With God, Self, and Deep Time in the Archives of the Earth
Part I: Autobiographical Reflections, Mostly
i.
With this essay (which, let me apologize, is going to run longer than most here will) I am beginning an intermittent series of reflections on the intersections between the history and experience of deep time (as manifest variously in the geological and fossil record, in human history in the deep, pre-literate past, and so forth) and theological and personal concerns, framed, at least initially, by my own experiences and changes in thinking and perceiving. In particular I am interested in what the past—both the vast and distant geological past as well as the relatively speaking closer deep human past—means to reflective observers and participants in the present, including different and sometimes clashing ways that the past is perceived and made to matter based on differences of interpretation, perception, and the like. My own life has to no small degree been determinatively shaped by questions about and engagements with past worlds and with issues of history: from grappling with the history of life on earth and of the universe itself to the history of Christianity to the much more close and recent issues of the past inherent in being a native white Southerner American. As if those were not enough with which to deal I have made it my professional life’s work grappling with the history of the Islamicate world, which has come with a whole other host of issues and entanglements. I hope to explore all of those trajectories here in the coming months, in ways that I hope will be helpful for my readers, given that at one level my interactions with the past have universal resonances, even if the exact trajectories and details are particular.
I’ve begun these autobiographical reflections (which will proceed beyond autobiography, using my own life and experience as a sort of entryway, hardly novel but certainly useful despite having been often used) in what seems an appropriate place, with the question of deep time and the history of life on earth and what that history might mean to us in the present—which will be a recurring theme in these digital pages. These issues are often referred to as the question of origins, and in the United States as in many other places they remain remarkably hot topics, with a sizeable number of Americans outright rejecting the existence of deep time, evolution, or even a deep human past (while no doubt the overwhelming majority care little one way or another, but that’s another matter for another time!). Instead they adhere to a form of young earth creationism, which, in broad outlines, holds that probably the universe and certainly the earth, and everything on it from single-celled organisms to humans, was created by God some six thousand years ago, and that everything we now see from biodiversity to the earth’s topography to the geological record to all of human history can be attributed to events running from the fall of Adam to the immediate aftermath of Noah’s Flood. Now, there is a great deal of variation within young earth creationist positions, in no small part because, as it turns out, trying to fit the massive archive of earth’s history into a narratively constrained frame of six thousand years is really difficult to do. Others have chronicled the history and internal divisions of this movement at greater length and so I have no need to do so here.
What matters instead is that I myself grew up in a young earth creationist milieu, coming of age in the ‘nineties at a time when the movement was arguably at its height of influence and wide public visibility. As a child I read creationist literature, attended talks, even went on a field trip with a creationist geologist to examine Carboniferous formations on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau. At the same time I consumed ‘mainstream’ scientific literature, from encyclopedias of prehistoric animals to National Geographic articles; I suspect that other creationist households of the time were stricter in such matters but, fortunately, mine was not. I honestly do not recall how if at all I reconciled or made sense of these varying perspectives, though for a while at least the young earth creationist one predominated.
Until, eventually, it didn’t.
Now, at this point, dear reader, you are probably expecting a story of intense intellectual and spiritual struggle, perhaps a crisis of faith, a dramatic turning point, or something along those lines. Alas for expectations of drama, I have no such story to report—in fact I cannot really tell you when I stopped believing in the young earth creationist perspective and accepted the antiquity of the earth and the explanatory power of biological evolution. Nor can I tell you when or precisely how I reconciled my acceptance of mainstream science and chronology with my Christian faith; and while it would make for good drama I did not undergo any wrenching struggle or conflict. Certainly a crucial part of my shift was in expanding my knowledge and understanding of human history—the further back one goes the more obvious the inadequacy of a six-thousand year chronology becomes, and things just sort of proceed from there. Also crucial in my case was the fact that all through my teenage years I was drifting away from evangelical Protestantism—I grew up Southern Baptist, in very evangelical Protestant Southern American cultural milieus—and towards, ultimately, Orthodox Christianity, a story that does have rather more drama and intense reflection and which I hope to tell here in time. I suspect that the coincidence of my gradual convergence (more than any dramatic conversion) upon Orthodox Christianity facilitated moving away from other aspects of my evangelical Protestant Christian past, including young earth creationism, a position predicated upon a particular perspective towards and reading of Scripture, a position not shared by Orthodox or Catholic Christianity.
Now, while by some point in my teenage years my young earth creationism had evaporated, I cannot say that I spent a lot of time reflecting on how, if at all, Christian faith or political praxis or anything else related to the deep history of life on earth and of human beings. Much of my energy that might have otherwise been directed towards such things was taken up with political questions and my ongoing radicalization, culminating in a period as a libertarian socialist (also another story for another time!). I do sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if I had grown up in, say, an evolutionary creationist milieu (assuming such had even existed at the time!). Even after my gradual rejection of the youth earth view I had what we might call a lingering bad taste, a vague uneasiness, or, better, a lack of good framing devices that could reconcile my abstract acceptance of the age of the earth and of biological evolution with more immediate concerns, from the medieval and early modern history increasingly occupying my attention to my Christian faith and practice to my nascent political activism. Some of this was due to my young earth creationist upbringing, but not entirely. One of the common talking points of young earth creationist organizations is the idea that ‘evolutionism’ exerts some vast and nefarious influence upon secular culture; kids learn that monkeys are their ancestors and so go out and shoot their classmates, and other lurid tales.
The reality is that the vast majority of people, whatever their religious faith (or lack thereof) and particular position, if any, on the question of origins, spend very little time thinking about such things, and hold perspectives grounded mostly or entirely in the present or the very recent past. Ironically even as advances in various sciences have brought more and more of life’s deep history into view and allowed us to situate our own history within that vast stream, other precipitates of modern life and its constant accelerations have meant a dropping off in our ability to synthesize and situate such knowledge into our own experience of the world and understanding of the past and present.
Whatever the causes, I can’t say that as an adult, until fairly recently, I’d spent much time thinking about the deep past, about biological evolution, or the theoretical and theological implications of such things. While I have always been attuned to natural history, from early childhood to now, to the point that when starting college I seriously if briefly contemplated a career in botany (my poor abilities in quantitative reasoning ultimately steered me away from the sciences however), for much of my adult life I paid only passing attention to such things. This began to change a few years ago when I resolved—for precise reasons that now escape me—to start reading more in the biological sciences, which led to a moderate amount of interest in integrating so-called ‘big history’ approaches into my thinking and teaching. Here the influence of my doctoral advisor was certainly a factor, and remains so. But my initial reactions were somewhat negative, mostly out of a fear, shared by many (most?) humanists of the hard sciences encroaching on ‘our’ historical turf. What, then, truly awakened my now burgeoning interest in the deep past of life on earth and our place in it?
ii.
We historians are fond of stressing the importance of contingency in human history in checking any grand explanatory schemes or too-neat progressions and trajectories, and my return in earnest to issues of earth’s deep past presents a good case in point of the role of unpredictable contingency. Two things intervened to accelerate my mild interest in the deep past into a much more intense and articulate interest with implications for my work as a historian: one, having children, and two, the global covid pandemic, neither exactly obvious precipitates I suppose.
‘Having children’ isn’t quite the correct phrasing, however—while I suppose the experience of childbirth and of caring for infants certainly reinforces the biological dynamics of human existence in a new and very powerful way, what I really mean is the experience of raising children and of introducing them to the wide world in all its complexity and diversity. Far more than I would have imagined prior to becoming a father, raising kids has meant a broadening of my horizons and intellectual ambitions, for a number of reasons, some of them quite quotidian. For instance, while my son and daughter are very good travelers, and have been pretty much since birth, we don’t usually travel so far from home that we return after nightfall, and overnight expeditions are very involved and hence rare events, for now (though they’re now reaching the age where camping will be much more practical and less strenuous, hopefully). This has meant maintaining a relatively more circumscribed radius of adventure, which has meant my discovering alongside them the wonders of our compact but very varied state of Maryland, with excursions to neighboring Virginia and Pennsylvania from time to time. I have visited (and re-visited) Civil War battlefields I had not been to since my own childhood; I have taken them to seventeenth and eighteenth century historical sites that I knew existed but had never gotten around to visiting, in the process thinking about my own work as a historian of early modernity in a much more globalized and localized manner. And, following the natural course of things, my son and in time my daughter became interested in dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures (Cormac, who turned four in March, has an especially ecumenical interest, with dinosaurs part but hardly the dominant element), as well as living things just in general.
As such, starting late in 2019, I realized that I needed to improve my knowledge in matters paleontological if I were going to offer my children anything but the most rudimentary answers to their inevitable queries. I also began to realize that I would at some point need to explain biological evolution, the origin of fossils, and the time-scales involved, and do so in a way that meshed with an understanding of God as Creator. I realized just how little thought I had given any of those things beyond the very abstract, and how poorly I had articulated them for myself. I’ve been working to correct that shortcoming since, and this Substack project is the most substantive attempt at a public-facing articulation of my thoughts. But I’m jumping ahead a bit.
The second factor that resulted in me setting out to write about deep time and evolution and theological and historical implications was that looming determinant of the last almost year and a half, the novel coronavirus (though I suppose it’s hardly novel anymore). Since I doubt anyone wants to read more than a few lines more about covid at this point, suffice to say that when coronavirus began to have social-political effects in March of last year I had been, for a couple of years, in the pattern of reading military, mostly First World War, history as a side pursuit, mostly for a couple hours before bed, with a long-term goal of doing some serious work on religious life in the Ottoman Army before and during the First World War. As normal life seemed overnight to fall apart or cease to exist, I found myself not very capable of continuing in this vein, hardly light or uplifting reading and research. So I decided that given my background interest in big historical approaches and a desire to bone-up (pun intended) on paleontological knowledge I decided to turn to scientific literature, and to do some fossil-hunting myself. A week or two before the pandemic closures erupted we had actually visited the Dinosaur Park in Laurel, Maryland, and participated in a volunteer weekend fossil hunt, during which we found no dinosaurs but did get to take home some handfuls of Cretaceous lignitized wood. Despite having done a fair bit of fossil prospecting as a kid myself, I had forgotten just how exciting an activity it was, and within a couple weeks of the pandemic lockdowns I found myself prospecting for Cretaceous, Paleocene, and Miocene fossils and so handling the ‘archives’ of deep time in a very tangible and direct way, not just reading and thinking about such things in the relative abstract.
And so, in a very roundabout manner, I find myself once again thinking about rocks, fossils, evolution, and the age of the earth in serious ways (and accumulating supporting samples, thanks for the richness of the fossil beds of the Mid-Atlantic), which would not have surprised my twelve-year old self, but from a quite different overall perspective. I’m still working out just what it might mean to integrate deep time perspectives into both the discipline of history (which for most practitioners is meant to address only the quite recent human past) and into theological understanding and into worship and thanksgiving, the doxology of paleontological and evolutionary scientific understandings one might say. I am increasingly convinced that one way out of the relative stasis and even morbidity that seems to mark so much intellectual, cultural, and social life in the contemporary world might well be to seriously undertake such an integration.
iii.
I’ll end this essay with a sort of recapitulation of my own episodic intellectual journey and the ensuing shift in my perception of the ‘archive’ of earth’s geological record, a recapitulation in the form of two theoretical walks on the beach, one on the part of a theoretical young earth creationist self, the other of my actual self in the present, highlighting what different observers might see, and how one might go about perceiving and experiencing the tangible traces of life’s deep past.
The setting is the above beach—or rather, the margin of the Chesapeake Bay along the Calvert Cliffs, which is sometimes a beach, sometimes simply a slanting strip of Miocene marl giving into the water. The Cliffs that run from a little south of Annapolis all the way to just shy of the mouth of the Patuxent River, with outlying outcrops further south and to the west and, less so, to the east across the Bay, are a magnificent archive of the mid to late Miocene, a period in earth’s history that saw the last really warm global period as well as periods of relative cold and glacial advance, leading up to the faster cooling of the Pliocene and thus to the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The cycles of cooling and warming, along with other factors, led to a series of marine regressions and transgressions (that is, sea rises and falls) which have left their marks in the unconsolidated (that is, not turned to stone) sediments that make up the Cliffs. Many of the beds are absolutely packed with fossils, mostly mollusks but ranging from bryozoa to cetaceans. The erosional dynamics of the Bay mean that in many places the Cliffs look like they’ve been sliced with a giant cake knife, the layers of transgression, deepening, shallowing, and regression in vivid display, fossils positively falling out in chunks onto the shoreline. At some points extensive bioturbation is visible in the form of invertebrate (and the odd vertebrate fish) burrows, and certain horizons are very rich in lignitized wood, washed down into the river deltas that ringed the Salisbury Embayment, as this ancient sea is known.
At least, this is what I now see when I walk the beach along the Cliffs. Some of this is based on my own direct observation and collecting, other aspects stem from my reading of the extensive literature on the geology and paleontology of the Maryland Miocene as well as in paleontology, paleoclimatology, and the like. I see in these beds the historical traces of climatic shifts and changes, the ensuing changes to the very surface of the earth, and the formation, retreat, and reformation of entire ecosystems, with new species evolving and others being locally extirpated or going extinct. The abundant vertebrate remains, from shark teeth to entire articulated skeletons of marine creatures, point to the explosive evolutionary growth from the Eocene forward of marine mammal clades, with sharks adapting to the new oceanic bounty. The occasional terrestrial plant fossil speaks of the Miocene emergence of basically ‘modern’ biomes (one of my favorite recent finds is a diminutive hickory nut which had washed out to sea and settled amongst mollusks). And so forth. But where perhaps other observers coming to similar conclusions might not have much in the way of metaphysical or (positive anyway) theological takeaways (though many today might be moved to think about the ethics of climate change, the reality of which is so vividly displayed in strata like these), I see in these archival records the evidence of God’s creative activity and design within the lineaments of deep time, and trust that herein as up and down the geological column and in the very structure of the earth and of all existent matter in the universe God’s providence and care are present, even if the modalities are not legible to scientific observation. Even someone as quantification-challenged as me can easily see that there is vast mathematical order displayed here at multiple scales, from the structure of mollusks’ shells to the regular, cosmically attuned cycles of regression and transgression, order which was spoken into being by the Creator and which I believe is upheld by the Logos Himself within and through all things.
And, more abstractly perhaps but nonetheless vital, there is an immediate beauty to the results of all this vast history, a beauty that is operative in the aggregate and in the particular, from the stunning color and interplay of water and sky and land on this estuary edge, from the details of the intricate mollusks and the massive cetaceans preserved therein, from the breadth and scope of the history contained in these massive looming archives. The existence of such beauty, and that we can perceive it, is itself a wonder, one that also in a different way bespeaks the Lord of deep time, the Lord of evolutionary change, the Lord of humanity, the Lord of salvation history, of which, in a way, all of life’s history is a part.
But let us imagine now that my gradual transformation away from young earth creationism had not happened and for whatever reasons that suite of beliefs had persisted into the present. What would I see in this particular stretch of geological record?
I can only answer based on my own experience, many years ago now, in that milieu, and from what I have read and seen of contemporary young earth creationism. Certainly over the years views have shifted in the wider young earth community, making it hard to generalize a single set of perceptions for our Miocene beach. Most salient, whereas in the past probably the vast majority of creationists would have perceived the record of Noah’s Flood in these strata, a number of young earth organizations have increasingly moderated their explanatory claims for the Flood’s direct geological footprint, interpreting some range of geological epochs, most commonly those above the K-Pg boundary, as post-Flood (which raises a whole host of intractable issues, such as how massive, ecologically zoned and stacked layers could have been generated in relatively normal conditions in the course of a few centuries!). But in general a young earth creationist would see some kind of trace of a global Flood in these sediments and their fossils, even if only secondarily in causation. As such my theoretical self would try to make sense of the depositional environments caused by such a Flood, perhaps, and would certainly see in them the signs of God’s wrath and punishment of human sin and the concordant evidence of nature with Scripture. This is, it should be noted, an emotionally and spiritually powerful resonance, and is crucial I think to understanding the appeal of young earth creationism from a Christian, particularly Protestant Christian, perspective. While my theoretical young earth self might well view the biotic changes from layer to layer as evidence of God’s ‘hardwiring’ of certain groups of organisms (‘kinds,’ a broad and rather ill-defined crown taxonomic grouping used by contemporary young earth creationists) and their ensuing evolutionary speciation, the story of that speciation would be rather vague, and it would all carry the weight of being caused by human sin. Otherwise there would be no animal death in the young earth understanding, and hence neither speciation nor Flood and so no fossil record.
Yet while thus far the spiritual significance and phenomenological charge is rather negative, my creationist self would also see in this trajectory of life history (albeit within a very small and compressed time frame!) the promise of redemption, the Flood narrative and its interpretation spring-boarding from the visible geological and paleontological record. In a very direct way these sediments and their contents would speak to salvation history, lying a mere two thousand years from the Incarnation of Christ. Indeed, and I suspect this is part of the appeal to some of such a view of the world, there is no vastness to the world really, as time is entirely manageable in its quantities and both theology and historical narrative refreshingly neat and straight-forward, with humans centered even when evidently absent. Even the record of biodiversity is containable, at least imaginatively, with recent special creation of broad kinds (and in what we might call ‘folk’ creationist understanding specific species, which even some creationist organizations still maintain to some degree) by God in the very recent past. There is an obvious and clean order to the universe in this view, even if it has been broken up and corrupted by human sin.
And so both my theoretical young earth self and my present actual self behold God’s activity and presence in the geological and paleontological record, but in quite different ways, and with very different interpretations. The young earth view has a certain self-containedness that is clearly appealing to some, in which everything can be coordinated and literally lined up with an evidently Scriptural chronology; if to actual present me the history of life on earth ultimately intersects with and in some ways is generative of the conditions of salvation history, I do not propose to explicate the details or to relate how precisely God’s providence and foreknowledge relate to the scientifically legible archive of life’s history. This mystery or ambiguity no longer bothers me, if it ever did; rather, I feel the need to explore the implications further. But I can understand, to no small extent, why from theological and exegetical grounds a young earth observer would come to such different conclusions, even if it is hard for me to understand how one can look at the archival evidence and maintain such discordant readings.
It would be nice if I could conclude this essay with a simple prescription for reconciling theological and scientific perspectives, or offer a straightforward path for integrating the study of human history with that of deep time, or charting a way to summon poetry from the geological archives. But as my own story—which in places is more a lack of a good story!—suggests, there are no obvious routes, and much of this is uncharted territory (curiously, I do not think I am the only person to have taken a new or revived interest in paleontology due to the pandemic—it’s probably worth exploring the roots of such a response). One takeaway might be that of the above walks on the beach there is of course a third, that of the observer who sees little beyond some dirt and fossil shells and for which the whole record of earth’s past is quite inconsequential and at best tangentially visible if that. I don’t know that at any point in my life I’ve been in quite that position but certainly until fairly recently I was close. But I am more and more convinced that we have only things to gain by not only seeing the archives of life’s past on earth but of thinking about it and interacting with it not just in intellectual terms but in experiential ones, grappling with and rejoicing in the philosophical, theological, and indeed personal implications and reverberations.