The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood by David R. Montgomery

appreciated the theological implications of a remodeled world. Foremost to him was how it revealed the second half of God’s plan: “ ’Tis very plain that the Deluge was not sent only as an Executioner to Mankind: but that its prime Errand was to Reform and New-mold the Earth.” 8 Before the Flood, the world was incredibly fertile, a perfect Eden where one need not plow or even plant to reap nature’s bounty. But with idle hands having led to humanity’s downfall, it made sense that God would remake the world into a place of no free rides, where eking out an existence required constant labor. Destroying the world, and mankind along with it, was the ultimate act of kindness.
For the Destruction of the Earth was not only an Act of the profoundest Wisdom and Forecast, but the most monumental Proof, that could ever possibly have been, of Goodness, Compassion, and Tenderness, in the Author of our Being. 9
    For naturalists, Woodward’s theory improved upon Burnet’s in that it explained how fossils came to be incorporated into rocks. Still, Woodward caught even more flack than Burnet because he made a simple testable prediction—what we today consider a hallmark of good science. If Woodward was right, then the rocks and fossils within them would be ordered from densest on the bottom to lightest on top, reflecting the order in which things settled out.
    Critics quickly pointed out how the heaviest fossils were often found on the surface rather than deep underground. Some objected to Woodward’s idea of a turbulent globe-dissolving flood when the sedimentary strata it supposedly deposited showed signs of having settled down through tranquil water.
    Woodward was considered brilliant by some, but his arrogance and habit of making enemies contributed to his undoing. In 1697, London physician John Arbuthnot gleefully skewered him in An Examination of Dr. Woodward’s Account of the Deluge . It not only laid out problems with Woodward’s theory but showed that the great blowhard had plagiarized Steno. Arbuthnot paired sections of Steno’s obscure book with virtually identical sections from Woodward’s popular essay. In passage after passage, Woodward had cribbed Steno without acknowledging his source. As it turned out, exposure of this act of intellectual theft helped promote Steno’s ideas.
    Arbuthnot’s devastating critique stamped Woodward’s account of the biblical flood as contrary to the laws of nature . How could the Flood have been violent enough to churn up and dissolve the entire surface of the world, and yet preserve both marine life and delicate plant fossils? Besides, Woodward’s assertion that rocks and fossils were arranged on the basis of specific gravity was wrong. Arbuthnot himself had descended into a two-hundred-foot-deep pit in Amsterdam and found the density of the layers to be variable and not ordered by depth. Contrary to Woodward’s theory, heavy layers lay on top of lighter ones. Fellows of the Royal Society of London corroborated Arbuthnot’s findings, reporting that it was common to find denser strata overlying lower-density rocks.
    Arbuthnot even conducted laboratory tests to disprove Woodward’s basic contention, finding that when an oyster shell and an equal weight of metal powder were dropped into a tank of water, the oyster shell sank to the bottom first. His simple experiment showed that size and shape influenced how fast things settled. Arbuthnot calculated that Woodward needed a flood 450 miles deep to turn the world into a slurry of half earth and half water, a scenario he ridiculed with dry wit: “The Doctor should have calculated the Proportions of his Drugs before he mix’d them.” 10 Just as with Burnet, Woodward’s critics eventually took his theory down. That the rocks did not back up his story earned Woodward the distinction of having proposed one of the first grand geological theories to be formally refuted.
    There was no shortage of subsequent fantasylike theories of