Brook Wilensky-Lanford

The seven of us stood in the parking lot of the office building across the street, and Joe opened the zippered cover of his three-ring binder full of painstakingly collected photographs of the old neighborhood gathered for the exhibition. As he began reading aloud an oral history from Marian Sahadi Ciacci—“A Syrian who married an Italian!”—it felt like a religious occasion, a conjuring out of almost nothing of an entire world gone by.

I hate to break it to you, but Noah’s Flood is not a real thing. As geologist David Montgomery wrote in his recent history, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, the religious idea that the Flood was real has been to the actual history of geology as a science. But by now, however, science knows better. I can’t say as much for the media.

At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, a place that promotes the idea that all of these layers of rock got created at once through Noah’s Flood—and yet right under their feet is this beautifully vetted stretch of limestone, it’s really too finely laminated and too extensive to possibly be explained by something like that. So you look at these things and you have to ask, what do you make of the world? Can the world tell its own story?