Today's creationist geologists are not who the secular may think. Numerous and thriving, many hold advanced degrees from top universities, and are making evangelicals more open to scientific evidence. And they are experts for the nearly half of Americans who believe God created the Earth in the last 10,000 years, the New York Times reports.
The geological role of the Biblical flood forms a central tenet of the "young Earth" scientists' work. The now-burgeoning creation geology movement was born from a 1961 book that argued that Noah's flood catastrophically warped the Earth's normal geological processes, causing the rapid creation of fossils that conventional geologists say were formed over millions of years. (More Christian right stories.)