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Geology and Genesis: how Noah’s flood shaped ideas but not landscapes

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.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/geology-and-genesis-how-noahs-flood-sh...