Reflections on Geologic Time, How the Debate Started

In Kentucky, issues and discussions related to separation of Church and State seem De rigueur. In public school classrooms, statutes require the Bible to be read (KRS 158.170), the Lord's Prayer may be recited as a reminder of the Freedom of Religion (KRS 158.175), and there is a right to include creationism when evolution is taught (KRS 158.177). More recently, Gov. Beshear announced the grant of tax incentives to developers of an Ark Encounter park next to the Creation Museum, both associated with the the ministries of Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis. There is a bill making its way through the current regular session of the General Assembly that would require the development of an elective social studies Bible literacy class in public schools. (The bill has passed the Senate and is assigned to the House Education Committee as of 2/14). The potential constitutional issues of the statutory provisions are addressed by allowing students to elect to be silent or excluded, but to the best of my knowledge, there has been no First Amendment challenge in the courts. Beyond pointing out that my position is strongly in favor of separation of Church and State, my purpose is not to argue the constitutionality (or rationality) of these issues here. My inte3nt is to take a historic look at geologic time.

As western civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, questions of the origin of the Earth and life were hotly debated among the cognoscenti. No answers beyond Biblical were required. God created the Heavens and Earth in 6 days, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, and there was a global flood. Bishop James Ussher made a scholarly examination of the Bible and manuscripts available at the time and published his Biblical chronology in 1650. This chronology, published in the gutter between the columns of the printed Bibles, has become the cornerstone of the argument that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. The answer to two pressing questions would lead to the emergence of geology as a science and the dismantling of the Biblical account:

• What are fossils?
• How did they get to the tops of mountains?

In his notebook now known as the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) contemplated the answer to those questions. It was pretty obvious that the shells in the rocks resembled shelled creatures living in the sea and some people advanced the proposition the creatures had lived in the rocks. Da Vinci observed that the shells were of multiple sizes and exhibited growth lines. He argued they could not grow without food nor could they move in rock to get food. He also observed that if there were a worldwide flood, there would be nowhere for the water to go when it receded, that the shells would have been carried and mixed up in a single muddy deluge and not deposited in regular steps and layers, and that rains and floods would carry fossils downhill and away from mountaintops and land. Leonardo described oysters and corals and considered it impossible that a single flood could have carried them 300 miles inland. Leonardo concluded that the fossils were once living organisms that had been buried at a time before the mountains were raised.

As an aside, Bill Gates purchased the Codex Leicester and through one of his companies, Corbis, a multi-media CD-ROM for exploring the Codex was published. Unfortunately, that CD has been out of print for several years, but it might be found at local public libraries. I don't know whether it still runs on current computers.

A conclusive demonstration that fossils were once part of living organisms didn't occur until Nicholas Steno (1638-1686) examined the triangular stony objects found on the island of Malta called glossopetra (tongue stones). These stones had been known since antiquity; Pliny the Elder concluded they fell from the sky. Steno was a Church educated anatomist and dissectionist who had the opportunity to study the carcass of a large shark. Steno concluded they looked like shark's teeth because that was what they were. The stones had been buried in mud and sand at the bottom of seas that were now dry land. The Seashell on the Mountaintop is a wonderful read about Steno's life and discoveries.

Steno's investigations of layered (sedimentary) rocks led him to set forth three guidelines he first proposed in Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid (published 1669). The application of these principles became foundational to the science of geology:

• The Law of Superposition states that in an undisturbed sequence of rocks a layer is younger than the rocks it lays upon and older than those that rest upon it. (This ordering in sedimentary rocks is a consequence of the Laws of Gravity)
• The Principle of Original Horizontality states that rocks composed of sediment (particles) were deposited in essentially flat layers.
• The Principle of Lateral Continuity states that rock layers are continuous and can be correlated across valleys and underground.

Using superposition, Steno was able, for example, to distinguish the top from the bottom of individual layers even if the rocks were folded and overturned as is often the case in mountain ranges. Like da Vinci, Steno didn't know how the mountains had been raised. But like Thomas Burnet (1635-1715) in Sacred Theory of the Earth (published 1681) and William Whiston (1667-1752) in New Theory of the Earth (published 1696), probably Steno would have cited Gen 7:11.

Natural science (geology hadn't emerged as a separate discipline) was now firmly set on the path of systematic investigations that would result in powerful, evidence-based answers to the questions.