Reddit reviews The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood
We found 8 Reddit comments about The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
These are some very broad questions, and some (like the age of the Earth) are outside the scope of biology but you are not alone and your questions, unfortunately, are common, especially for those coming from religiously fundamentalist backgrounds like yourself.
> I need to see evidence for myself.
If I showed you a murder weapon, a fingerprint that was lifted from it, and the finger print of a suspect, and you knew nothing about finger prints then the evidence, even in your hands, physically, wouldn't mean much to you. What's far more important than the evidence itself are the inferences we make from it, based on an understanding of how that evidence matters in some investigation. The same is true in biology and other fields of science.
So while you can certainly visit natural history museums and view their collections (like this or this), just seeing specimens won't really give you the whole story.
> Why should I, personally, be convinced that the Earth is billions of years old?
If you care about having beliefs that are true, then you should devote some time to understanding how we know the true age of the Earth, and the many different methods we use to demonstrate that it is indeed very old.
Wikipedia would be a great start:
As is typically the case, the sources are the the bottom of each page. If you're like me and you enjoy pop-science documentaries, you might enjoy episode 7 of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, titled The Clean Room which deals with how Clair Patterson became involved with one of the first accurate methods of dating the Earth, using uranium-lead dating. It does a good job of explaining the basics of radiometric dating, why it's accurate, and why we can trust it the way we trust other scientific processes to give us good answers.
> How can I better understand the Fossil record, which supposedly somehow tells us that humans and dinosaurs were not in the same time period?
You likely already know that sedimentary rocks are formed in layers, with newer rocks being deposited on top of older rocks. So while there are processes that tilt distort rocks, we don't find examples of older rocks being found on top of younger rocks, and we don't find examples of rabbit fossils being in the same layers as velociraptors, for example. A lot of the evidence you're likely to encounter is a variation on this theme: things that happened a long time ago leave evidence that is separate from the evidence from things that happened more recently.
While I've not personally read it, I hear it being recommended by people from fundamentalist backgrounds saying that it helped them: The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood.
> And though I get it as a concept, natural selection has always been confusing to me; I can't see how it would practically happen in real life.
It might be that you're used to thinking on time scales you are familiar with. A billion years is an incredibly long time. An analogy here that is often useful is to think of the entire history of the universe, mapped onto a single calendar year, with 00:00 January 1st being the first meaningful moment after the Big Bang, and December 31st at 23:59:59 being now. In this analogy, our planet did not appear until the first week of September, and the first life appearing sometime around the middle of September. The first amphibians, descendants of lobe-finned fish, appeared around December 22nd, and the first mammals appeared December 26th. Anatomically modern humans appeared about 8 minutes before midnight on Dec 31st. You can see more examples here. I know that for me, this really helps me conceptualise deep time.
Dogs are descended from wolves, and they domesticated themselves beginning a few tens of thousands of years ago. Most of the breeds of dogs you are familiar with appeared only in the last few centuries, through artificial selection. If we can go from wolves to chihuahuas in hundreds or thousands of years, it is not a huge stretch to imagine what natural selection could do over millions of years. And, we have lots of evidence to support this idea.
> Because of the way I was raised, a lot of this sounds like science fiction to me.
The difference between any holy book you'll read, and what we know from science, is that behind the person saying it, there is an answer to the question "how did it happen?" At most, a religious answer will involve some shrugging of the shoulders, and what frankly amounts to "magic".
Ah, sorry - I mean that's a pretty sufficient TL;DR, but if you want more of a story, I was never really a great Mormon - I always had my issues with the doctrine, only went semi-actively, and never served a mission, but after moving to SLC for a job I needed friends so I began attending a YSA ward and I was all-in. I met my wife and we became engaged. I went through the temple for the first time at 27 - it disturbed me. I never went back (other than for the wedding) and became an active NOM at that point.
Then one night, in 2014, I was on field assignment in Northern Canada. I was working night shift logging drill core and reading a book about the implausibility of Noah's Flood during my down time. I decided to see how this jived with Mormon beliefs. Well, one thing led to another and I stumbled across the CES Letter. Suddenly it all made sense - why I could never be the good Mormon I was raised to be. Why I had so many issues with the one true church.
I got home, let her know what I had discovered. She was not happy. We argued a lot over religion. A few months later we discovered we were having a little boy. She made it clear our son would be raised Mormon. I hated that because I knew he would be raised to see me as a sinner. I knew she was not a huge fan of Utah, so I decided applying for work anywhere. I ran this across her and she agreed. I figured Godless New England would be our best bet - I must've sent out 100 resumes. No luck for a year. We had our baby, I blessed him in our house, they'd go to church without me. I kept sending resumes and started expanding my locations. Seattle, Portland, Pittsburgh, New York, ... Then finally, at long last I got a job offer! ... The offer was in Detroit. I knew nothing about Detroit other than abandoned homes, but... we needed a new home, and Detroit needs new people, so it sounded perfect!
So we packed up everything, sold our house, and moved 2,000 miles to the Great Lakes State and settled in a little suburb of Detroit. She relaxed the Mormon-image that she was keeping for her family and friends over the first few months. A sleeveless shirt here, a Sunday at the park there, but yes we still argued about church and she still attended most of the time.
One Sunday morning we had an argument about the November 2015 policy. I knew her acceptance of LGBT rights and I knew this terrible policy had to bother her as much as it did me. She left for church angry and texted me about 60 minutes later, "You're right. I don't believe it anymore."
I felt so bad, but so relieved at the same time. Today we go to church on occasion, but for cultural/familial reasons; neither of us believe - though I believe she still maintains a minor NOM aspect and maintains firm belief in Christianity while I'm a bit more Agnostic. Our little boy has never been to nursery and never will. We'll be having a second kid in a few weeks and they'll never know anything of Mormonism other than, "Oh, that's that thing Grandma and Grandpa do on Sundays."
Oh, and did I mention we love Detroit? It's an incredible city! Not just because we moved here, but the history, the arts, the culture, the sports, the cuisine - it's a real big city, but at a discount price. Plus, neighbors don't judge us for not being at church. We just bought a house, and I think we may just make it a long term home.
I lived my whole life as some form of Christian or another. Went to Catholic schools as a kid, became "born again" at 18, went to a pentecostal/evangelical Bible college.
By age 45, I had to objectively acknowledge that Christianity didn't ever perform as had been promised. There was no evidence that I was better off for having been devoutly, obnoxiously religious, and a whole lot of evidence that I was worse off.
I had also long ago realized that Christian "science" was all reactionary stuff that was more about poking holes than actually proving anything. If science was so vacuous, we wouldn't be using computers and flying to the moon and whatnot. So I picked up a book by a geologist showing why the evidence is against Noah's flood, and I read it to understand rather than to poke holes. It blew me away.
From there, I started reading all sorts of science, and scholarly criticisms of the Bible, and it was pretty much the end for me. I realized how much effort I had to put into maintaining faith (a huge amount!), and it all just crumbled.
I haven't read it, but your claim checks out. Amazon 59 reviews, 4.5 out of 5 stars average
I really enjoyed "Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood", which I don't think I've ever seen mentioned here (I only heard about it myself because it was a local author).
It's been a while since I read it, but what I remember enjoying was how the religious beliefs of our earliest geologists influenced their understanding of what they were discovering in the field. The early explorers set out to find evidence for Noah's flood, so it was amusing seeing them trying to wrap their heads around things like finding mammoths in Siberia, that were obviously washed away in the deluge!
I've not read it myself, but I really enjoyed the Your Inner Fish documentary series and have been reading to pick this one up.
A really fascinating book about the history of geology (with a focus on how much of it was shaped in relation to a cultural belief in the Noachian Flood) is The Rocks Don't Lie
Can't recommend it enough. It really puts modern flood geology in perspective.
There are some great suggestions here, and I would include The Rocks Don't Lie.
It does a great job recounting the history of geology as the science evolved, and how it affected culture. I different take than the other suggestions, but certainly relevant and well worth the read.
The author is a well known geomorphology expert.
I would say don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Yes, in the US, you have some bat shit crazy christians that take a literal view of the bible. Go back in time a century or two to any of the universities that the major churches were sponsoring, and they'd laugh at the suggestion that the bible should be taken literally, even in the theology department. Yes, they tried to view the evidence they had through a prism that presumed the bible was in some way true, but they were willing to reject the idea that each word was litterally true. "The Rocks Don't lie" gives a pretty interesting account of that from a geology perspective https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rocks-Dont-Lie-Geologist-Investigates/dp/0393346242/
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The Modern Catholic church doesn't reject science. The pope worked in Chemistry, evolution and the big bang are accepted as facts, even if again the religious prism is applied to map that to "how God did it". The Catholic church still does a lot scientific research, recognising "How" and "Why/Who" are different questions. (Thats not dimiss the major, major issues with the modern Catholic Church, but their treatment of science isn't one of them).
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At the risk of invoking the no true scotsman theory, a lot of the stuff that American preachers today are saying, were rejected a long, long time ago by theologans.