Sorry. Sea shells on top of the mountains with fossils of land animals below them tells me there was a flood. You must be mistaken.
1. ROFL! Even a Renaissance man like Leonardo Da Vinci realized that these shells were NOT evidence for a global flood and here's a good synopsis of this:
Leonardo da Vinci was not just a great painter. He was also a brilliant geologist, as
today's latest instalment of our interactive series on his drawings reveals. . . .But Leonardo did not only look at stone from a painter's point of view. It was not a background feature in his eyes. It was a scientific problem.
As a geologist, Leonardo anticipated the scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries who were to prove that
the Earth is far older than it says in the book of Genesis. When scientific pioneers around 1800 recognised fossils for what they are – traces of ancient animals – and analysed the processes that create and erode rocks, they quickly reached a set of conclusions that led to
Darwin's theory of evolution and a crisis of Christianity. But amazingly, a self-taught researcher called Leonardo da Vinci thought through a lot of their key discoveries hundreds of years earlier.
Leonardo had the following astonishing insights about geology and fossils:
1) Shells that appear on mountain tops and fish bones in caves must be the remains of animals that long ago swam in these places when they were covered in sea. The claim they were swept there by the biblical flood is a completely inadequate explanation. So the surface of the earth has changed over time, with land where once there was sea.
2) The most powerful natural force is the movement of water in rivers. Water has sculpted the very largest features of the landscape, a process that must have taken a very long time.
3) Therefore slow and relentless natural processes, not the divine instantaneous act described in Genesis, have shaped our planet.
The quotations from Leonardo's notebooks in
our interactive today show him puzzling over these basic problems of science and reaching some of his radical conclusions. He did not merely think about these things in the abstract – he did real research. When
he lived in Milan as court artist to Ludovico Sforza he was conveniently close to the Alps. He went walking in the mountains and climbed to the top of
Monte Rosa. He writes in his notes about exploring a mountain cave where he found massive fossil bones, and reveals that he was famous for this interest in rocks and strange forms hidden within them: one day, he says, when he was living in Milan, some peasants brought him a sack full of seashells they had found in the mountains.
When I read the garbage from YECs (young earth creationists) one would think it wasn't until Darwin published his work that people started disbelieving the story of about a global flood a la "literal" Genesis, but that's complete bunk, as people have noted before geologists formally rejected this ridiculous interpretation as rubbish (Da Vinci just one instance).
Another example is Thomas Jefferson who also panned this interpretation as flawed, one of the things that earned him the epithet of "howling atheist" from some of the smugly aggressive self-righteous of his day:
In the Paris edition of
Notes (1785), Jefferson discussed a chemical theory of the formation of shells found on mountaintops. Bedini relates how the passage "...brought [Jefferson] considerable criticism because it was inconsistent with the Biblical account of Noah’s flood." That criticism was mild compared to what Peden terms the "long and frequently violent controversy" in opposition to the analyses Jefferson presented in the English language edition of
Notes, published in 1788.
4 Readers in America could then assume, from Jefferson’s analysis of the physics of the atmosphere, that he was rejecting the literal truth of Noah’s flood.
5 In an attempt seemingly directed at diluting the controversy, Jefferson examined three conflicting explanations of how shells came to present 15,000 feet above sea level, and he discounted all three “explanations” as equally unsatisfactory. He tried to clarify his position by stating a cardinal principle of science: "...we must be contented to acknowledge, that this…is as yet unsolved. Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong Jefferson’s critics were far from content or satisfied.
Jefferson wrote and perfected
Notes when he was in his late thirties—that is, before his involvement in bitter political fights. Historians are in general agreement that Jefferson was thin-skinned about criticism and became more so with age. In 1803, Jefferson wrote: "Every word which goes from me, whether verbally or in writing becomes the subject of so much malignant distortion, & perverted construction, that I am obliged to caution my friends against…my letters getting into the public..."
As I pointed out
HERE in Post #45, 04-04-15 on CARM, even a late 18th/early 19th century man, without the scientific resources/knowledge we have now, such as Thomas Jefferson, did NOT believe all the supernatural riff about Jesus in the Bible and took a very sharp blade to the Gospels, cutting out all of the miracles/supernatural guff,
creating what's known as "The Jefferson Bible". Also here are links showing just how far some right-wing Christians like Barton have gone to try and "rehabilitate" Jefferson as their kind of Christian, but even Barton's own buds eventually called him out on his lies.
