The Rocks Don’t Lie, by David R. Montgomery – review

This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale.

David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of his discipline from Aristotle to plate tectonics, showing how geological thinking has always been shaped by the great narrative of Noah’s flood. It is a grand tale, and told with verve and excitement. Montgomery also entertainingly surveys the archaeological and literary evidence for ancient Middle Eastern floods — each of which has been acclaimed, in turn, as ‘Noah’s’.

The major theological puzzle wasn’t that Genesis described the deluge as having lasted both 40 and 150 days. The big debate was whether the flood was a local or global affair. Translation hadn’t helped. St Jerome rendered the Hebrew eretz, meaning ‘land’ or ‘soil’, as terra — which was in turn translated into English as ‘earth’. This suggested to many that the flood affected the whole planet, and that rivers, mountains and continents were formed by the flood —and not at creation.

Then there were the fossils, which were plainly everywhere. One of the first to doubt that they were evidence of a global deluge, interestingly, was Leonardo. Investigating a cave in the hills near Vinci, he found the rock to be ‘a hash of seashells and fish bones’. Yet, having tested sediment in water, he knew that heavy objects settled; they were not distributed evenly. And spotting worm tracks in the stone, he wondered how such creatures should have crawled around serenely during an epic global flood.

As others started to look at the rocks around them with Leonardo-like attentiveness, extravagant flood theories accumulated.