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Evidence
of the Global Genesis Flood David Stewart, Jr. Uniformitarianism:
The Ultimate Argument from Ignorance Ice age theory and the
“millions and millions of years” of geology are founded in the belief in uniformitarianism
– that “the present is the key to the past,” and that the features of today’s
earth are the result of slow processes occurring over millions of years
rather than any cataclysmic event. The fossil record and
geology demonstrate the occurrence of massive cataclysms: the extinction of
the dinosaurs, the extinction of woolly mammoths, and clear delineations
between geologic “epochs,” rather than an uninterrupted transition. In the past few years, we have seen the
eruption of Mount Saint Helen’s, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the
Indian Ocean Tsunami, and the mud flows that completely buried the town of Uniformitarianism is the
ultimate argument from ignorance. It
insists that, if we do not see it, it doesn’t exist. Scriptural descriptions of great cataclysms
like the Genesis flood are disallowed a priori. Uniformitarianism would
predict that if Vesuvius is not erupting today, then it did not erupt in the
past. If cities were submerged, it
must have been by gradual encroachment of the sea and not by earthquake or
calamity. Known evidence from recorded
history is sufficient to overturn uniformitarian assumptions. Events like the
destruction of Even uniformitarians have
had to invoke cataclysms to explain obviously catastrophic events. Numerous sharp discontinuities in the
geological and fossil records demonstrate that change has been anything other
than gradual. Uniformitarians have
speculated and then claimed as fact that meteor impact led to the extinction
of the dinosaurs. However, they have
been very careful to make sure that the invoked cataclysms sufficiently
contrast to the biblical record to ensure that religious believers remain
marginalized as hopelessly uninformed zealots who believe ancient mythologies
unsupported by any objective evidence. The
Double Standard Uniformitarian critics who
assert that there is no evidence for a global flood employ a double standard
in demanding evidence that their own theories do not meet. They claim that, if there were a global
flood, one would expect to find a thick layer of sediment in locations around
the world. A level of sediment
consistent with a flood has been found in many parts of Critics’ claim that the absence
of a consistent, uniform sedimentary layer around the world disproves the
concept of a global flood is both convenient and naive. These same individuals have no difficulty
with accepting the time frame of “millions and millions of years” demanded by
evolutionary theory, even though 90-99% of the geological record claimed by
scholars is missing! Cremo and
Thompson wrote: To the present day, the drastic incompleteness of
the fossil record has remained a critical factor in paleontology. Most popular presentations of evolution
give the idea that the layers of sedimentary rock offer a complete and
incontrovertible record of the progressive development of life on earth. But geologists who have studied the matter
have come up with some astounding findings.
For example, Tjeerd H. van Andel looked at a series of sandstone and
shale deposits in Most of the presumed
geologic “epochs” – Cambrian, Devonian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, etc.
– are missing in any given area. The
worldwide extent of sedimentary evidence for the flood compares favorably
with most of the geologic epochs.
Applying the same logic that is used to discredit the global flood, can
we conclude that there was no global Permian or Eocene era because the
geology of these eras is not universally found? Yet during Noah’s flood, the “waters
prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days” (Genesis 7:24). The
previously mentioned geologic epochs allegedly lasted for tens or even
hundred of millions of years each! Critics insist that there
could have been no global flood because of the lack of a universal layer of
ancient sediment which has been consistently identified at all locations
around the earth, but that global geologic epochs lasted for hundreds of
millions of years, even though no evidence for them can be identified in most
locales. The double standard and the mental
gymnastics invoked in such an exercise demonstrate that their tactics are
polemical rather than scholarly. Global
Flood vs. The Ice Age Much evidence of the
global flood has been misclassified as pertaining to the so-called “Ice
Age.” Traditional pictures of the ice
age – wooly mammoths frozen in ice – belie the fact that the “Ice Age” is an
impossibility contrived to create a pseudo-scientific alternative to the vast
evidence of the global flood with at least an air of plausibility – as long
as one does not look too closely. It is claimed by scholars
and popular science media like the Discovery
Channel that the “woolly mammoths” and other large prehistoric animals
lived in icy tundra and “cold, dry grasslands.” Popular depictions (above, image by Daniel
Schreve) show mammoths grazing on icy tundra. The mammoth’s woolly hide
is introduced as “proof” that it was a cold-resistant species. It is claimed that
the wool is an obvious evolutionary adaptation to keep out the cold. The mammoths allegedly were adapted to cold
weather, but perished in large numbers in particularly dire, unanticipated
freezes during the “ice age.” Not able
to adapt rapidly enough to the advancing cold, mammoths and a host of other
flora and fauna suffered extinction. Is scientific evidence
consistent with the ice age theory? Ancient remains of numerous creatures that presently live
only in temperate and even sub-tropical climes that have been found in
northern The New Siberian Islands, in the Arctic Ocean [north of the Professor
Charles Hapgood observed of finds on the New Siberian Islands in the There the remains of mammoths and other animals are most
numerous of all. There Baron Toll, the
Arctic explorer, found the remains of a sabertooth tiger, and a fruit tree
that had been ninety feet tall when it was standing.[3] Nor have such
finds been confined to Siberia and the A similar
abundance of ancient ancient flora and fauna has been found in northern When learning of this exotic mixture of hyenas, mammoths,
sabertooth cats, camels, horses, rhinos, asses, deer with gigantic antlers,
lions, ferrets, saiga and other Pleistocene species, one cannot help
wondering about the world in which they lived. This great diversity of species, so
different from that encountered today, raises the most obvious question: is
it not likely that the rest of the environment was also different?[5] Woolly mammoths,
sabertooth tigers, saiga antelopes, and other ancient animals commonly
associated with the “ice age” are not On the other side of the globe, Dr.
Charles Hapgood cites evidence of “long periods of temperate climate in In
1990...two geologists made a discovery that completely reopened the question
of the age of the Ice Sheet. Working just 250 miles from the South Pole the
geologists discovered the frozen remains of forest that was later dated to be
between two and three million years old. So it turns out that the
encyclopedias of 1976 were wrong by a much as fifty-eight million years! The
absolute ancient age of the Antarctic ice cap wasn’t so absolute after all.[7] Radiometric dating of material prior to
the great deluge is unreliable, as I have previously
documented, and as will be discussed later in this article. Areas where
the most abundant finds of woolly mammals and other large animals in
locations inside the Arctic Circle, like the The “ice age”
theory utterly fails to explain such findings. The real question is, when and how did the
“warm age” occur that allowed vast numbers of large mammals to flourish in
what are now polar conditions? Dr.
Hapgood quotes Priestly: “There can be no doubt from what this expedition and
other expeditions have found that several times at least during past ages the
Antarctic has possessed a climate much more genial than that of Hapgood further notes that
traditional models of east-west continental drift fail to explain these
findings, and that there have always been temperature differences on the
earth: If they are instances of
extremely cold climates distributed in an unexplained manner on the earth's
surface, there were also warm climates whose distribution is equally
unexplained. In connection with these warm climates in the present polar
regions, there arises a contradiction of an especially glaring character. On
the one hand there is evidence that the distribution of plants and animals in
the past did not, as a rule, follow the present arrangements of the climatic
zones. On the other hand, the trend of the new evidence is to show that
climatic zones have always been about as clearly distinguished by temperature
differences as they are today. This is in flat contradiction to the
assumption, still widely held, that the earth, during most of geological
history, did not possess clearly demarcated climatic zones. We are forced to
conclude that, since many ancient plants and animals were not distributed
according to the present climatic zones, the zones themselves have changed
position on the earth’s surface. This requires, as we have seen, that the
surface shall have changed position relative to the axis of rotation.[8] An
understanding of the nature of polar climate demonstrates that even a large
increase in average worldwide temperature would not adequately explain the
presence of vast temperate and sub-tropical flora and fauna inside the Modern scholars
and politicians warn about the dire effects of global warning including
rising sea levels, increasing hurricanes and dire storms, and more, over a
temperature increase of only one degree Celsius over the past century, and an
estimated increase of another 1.5 degrees over the next hundred years. Some have called global warming the “greatest
crisis of our time.” It is estimated
that trillion-dollar political proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
would reduce global temperature by just 0.13-0.18 degrees Celsius over the next
ninety years.[9] The allegedly drastic effects of even
minute modern temperature shifts and the vast worldwide human industrial
activity claimed to be necessary to explain even such a minute temperature
change only demonstrate the absurdity of ice age theory. No amount of plausible global warming would
allow vast numbers of mastodons, saber-tooth tigers, and other temperate and
subtropical flora and fauna to flourish inside of the Arctic circle, nor
would any amount of cooling allow glaciers in the Sierra Nevada mountains to
sustain Lake Lahontan, Lake Manly, and other lakes that once covered the vast
desert of the American southwest (see “fairy tale geology” below). A review of
these finds demonstrates the scientific impossibility of the ice age
theory. The only tenable explanation
for the discovery of temperate and subtropical flora and fauna in polar zones
is that the land was once in a temperate zone, and that the position of the
poles has changed. In his book “The
Path of the Pole,” Professor Charles Hapgood produces considerable evidence
for historical shifts in polar alignment due to displacement of the earth’s
crust. Hapgood’s research was endorsed
by Albert Einstein, who carried on correspondence with Hapgood over crustal
displacement theory. The fact that the poles were not always in their current
positions can be seen from ancient animal and plant life found in regions far
outside the current ranges of comparable modern species. The Ice Age Hoax In “The Case
for the Flood” in Forbidden History,[10] Peter Bros describes the background that
led agnostic scholars – still with little very limited information about the
world – to contrive the “ice age” as an alternative, counter-scriptural
explanation for the vast evidence of a worldwide flood: The scientific establishment unknowingly cast its
lot against a prehistorical civilization before the evidence began showing
up. It did so by enforcing the eighteenth-century rule of reason which
stipulated that God could not be used as an explanation for physical reality,
thereby rejecting out of hand the possible validity of all biblical accounts
and, in the case of a worldwide prehistoric society, the possibility that a
flood of biblical proportions destroyed all but the megalithic evidence for
that civilization. Making the world of science safe against
Bible-thumpers became the overriding goal of nineteenth-century science. Pierre-Simon de Laplace had barely finished
banishing God as the source of Newton’s perpetual motion in the solar system
(by creating his swirling mass of gas out of whole cloth) before evidence for
the worldwide flood described in the Bible began to accumulate. Science, at this time, was unaware that
accounts of a universal flood appear around the globe, the universal flood
being a part of the myths and traditions of more than five hundred widely
separated cultures. [44-45]... The ice age was crafted out of whole cloth to
counter the possibility that evidence turning up all over the world could be
used to support biblical interpretations of the world. No one wants to go back to the days of
feudal science, where decisions about reality were filtered through belief
systems designed to provide for our salvation. However, we have created a scientific
system that enshrines off-the-cuff ideas of men who lived before we knew
about the atom, electricity, or even that some stars were galaxies – in short,
we are allowing our views of reality to be controlled by the unverifiable
notions of dead men who knew relatively nothing. [51] Yet explorations of the world produced increasing
evidence that a global flood had in fact occurred. High mountains demonstrated geological
scoring and drift materials demonstrating that they had been covered by rapid
flood waters: As explorers started to bring home descriptions of
the world from afar, science was horrified to see a picture emerging of a
planet scarred by massive movements of water, generally from the northwest to
the southeast, over its surface. The
northwestern sides of whole mountains were scored as if they had been
subjected to fast-moving waters containing gravel and boulders. Floodwater was unmistakably the source of
the scoring because science could see the same effect from fast-moving
rivers. Furthermore, those same sides
of the mountains were also home to massive buildups of drift materials,
detritus presumably left behind by receding waters. Again, this was an effect that mimicked
natural actions in the real world.
These drift deposits even contained the remains of animals, including
the woolly mammoth. While the mountainside silt and ancient fossils
were at least out of view of most people, the large unexplained boulders
across the countryside in public view presented a more embarrassing problem: More horrifying to nineteenth-century scientists
than the evidence of water damage and silting were the gigantic boulders
exposed to public view all over the European countryside in places where they
clearly didn’t belong. These oversized
rocks, many weighing thousands of tons, could have been moved only by massive
floodwaters carrying them along and then depositing them when the waters
receded. The movement of these rocks
by the floodwaters would have been, in part, responsible for the
aforementioned mountainside scouring. What to do with these discoveries that constituted
irrefutable evidence of a worldwide flood?
If science had been true to the evidence and had concluded that the
evidence had, in fact, resulted from a worldwide flood, religious crazies
would have filled the pulpits and newspapers with cries that the biblical
story of the flood, and thus the entire Bible, had been scientifically
confirmed: not a desirable result...[44]
Science saw the evidence of the flood described in the Bible and
created the ice age to avoid the appearance of verifying an event described
in the Bible. [48] Desperate times called for desperate measures, and
scholars scrambling for a non-scriptural, uniformitarian explanation colluded
to invent the “ice age.” The fact that
remains of mammoths – erroneously deemed to be Arctic and sub-Arctic animals,
since they had been found in northern Siberia – were found in Europe, served
as the basis for an inductive leap that
icy glaciers must have descended from the frozen north across Europe,
bringing mammoths with them! Bros
continued: The task that faced science when it was confronted
with the incontrovertible evidence of a worldwide flood was to create a
scientific fact that would provide a substitute for the already existing
evidence left behind by the actual flood.
In the early 1820s, a Swiss engineer, Ignaz Venetz, focused on the
remains of woolly mammoths found in the drifts, pointing out that as the same
animals were being found in the frozen Siberian wastes, the area in which the
drifts were found must at one time have been covered with ice. A chorus of experts joined in, positing the
slow descent of glaciers from the north, a process that, because it
visualized the inexorable creep of ice over eons, deftly captured the spirit
of uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell’s theory, published in the 1830s, which
maintains that geologic processes occur gradually rather than
catastrophically. Lyell’s own
reconstruction of the earth’s history, focusing on the layers of sediment
left as the floodwaters receded, pictured the sediments as deposited over
eons so they could be used to produce a fictitious dating system for the
earth to counter the biblical creation story. [46] A decade later, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz
consolidated the speculations of Venetz and his chorus of approving voices by
enthroning himself as the inventor of the ice age. Rather than analyzing the data without
preconceptions in order to determine the truth, the “reverse scientific
method” was employed by picking a conclusion and ignoring data inconsistent
with the theory. These conjured
glaciers of the imaginary ice age have failed to explain why fossils of sub-tropical
species are found inside the The glacier theory did not explain why the scoring,
labeled striations that supported glacier theory appeared only on one side of the mountains or why the
drifts, called moraines to tie them
to the glacier theory, contained the remains of animals that were found only in equatorial regions, insects
that were found only in the
southern hemisphere, and birds that were native to Asia. The glacier theory did not explain why
giant boulders, named erratics to
accommodate the glacier theory, were found in desert regions where no glacier
could possibly go. Data points that the theory could not explain were
designated as erratics or
anomalies. Once again, scholars
employing the reverse scientific method have declared that it is the evidence
which is erratic or anomalous, and not the theory which fails to explain
it! Ice age theory also managed to redefine
gravity. Ice age glaciers are somehow alleged
to have climbed hills and high mountains and to have traveled across plains
and deserts. The glaciers covered But these discrepancies were small potatoes
compared to the scientific reality of glaciers themselves. Glacier theory simply ignored the basic
facts of glacier movement. Glaciers
are flows of ice that, like rivers, respond to gravity. Glaciers do not climb hills and they do not
travel across level land. However,
because scientific facts are merely notions, ideas that cannot be disproved,
those who present strong visual confirmation of their truthfulness are always
both widely and wildly accepted. Even
though glaciers could not have carried the erratics the thousands of miles
required to reach (and cover) the European countryside, the fact that the
North Pole was north, which was “up there” on the globe, was more than ample
scientific proof that gravity could cause the glaciers to inch “down” over
the sides of the globe. No one
proposed that ice fields covered the southern half of the planet because that
would require the glaciers to defy gravity and travel “up” the sides of the
globe from the South Pole. Such is the
stuff upon which empirical science bases its notions of reality. [47] In the intervening years, scholars have failed to
produce any rational or credible explanation for how the vast temperature
variations demanded by ice age theory could have occurred. The only real “ice age” seems to be in the
minds of many scholars. As the ice age theory is proclaimed to represent
“fact,” and as the theory is not based on evidence, no evidence can disprove
it! Today, we are stuck with the scientific fact, the
myth, that ice can creep down from the North Pole and cover Europe and Biology of the Flood Fossil evidence is also inconsistent with the alleged
“ice age,” but fully consistent with the scriptural account of a global
flood. Peter Bros continues: Subsequent discoveries continued to verify the
presence of a worldwide flood and mirrored the hundreds of newly encountered
myths and traditions attesting to the flood’s actuality. The very drifts that contained the bones of
the woolly mammoths that gave rise to the idea of the ice age contained,
along with the remains of exotic animals, insects and birds that had never lived in the same location and
vegetation that could never have
been local to where the drifts were found.
There was no way to explain this admixture of life by glacial
movements. It was as if all the creatures, all the trees, all
the vegetation of the earth had been caught up in flowing whirlpools, mixed
together, and then deposited wherever the water settled. In addition to the drifts at the northwest
bases of the mountain chains, these jumbles of diverse life-forms were also
found in drifts that filled isolated valleys and made up entire islands in
the Arctic whose boneyards contained not only the remains of animals from
warmer climes, but also unaccountable tree trunks extirpated with their roots
intact – trees that could have grown only below the Arctic treeline. Science did not rush to proclaim the
existence of a warm age! Like the geologic evidence, biological evidence
inconsistent with the ice age theory was ignored by establishment scholars: Instead, as soon as the ice age became a scientific
fact, the fossil remains of life that had been found in the drifts, including
the woolly mammoth that gave rise to the myth of the ice age, disappeared
from scientific discourse and the newly named moraines became a simple
admixture of sand and rock. When the
same admixture of bones and plant life was found stuffed deep in caves, a
process that could have occurred only if
it had been carried into the small cracks and crevices by the recessions of
massive floodwaters, the caves were deemed an anomaly that explained nothing,
and the evidence was allowed to be mined into nonexistence. [48] Mass Extinctions In Forbidden History, David Lewis wrote: A great, sudden extinction took place on the
planet, perhaps as recently as 11,500 years ago (usually attributed to the end
of the last ice age), in which hundreds of mammal and plant species
disappeared from the face of the earth, driven deep into caverns and charred
muck piles the world over. Modern
science, with all its powers and prejudices, has been unable to adequately
explain this event. Instead, one might
reasonably say, it has tried to explain
away the evidence with ever more cumbersome theories meant to account for
everything and anything of a cataclysmic nature that happened in recent
prehistory. Gradual glacial movement
caused all the death and destruction, we are told, though such assertions do
not account for much of the world wide evidence indicating that, on review, a
global cataclysm must have taken place. Indeed, scientists can’t explain why
massive glaciers would slide in the first place.[11] Problems with radiometric dating are addressed here. A much better explanation for the observed
mass extinctions is provided in the Genesis account of the global flood: And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both
of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils
was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And
every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground,
both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven;
and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they
that were with him in the ark. (Genesis 7:21-23) Sunken
Cities Legends found in over five
hundred geographically separated cultures worldwide that converge, with minor
variation, upon the biblical account of the great flood. Converging accounts of an ancient While the search for some
continues, numerous sunken cities have been found, validating scriptural
teachings of catastrophic changes to the land. Vast historical and archaeological evidence
demonstrates cataclysmic rather than uniformitarian changes. The remains of sunken cities have been
identified in regions where uniformitarian geography claims no upheavals have
occurred for millions of years. Some
examples include: The cities of Heliki and Boura, A sunken city just west of Cuba
and east of the Yucatan contains megaliths "of a kind you'd find at
Stonehenge or Easter Island," large structures that “bear a remarkable
resemblance to the pyramidal design of Mayan and Aztec temples in Mexico,”
and “symbols and inscriptions” in a language that has not yet been
identified.[12] The remains of man-made or crafted monuments[13]
and evidence of an entire sunken city with pyramid-like structures have been
identified off the coast of Yonaguni
Island, Japan, although some critics insist that these are “natural formations.” Natural formations? Images of structures off Intriguing city-like
archaeological structures, inscribed ancient pottery, and over 2,000 ancient
artifacts have been found in Indian’s Bay of Cambay. Badrinaryan Badrinaryan’s writeup of explorations of this possible
sunken city are found here. Turbulent water conditions make deep diving
impossible, and with imaging alone but without direct exploration, the
implication of the structures identified with imaging is disputed. It is not clear how alleged natural formations
could account for the city-like pattern of ruins, or how such remarkably
human-appearing structures would spontaneously form in a turbid zone. While these discoveries individually and
collectively do not serve as “proof” of a great flood, they are consistent
with scripturally described cataclysms, and unexplained by uniformitarian
theory. The response of uniformitarian
scholars, as in the case of the Yonaguni ruins or the Ballard’s
Black Sea Flood Explorer and oceanographer
Robert Ballard’s discovery of proof of a catastrophic flood in the Black Sea
region has experienced wide coverage in the National Geographic
and other media. The Ballard’s flood, while
cited as evidence for the Genesis flood, has been declared by scientists and Christian apologists
alike to have been only a localized event.
While noting that the discovery of evidence for this flood was made
possible only by the unique anoxic environment of the Black Sea region, the
former group construes Ballard’s flood as demonstrating that Noah’s flood was
only a regional deluge which was either exaggerated to become the basis of
the Biblical account, while the latter group represents it as an entirely
different event unrelated to the global Genesis flood. This reasoning, however,
suffers from a curious leap of non-sequitur logic. The Black Sea flood was proven to have
occurred only by evidence from the
unique combination of factors leading to an anoxic environment as the salt
water Mediterranean floods overtook the fresh water Ballard’s Black Sea flood
provides additional evidence of a worldwide flood, where the anoxic layer
created by the unique combination of circumstances in the The Antarctic and Yet virtually no snow is falling on most of
Antarctica, nor on the The observation that “entire mountain
ranges lay buried beneath the ice cap"[20] brings to mind the description of the
Genesis flood: And the waters prevailed, and were
increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the
waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth;
and all the high hills, that were
under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward
did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. (Genesis 7:18-20) Modern science fails to explain how the ice caps of
Greater Antarctica or What does water do in polar regions? It freezes!
Whereas the water covering other areas of the world is long gone, the
ice caps on Antarctica and Fairy Tale Geology Death Valley was once submerged under How does this
explanation square with reality? The
water line is slightly oblique and not fully level. The lower layers of the mountain
demonstrate no water marks at all. Elsewhere in the valley, the water line is
not found at a consistent level.
Current geologic features are not consistent to retain Similar fairy tales are invoked by
geologists to explain the misclassification of the results of cataclysm as
representing millennia of erosion. David Stewart, Sr. wrote: We know perfectly well what erosion
patterns look like. We know perfectly well what fracture patterns look like.
It astounds me that seemingly intelligent persons can with a straight face claim
that the Grand Canyon was actually caused by the Recent Uplift of
Today’s Mountains In “Recent Rapid Uplift of Today’s
Mountains,” Dr. John Baumgardner observed: An ongoing
enigma for the standard geological community is why all the high mountain
ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the
Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what
amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time
scale. In terms of this time scale, these mountain ranges have all undergone
several kilometers of vertical uplift since the beginning of the Pliocene
about five million years ago. This presents a profound difficulty for uniformitarian
thinking because the driving forces responsible for mountain building are
assumed to have been operating steadily at roughly the same slow rates as
observed in today's world for at least the past several hundred million
years. But the uplift history of today's mountains is anything but
uniformitarian in character. Observational evidence indicates that the
terrain where these mountains now exist, in many if not most cases, was
nearly flat and near sea level when the recent intense pulse of uplift began.
The expectation of uniformitarian thinking generally is that most of the time
denudation by erosion ought to be more or less in equilibrium with uplift. Baumgardner
observes, as we have previously seen, that the catastrophic changes at the end
of the imaginary “Ice Age” or Pliocene/late Pleistocene eras correspond to
the timing of the biblical flood: Uniformitarians
interpret the rock record since the abrupt appearance of multi-celled
organisms in the rocks to represent more than 500 million years of time,
while Biblical creationists interpret all but the topmost of these
fossil-bearing rocks to represent the destructive work of a year-long global
cataclysm that took place less than 5000 years ago. The Pliocene-Pleistocene
timing of the main phase of mountain uplift, corresponding roughly to the Ice
Age, while brief in the uniformitarian framework, still requires several
million years on their calendar. By comparison, in the Biblical time frame,
this uplift unfolds over several centuries following the main Flood cataclysm
that itself lasted but a single year. He goes on to
present a mechanism consistent with observed data for the changes associated
with the flood: The case is
compelling that the Flood involved massive tectonic transformation of the
earth's surface. Many lines of evidence show that today's igneous ocean
floor—all of it—has formed via seafloor spreading since roughly mid-way
through the Flood. This implies that all the ocean floor formed prior to that
point in earth history, including all the ocean floor formed at Creation and
existing at the beginning of the Flood and all the ocean floor formed during
the interval in which Paleozoic sediments were being deposited on the
continents during the earlier stages of the Flood, has vanished from the face
of the planet. Seismology provides a clue as to where it went. Seismic images
of the mantle reveal a ring of dense, presumably cold, rock at the base of
the mantle beneath the subduction zones surrounding the The only way
to fit all these observations together in a consistent manner is to conclude
that the Flood involved an episode of extremely fast plate tectonics that
cycled the pre-Flood ocean floor, as well as that formed early in the
cataclysm, into the earth's mantle. The energy to drive this event was
readily available in the form of gravitational potential energy of the cold,
pre-Flood ocean floor rocks. The stress-weakening tendency of silicate
minerals comprising mantle rocks allows the process to unfold in a runaway
manner. Laboratory experiments document that these minerals can weaken by as
much as 8-10 orders of magnitude for shear stress levels that can occur in
the mantles of planets the size of the earth.
Calculations performed over the past decade show that the pattern of
flow generated by subducting seafloor around a Pangean-like supercontinent
similar to the one we believe existed prior to and again during the Flood,
pulls the continental blocks apart in a manner similar to that indicated by
the earth's present day seafloor record. In addition, the huge amount of
subduction at continent margins during an episode of runaway sinking of ocean
floor leads to considerable thickening of the continental crust via two main
processes. One is the melting of subducted sediments as they reach a depth of
about 75 miles. This magma penetrates into the crust above as sills and
dikes, with some being extruded at the surface as lava and volcanic ash. The
other main process is the physical dragging of warm and ductile lower crust
inboard relative to the continent by the subducting ocean slab. Both
processes serve to produce zones of thickened continental crust at a
continental margin adjacent to where slabs of ocean floor are plunging into
the mantle. The west coast of He also
introduces an interesting mechanism that would account for both the uplift of
today’s mountains, and the depression of coastal regions such as we have seen
with various sunken cities: Smooth-planed
eroded surfaces that immediately precede the global uplift fits well with the
story of the Genesis flood, but is unexplained by uniformitarian geology: Yet an
equally bewildering difficulty for a uniformitarian is the widespread
presence of what are known as planation surfaces that pre-date this global
pulse of mountain building. Ollier and Pain document dozens of examples where
regions that were later uplifted to form mountain ranges were first beveled
to nearly flat surfaces by intense erosion just prior to uplift. These
authors puzzle how the tectonic forces could have ceased operating long
enough for erosion to have abraded away hundreds to thousands of feet of rock
to form flat topography and then be unleashed again to uplift rapidly the
entire region by many thousands of feet. The Flood framework provides the
obvious answer. The beveling flat of such broad expanses of terrain was the
logical consequence of the runoff from the Flood. And it would have occurred
just prior to when the uplift took place. The geological evidence is fully consistent with
the story of the great flood, and the earth being “divided” (presumed by many
to refer to completion of continental drift) in the days of Shem’s
great-great-grandson Peleg approximately 150 years later (Genesis 10:25). Harmonizing the Evidence Putting all the pieces together, it appears that
several phenomena occurred at the time of the great flood and shortly
thereafter: -
Displacement of
the earth’s crust shifted the position of the North Pole from a location near
modern Hudson Bay to its current location, and the South Pole shifted from
the eastern periphery of Greater Antarctica (in the direction of -
Cities and
entire lands were sunk into the ocean, including Atlantis
and others. -
Great mountain
chains were lifted up in areas that had previously been flat -
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