Book: McPhee, John. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981. 

Point: The earth is moving, changing, growing and shrinking.

Path: In a rolling manner, McPhee takes the reader through the exploration process of discovering the sea that could be between Utah and California. Along the way, strata is identified, samples are taken, interviews are had, theories are proposed.

Sources: Geological theories, articles, and research.

Agreement: Our world is not as static as we would like to believe it to be. There is something unnerving about know that the ground beneath me is rebellious – at any moment eager to break open, sink, or rise.

Disagreement: I am not a geologist. I am a believer in a young earth. I don’t think that time+chance=what I see. I don’t think that “Genesis has been debunked.”

Personal App: Appreciate what is below. Understand that man is not as mighty as we would like to believe ourselves to be. Appreciate the fact that amidst all the theories, the earth still changes.

Favorite Quote: “Now he [Darwin] was voyaging on the Beagle and developing his own sense of the slow and repetitive cycles of the earth and the giddying depths of time, with Lyell’s book in his hand and Hutton’s theory in his head. In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too” (143). (So in other words, if you can’t explain it, throw lots of time at it.)

The reason I read this book is because I wanted to step into a discipline I knew little about. A geologist in our church recommended it to me. So, if you would like to do the same, here you go!

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