The weather is more dramatic than it used to be.

Frazes like biblical flood trip off the most secular of tongues.

The geologist David Montgomery set out a few years ago to debunk any serious connection

between an ideal like Noah's flood and the wisdom of geology.

His passion is for how the shape of the earth has evolved.

He takes delight in the puzzle of how landscapes became what they are.

And he found a richer and more interesting story around the world of an interplay between

human stories and the story's geologists tell as they read rocks and discern the sweep

of deep time, geologic time.

Geology really is that in cosmology you put those together in the essentially the scientific

creation story, sort of how did it really work?

What can we tell from the nature of the universe around us that would inform us in our thinking

about how we got to the place we are now?

And that really is, I think, central to our sort of view of ourselves as a species,

our place in the universe, as well as sort of your personal relationship to the universe.

What am I doing here?

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

David Montgomery is a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington

in Seattle.

There, he leads the Geomorphological Research Group.

He's written a book for non-scientists about the connection between soil and civilization,

as well as his book The Rocks Don't Lie, a geologist investigates Noah's Flood.

...