Window or Mirror?

I have been faced with discussions on the Flood recently. What I mean is, I have participated in discussions where Christians are under extreme attack because they believe in the “ridiculous parts” of the Bible (like the story of the Great Flood).

Why are Christians under attack? Because scientists and other people “who can reason” have stated that the world is very old and that – because of this – the Bible is not a literal record of what happened. Care to investigate this with me just for a moment?

There is a principle called uniformitarianism which states that the way that things are now is the best model for projecting the way things used to be. Scientists use this model because they really don’t have another one. This model says that the earth has always looked the way it looks, with the physical constants of the universe the way they’ve always been. While we aren’t going to refute this in a “proof” format, let’s just muscle our way through a couple of short Gedankenexperimenten to discuss the possibilities.

First, old earth or young earth? Here’s what I used to argue, “My God is pretty powerful and can use whatever method He desires to create an earth. He is timeless and therefore I cannot place upon Him restrictions on His creative muse and process”. So far so good. I then continued this thinking into, “Therefore either theory is equally valid as an evolutionary approach and order follows – to a tee – the process and steps outlined in Genesis 1″. Somebody give me a buzzer noise! The simple refutation here is that evolution requires death, and lots of it. We don’t have a process problem, we have a theological one. Death didn’t occur until sin took hold, and our first two humans did that; ergo, no “evolutionary” process until humans were already here.

Second, let’s chat for a moment about things always looking like they do now. A couple of key points here are that the speed of light has been demonstrated – since we’ve been able to accurately measure it – to be decreasing. Yes it’s only decreasing a little, but we have NO way of knowing if this decrease has been constant since the start of the universe or if we in an asymoptotic pattern that was a massive curve at the beginning. On this point, if the speed of light were infinite in the past, this “issue” of seeing the light from really old galaxies is not really a problem. is it? Another key point is a little place near Mt. St. Helens where a small lake near the crater has completely changed scientists perceptions about the way “old” looking things are formed. In this lake, scientists watched peat form in 18 months, oil in less than 4 years, and a “petrified forest” appeared in less than 5 years. How is this possible? We “know” that this process takes thousands of years! Well, volcano blows up, fills lake with blown down trees. Ash and trees choke the lake and the water becomes very corrosive. The trees bump against each other in the water, debarking themselves. The bark sinks to the bottom of the lake (under some pressure) and begins to form peat and oil. The trees, first heavy and waterlogged at the base, begin to assume a “standing” posture in the water and as the water recedes, they hit the bottom and stay there, creating a “petrified forest” of trees that have been waterlogged by a very acid and mineral environment. The assumption is that they’ve always stood where they stand (they grew there) and that the conditions under which they were created are the same environment that they “grew” in. The problem? Those trees did NOT grow there and they were formed into this form not in open air, but in water. Assumption error, conclusion error.

Third, the Great Flood. This one always tickles me pink (you’ll see why that’s funny). There is not enough water on the face of the planet to cover some of the mountains on the earth (true statement). However, since we are not bound by thinking the earth then looks like it does now, let us reason now with one another. The Bible says there was no rain before the Flood.. that is, no transpiration cycle as there is now. There were “fountains of the deep” and rivers, as well as water vapor in the air (dew in the morning). Perhaps the earth’s axial tilt was less as well (since Adam and Eve ran around naked, we might assume that the Earth was more moderate in climate overall with fewer extremes). So, what does an Earth look like before the Flood? I am not sure, but what if it had rolling hills instead of mountains? Then there would be enough water to cover the Earth 1.5 miles deep! If the water vapor canopy was large enough to retain the water needed to rain in deluge form for 40 days, the sky would be pink. Did you know that the color calculated to be easiest on the human eye is the exact same wavelength of pink that the light would have been before the Flood if this assumption is true? Coincidence? So, we have an earth that may have looked VERY different before the Flood. Large temperate zone, few seasons (low axial tilt), rolling hills, pink sky, no rain… wow. This is the world that Noah may have led the animals into the Ark through. By the by, with that much water vapor, no killing radiation makes it to the surface of the earth and people would live a ridiculously long time. Also, there would have been fewer species as some divergence has been caused by mutation (due to radiation). More than this, if the animals were vegetarians before the Flood (as humans were), the foodstuffs would have been incredibly similar across the face of the planet, making it easier for Noah to feed everything.

Whew, long paragraph… let’s break it up. Into an ark the size of 569 rail cars Noah arranges the animals sent to him. Today there are around 20,000 species of land animals. If you do the math on the rail car analogy, you could have fit over 140,000 animals into the ark. Since there may have been fewer “kinds” then (genetic base), the issue seems to dissolve before our very eyes. There is another argument that says the ark couldn’t float, couldn’t hold together, etc. Without bringing the omnipotent hand of God into this, let me just suggest that you go and study a bit about the pitch (bitumen and oil) and the wood God told Noah to use and then come back to me when you’re all “chemistry majored up” and we’ll both marvel at the goodness of our God. The Bible also states that all living things dies, but there are no sea animals on the ark. You’ll read it again more carefully I hope as the writer of Genesis then states that all animals die, on the land that had breath, in the air, on the ground… and so forth, conspicuously leaving out the seas.

So Noah floats around for a while and then lands and emerges from the ark in a world totally different than the one he left. There are tall mountains now (he landed on one). The sky is blue, there are clouds, there is rain, it’s not humid, and so on. I’ve heard people tell me that the rainbow always existed, but now God is using it as a symbol… guess what!? This thought experiment can show that rainbows did NOT exist prior to this! If the canopy contained water in vapor form, there would be no rainbows as they are created (like clouds) by water in liquid droplet form. How awesome was it for Noah to see a rainbow for this very first time in this “new world”?

So, how could this happen? Without removing God from the equation, there is a scientist at a rather liberal university that did a study on ancient measurements of the sky, and he found that many ancient records of star placement and so on did not match with current observations. He plotted the events back and found that in ~4200 B.C. the earth was hit – like a spinning top – and its axial tilt was changed. It took months to recover from this precession (it’s still precessing slightly in a long cycle). He posited that a large asteroid hit an ocean on the earth, shattering the crust and changing the tilt. This event certainly would break the crust, throwing up mountains, creating plate movement where there was none, releasing the water under the crust, throwing up a massive cloud of dust to which the water vapor would cling, creating water droplets (rain), and so on. Sounds a lot like the Biblical account, yes? This would also throw a sheet of water over the poles, crushing mammoths vertically under a wall of ice and water, freezing them quickly. Isn’t it interesting that we find mammoths today that are crushed from above with grass in their stomachs (yes grass, near the poles) that is still green?

The fact of the matter is that our God is an awesome God and He made a world for us that we broke with sin. He destroyed that world, preserved us, and this sinful broken world is still beautiful because God cares about us. Let’s find reasons to believe in God, rather than finding ways to refute the great things that He has done.