CATACLYSMIC FLOODING AND CATASTROPHISM: 350 YEARS OF GEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSY

Cataclysmic flooding and catastrophism have been major concerns for geology since its inception as a science. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use in English of the word “geology” dates to the 1690 publication of Erasmus Warren’s Geologia: or, a Discourse Concerning the Earth Before the Deluge. This book dealt with the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, thereby indicating relationships among the Noachian debacle, biblical literalism, and Earth science, a view that did not get scientifically dispelled until geology’s “axial age” of the latest 18^th and earliest 19^th centuries. (Unfortunately similar concepts were subsequently resurrected by modern purveyors of sham reasoning). Nevertheless, in contrast to the conventional story of secular science overcoming religious dogma, much progress had been made in the scientific study of cataclysmic flooding up to the early 19^th century.

In the zeal to make geology a science based in the study of “true causes” (vera causae in the methodology of Sir Isaac Newton), it came to be stipulated that only causes that could be directly observed were appropriate for being invoked to explain past causes. This turns out to have been a violation of the most basic rule for scientitic reasoning: that, if you designate a priori a phenomenon to be unworthy of study, you will learn absolutely nothing about that phenomenon. It is one of history’s many ironies that this fundamental principle of logic had been invoked two hundred years ago by William Whewell, the polymath Cambridge don who first coined the words “catastrophism”and “uniformitarianism.” But Whewell’s admonition to the geological community went unheeded.

A century after the demise of scientitic cataclysmic flood investigations J Harlen Bretz single handedly resurrected what today has become the science of megaflood paleohydrology. It took several decades for Bretz’s insights to overcome uniformitarian prejudices, but starting in the late 1960s an accelerating pace of discovery revealed that the last major deglaciation involved a global pattern of immense outbursts of water from the margins of wasting continental ice sheets. This megaflooding may have inspired the flood myths that are intrinsic to human cultural heritages around the world—even (though controversially) including the Noachian debacle itself.