2. The Flood

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day or the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.”

Moses, Genesis 7: 11-12

Hollywood has produced films showing global cataclysms as the result of global warming. They show a subzero cold front freezing a helicopter instantaneously to temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero causing it to fall from the sky while its crew members are nothing more than ice statues. They showed New York and California being flooded and frozen, a volcano erupting in the middle of LA, and much more. Yet, little creativity on their part is afforded to the efforts of demonstrating the reality of the Flood, God’s first (but not final) Judgement upon the earth. In this e-mail, you will see science and scripture walk hand in hand as the reality of the “springs of the great deep bursting forth” had cataclysmic effects resulting in it raining for forty days and forty nights; the ice age; the rapid formation of oil, coal, and the fossil record; the creation of the modern day mountains, volcanoes, canyons, oceans, and continents.

The Hydroplate Theory

Any scientific assumption that cannot be proved in a lab on a regular basis is a theory. Evolution is a theory. Electromagnetism is a theory. The existence of black holes is a theory involving a lot of math and assumption, yet we all for the most part find their existence certainly plausible. Even the way a radio works is a theory because let’s face it, we may have big ideas about how it works with tried and true measurements to support what we all believe in, but let’s face it, no one has ever seen a radio wave. There could be even deeper mysteries to it.

Even in Creationism, we have theories of our own. The difference is that our theories yield to the Word of God which we know to be true. One of these theories is the Hydroplate theory. Hydro meaning water and plate involves the many layers of sediment, dirt, and rock which make up the crust and mantle of the earth. So, the theory involves a subterranean layer of water that is underneath the earth’s surface constituting the water mentioned in Genesis that burst forth from the Great Deep. The theory was developed by a Dr. Walter Brown (Former Air Force Academy Professor, Professor Emeritus of Physics, and Director of the Center of Scientific Creation) who is also a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. He has created various computer simulations and mathematical models that uncover what we see in scripture with what we see today.

According to Dr. Brown’s theory, 10 miles below the earth’s surface, a subterranean layer of water that was a ½ mile thick existed in various interconnected chambers. This water constituted half of the water in the oceans today existed in this thin spherical shell of interconnected chambers. Subterranean pressures began to build up which caused the earth’s crust to stretch and expand like a balloon causing failures in the earth’s crust in between the hydroplate and the earth’s surface causing a crack to form. The crack went in two different directions: one moving north and one moving south at the rate of 3 miles per second. The cracks followed the path of least resistance as it encircled the globe in about two hours time. As the crack formed, the subterranean water began to vent through the small crack as 10 miles of earth and rock pressing down upon it accelerated the water to hypersonic speeds. Enormous amounts of pressure and hundreds of degrees of heat due to friction took its effect upon the water making its rocketing ascent all the more explosive. As it spewed forth from the crack at speeds breaking the sound barrier, it sprayed 20 miles upward into the earth’s atmosphere giving birth to this global cataclysm. According to Dr. Brown, this event would have the energy release of 10 billion hydrogen bombs. Some of the water coming out of the crack just fell down to the ground as a tidal wave. Some of it began to change weather patterns and set the stage for the forty days and nights of torrential rainfall that the world has never seen before or after. Some of the large volumes of water quickly froze in the earth’s atmosphere and fell back down to earth as a freezing blast instantaneously freezing, suffocating, and burying all life in its path. This is why in places like Siberia and Alaska, you find perfectly preserved mammoths that were instantly frozen in place. The ice age was not global. In caves in Nebraska, evidence can be found for an ice age, while in Arkansas caves, you cannot find evidence for the ice age. So, the effects of the ice age did have north and south limits and would not have affected places like Israel and Mesopotamia, but the Flood did.

The Sedimentary Mudslide

As this high pressure water spewed forth, another thing began to happen. Erosion occurred at the cracks and they were continuously widened as sediments began to spew forth with the water creating a large mudslide on both sides of the cracks covering the continents. The mudslide engulfed plants and animals leading as it spread forth over the land with a tremendous amount of heat and pressure. This set of dynamics led to the rapid production of coal, oil, and the current fossil record. If it were not for this sedimentary burial of animals today, the mineralization process could not have occurred to preserve the animals that are being dug up today. This fact alone challenges evolutionary beliefs in how the fossils got to be in a position to be fossilized in the first place.

The Significance of the Mid Oceanic Ridge (MOR)

The Mid Oceanic Ridge (MOR) is the tallest and largest mountain range in the world and traces the globe like a seam on a baseball. Where is it? It’s on the ocean floor. How did it get there? It’s one of the cracks from the Flood. As the cracks eroded to a certain width, subterranean rocks began to spring upward to form this mountain range. As it gained in height, it elevated the earth’s crust in that region. A small portion of the water left behind from the subterranean hydroplate began to act as a lubricant causing the continents to begin to drift away from the crack. The continents accelerated to a speed of 45 miles per hour until they met resistance. Once resistance is met, the crust began to compress and buckle up and down. Where it buckled up, a mountain was formed. Where it buckled low, a trench was formed. The rising of the MOR continued to push the earth to form the rise of continents, mountains, and oceanic trenches throughout the period of the flood. All major mountain ranges today are parallel to the Mid Oceanic Ridges from where they slid. Eventually water drained off from the rising land into the deep ocean basin.

In Conclusion

Before the Flood, there was no rain: “for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth . . . but streams (also can be translated as a mist or a spring) came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.” (Genesis 2:6). Plant life found from this period is described to have very broad leaves in order to catch the mists which supplied the earth its daily allotment of water. God’s Judgment brought change. This cataclysmic Flood left the earth, its climate, and everything now different. Now we have a hydrologic cycle which did not exist before the Flood. In the hydrologic cycle, you have rain falling on the land, then it gets evaporated into the air, it condensates, it rains, and so on. As a result, a dramatic reduction in the size of leaves is noted between the plant life of today and Pre-Flood. Only God could put together something so violent and altering, and could make it so life giving.

In His next and final Judgment according to the book of Revelation, the earth and the universe as a whole shall undergo an intense fire causing them to pass away and leaving us with a New Heaven and a New Earth. There we shall have no tears and no sorrows. There will be no seas for the water that flows there shall be the Water of Life flowing from the Throne of God established on the New Earth. We also will not have any light except for the Light of God. Another Judgment is coming: more severe, more intense, more violent, and much more altering. But, the life it will yield will be all the more exquisite for those who know that Christ is their Ark through the coming storms.

1. Canyons are young

Before we dive into the Creation Week, the Flood, and many other events, let's take a moment to lay down some groundwork which we can be seen in the Grand Canyon and other canyons like it. The world view of evolutionists is that several mathematically IMPOSSIBLE events randomly bounced together to create something advanced and wonderful. In order to support their theory, they need a great deal of time to allow these completely random events to come together. Often, they continuously extend the timeline more and more in an effort to make all of their numbers work out. The philosophy behind this way of thinking is known as uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism is spelled out in a unique quote that is on the first few pages of almost every textbook stating that one must measure the way things are today to understand the past. So according to uniformitarianism, powerful assumptions are made that if one measured the Colorado River today, then we should assume that it has been flowing like this for millions of years. In contrast, Creationists take the Word of God as the standard and therefore believe in a young earth and universe which is between 6000 to 7000 years old. Creationists also believe in two very significant cataclysmic events which have instantly altered the entire planet when they happened: the curse of the fall of man, and the Flood. Once a person understands some of the details of the global impact of these events, you can understand that there is no way one can look and measure the things of the world we have today in order to understand a greatly different world. In our age today, a lot can happen naturally in 6 hours, 1 day, 1 week or a month in the appropriate conditions.

The Grand Canyon:

It is said today that the Grand Canyon has been carved by the Colorado River for the past 65 million years in order to be the breath taking sight that it is today. To come up with this figure, they measure present day averages of river flow, sedimentary content, divided by the present day volume of what has been cut into the 227 mile long, 4-18 mile wide, 1 mile deep canyon while also taking into account for the different type of rock layers and the impact the Colorado River would have upon them. When the math is done, they come up with the large 65 million year number. This takes no account of the impact of water flowing in from a melting glacier from the end of a post flood Ice Age and it does not take into account of global flood which occurred from an eruption of a large amount of subterranean water into the upper atmosphere (Genesis 7:11; we'll get more into this in a later edition).

But, in being fair to the uniformitarianists, what does the present day evidence say?

EROSION: Types of erosion (slow, semi-turbulent, or turbulent) can be pinpointed by the formation of certain rock/crystal patterns. The formation of aragonite shows a slow, gradual erosion. Semi-turbulent erosion would develop calcite. Turbulent water erosion would develop microcite. Guess which one is found in the Grand Canyon? . . . MICROCITE! With this verifying turbulent waters existed in the formation of the Grand Canyon, this counters the idea that it was formed slowly over 65 million years. Instead, it was formed with great violence and turbulence.

LAYERING: Take a close look at the 17 layers of the Grand Canyon. Notice how very neat and distinct they are. None of them are blended together. They are like pancakes stacked on top of each other. The layers do not blend like a painting with the colors running down. They are all very neat. Why? A teacher had a large see through cylinder filled with water and an array of different types of sediments. She asked the class how long it would take for the layers of earth to settle. The class responded with millions of years as they have been conditioned to. The teacher shook up the cylinder, and within minutes, all the different layers have formed with the densest ones being on the bottom. She had to repeat this experiment four times before the class realized that subterranean layers can settle and form in the presence of a large volume of water. Speaking of layers, every 3rd layer out of the 17 layers in the Grand Canyon has a gypsum layer. It takes 300 degrees F and a lot of water in order for gypsum to form. This could have happened by the uniformitarianist way of a cataclysmic event happening every 3 ages; or it could happen by one cataclysmic Flood and when the layers settled in accordance to their density, the gypsum mud slides came in settled with them.

FOSSILS: Nautiloids are small squid-dart like creatures that are found on one of the deep layers of the Grand Canyon. These fossils would not exist if tons of sediment did not violently come down on top of them and encapsulate them. One of the interesting observations about these fossils is that they are all parallel to each other. Creation scientist made models of the shapes of these creatures and put them in a wave pool to simulate a violent wave burying them. The result, they all got buried parallel to each other. What you have here is a mass nautiloid-cide.

FOSSILIZED FOOTPRINTS: Also, amphibian (not reptile) footprints seen in a distressed, crisis fashion with heavy toe imprints with little to no pressure on the soles of the feet. The footprints also do not go in the direction they are pointed. It was as if the animal was trying to hold its head above water as a wave was pushing it in a direction it did not want to go. Lab tests conducted with amphibians showed similar results and conclusions.

Now, let's look at the formation of present day canyons, gulches, and valleys so we can see how long it took them to take place.

Mount St Helen Revealed:

Last week, we discussed that the eruption of Mount St Helen offered volumes of data in favor of a young Earth. The eruption showed that within a 24 hour period, a volcanic mudslide roaring at 40-90 MPH can create a 140 foot deep cut through solid rock which came to be known as the Little Grand Canyon (please note that this should not be confused with the Little Grand Canyons in the states of Illinois, Missouri, and Utah). It turns out that this hot mudslide came into contact with water and ice as it was cutting through the rock which caused explosions of steam which amplified the efforts of creating the canyon. Under conditions such as these, the actual Grand Canyon could have been cut in months as supposed to millions of years. Within a 24 hour period, Mount St Helen also accomplished the following feats that are supposed to take thousands or millions of years: it petrified wood in 6 hours, created a 600 foot sediment layer with fossilized plants and animals, it formed peat which is a precursor to coal, and formed igneous rock created in 1980 but having a radioisotope date of millions of years. We now know that time is not a factor in these events, rather temperature, water, pressure, and mineralization are the keys to these processes.

Other Canyons:

- Burlingame Canyon (1500 ft long, 120 ft deep, 120 ft wide) near Walla Walla, WA formed within a six day period when an irrigation effort went bad due to some heavy spring rains. Within the six day period, 5 million cubic feets of silt, sand, and rock were washed away.

- June 8, 1974, a rain storm eroded a valley in Brazil that is 16 ft deep, 50 ft wide, and 1600 ft long within 5 minutes.

- Providence Canyon, Lumpkin, GA, irrigation ditches dug in the 1850s eroded into gullies that were 1/4 mile wide and 150 feet deep.

- The Grand Canyon's own Colorado River flooded irrigators in Mexico. In nine months time, 450 cubic meters were eroded which are four times the size of the efforts of the Panama Canal. The erosion formed 43 miles of channels with an average width of 1000 ft and a depth of 50 feet and also formed the Salton Sea lake which was 45 miles long and 20 miles wide. This river diversion effort by irrigators became the largest man-made disaster in history.

In Conclusion (yay!):

A good motto to remember is "It either takes a little water and a long time, or a lot of water and a short time." It should also be known that all present day observable canyon, gulch, and valley formations have been by a lot of water and a short amount of time. I hope this small excerpt can show you that many scientific claims today do not line up with what is going on around us that can be observed everyday. Canyons and gulches are not formed quietly over millions of years, but over a short amount of time with great violence, temperature, and many dynamics taking place. "Even though we did not witness the Flood, we do see modern catastrophes, and they rapidly accomplish things the Flood did on a grander scale. In a short, Biblically compatible time scale, such a Flood can account for the features we see on earth, features which many geologists mistake for evidence of great age. Earth doesn't really look old, it looks flooded." (John Morris, PhD, Why Does the IRC study the Mount ST Helen's Eruption) A critical question to ask any scientific claim is "What's the evidence?" Many fallacies can be found by a fair examination of the evidence that many un-Biblical claims are based upon.