Geology

Geology reconstructs earth history from observable rock strata, fossils and ongoing geological processes, applying the uniformitarian principle that the same slow processes visible today, erosion, sedimentation, volcanic activity, shaped the deep past, rather than assuming the landscape was formed by sudden catastrophe. The Scottish geologist Charles Lyell set the discipline's modern method with Principles of Geology, published in three volumes beginning in 1830, arguing systematically that the earth's features could be explained by processes still actively observable, an argument that gave geology an evidentiary method independent of any particular chronology inherited from scripture or tradition.

Flood narratives, accounts of a young earth, and other traditions' claims about the earth's age and formation are exactly the kind of question the geological record can independently test, since strata, fossil sequence and radiometric evidence exist regardless of what any tradition's cosmology asserts. The atlas relies on geology to describe what the physical evidence for the earth's age and history actually shows, distinct from and alongside a tradition's own cosmological account of the same subject.