In the two most recent articles of this series, we considered a pair of important items of geological data that point towards Noah’s Flood having actually happened, namely that it was a historical event, a recent historical event, and a fully global event.
It was not merely a local or regional catastrophe, i.e. a great, sudden calamity, but, on the contrary, a worldwide cataclysm, having all the elements of catastrophe, but with an upheaval and overturning.
This dovetails with the many Scriptural references to Noah and the Flood (Gen. 6:1–9:19), including the words of Our Lord Himself in the Gospels (Matt. 24:37-39), plus with the writings of the Church Fathers and Church teaching.
The first item of data that was discussed was evidence of human and dinosaur coexistence: overlapping footprints of man and dinosaur, with human footprints in strata that contain the dinosaur prints.
Obviously, there’s something seriously amiss with the conventional million or, as is often the case, multi-billion-year history of the Earth, that places dinosaurs and man over sixty million years apart. Since human history only goes back a few thousand years, it thus stands to reason that these creatures are recent as well.
The fact that dinosaurs don’t wander into our backyards is not terribly unusual: when was the last time anyone saw a dodo or a passenger pigeon on their property? If the natural science data are pointing at history being recent, it is perfectly plausible that the genealogies in Genesis are literally true and can serve as a historical timetable from Our Lord backwards in time.
The second data item that was discussed is the utter ubiquity of horizontal strata of sedimentary rocks on every continent. True, these strata are deformed in places, but even the deformed ones were originally horizontal. What’s more, they are piled high and deep on most continental surfaces, averaging about two miles thick globally.
There are no known geological processes operative today that can account for their almost-universal horizontality and great thickness. Something very big and very global must have happened that emplaced them. Given that sedimentary strata are largely formed by and within water, some universal watery process must have taken place that enabled their appearance.
Interestingly, Australia, which is the size of the continental United States, and Africa, which is more than three times larger, are the flattest continents in the world, being for the most part vast sedimentary plateaus with only a few ranges of mountains and hills. The fact that these continents are level at a vast scale implies an equally vast process to produce the effect.
Again, Scripture, including Our Lord’s own words, the Church Fathers, and Church teaching all speak of this process — really, an event. That event was the great flood of Noah.
While there are many geological data points supporting the reality of the Flood besides the two already mentioned, those two more than suffice as evidence of a Great Deluge — additional evidence will be touched upon in future essays.
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Data points make sense in a paradigm, as mentioned in an earlier article, so choosing an appropriate one is crucial. Employing Occam’s Razor, the best paradigm is the simplest and the most comprehensive. Given that Flood was a Divine punishment for man’s serious sins, and was thus a supernatural event at its root, it nevertheless occurred through a variety of natural processes that we can examine today; processes that, to the author’s growing horror as he examines more of the geological evidence with time, are absolutely frightening.
The best paradigm that the author has come upon so far is the Hydroplate Theory (HPT). Simple background information on the theory can be found at this website and at the Creation Science Center’s website. The latter of which has the latest edition of a free online book written by the originator of the theory, a Protestant, Walt Brown, who is now deceased.
Brown’s theory is comprehensive, and the book covers it in totality, the main text being readily understandable for the average reader, with the end of each chapter featuring an extensive section of detailed technical notes that would satisfy an engineer.
The Dispatch
Brown put yeoman’s work into his book, including many connections to Scripture. As is, or should be the case but often is not, theories stand or fall according to the data that they seek to explain. Honest natural science employs a theory for as long as it can explain the data; once there is data that contradicts it, a new one must be sought.
We will only take a cursory tour of the HPT, as much more can be delved into by the interested reader at his leisure in the above-mentioned pair of websites, including abundant illustrations and even videos.
What is Hydroplate Theory?
As with any process-related theory, there need to be initial conditions. HPT holds that God created the earth with a basaltic interior containing some carbon, overlaid by a mile-thick layer of water, and capped by a sixty-mile-thick, undulating granite shell. Atop this shell lay a thin layer of soil, relatively small bodies of water, globally abundant vegetation, a wealth of animal life — both air-breathing and aquatic — and man, set as lord over it all.
It was a world of no weather, instead being a greenhouse writ large. The granite undulated into small mountains, and its undulating bottom dipped in places to rest upon the underlying basalt. The tidal flexing of the sun and moon heated the subterranean water much like the repeated squeezing of a stress ball heats it up. That water was around one thousand-degrees Fahrenheit and thus dissolved out a lot of the adjacent basalt and, even more so, granite surfaces, indicating there were abundant deposits of limestone, dolomite, iron hydroxide, salt, and gypsum on the bottom of the subterranean water chambers.
Heat gradually was conducted, then radiated out harmlessly from the Earth’s surface. The subterranean water pressure was immense, but, with sixty miles of solid rock overhead, the water had no physical contact with the surface.
Because man was so miserably sinful, God had to save man from himself, permitting a baseball seam-like crack to encircle the Earth. The superheated water blasted out, going very high. These were the fountains of the deep spoken of in Scripture. The depressurization cooled the water to a lukewarm temperature.
Keep in mind: much of that water came down as blinding rain for forty days. It took a while to build up depth, so inundation from the rain was a gradual process.
When huge, unsupported piles of granite crumbled, large masses continuously collapsed into the fountains, where they were power-blasted into fragments of varying sizes: slabs, boulders, gravel, sand, silt, mud, and more. Some of this material was launched into space, but most was hurled sideways across the land in a series of tsunamis of different heights and speeds.
Of the material launched into space, Brown theorized that fragments of the shattered crust and deeper layers escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and coalesced into asteroids and comets. Many fragments never coalesced and have since returned as meteors. According to this theory, the excitement over organic matter found on some meteors is unwarranted: since these meteors are terrestrial in origin, they would be expected to contain organic molecules.
Because of the irregularity of the fissure and the underlying surface of the granite, enormous water-hammering took place, like with old pipes, causing the tsunamis of watery sediment to go out in pulses. And, as was the case with the rain, they submerged areas near the fountain cracks first and then gradually expanded and deepened the pile of sediments continent-wide.
Except for the inhabitants of the Ark, every man and every air-breathing beast outside perished as the nightmare wore on. Immobile creatures died and were buried first, while the fastest beasts and humans fled to increasingly diminishing high ground before finally being overtaken and drowning.
After forty days, the rain stopped, and the entire Earth was submerged.
With the initial crack power-blasted to hundreds of miles of width — thus, creating today’s Atlantic Basin — the Earth’s bottom was unburdened from five dozen miles of overlying weight and rebounded upward over fifty miles. Meanwhile, the Pacific side of the Earth compensated by shattering and meltingly sinking down, creating the Pacific Basin.
The remaining parts of the granite crust, now covered deeply with sediment, slid toward the newly formed Pacific Basin. This ground to a halt when irregular undersides snagged on the bottoms of the now near-empty water chambers. The resultant friction produced underside melting and volcanoes on the continents. The shattered Pacific basin thus had its own complement of volcanoes from the sinkage melting — note well, all of this was happening underwater.
With ocean basins now formed, the Floodwaters began running off into them, producing assorted landforms that will be discussed in future essays. Meanwhile, Noah’s Ark eventually came to rest on Mount Ararat, a newly formed volcano.
In a nutshell, the combining of a few significant data points with the paradigm of the Hydroplate Theory provides a plausible, natural science explanation of a global cataclysm that is well-attested to, not only in Scripture, Church Fathers, and Church teaching, but is even preserved to varying degrees in the lore of diverse cultures the world over.
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