Flood geology (also creation geology or diluvial geology) is a prominent subset of beliefs under the umbrella of creationism that assumes the literal truth of a global flood as described in the Genesis account of Noah's Ark. For adherents, the global flood and its aftermath are believed to be the origin of most of the Earth's geological features, including sedimentary strata, fossilization, fossil fuels, and salt domes. Young Earth creationists regard Genesis as providing an historically and scientifically accurate record for the geological history of the Earth and believe that there exists evidence to support the historicity of the flood. However, the evidence creationists have presented in support of flood geology has been evaluated, refuted and unequivocally dismissed by the scientific community, which considers such flood geology to be pseudoscience. Flood geology directly contradicts the current consensus (and much of the evidence underlying it) in scientific disciplines such as geology, chemistry, molecular genetics, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and paleontology.[1][2][3][4]
History of flood geologyThe great flood in the history of geologyThe modern science of geology was founded in Europe in the 18th century.[5] Its practitioners sought to understand the history and shaping of the Earth through the physical evidence laid down in rocks and minerals. As many early geologists were clergymen, they naturally sought to link the geological history of the world with that set out in the Bible. The ancient theory that fossils were the result of "plastic forces" within the Earth's crust had by this time been abandoned, with the recognition that they represented the remains of once-living creatures. This, though, raised a major problem: how did fossils of sea creatures end up on land, or on the tops of mountains? The idea that fossils represented organisms that were killed and buried during the brief duration of the Flood was once commonly held by many Christian thinkers. Acceptance of the idea was furthered by the geological peculiarity in northern Europe where much is covered by layers of loam and gravel as well as erratic boulders deposited hundreds of miles from their original sources. This was interpreted as the result of massive flooding, though it is now known that these features are the product of ice age glaciations. Notions were once held that the global flood was associated with massive geographical upheavals, with old continents sinking and new ones rising, thus transforming ancient seabeds into mountain tops. During the Age of Enlightenment, there were significant attempts made to provide natural causes for the miracles recounted in the Bible. Natural philosophy explanations for a global flood can be found in such works as An Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) by John Woodward and New Theory of the Earth (1696) by Woodward’s student William Whiston.[6] By the early 19th century, however, this view had fallen into disrepute. It was already thought that the Earth's lifespan was far longer than that suggested by literal readings of the Bible (an age of 75,000 years had been suggested as early as 1779, as against the 6,000 years proposed by Archbishop James Ussher's famous chronology). Charles Lyell's promotion of James Hutton's ideas of uniformitarianism advocated the principle that geological changes that occurred in the past may be understood by studying present-day phenomena. In common with Newton, Hutton assumed that the world-system had been in a steady state since the day of creation, but unlike Newton he included in this vision not only the motion of celestial bodies and processes like chemical change on earth, but also processes of geological change. Christopher Kaiser writes:
The idea that all geological strata were produced by a single flood was rejected in 1837 by the Reverend William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford University, who wrote:
Although Buckland continued for a while to insist that some geological layers related to the Great Flood, he was forced to abandon this idea as the evidence increasingly indicated multiple inundations which occurred well before humans existed. He was convinced by the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz that much of the evidence on which he relied was in fact the product of ancient ice ages, and became one of the foremost champions of Agassiz's theory of glaciations. Mainstream science gave up on the idea of flood geology, which required major deviations from known physical processes. Emergence of flood geologyFlood geology was developed as a creationist endeavor in the 20th century by George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist and armchair[9] geologist who wrote a book in 1923 to provide a Traditional Adventist perspective on geology.[10][11] In the 1950s Price's work came under severe criticism and in particular by Bernard Ramm in his book “The Christian View of Science and Scripture”. Together with J. Laurence Kulp,[12] a geologist and in fellowship with the Plymouth Brethren, and other scientists,[13] Ramm influenced Christian organisations such as the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in not supporting flood geology. Price's work was subsequently adapted and updated by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr. in their book The Genesis Flood in 1961. Morris and Whitcomb argued that the Earth was geologically recent, that the Fall of Man had triggered the second law of thermodynamics, and that the Great Flood had laid down most of the geological strata in the space of a single year .[14] Given this history, they argued, "the last refuge of the case for evolution immediately vanishes away, and the record of the rocks becomes a tremendous witness . . . to the holiness and justice and power of the living God of Creation!"[15]. This became the foundation of a new generation of Young Earth creationist thinkers, many of whom organized themselves around Morris's Institute for Creation Research. Subsequent research by the Creation Research Society has observed and analyzed, and interpreted geological formations, within a flood geology framework, including the La Brea Tar Pits,[16] the Tavrick Formation (Tauric Formation, Russian: "Tavricheskaya formatsiya") in the Crimean Peninsula[17] and Stone Mountain, Georgia.[18] In each case, the creationists claimed that the flood geology interpretation had superior explanatory power than the uniformitarian explanation. The Creation Research Society argues that "uniformitarianism is wishful thinking".[19] The impact on creationism and fundamentalist Christianity of these ideas is considerable. Morris' theories of flood geology are widely promoted around the world, with his books being translated into many other languages. Flood geology is still a major theme of modern creationism, though it is rejected by earth scientists. Theological basisFlood geology starts from the viewpoint that the Biblical Book of Genesis is an accurate and impartial description of actual historical events. The majority of proponents of flood geology also believe that God created the universe between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, in the space of six days. Genesis states that God deliberately caused the flood, indicating that the cause of the flood was supernatural in origin. The account describes two events which resulted in the flood, the "fountains of the great deep were broken up" and the "windows of heaven were opened". The waters of the flood rose so high that "all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered", drowning all land animals on Earth except the occupants of Noah's Ark. The Flood story is considered by most modern scholars to consist of two slightly different interwoven accounts, [1]not in citation givencitation needed hence the apparent uncertainty regarding the duration of the flood (40 or 150 days) and the number of animals taken on board Noah's Ark (two of each kind, or seven pairs of some kinds). Eventually the waters subsided and the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (not necessarily Mount Ararat, but the mountains in that region). The idea that Genesis is literally accurate is not universally held within Christianity. It is principally associated with conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant denominations in the United States. The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, both regard Genesis as being a non-literal description of the Earth's creation. Indeed, the literalness of Genesis had been rejected in Jewish thought as early as the 1st century by Philo of Alexandria, and in Christian thought in the 3rd century by Origen. Although Origen was followed by the Alexandrian school and such Church Fathers as Augustine of Hippo, the Antiochian school, which preferred a more literal interpretation of Scripture, was always numerically superior.[20] Christian theologians such as Langdon Gilkey have argued that flood geology and creation science, as well as philosophical naturalism, err in reducing all truth to scientific truth. Gilkey’s key claim is that these endeavors confuse religion’s language of ultimate origins with scientific theories about proximate origins and as a result give the impression that independent domains of knowledge are competing exhaustive explanations of reality.[21][22] Others regard flood geology as both unscientific and an impediment to evangelism.[23] Evidence cited to support a global floodFossilsGenerally, the geologic column and the fossil record are used as major pieces of evidence in the modern scientific explanation of the development and evolution of life on Earth as well as a means to establish the age of the Earth. Some creationists deny the existence of these pieces of evidencedubious . This is the approach taken by Morris and Whitcomb in their 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, and it is continued today by leading creationists such as Michael Oard and John Woodmorappe.[24] Other creationists accept the existence of the geological column and believe that it indicates a sequence of events that might have occurred during the global flood. This is the approach taken by Institute for Creation Research creationists such as Andrew Snelling, Steven A. Austin and Kurt Wise, as well as Creation Ministries International.[25][26] They claim that fossils are produced not by a process lasting millions of years, but by rapid burial of the remains of many of the Earth's lifeforms by sediments in the short period of the flood. Sometimes, creationists will claim that fossilization can only take place when the matter is buried quickly so that the matter does not decompose.[27] Flood geologists have proposed numerous hypothesis to reconcile the sequence of fossils evident in the fossil column with the literal account of Noah's flood in the Bible. Whitcomb and Morris proposed three possible factors. One is hydrological, wherein the relative buoyancies of the remains based on the organisms' shapes and densities determined the sequence in which their remains settled to the bottom of the flood waters. The second factor they proposed was ecological, suggesting organisms living at the ocean bottom succumbed first in the flood and those living at the highest altitudes last. The third factor was anatomical and behavioral, the ordered sequence in the fossil column resulting from the very different responses to the rising waters between different kinds of organisms due to their diverse mobilities and original habitats.[28] In a scenario put forth by Morris, the remains of marine life were the first to settle to the bottom, followed by the slower moving lowland reptiles, and culminating with mankind whose superior intelligence and ability to flee enabled them to reach higher elevations before they were overcome by the flood waters.[29] Some creationists believe that oil and coal deposits formed rapidly in sedimentary layers as volcanoes or flood waters flattened forests and buried the debris. They believe the vegetation decomposed rapidly into oil or coal due to the heat of the subterranean waters as they were unleashed from the Earth during the flood or by the high temperatures created as the remains were compression by water and sediment.[30][31] Creationists continue to search for evidence in the natural world that they consider to be consistent with the above description, such as evidence of rapid formation. For example, there have been claims of raindrop marks and water ripples at layer boundaries, sometimes associated with the claimed fossilized footprints of men and dinosaurs walking together. Most of this footprint evidence has been debunked by scientists[32] and some have been shown to be fakes.[33] LiquefactionLiquefaction is a process by which sediments saturated with water can, under certain conditions, acquire properties that are more like those of a heavy liquid than those of a loose solid. Flood geology proponent Walt Brown contended that this process can explain a number of observations in a way that is consistent with a global flood. In particular, he proposed that the observed sorting of fossils into globally ordered layers can be explained by the effects of liquefaction precipitated by the wave action from undulating hydroplates compressing water into the saturated sediments at the ocean floor. Brown contends that liquefaction during the flood sorted the sediment into identifiable sedimentary layers and can explain how these layers extend over over wide areas.[34] Widespread flood storiesWhile it is not geological evidence, believers in Flood Geology also point out that flood stories can be found in many cultures, places, and religions; this, they suggest, is evidence of an actual event in the historic past because local floods would not explain the similarities in the flood stories.[35] Anthropologists generally reject this view and highlight the fact that much of the human population lives near water sources such as rivers and coasts, where unusually severe floods can be expected to occur occasionally and will be recorded in tribal mythology [36]. Geologists William Ryan and Walter C. Pitman, III have suggested that a massive local flood in the Black Sea area, or possibly even the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age, may be responsible for the preponderance of the flood myths in the Near East and across the world.[37] Proposed mechanisms of the floodAlthough most proponents of a global flood believe that it was at some level the result of divine intervention, some have also attempted to find a mechanism by which a flood could have occurred within the framework of natural laws. The main difficulty is where the enormous amount of water required to cover "all the high mountains" came from or where it went to. Some flood geology supporters propose that the mountains were much smaller before the flood, and would be submerged by only tens of meters of water. At various times, subterranean sources ("hydroplates"), atmospheric sources (a "vapor canopy"), and extraterrestrial sources (a comet strike or orbiting ice) have been proposed as the source of the flood waters. The source currently most often discussed is that the ocean basins were closed by some form of rapid tectonics, spreading the water over the whole Earth. Most flood geology proponents envision the ocean basins opening up after the flood, whether for the first time or reopening, providing a place for the flood waters to drain to. This would require tectonic motion millions of times faster than that observed today. HydroplatesOne of the proposed mechanisms relying on a subterranean source of water is the hydroplate hypothesis, put forward by Walt Brown. In this picture, the Earth was originally created with a great deal of subterranean water, and the Flood was brought on when the crust of the Earth was cracked, allowing this water to escape violently to the surface.[38] The pieces of the surface, referred to as "hydroplates", are supposed to have rapidly divided during and after the flood. Brown states that the water later drained into the basins that had been formed by the division of the plates becoming the oceans. The creationist organizations such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research reject the hydroplate hypothesis in favor of the catastrophic plate tectonics hypothesis. [39] The Hydroplates hypothesis has been criticised for numerous faults:[40][41]
Vapor canopyThe "vapor canopy" is the idea that the waters for the flood came from a "canopy" of water vapor surrounding the Earth. Related proposals have been made with the water in the form of a liquid or ice. The earliest water canopy proposal was that of Isaac Vail in 1874, but the idea came to prominence in 1961 with the publication of the book The Genesis Flood by Henry M. Morris and John Whitcomb. The concept of the water canopy seems to come from Genesis 1:7 with the phrase "the waters above the firmament". Other biblical statements that point to this possible interpretation include:
One major proponent of the vapor canopy is Kent Hovind, who has made the model popular among the general population of creationists, but most creation scientists now reject the idea.citation needed Walt Brown's Center for Scientific Creation opposes it, and it has also fallen into disfavour at Answers in Genesis [42]. The scientific criticism of the vapor canopy focus on the required pressure and temperature of the atmosphere. For water vapor equivalent to one kilometer of liquid water, the pressure at the surface of the Earth would be 100 times greater than it is now. The critical pressure of water is only 217 atm, so it is difficult to distinguish between liquid and vapor under these conditions, but either the temperature would be high (hundreds or thousands of degrees) or the density of the vapor would be more like that of liquid water than our present atmosphere. Finally, to get this vapor to condense into rain, an enormous amount of heat would have to be extracted and disposed of. A canopy of liquid water or ice faces other difficulties. A stationary layer of water would, of course, not be stable and would immediately fall. An orbiting ring or shell of water or ice, even if it could be made stable for long periods and then suddenly fall, would be heated by conversion of gravitational energy during the fall, resulting in steam rather than rain. There have also been versions of the vapor canopy idea that interpret the frozen remains of woolly mammoths with grass in their mouths as evidence of a sudden freezing out of the water vapor as ice at the poles. Modern science does not see the frozen mammoths as difficult to explaincitation needed, and the difficulty of getting rid of the excess heat would be even more severe in this scenario than it already is to produce rain. Runaway subductionIn the last decade, most proposed flood mechanisms involve "runaway subduction" (the rapid movement of tectonic plates) in one form or another, at least in order to open up the ocean basins to allow the drainage of the water after the flood, but possibly also to close them before the flood in order to force the oceans onto the land. One specific form of runaway subduction is called Catastrophic plate tectonics, proposed by geophysicist John Baumgardner and supported by the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis.[43] This holds the rapid plunge of former oceanic plates into the mantle caused by an unknown trigger mechanism which increased local mantle pressures to the point that its viscosity dropped several magnitudes according to known properties of mantle silicates. Once initiated, sinking plates caused the spread of low viscosity throughout the mantle resulting in runaway mantle convection and catastrophic tectonic motion as continents were dragged across the surface of the earth. Once the former ocean plates, which are known to be more dense than the mantle, reached the bottom of the mantle an equilibrium was reached. Pressures dropped, viscosity increased, runaway mantle convection stopped, leaving the surface of the earth rearranged. Proponents point to subducted slabs in the mantle which are still relatively cool, which they regard as evidence that they have not been there for millions of years of temperature equilibration.[44] The hypothesis of catastrophic plate tectonics is considered pseudoscience and is rejected by the vast majority of geologists in favour of the conventional geological theory of plate tectonics. It has been argued that the tremendous release of energy necessitated by such an event would boil off the Earth's oceans, making a global flood impossible.[45] Further, this hypothesis is contradicted by a considerable body of geological evidence:[46]
Catastrophic plate tectonics lacks a plausible mechanism. Particularly, the greatly lowered viscosity of the mantle, the rapid magnetic reversals, and the sudden cooling of the ocean floor afterwards cannot be explained under conventional physics.[46] Conventional plate tectonics accounts for the geological evidence already, including innumerable details that catastrophic plate tectonics cannot, such as why there is gold in California, silver in Nevada, salt flats in Utah, and coal in Pennsylvania, without requiring any extraordinary mechanisms to do so.[46][47] Evidence cited against a global floodModern geology, and its sub-disciplines of earth science, geochemistry, geophysics, glaciology, paleoclimatology, paleontology and other scientific disciplines utilize the scientific method to analyze the geology of the earth. The key tenets of flood geology are refuted by scientific analysis and do not have any standing in the scientific community. Modern geology relies on a number of established principles, one of the most important of which is Charles Lyell's principle of uniformitarianism. In relation to geological forces it states that the shaping of the Earth has occurred by means of mostly slow-acting forces that can be seen in operation today. By applying this principle, geologists have determined that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. They study the lithosphere of the Earth to gain information on the history of the planet. Geologists divide Earth's history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and faunal stages characterized by well-defined breaks in the fossil record (see Geologic time scale).[48][49] In general, there is a lack of any evidence for any of the above effects proposed by flood geologists and their claims of fossil layering are not taken seriously by scientists.[50] Historical recordsThe dates of a number of ancient cultures (such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia) have been established by the analysis of historical documents supported by carbon dating to be older than the alleged date of the Flood. Erosion
The Rocky Mountains; The Rockies do not share erosion traits consistent with a great flood - erosion would be expected equal to the Appalachian Mountains.
The Appalachian Mountains show an immense level of erosion. If a flood had occurred, similar erosion should be found in the Rocky Mountains.
The flood, had it occurred, should also have produced large-scale effects spread throughout the entire world. Erosion should be evenly distributed, yet the levels of erosion in, for example, the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains differ significantly.[50] GeochronologyGeochronology is the science of determining the absolute age of rocks, fossils, and sediments by a variety of techniques. These methods indicate that the Earth as a whole is at least 4.5 billion years old, and that the strata that, according to flood geology, were laid down during the Flood 6000 years ago, were actually deposited gradually over many millions of years.
This Jurassic carbonate hardground with its generations of oysters and extensive bioerosion could not have formed during the conditions postulated for the Flood.
PaleontologyPaleontologists note that if all the fossilized animals were killed in the flood, and the flood is responsible for fossilization, then the average density of vertebrates was an abnormally high number, close to 2100 creatures per acre, judging from fossil sites found worldwide.[51] In addition, carbonate hardgrounds and the fossils associated with them show that the so-called flood sediments include evidence of long hiatuses in deposition not consistent with flood dynamics or timing.[52] GeochemistryProponents of Flood Geology also have a difficult time explaining the alternation between calcite seas and aragonite seas through the Phanerozoic. The cyclical pattern of carbonate hardgrounds, calcitic and aragonitic ooids, and calcite-shelled fauna has apparently been controlled by seafloor spreading rates and the flushing of seawater through hydrothermal vents which changes its Mg/Ca ratio.[54] Philosophical objections
The scientific communitywho? contends that Flood Geology, in contrast to conventional geology, is not able to plausibly explain the available observations. However, even if both hypotheses did an equally good job, many scientists would nevertheless reject Flood Geology on philosophical grounds, specifically Occam's Razor. Occam's razor is the principle of rejecting any unnecessary assumptions from scientific theories: "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less."[55] Applied to geology, if one explanation requires only natural processes and the other requires a belief in an infallible Bible in addition, then the explanation that only requires natural processes is to be preferredcitation needed. Furthermore, Flood Geology supporters are accusedby whom? of not approaching the subject with the objective, open mind which is the scientific ideal. Their purpose is to find evidence for a particular explanation, rather than to find the explanation that best fits the evidenceneutrality disputed. The history of geology supports this view by the recounting that geologists had looked at the evidence for a worldwide flood in the century before Darwin and found it lacking, dismissing it in favor of uniformitarian models.[50]not in citation given Notes
References
Further reading
See also
External linksFlood geology sites
Sites critical of Flood Geology
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