The Rocks Don't lie: A geologist investigates Noah's
flood
David R. Montgomery
W. W. Norton & Co. £12.99
(978-0-393-34624-4)
Church Times Bookshop £11.70 (Use code
CT798 )
THERE was astonishment in the 1970s when Jim Irwin, an astronaut
who walked on the moon, toured the schools of England to talk about
his expedition to Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey in search of
Noah's Ark. How could a man whose training had taken him to the
heart of modern technology still believe the world to be only a few
thousand years old, and Noah's flood the cause of all the
disruption in its rocks? After all, it was on his mission to the
moon, Apollo 15, that the four-billion-year-old "Genesis" rock was
picked up, dating back to the origins of planet Earth.
The debate between the Bible and geology has been fascinating,
and David Montgomery, a geologist, recounts its history in
scholarly detail. The Rocks Don't Lie is a compellingly
readable and illuminating book. The author reveals a delightful
understanding and respect for those people in the distant past who
told flood stories - whether it be the North American Indian tale
of a woman surviving a catastrophic flood in a hollowed-out log to
become the mother of all humanity, or the better-known story of
Noah in the Bible. He identifies with them, because geologists,
too, he states, are storytellers, attempting to read the topography
of the landscape to explain why it is the way it is.
By chapter two, the reader is hooked. Montgomery takes us on a
gruelling hike from the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand
Canyon to the rim a mile above. Step by step, he reads the
astonishing story told by the rocks, earth's autobiography: the
alternating layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone mark the
remains of ancestral seas and eroded mountains. His imagination
wrestles with how, at the base of the Canyon, a thousand million
years have vanished from the rock record (eroded in unknown
episodes of geological history) between the ancient Vishnu Schist
and the overlying Tapeats Sandstone.
As we ascend, he is able to reveal how the Creationist claim
that the Grand Canyon was created in one year by Noah's flood just
doesn't hold water. The rocks don't lie.
The Revd Adam Ford is a former Chaplain of St Paul's School
for Girls.
