While helping at a science outreach booth for a local county fair recently, I became engaged in exactly the joust I had hoped to avoid. A group of young Earth creationists who also had a booth—complete with a poster describing the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs—had landed missionaries on our shores.

I was presented with some remarkable ideas: the earliest fossil assemblages look no different from modern organisms; there was ample room on Noah’s Ark because all species present today are descended from about 8,000 “kinds” that were initially created; radiometric dating of materials has been proven not to work; rocks cannot fold (bend under pressure)—only soft sediment can; the Grand Canyon, far from clearly placing the unfathomable depth of geologic time on display, is actually definitive evidence for Noah’s flood... and on it went. It was quickly clear that the conversation was not really about evidence supporting one position or another. These folks had never gone out to study an outcrop of rock. They weren’t interested in what the rocks had to say—they already knew what the answer had to be.

It’s easy to view the conflict between religion and the science of Earth’s history as a single story arc in which science eventually overcame fundamentalist dogma. But, as is often the case with narrative-driven histories, the truth is a bit messier—and a good deal more interesting—than that.

David R. Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington, traces the historical interplay between geology and theology in his new book, The Rocks Don’t Lie. As he explains in the book’s preface, “I started writing this book intending to present a straightforward refutation of creationism, the belief that the world is a few thousand years old and that all the world’s topography—every mountain, hill, and valley—was formed by the biblical Flood. But as I read through old books I learned how stories about enormous floods shaped both scientific and religious views.”

Many cultures have flood legends, and there is often reason to believe the story is rooted in a real flood—just not one that inundated the entire planet. After seeing evidence of what was once a glacial lake in Tibet and hearing a local legend about a guru who brought Buddhism to the region by defeating a lake demon, he writes, “You see, the stories of Noah’s Flood and the Tibetan flood are much the same, except of course that one went viral and we’re still arguing about it.”

Stone ages

The fact that marine fossils were plentiful in rocks on land did not escape the Greeks. Aristotle imagined that continents and seas slowly alternated identities, after sediment from rivers filled in ocean basins. But when Europeans eventually turned their attention to geology, they saw things through a different lens. The recognition that some rocks were composed of sand or mud, and that some even contained the remains of organisms, could only be interpreted in one way—as remnants of Noah’s flood.

When natural philosophers studied the rocks closely enough to complicate that picture, they viewed the rocks as containing new details of Noah’s flood that were missing from the Biblical account. Even Nicolas Steno, whose pioneering work in the 1600s enabled geology to outgrow its infancy, spent most of his energy on creative models of what you might call “flood mechanics” in an attempt to accommodate all his observations.

In a striking blow against the simplified story of religion vs. geology, Montgomery describes the views of the early leaders of the Christian church. Major figures in Christian history—including Origen, Clement, Augustine, Jerome, and Thomas Aquinas—considered literal readings of Genesis to be a sign that one was uneducated. Faced with evidence in nature that contradicted a certain reading of the Bible, all of them decided that the only sensible response was to adjust how they read the Bible. In their view, nature clearly showed the way things were, so any discrepancy had to lie with one’s understanding of scripture. It actually wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that literalism became prominent.

Montgomery outlines the roles of several major figures in geology, including Georges Cuvier, James Hutton, and Charles Lyell, noting how their ideas were influenced by (or conflicted with) existing views about Noah’s flood. For example, long after it was agreed that rocks represented a record of history that could only be encompassed by millions of years—but before the transport of sediment by massive ice sheets was imaginable—most geologists explained Europe’s glacial deposits as the real remnants of the biblical flood.

It’s in that context that the remarkable story of William Buckland, a prominent theologian and Oxford geologist, played out. Buckland was a staunch proponent of a global flood origin for Europe’s sediment and topography, and he rose to the position of Dean of Westminster in the Anglican Church partly for his work on that topic. Admirably, he later completely and publicly changed his mind when faced with clear evidence that a flood had nothing to do with it—evidence such as the lack of any similar deposits in the tropics.

Dogma strikes back

The book goes on to detail the modern resurrection of fundamentalist opposition to the findings of geology and paleontology. In the early 1900s, a man named George McCready Price attempted to return to the dogma that the slow progress of geology had eroded. Montgomery writes, “Whether ignorant or simply dismissive of centuries of discovery and debate, Price attributed the entire geologic record to Noah’s Flood depositing enormous piles of sediment chock full of fossils… Price accused mainstream geologists of raw prejudice as he never bothered to learn any geology and ignored evidence accumulated by generations of geologists.”

In the 1950s, Price’s work inspired Henry Morris (who later founded the Institute for Creation Research) and John Whitcomb to develop the ideas and materials that would define young Earth creationism straight through to the present day, even as massive scientific developments (like radiometric dating of the Earth and plate tectonics) marched on by.

In an interesting coda, Montgomery relates the geologic community’s reticence to recognize the significance of Washington’s Scablands. In the 1920s, a young geologist named J. Harlen Bretz became convinced that the evidence in the massive, dry canyons of eastern Washington pointed to only one possible sculptor—a catastrophic flood. Having spent the past century dispensing with Noah’s flood as a geologic architect, most geologists knew just one thing about Bretz’s claim: it couldn’t be so.

It would be fifty years before the rest of the field would admit that Bretz was right. (“All my enemies are dead,” he would quip, “I have no one to gloat over.”) It was, in fact, clear that the Scablands had been created by incredible floods unleashed by the draining of a lake of glacial meltwater that once covered 3,000 square miles of Montana. Many scientists simply couldn’t consider this possibility, since it had only just been settled that geology is shaped by gradual change, not catastrophic events.

Decisive here, tentative there

Though the book is about much more than the impossible wrongness of thinking a global flood is a plausible explanation for the complexities in Earth’s crust, there’s still plenty of that to be found. (For example, the evaporite rocks of western Texas are so thick you’d have to evaporate a 450 mile deep ocean to precipitate them. At the maximum rate observed on the Earth, this would take at least 100,000 years.) It’s obvious from the clarity of Montgomery’s straightforward writing that he is an educator. He effectively strings together the key details without hiding them in a dense forest of jargon or self-indulgent storytelling.

There’s only one facet of the book that comes across awkwardly. Montgomery briefly touches on the philosophical rub between science and religion, ostensibly to reach out to believers who are suspicious of science (but also to remind scientists they are not immune to biased thinking). He tries to build bridges, coming close to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of non-overlapping magisteria, but always qualifying that religion must, of course, yield to the facts of science.

The result is a halting olive branch that almost seems to argue with itself. By trying to criticize both sides equally to create a comfortable middle ground that most people will identify with, Montgomery ends up with a very vague notion that always seems a few steps away from definition. Still, he can hardly be expected to produce gold where thousands before have unsuccessfully scratched in the dirt.

Overall, it’s a great book that could be read for several reasons—whether you want to know why geology doesn’t support the flood story, understand the roots of modern creationism, contemplate a cautionary tale of scientific paradigms, or just learn about the history of Earth science. The respectful way in which it’s written means it could even win over creationists who are willing to critically evaluate their views. After all, as the fathers of the Christian church would have agreed—The Rocks Don’t Lie.