Scienticians and the Great Flood: Theories That Don’t Hold Any Water

With the coming of the Age of Enlightenment natural scientists were suddenly offered new tools for exploring and understanding the world around them. Many turned these tools towards describing a scientific principle or mechanism that could explain the Great Flood described in the Bible, shared by the Islamic world as the Toofan-e-Nooh. Read from the contemporary perspective, many of these explanations can only be described as ‘fanciful,’ but recent geological research using data gleaned from the USArray suggests that one of these explanations, proposed in 1681 by Thomas Burnet, just might hold water after all.
This talk will explore some of these Enlightenment era theories and connect them to contemporary research, and in so doing underscore the deep connections between the natural and social sciences.