Flood geology

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, submarine canyons, salt domes, and frozen mammoths. Young Earth creationists regard Genesis as providing a historically and scientifically accurate record for the geological history of the Earth and believe that there exists evidence that can back up the historicity of the flood.

However, creationist presentations of what they believe is evidence have routinely been evaluated, refuted and dismissed unequivocally by the scientific community and as such flood geology is considered pseudoscience. Flood geology directly contradicts the current consensus (and much of the evidence underlying it) in scientific disciplines such as geology, evolutionary biology and paleontology.

History of flood geology

The great flood in the history of geology

The modern science of geology was founded in Europe in the 18th century. 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?

As early as the 2nd century AD, Christian thinkers had proposed that fossils represented organisms that were killed and buried during the brief duration of the Flood. This idea became commonly held, aided by the geological peculiarity that much of northern Europe 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 being the result of massive flooding, though it is now known that they are the product of ice age glaciations (an unknown phenomenon at that time). Prevailing notions of the time 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.

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:

In other words, in comparison with Newton's, Hutton's was a higher order concept of the system of nature which included not only the present structure of the world, but the process (or natural history) by which the present structure had come into existence and was maintained. As with Newton, and in contrast to materialists like Buffon and neomechanists like Laplace, the origins of the system were beyond the scope of science for Hutton: in nature itself he found 'no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end'. But Hutton came about as close to being a neomechanist as one possibly could without changing the Newtonian framework of God and nature. Only the Newtonian stipulation that God had personally designed the present system of nature stood between natural theology and the retirement of God from science altogether... Like Derham and Cotes, Hutton believed that God had implanted active principles in nature at creation sufficient to account for all its natural functions.

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:

Some have attempted to ascribe the formation of all the stratified rocks to the effects of the Mosaic Deluge; an opinion which is irreconcilable with the enormous thickness and almost infinite subdivisions of these strata, and with the numerous and regular successions which they contain of the remains of animals and vegetables, differing more and more widely from existing species, as the strata in which we find them are placed at greater depths. The fact that a large proportion of these remains belong to extinct genera, and almost all of them to extinct species, that lived and multiplied and died on or near the spots where they are now found, shows that the strata in which they occur were deposited slowly and gradually, during long periods of time, and at widely distant intervals.

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 geology

Flood geology was developed as a creationist endeavor in the 20th century by George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist and amateur geologist who wrote a book in 1923 to provide an explicitly Christian fundamentalist perspective on geology. His work was 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. 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!"

This became the foundation of a new generation of Young Earth creationist thinkers, who organized themselves around Morris' 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, the Tavrick Formation (Tauric Formation, Russian: "Tavricheskaya formatsiya") in the Crimean Peninsula and Stone Mountain, Georgia. 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".

The impact on creationism and fundamentalist Christianity of these ideas is considerable. Morris' theories of flood geology are widely promoted throughout the United States and overseas, 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 basis

Flood geology starts from the viewpoint that the Biblical Book of Genesis is an accurate and impartial description of actual historical events. Young Earth creationists – a position held by the majority of proponents of flood geology – believe that God created the universe between 6000 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], 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 (2 of each kind, or 7 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, being associated principally 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.

Opponents of flood geology within the church such as Landon Gilkey argue that it 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. Others regard flood geology as both unscientific and an impediment to evangelism.

Creationist interpretations of evidence

Fossils

Generally, 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 evidence. 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.

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. 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.

The ordering of fossil layers is often used as evidence for the scientific explanation of geological features. Certain creationists believe that the separation between dinosaur fossils and hominid fossils is not due to the organisms living in different geological eras. Instead an unspecified and unmodeled "hydraulic sorting action" is claimed to be able to sort out fossils according to their shape, density, size, and the gases released from the body after death.

Some creationists believe that oil deposits are the result of the flood's accumulation and subsequent subsurface compression of dead plant matter.

Frozen mammoths

According to scientists, the giant mammoths went extinct about 11,000 years ago, although remnant populations are believed to have persisted on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia based on fossil remains dated to about 2000 BC.

Some proponents of Flood Geology have claimed that this extinction is evidence of catastrophism because certain mammoths have been found with grass in their mouths. Proponents of the vapor canopy flood model claim it can explain these mammoth remains. They argue mammoths were suddenly frozen solid when large quantities of water vapour in the atmosphere were deposited as ice at the poles.

Scientists do not view the few instances of grass in the mouths of frozen mammoth carcasses as sufficient evidence for a global catastrophe. Moreover, the extraordinary temperatures needed to quick-freeze a mammoth are way below any temperature ever measured on earth and the idea of a canopy itself is considered so extreme as to cause the surface of the Earth to have the conditions of a pressure boiler before the flood.

However, there are so many problems with this that even the Young Earth Creationist ministry Answers in Genesis states that it is an argument that should not be used. Rather, they claim that mammoths and the surrounding circumstances are best explained by radical climate change in a supposed ice-age following the flood, although that answer is not to be found in Genesis. Other creationists counter that there is no evidence for an Ice Age before 10,000 years ago. Scientists, however, recognise a large number of earlier Ice Ages, with the earliest so far identified occurring 2.3 billion years ago.

Liquefaction

Proponents of flood geology believe that Liquefaction, a phenomenon commonly seen in quicksand and earthquakes, played a major role during the posited flood. Some have proposed that a global flood is the most reasonable explanation for the means by which sediment came to precipitate in such depth over so much of the Earth's surface. They further argue that the liquefaction predicted by the flood can explain phenomena such as transported blocks, sand plumes, coal and limestone deposits, and aquifers.

They do not assert that all geological phenomena are a result of the flood. Flood geology supporters acknowledge many geological formations were formed by other processes. However, they believe that there are a large number of geological formations which can only be explained with reference to massive cataclysmic action involving enormous amounts of water and sediment which rapidly precipitated from solution, liquefied, and dried.

Radiometric dating

Much of flood geology is devoted to attacking the dating methods used in anthropology, geology, and planetary science that give ages in conflict with young Earth theories. In particular, creationists dispute the reliability of radiometric dating and isochron analysis, both of which are central to geological theories of the age of the Earth. They usually dispute these methods based on uncertainties concerning initial concentrations of individually considered species and the associated measurement uncertainties caused by diffusion of the parent and daughter isotopes. However, a full critique of the entire parameter-fitting analysis, which relies on dozens of radionuclei parent and daughter pairs, has not been done by creationists hoping to cast doubt on the technique.

Submarine canyon formation

Proponents of Flood Geology argue that such submarine canyons were formed as the floodwaters receded from the continents. Such extensions are found in the Congo, Amazon, Ganges, and Hudson rivers, they are generally understood to be geological formations which have developed when sea levels were significantly lower than today.

Creationists argue that uniformitarian explanations are inferior to flood explanations, because the submarine canyons are extremely long, deep, and the sides are steep and often vertical, and thus do not show evidence of the erosion predicted by long periods of time, and being much more consistent with a shorter time frame. This claim is unsupported by the planetary science description of erosion processes which allow for a wide variety of formations to occur over the (relatively) long timeframes seen in scientific descriptions of such formations.

Proposed mechanisms of the flood

See also: Creation geophysics

Creationists have been proposed a number of the mechanism to explain how a global flood might have occurred.

Hydroplates

Hydroplates, as proposed by mechanical engineer Walt Brown, Director of the Center for Scientific Creation, are the concept that the Earth was originally created with a great deal of subterranean water, and that the flood was brought on when the crust of the Earth was cracked, allowing this water to escape violently to the surface, and broke the surface into "hydroplates" which rapidly divided during and after the flood.

Runaway subduction

"Runaway subduction" or Catastrophic plate tectonics, was proposed by geophysicist John Baumgardner, and supported by the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis. This holds that rapid plunge of the original continental plates into the mantle could have heated silicates to a temperature at which tectonic motion would have happened extremely quickly. 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.

Vapor canopy

A vapor canopy was proposed by Henry Morris in his book The Genesis Flood in the 1960s. It holds that a canopy of water vapor existed over the atmosphere prior to the flood, and that the floodwaters were brought on when this vapor canopy collapsed. This model has been rejected by many creationists.

Scientific analysis of flood geology

Modern 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 tenants 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). 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.

Physics

Many scientific objections have been raised concerning the physical mechanics of flood geology. In particular, the amount of water required to cover the Earth's entire surface is enormous enough that no observed mechanism can plausibly explain where it came from or where it went. The mechanisms proposed by creationists to account for the fossil record, lithospheric layering, and tectonic formations are also all firmly rejected by the scientific community.

If the flood were a global flood, a source of water would need to be found which could provide such a deluge. Flood geology supporters have proposed several sources at different times: (1) a vapor canopy in the upper atmosphere; (2) a comet strike; (3) the Earth's crust was much flatter, requiring less water in order to cover the face of the planet; and (4), subterranean water sources. However, geological science indicates that none of these theories are viable.

The proposed vapor canopy suggested a layer of water vapor in the upper atmosphere which, triggered by a meteoroid, caused a giant rain shower and so contributed to the flood. However, such a volume of water held suspended in the atmosphere would give rise to an atmospheric pressure in the order of nine atmospheres. The atmospheric temperature would also have to be extremely high to prevent the saturated atmosphere from condensing. The vapor canopy model has lost favour and is no longer accepted by most creationist scientists.

A canopy holding a column of more than 15 m of liquid water or its equivalent in vapor or ice would increase the atmospheric pressure to levels that would destroy life. In addition, the concentration of oxygen and nitrogen would become toxic. In addition, if the water from this column were to fall, enough to from a 15 m layer of water upon the earth, the heat of condensation would raise the atmospheric temperature by over 780 degrees C, which of course would cause more water to evaporate, and a permanent greenhouse effect would ensue. The planet Venus is an example of that effect.

Flood geology should not be confused with episodic catastrophism as observed by geologists and earth scientists at many locations throughout the Earth's ~4.55 billion year natural history. Such confusion surrounded the observations of the geologist J. Harlen Bretz who discovered the Missoula Floods in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. His observations and theories were rejected out of hand for many years by geologists and scientists on the basis that catastrophism was not science, but rather religion. Today, it is recognized by geologists that while periodic catastrophes may occur, there are uniformitarian principles at work in geologic history as well.

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 evidence has been debunked by scientists and some have been shown to be fakes. Creationists highlight unexplained phenomena in order to point out what they see as inconsistencies in the scientific view (see God of the gaps), and they often profess a general incredulity about geological mechanisms of mineral, rock, and fossil formation.

Archeology

Archaeology proves to be a potent source of evidence. Flood geology claims that the current sedimentary layers were produced by liquefaction, and that objects caught in the flood (including living creatures) were sorted by mass and location at the time when the flood engulfed them. However, archaeologists state that if this sorting actually took place, heavy, dense objects (such as human artifacts) would be expected to sink to the bottom. In actuality, man-made artifacts are very close to the top of the sedimentary layers.

Furthermore, the 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. Creationists dispute these dates.

Believers in Flood Geology also point out that flood stories can be found in many cultures, places and religions, not just in the Bible; 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. 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. Geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman 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.

Geology

The Rocky Mountains; geologists do not believe the Rockies share erosion traits consistent with a great flood - erosion would be expected equal to the Appalachian Mountains, below

The Appalachian Mountains show an immense level of erosion. Geologists assert that if a flood had occurred, similar erosion should be found in the Rocky Mountains, above.

Geologists claim that 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. However, different regions of the Flood need not have the same erosional intensities, because that depends on depth and gradient as well as rock hardness. In addition, proponents of Flood Geology believe submarine canyons were formed as the floodwaters receded from the continents. These canyons are actually due to persistent water flow which creates over a period of thousands if not millions of years structural breaks in the continental shelf. These fractures are even modeled in geological simulations which show the processes occurring as described by scientists.

Radiometric dating analysis indicates that the Earth is at least 4.5 billion years old. Young Earth creationists reject these ages on the grounds of what they regard as being tenuous and untestable assumptions in the methodology. Apparently inconsistent radiometric dates are often quoted to cast doubt on the utility and accuracy of the method. Scientists who get involved in this debate point out that dating methods only rely on the assumptions that the physical laws governing radioactive decay have not been violated since the sample was formed (harking back to Lyell's doctrine of uniformitarianism). They also point out that the "problems" that creationists publicly mentioned can be shown to either not be problems at all, are issues with known contamination, or simply the result of incorrectly evaluating legitimate data.

Paleontology

If creatures were differentiated by body size and density, then massive dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus should be found near the top sediments, rather than in sediments containing all the other Jurassic dinosaurs.

Additionally, paleontologists 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.

Philosophical objections

The scientific community 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." Applied to geology, if one explanation requires only natural processes and the other requires a God in addition, then the explanation that only requires natural processes is to be preferred. See here for a more thorough discussion.

Furthermore, Flood Geology supporters are accused 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 evidence. 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.

Further reading

• Brown, W (2001). In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood. Center for Scientific Creation. ISBN 1-878026-08-9.
• Dubrovo, N. A. et al., “Upper Quaternary Deposits and Paleogeography of the Region Inhabited by the Young Kirgilyakh Mammoth,” International Geology Review, Vol. 24, No. 6, June 1982, p. 630.
• Hapgood, Charles H. The Path of the Pole (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1970), p. 267.
• Howorth, Henry H. The Mammoth and the Flood (London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1887), pp. 2–4, 74–75.
• M. Huc, Recollections of a Journey through Tartary, Thibet [Tibet], and China, During the Years 1844, 1845, and 1846. Vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1852), pp. 130–131.
• H. Neuville, “On the Extinction of the Mammoth,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1919.
• Numbers, RL (1991). The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520083936.
• E. W. Pfizenmayer, Siberian Man and Mammoth, translated from German by Muriel D. Simpson (London: Black & Son Limited, 1939).
• Ukraintseva, Valentina V. Vegetation Cover and Environment of the “Mammoth Epoch” in Siberia (Hot Springs, South Dakota: The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, 1993), pp. 12–13.

See also

• Baraminology
• Creation biology
• Creation science
• Frank Lewis Marsh
• Pre-Adamite
• Pseudoscience
• Polystrate fossil

External links

Flood geology sites

• Clues to Noah's Flood Found on Ocean Floor
• Noah's Flood - What does the Evidence Say?
• Unveiling the Mechanism Behind the Genesis Flood
• Startling Evidence That Noah's Flood Really Happened
• Answers in Genesis' Geology Questions and Answers Page
• Tas Walker's Biblical Geology
• Christian Geology
• Global Flood Geology from "Creation Science Prophecy"
• Hydroplate Theory
• Biblical Evidence for the Universality of the Genesis Flood - Richard M. Davidson - John Nevin Andrews Professor of Old Testament Interpretation - Old Testament Department - Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan
• Revolution against Evolution geology page
• Recolonisation Theory
• Shock Dynamics geology theory - Evidence of a catastrophic meteorite impact causing continental drift in 26 hours instead of 200 million years

Sites critical of Flood Geology

• Answers In Creation and Age of the Earth. Old earth creationist websites explaining the problems of young earth flood geology.
• talk.origins Flood Geology archive
• Fossils, Flood Geology and Creation Science
• Creationist "Flood Geology" Versus Common Sense
• Problems with a Global Flood
• Mount St. Helens: Explosive Evidence for Catastrophe
• History of the Collapse of "Flood Geology" and a Young Earth, adapted from the book The Biblical Flood by Davis A. Young, ISBN 0-8028-0719-4
• Why a Global Flood is impossible
• A Series of Articles written by a former YEC attacking Flood Geology
• A Collection of Essays Criticizing Creation Science, including Flood Geology
• Critique of a YEC article defending Flood Geology
• Problems with Flood Geology