguments were constantly influenced by new data. They were not doing eternal meta-analysis on the same data set. The scientific consensus actually moved forward. It changed linearly across time (over against the endless cycles of theological invention and reinvention on the themes of divine and human nature, grace and obedience, form and Spirit).

While browsing the library’s limited collection of books on geology I came across a small book titled, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record. In it Derek Ager, a professor of geology at University College in Swansea, U.K., ridiculed the notion that Noah’s flood could have produced the geologic column, then proceeded to demolish with equal glee the bedrock principle of classic geology–uniformitarianism.

Every science textbook I had ever read–if it mentioned geology at all–honored the work of James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Their research in the middle 1800s in Great Britain led them to conclude that we best understand the history of landforms by studying the rates and forces operative in our world today. “The present is the key to the past.” How long did it take for the Mississippi delta to form? Go measure current rate of deposition at the mouth of the river and extrapolate backward (taking into account, of course, the effect of farming and other human factors).

Creationists constantly attacked uniformitarianism. They cited multiple examples of catastrophe in the geologic record. Catastrophism and creationism were synonymous. But here was a professor of geology at a secular institution arguing against uniformitarianism. And the instances he cited were incontrovertible. They were not obscure relics found by preachers and amateur geologists. The great Red Wall formation in Grand Canyon is 400 to 500 feet of massive limestone. There is no modern exemplar for the formation of massive limestone, but the Red Wall is incontrovertible evidence that once upon a time it did form. In India, the Deccan Plateau is formed by two-thousand-foot-thick lava flows covering more than 500,000 square kilometers. While we observe contemporary volcanoes and lava flows, nowhere is there anything like this kind of magnitude. What obviously happened is no longer happening. The present is not the key to the past, at least not in a straight-line fashion. Professor Ager went on to cite other examples–the formation of coal, sandstone and fossils. In each case, there is no modern correlate for what we see in the geologic record.

Like the journal articles about radiometric dating, Ager’s book confirmed the assertions of Creationists–there are problems in conventional geology. He even invoked the ultimate Creationist term, catastrophe. Instead of a long, gradual, steady evolution of landscape, the geologic history of the earth is like the life of a soldier–long periods of boredom interrupted by brief moments of terror.

Ager acknowledged Creationists would cite his work in support of Noah’s flood and other elements of their young earth theories. But, he argued, this was no excuse for geologists to ignore the strong evidence of their own discipline. Classic uniformitarianism could not withstand close scrutiny. It was time to let it go and move on.

At first I was greatly heartened by Ager’s book. The examples he cited were major, observable geological features. There was nothing obscure about the Grand Canyon Red Wall or the lavas of the Deccan Plateau. And these rocks supported the Creationist argument that the past was radically different from the present. We can not deduce the age of upstream erosional features by studying the present sediment load of the Mississippi River.

But like the journal articles on radiometric dating, Ager’s book ended up eroding one of the bedrock assumptions of Creationism–that scientists hide contrary evidence. Reading his book, I was reminded of something I had noted before: Creationists did not discover problems with conventional geology, they simply presented in popular form problems scientists themselves freely acknowledged. Far from ignoring these problems, scientists–at least some of them–embraced anomalies, discordance between theory and data, as the loci of their research. The Creationist position appeared increasingly tenuous.

About this time, I attended a minister’s meeting at Camp Berkshire. It was held in the same building where Robert Gentry had presented his lecture on pleochroic haloes. The featured speaker at the meeting was H.M.S. Richards, Jr. the speaker/director of The Voice of Prophecy. The Voice of Prophecy was a national radio program with great prestige among Adventists.

At one point in his presentation he issued a strong challenge: if we as ministers could not wholeheartedly, unreservedly affirm the traditional Adventist teaching about the age of the earth, we should have the integrity to resign. We had no business taking a pay check from a church we disagreed with.

I was devastated. I was not ready to believe life on earth was five hundred million years old. But neither could I still affirm without qualification that all of life originated six thousand years ago. I wondered if our conference president agreed with Elder Richards. I imagined walking into Elder Kretschmar’s office and offering him my resignation. I hoped he would disavow what Elder Richards had said. I hoped he would explain that Elder Richards spoke for himself, not the entire church. I needed someone to know about my questions and say it was okay. I needed someone to tell me it was okay to be an Adventist and a geochronological agnostic. I wanted to remain a Seventh-day Adventist pastor. But the cognitive dissonance was becoming unbearable.