About the Earth
If you drew a straight line from the surface of the earth to its center, that line would be a little over 3,950 miles long. The crust of the earth is from the surface to 20 to 25 miles down. Immediately below the crust is what is called the mantle. The mantle is l,800 miles thick. It is then a little over 2,100 miles from the bottom of the mantel to the centermost point in the earth. That part of the earth is known as the core. Neither scientists nor any other men know anything for certain about the mantel and the core. There are many ideas and theories, but nothing has been learned by direct study, which is the only legitimate way that science can know, or honestly claim to know, anything for sure. Seismographs and other velocity-measuring equipment have given the basis for inferring certain things, which may or may not be correct; but nothing is known.
The Mantel and the Core of the Earth
The oldest accepted idea is that the core is an inferno of melted iron and nickel. A small bit more is known about the mantel, though not much. From what is known, the mantel is thought to be very dense, comprised primarily of silicates, rich in metals, and very vaguely described. Some earthquakes originate in the mantel. The magnetic field of the earth, it is believed, is caused by some unknown phenomena in the core. The deeper you go in the interior of the earth, the denser the material gets and the higher the temperatures rise, some think to as high as 2500 degrees Centigrade, squared!
Why are True North and Magnetic North Different?
There are Bible believing scientists who think that the mantel slipped on the core during the Genesis Flood. Definitive statements are impossible, however, due to the uncertain nature of information and understanding of the mantel.
The Earth’s Crust
Virtually all of the geological activity and changes that we can observe, and that have taken place in the history of the earth, have occurred in the crust.
Geological Evidences of the Great Flood
It would be quite impossible and impractical for us to attempt a thorough, much less exhaustive, examination of the geological evidences of great changes and then relate them to the Flood. No such thing is necessary, however, to make the points we want to make. Nothing in geology contradicts the Biblical account. And then, nothing but the Genesis Flood can really sensibly account for these phenomena. As you think about these things, there is a very significant and singular point to keep in sight. If one single example clearly denies the claims of uniformitarian evolution and historic geological time, then the whole theory is based upon a faulty premise.
World Class Testimony to the Great Flood
One of the clearest evidences of the Genesis Flood happening in just the way and the short period of time that the Bible says, is the enormous vertical build up of stratified layers in the Grand Canyon. In the Grand Canyon we have very high embankments comprised of one sedimentary layer on top of another. All of these are comprised of more or less of different types of soils and rocks.
The Preposterousness of Uniformitarian Fantasy
The uniformitarian evolutionary explanation, greatly simplified, is that these were done gradually over untold millions of years as the region, being a geosyncline plane, sank beneath the sea and received a strata layer, only to be heaved up by some force. It would then sink again in another few millions of years. Another evolutionary theory is or that these strata continued to pile up in place over a geological time period, only to be exposed by the gradual cutting down of a uniform river over millions of years. There are some other similar ideas too, but you get the picture.
The Atheistic Religious Bias of Evolutionists
These arbitrary and dishonest theories can only be believed by religious atheists who are so desperate to deny the Bible that they will grasp at any alternative. If one removed the religious zeal of these Biblical antagonists, no sensible scientist would ever believe for a moment such illogical and disreputable gobbledygook.
The Obviousness of the Biblical Record
The only sensible answer is the Great Flood. From the science of hydro-selectivity we know that when a current moves into a land mass it slows. The slower it gets, the smaller the particles of sediment that are released. When it makes land it stops; the current at this point is virtually motionless and the deposited layer is nearly undisturbed. The final load of sediment is deposited and the current moves back out to sea. During the Genesis Flood the waters were gradually rising on the earth for forty consecutive days until they reached the highest point. Great currents, carrying sediment loads from all over the earth, were being driven with great force and velocity in every direction. With this magnitude of speed and violence a good portion of the sediment remained in suspension. As the currents, from all parts of the earth, came into the land region of the Grand Canyon and stopped, they deposited one layer on top of another; each one different from the other. While the difference in stratification may give the appearance of widely separated time intervals if one looks at them from that bias, it is nevertheless exactly what we would expect to see in this area as a result of the Great Flood. Whitcomb-Morris state, in The Genesis Flood, page 153, figure 6: “According to uniformist concepts, numerous changes of environment, with great regional subsidence and uplifts, must have been involved, but this would appear quite impossible. The strata simply could not have remained so nearly uniform and horizontal over such great areas and great periods of time, while undergoing such epeirogenic movements. By far the most reasonable way of accounting for them is in terms of relatively rapid deposition out of the sediment laden waters of the Flood.”
Glaciation and the Flood
Another geological phenomenon which looks to the Genesis Flood for a sane answer is Glaciation. This not only includes the existing glaciers, but the legitimate evidences of those of the past. A very simplified explanation of the bases for the evolutionary and uniformitarian arguments of an ice age or ice ages over very long periods of time are what are called tillites and striations. Tillites are hardened tills. A till is sediment that has supposedly been left by a melting glacier or a layer or sheet of ice. Striations are long scratches, supposedly made by one glacier, containing rocks in its bottom surface, overriding another, separated by great periods of time.
They Became Vain in their Foolish Imaginations
This kind of an argument is almost undisciplined imagination. There are many things that can make scratches on the surface of a glacier, and there is nothing in either tillites or striations to say that they represent different time periods. There is a wild casting about in the worlds of Uniformitarianism and the Geological Ages for an answer to the Glaciation phenomena. The Genesis Flood allows for it very logically and completely.
The Rapid Birth and Death of Glaciers
The thermal blanket (i.e. the great water vapor canopy), surrounding the earth and holding in the heat and making the earth’s temperatures very warm and uniform, fell as great torrents of rain during the first forty days of the Flood. When this happened, all of the heat dissipated and the earth suddenly became very cold. To help this along, great volumes of rain were falling from heaven and the sun was virtually shut out. After the rain, a fierce wind began to blow all over the earth making a chill factor of many degrees below zero. Without the thermal blanket to keep the earth’s temperatures uniform, the Polar Regions suddenly became sub-zero–much colder than they are now–because there was no vapor canopy to radiate heat back to earth, and to keep it from escaping into space. The huge canyons in which the glaciers formed were made by turbidity flows as the torrential rains washed great depths of soil from the surface of the antediluvian earth. Turbidity flows are water currents loaded up with rocks, sands, soils, and debris. These turbidity flows have the ability to do tremendous amounts of geological work in very short periods of time, depending on their size and velocity.
The magnitude of them during the Flood is virtually unfathomable. In addition to this, there were violent earthquakes opening up great fissures in the rocks, and there were mountains being heaved up by tectonic activity, certainly containing cracks, seams, and fissures for rivers to run in and glaciers to form in. Many glaciers were formed in regions that rapidly became too warm to sustain them once the vapor canopy was built back up to a significant extent and the wind stopped. Almost immediately the atmosphere began to heat up again and the glaciers began to melt. A famous example would be the Merced River Canyon in the high country of Yosemite National Park in California. The so called tillites were the result of different currents flowing into these glacier canyons and being frozen, along with the soils and rock being carried as sediment. No doubt there was overriding and scratching as these various sheets of ice kept building on top of one another for forty days. When the glaciers started to melt, the hard tills were left as the sediment that was contained in that current. In places like Yosemite, the glaciers did not last too long because the region is not that cold. There are evidences of movement, polishing and scratching of ice and boulders, and there are many glacial tills. This again is what one would normally expect in a situation where a universal flood built up over forty days, depositing one current that froze into ice on top of another. Obviously there was movement going on in these areas.
The Canyon Came First and Then the Glacier
Clearly the glaciers did not make these canyons. The water flowed into the canyons that were made by turbidity flows, earthquakes, or heaving up of mountains, or else they were already there when the Flood came, though probably not in too many cases. The striations are the interaction between different currents forming different layers of ice, each carrying its own kind of sediment.
The Universal Flood Alone Accounts for Glaciation
Nothing but the rapid dissipation of the earth’s heat into a bitterly cold condition, the increasing waters of the flood, the different currents from different parts of the earth, and the rapid warming again when the great wind stopped and the canopy was to some extent evaporated back up by the great wind, can sensibly explain the glaciers. In that regard it must be stated that many of the areas where scientists had thought in the past that they had seen clear evidence of glacier polishing–principally in what are now regions of African, South American, and tropical regions, thus causing them to conclude a world wide ice age, are now thought to have been caused by great turbidity flows and not glaciers at all.
Coal Deposits and the Flood
The great coal deposits could only sensibly have been formed by the Genesis Flood. These are thick layers of rich vegetation deposited upon one another. This shows that the vegetation was much more luxuriant before the Flood, and that the Flood, along with layers of sediment, flowed this vegetation into the areas where it was trapped and buried. Some places there are many layers of coal, separated by layers of sediment. This is what one would naturally expect to find as a result of the Flood. As the waters rose higher different currents with different loads of vegetation and sediment layered one on top of another.
Diamonds Formed in Twenty-Four Hours by Heat and Hydraulic Pressure
Years ago Uniformitarians declared that it took millions of years for carbons to form, and particularly diamonds. This self-serving pronouncement was used for a long time to frustrate those who would believe in the Flood. But in recent years it has become common knowledge that carbons can form, even diamonds, virtually over night. Commercially produced diamonds for drill bits and similar applications, can be made in 24 hours with heat and hydraulic pressure. So, given the amount of heat and hydraulic pressure that was being built up in the earth’s crust during the Flood, the great coal and diamond beds could have formed in much less than 150 days.
The Greatly Increased Size of the Oceans and the Genesis Flood
Only the Great Flood could have raised the level of the ocean from 2000 to 4000 feet. This is what the geologic testimony shows rather clearly in some instances. Far out from the present shore lines, and down to depths of 4000 feet, there are river canyons where rivers once ran. Many of these subterranean rivers show evidences of having been formed by huge turbidity flows when the first waters of the Great Flood began to reach the ancient sea level.
Continental Shelves
And then there are the continental shelves, which demand an acceptance of the fact of a much lower sea level before the Flood. These mark the original boundary between the continental blocks and the original shore line of the oceans. Some of these shelves are hundreds of miles out to sea at present, with the average distance being around fifty miles.
Seamounts
A quote from Whitcomb-Morris in The Genesis Flood, page 124, under the heading, “More Water in the Present Oceans,” also serves to establish the point: “In past decades have been discovered great numbers of seamounts which are nothing but drowned islands out in the middle of the ocean. These are flat-topped, and therefore non-volcanic in formation, and are now in many cases more than 1000 fathoms below the surface. Yet they give abundant evidence of having once been above the surface (A fathom is six feet).”
The Geological Time Column Hoax
The method that uniformitarian evolutionists and historic geologists use for their dating schemes is illogical, contrived, dishonest, and subjective. It is tied entirely onto its own tail. It is circular reasoning in its most obvious form. It argues that the age of the rocks and the strata can be determined by the fossils, and that the age of the fossils can be determined by the age of the rocks in which they occur. But there are numerous places throughout the world, where the rock strata are out of order by the evolutionist’s criteria. If this where allowed to stand–as of course it does in fact–the evolutionary theory would have to be abandoned as being fatally flawed. But this theory, which has been proven fatally flawed some 7000 times since 1830 when it got started, shows amazing resiliency. Nowhere is this more evident than when they try to rationalize away the obvious geological contradictions that are found in many strata.
The Lewis Overthrust Fiasco
One of the famous examples is the so-called Lewis Overthrust in Glacier Park, Montana. The Lewis Overthrust, a block of rock that is supposed to have been thrust up and out over the shale deposit beneath it, is about 35 miles wide and 6 miles thick. According to uniformitarian evolutionists and their geologists this massive formation has ridden over the shale deposit below it for a distance of about 40 miles. The problem for evolutionists is very simple. This enormous mass of rock is so-called Pre-Cambrian limestone that according to them, is supposed to be about 500,000,000 years older than the rock on which it rests, which is a very thin layer of so-called Cretaceous shale. In an effort to avoid the obvious negating of their arbitrary dating theories, they have come up with this idea. But anyone with dull normal intelligence and no education at all could stand and look at this phenomenon and see the utter ridiculousness of it. How could eight hundred thousand billion tons of rock slide over a thin layer of soft shale for great distances without entirely obliterating the shale layer?
Peer Condemnation
According to Hubert and Rubey, in an article entitled “Role of Fluid Pressure in Mechanics of Overthrust Faulting,” published in the Bulletin of Geological Society of America, Vol. 70, Feb. 1959, pp. 126, “the condition assumed, the pushing of a thrust block, whose length is of the order of 30 km. or more, along a horizontal surface, appears to be a mechanical impossibility.” Dr. Walter Lammerts made a survey of the area in the early l980’s. His conclusion was: “At the actual contact line very thin layers of shale were present. This seems to clearly indicate that just before the Altyn limestone was deposited and after the tilting of the Cretaceous beds, a thin wafer-like 1/8th to 1/16th inch layer of shale was deposited…Likewise careful study of these intercalations showed not the slightest evidence of abrasive activity such as one would expect to find if these were shoved forward in between layers of shale as the Overthrust theory demands.” He goes on to echo Hubert and Ruby by saying that the over thrusting of the limestones “…appears to be a mechanical impossibility.”
Matterhorn and MythenPeak Problems
In other cases, these same evolutionists have the massive Swiss Matterhorn being moved upward and sideways for more than forty miles, in order to explain why it is out of place in the geological time column. But that is only a small thing when compared to the Mythen Peak of the Alps, which has a number of strata which are all out of order. Eocene is on the bottom, then Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. This is a contradiction of the geological time column’s fanciful dating of these rock formations. In order to try to work their way out of this embarrassing denial of their schemes, historic geologists have arbitrarily moved this mountain, in tact, thousands of miles from Africa into Switzerland! Well, now! Certainly the Genesis Flood did enormous geological work; but the movement of a whole mountain thousands of miles and set it down in perfect conform-ability with, and cemented to, the strata below it with no valid indication of its ever having moved? Hah! Divine intervention could account for such a thing, but certainly nothing that is reportedly held by evolutionists and historic geologists advances a valid answer.
When Liars Fall Out Among Themselves
These and many others, such as the Heart Mountain thrust plain, have caused the highly regarded evolutionist J. A. Jeltzky, in an article entitled “Paleontology: Basis of Practical Geochronology,” published in Volume 40, April 1956, by the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, to admit: “The more amply proved and almost unanimously recognized impossibility of establishing any practically and useful broadly regional or world-wide geologic time scale of Pre-Cambrian time supplies conclusive proof that these phenomena are devoid of any general recognizable geologic time significance.” What did Dr. Jeltzky say? “The geological strata and other evidences do not mean a thing when it comes to determining how they got there and how long they have been there. It is impossible to make anything from the geological record that will establish times and ages that have any practical meaning whatsoever. This has been amply proved and has gained wide recognition.
This simply cannot be ignored any longer.” One of the most respected uniformitarian geologists of his day, Dr. Edmund M. Spieker, Professor of Geology at Ohio State University, confessed the failure of the geological record to support the geological ages theory when he wrote, in an article called “Mountain-Building Chronology and Nature of Geologic Time-Scale,” published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Volume 40 in l956: “Does our time scale then partake of natural law? No…I wonder how many of us realize that the time scale was frozen in essentially its present form by 1840…? How much world geology was known in 1840? A bit of Western Europe, none too well and a lesser fringe of North America? All of Asia, Africa, South America, and most of North America was virtually unknown. How dared the pioneers to assume that their time scale would fit the rocks in these vast areas, by far most of the world. And in many parts of the world, notably India and South America, it does not fit. But even there it is applied. The followers of the founding fathers went forth across the earth in Procrustean fashion and made it fit the sections they found, even in places where the actual evidences literally proclaimed denial. So flexible and accommodating are the ‘Facts’ of geology.” Of course Dr. Spieker was not trying to do Creationist any favor and he would not agree with our views, but the confessions and admissions that he made are startling:
1. The geological evidences mean nothing in terms of a time scale.
2. This time scale was developed by Lyell and his followers who made it up arbitrarily without broad knowledge or significant evidence.
3. Since then men have blindly followed these ideas, which practice must be religion since it certainly does not follow natural law.
4. What historic geologists have come up with is not science at all but a willful bending of the evidence, even in areas where anyone can see that it does not fit, to make it conform to a preconceived formula that they are determined to protect at all costs.
5. And so the witness of the geological evidence, that many have thought clearly speaks to them of evolution, really says nothing to them at all because they are blinded by the brainwashing and indoctrinating they have had into their religious beliefs and have been fully committed, even against plain evidence to the contrary, that their beliefs are right. “How dare they do this in the name of science?” the good doctor chides. “My, my,” he mocks, “how easy it is to bend our theories and how easily they accommodate to every new and imaginary hunch. Such,” he says, in scathing tones, literally dripping with sarcasm, “are the ‘facts’ of geology.”
In conclusion to this article we quote again from Whitcomb-Morris, on whom we have relied often, though not exclusively, for much of technical information: “In the light of such frequent flagrant contradictions to the established geologic time sequences, in addition to the arbitrary methods and circular reasoning by which the scale itself has been established, and also in addition to the innumerable evidences of catastrophe, rather than uniformity, as the basic principle in the deposition and modification of the geologic strata, the writers feel warranted in contending that the data of geology do not provide valid evidence against the historicity of the universal Deluge as recorded in the book of Genesis.
It is thus legitimate to attempt a new interpretation of these data which will be in harmony with the Biblical account of the Creation and the Flood.” While it is not my intent to offer any apology or any new theories, I quote these things to show that, for scientists in the field, creationists and otherwise, the evidence of the geological phenomena in the earth today, not only does not deny, but supports the Genesis account of the Flood. And in any case it does not support and it does deny the historic geological-ages theory and uniformitarian evolution. For the honest seeker these are matters of the witness of nature to the truths revealed to us by the Holy Scriptures.