Print Page - In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

Preface

As a reader of this book, you may have several questions: Why was the book written? How is it organized and why? For whom is it intended? Where is the creation-evolution issue headed?

This study began unexpectedly in June 1970. I was a Christian, an evolutionist, and a new professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. I heard surprising claims that Noah’s Ark rested near the 14,000-foot level of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. If a gigantic boat was ever at that elevation, a huge flood must have occurred. However, the biblical flood was always hard for me to imagine. After all, where could so much water come from? Where did it all go? Every attempt I had heard to answer the first question was shallow at best. Few, if any, ever tried to adequately answer the second.

For several years I pondered these issues, reading most of what was written about claimed Ark sightings and talking with many “Ark hunters.” Almost daily I gazed up at 14,000-foot Rocky Mountain peaks and tried to imagine, at one of their summits, an object large enough to fill a football stadium. The case for the Ark’s existence grew stronger as many of my questions were answered.

With this growing possibility came a problem. If that much water sloshed over the earth for a year, many dead animals and plants would have been buried in vast amounts of mud and other sediments. This could explain how almost all fossils formed, especially those on the highest mountains. But the fossil record was supposedly the best evidence for evolution, a theory I had passively accepted. If a global flood produced most fossils, where was the evidence for evolution? The more I struggled with this question, the more amazed I became at the lack of evidence supporting evolution and the abundant evidence supporting creation. By 1972, I had become a creationist.

As I began to talk with friends and colleagues about origins, invitations to speak arose. Speaking publicly on the subject forced me to organize my thoughts. In this way, the first edition of this book began to “evolve.”

In 1978, my wife and I decided the subject was so broad and important that I should pursue it full time. Therefore, I should leave a demanding, interesting, and successful military career at the first opportunity. That came in 1980. Since then, study, research (particularly development of the hydroplate theory which deals with the flood), writing, debates, “In the Beginning” Seminars, and other speaking engagements have kept me busy. It has been exciting to see how greater awareness of creation profoundly affects so many people. You may discover this yourself.

Initially, those attending the full-day “In the Beginning” Seminar were given material summarizing the seminar content and answering many frequently asked questions. The first three editions of this book served that purpose. Later, outside requests for the book grew to the point that it had to be modified for those who had not attended. However, the book’s basic organization still follows the seminar format—an ideal format for learning this subject.

Part I of this book begins with a summary of the scientific evidence dealing with origins. That evidence falls into nine areas: three in the life sciences, three in the astronomical and physical sciences, and three in the earth sciences. Figure 1 on page xi shows this organization. Part II contains the most popular of those nine areas, as demonstrated in 200 seminars and by letters and phone calls we receive daily. Scientists, in particular, are struck by the number of diverse problems the hydroplate theory easily solves. Part III contains 30 questions most frequently asked during question and answer sessions at seminars and in media interviews—questions not already answered in Parts I and II.

This format and a comprehensive index allow a reader to focus on areas of primary interest while keeping the “big picture” in mind. Parts I, II, and III, which are quite different, may be read independently and in any order. Difficult parts can be skipped. Readers are often amazed at the endnotes, which contain many revealing and surprising quotations—usually by evolutionists.

The intended reader is anyone interested in the subject of origins—from high school students with little scientific background to people with multiple Ph.D.s in science. Parents have even paraphrased topics for their children at mealtime or bedtime.

Here is an offer for students, parents, and educators who read the entire book. Rather than place you in the awkward position of debating with science teachers or professors who are evolutionists, let me suggest an interesting alternative. As you read this book, identify questions to ask educators. If they object to any scientific information or conclusion in the book, I will be happy to discuss it with them by telephone, provided you are part of our three-way conversation. With their permission, you may record our conversation for the entire class. If nothing else, this will sharpen everyone’s critical thinking skills, put more information “on the table,” and move us a little closer to the truth.

Where is the creation-evolution controversy headed? I believe the battle will be won—not in courts, legislatures, boards of education, or church councils—but by grass-roots science education. Yes, today evolutionists generally control higher education, science journals, and the media, but the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports creation and a global flood. (If you find someone who disagrees, please refer them to the preceding paragraph and to pages 344–346. Challenge them—then watch what happens.) Throughout the history of science, controversies have raged. Perhaps none has had the profound social consequences—and therefore, the interest and emotion—of this origins debate. In the end, the side with the scientific evidence has always prevailed. The Galileo episode is one example.

Our task, then, is to educate the public, including students. People who are aware of this evidence will inevitably bring pressure and embarrassment on the entrenched interests, starting in the classroom. This is already happening. How can more be done? Dozens of pictures in this book could be fascinating subjects for a grade-school child’s classroom report. High school students could go further by reading and analyzing articles and reports related to such pictures. College students could extend this by interviewing and critiquing scientists specializing in the subject. Adults will enjoy explaining these and hundreds of other points of evidence to friends. (Many conduct courses using this book.) As more people learn, more will want to learn. Increasingly, the public will ask—or tell—educators, publishers, museums, and the media to educate themselves and stop perpetuating misinformation and bad science.

Although many people helped with this book and offered constructive suggestions, five must be mentioned: Brad Anderson, Peggy Brown, David Hull, Stuart Patterson, and Jon Schoenfield. To them and many others who helped, I am immensely grateful. The mistakes, of course, are mine alone.

My hope is that In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood will help you, the reader, as you explore the amazing events “in the beginning.”

Walt Brown

Part I: The Scientific Case for Creation

Part I is a brief summary, in outline form, of 131 categories of scientific evidence that support a sudden creation and oppose gradual evolution. As Figure 1 shows, categories 1–42 relate to the life sciences, 43–94 relate generally to the astronomical and physical sciences, and 95–131 relate to the earth sciences.

Quotations, references, and notes on pages 47–98 provide supporting details for specific conclusions. Usually, these details are based on research done by evolutionists who are experts in that particular field. Choosing evolutionists rather than creationists will minimize charges of bias. (Besides, no testimony is more convincing than that from a “hostile witness.”) Most people find the quotations, highlighted in blue type, fascinating.

For many years, students, teachers, and professors have been unaware of most of this information, especially the broader conclusions that can be reached. Those conclusions are stated in Figure 1 and in the following pages in large, bold captions. The larger the caption, the broader the conclusion. There is one overall conclusion for the life sciences, one for the astronomical and physical sciences, and one for the earth sciences. Each has three supporting conclusions, for a total of nine. Each conclusion is based upon about a dozen categories of evidence. All 131 are summarized in the following pages. Figure 1 shows the relationships of these 3 + 9 broad conclusions and the 131 categories of evidence.

Scientific information cannot be suppressed for long, so it is not surprising to see a growing awareness and excitement concerning this information. Some evidence involves new discoveries. Other evidence, discovered long ago, has been poorly disseminated. If all this information were openly presented in science classrooms, better education would result. Regardless of your age or education, you can learn and help others learn this information about a subject that holds great interest for most people—the subject of origins.

Earth Sciences

The center object on the opposite page represents Noah’s Ark. This drawing is based on a detailed and convincing description by a man who claimed to have twice walked on the Ark in the early 1900s. His information has been checked in ways he never could have imagined. Every known detail has supported his story. We must emphasize, however, there is no proof the Ark exists, although there are many alleged sightings. We must patiently wait for a verifiable discovery of this huge object that is reportedly buried under rock and ice near the 14,000-foot level of rugged Mount Ararat in a remote part of eastern Turkey.

The implications of a worldwide flood for the earth sciences, for the theory of evolution, and for mankind in general, deserve the serious reflection of every thoughtful person. Earth has many features which scientists with evolutionary presuppositions cannot explain. But these features can be explained by a gigantic flood—the most cataclysmic and literally earthshaking event the world has ever experienced—which also formed deep ocean trenches, most mountains, and many other amazing features.

A detailed and scientific reconstruction of these events now can be made independently of Scripture. This reconstruction, based only on what is seen on Earth today, is explained in Part II, “The Fountains of the Great Deep” on pages 100–255. If you study both this explanation and the biblical descriptions of the flood—two completely different perspectives—you may be startled by their agreement and the sheer power and violence of that event. Both biblical scholars and scientists have been surprised at the extent to which each perspective illuminates the other. After reading “The Fountains of the Great Deep,” you will more deeply appreciate what the psalmist wrote 3,000 years ago, “The waters were standing above the mountains. At Thy rebuke they fled; at the sound of Thy thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose; the valleys sank down ... [so the waters] may not return to cover the earth.” (Ps 104:6–9)

Life Sciences

Before considering how life began, we must first understand the term “organic evolution.” Organic evolution, as theorized, is a naturally occurring, beneficial change that produces increasing and inheritable complexity. Increased complexity would be shown if the offspring of one form of life had a different and improved set of vital organs. This is sometimes called the molecules-to-man theory—or macroevolution. [See Figure 4 on page 6.] Microevolution, on the other hand, does not involve increasing complexity. It involves changes only in size, shape, color, or minor genetic alterations caused by a few mutations. Macroevolution requires thousands of “just right” mutations. Microevolution can be thought of as “horizontal (or even downward)” change, whereas macroevolution, if it were ever observed, would involve an “upward,” beneficial change in complexity. Notice that microevolution plus time will not produce macroevolution. [micro + time ≠ macro]

Creationists and evolutionists agree that microevolution occurs. Minor change has been observed since history began. But notice how often evolutionists give evidence for microevolution to support macroevolution. It is macroevolution—which requires new abilities, increasing complexity, that results from new genetic information—that is at the center of the creation-evolution controversy. Therefore, in this book, the term “organic evolution” will mean macroevolution.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/transitionfossil.jpg)

Figure 4: Microevolution vs. Macroevolution. Notice that macroevolution would require an upward change in the complexity of certain traits and organs. Microevolution involves only horizontal (or even downward) changes—no increasing complexity.

Because science should always base conclusions on what is seen and reproducible, what is observed? We see variations in lizards, four of which are shown at the bottom. We also see birds, represented at the top. In-between forms (or intermediates), which should be vast in number if macroevolution occurred, are never seen as fossils or living species. A careful observer can usually see unbelievable discontinuities in these claimed upward changes.

Ever since Darwin, evolutionists have made excuses for why the world and our fossil museums are not overflowing with intermediates.

5. Natural Selection

An offspring of a plant or animal has characteristics that vary, often in subtle ways, from its “parents.” Because of the environment, genetics, and chance circumstances, some of these offspring will reproduce more than others. So a species with certain characteristics will tend, on average, to have more “children.” In this sense, nature “selects” genetic characteristics suited to an environment—and, more importantly, eliminates unsuitable genetic variations. Therefore, an organism’s gene pool is constantly decreasing. This is called natural selection.a

Notice, natural selection cannot produce new genes; it only selects among preexisting characteristics. As the word “selection” implies, variations are reduced, not increased.b

For example, many mistakenly believe that insect or bacterial resistances evolved in response to pesticides and antibiotics. Instead,

* a previously lost capability was reestablished, making it appear something evolved,c
* a mutation reduced the binding ability, regulatory function, or transport capacity of certain proteins,
* a damaging bacterial mutation or variation reduced the antibiotic’s effectiveness even more,d or
* a few resistant insects and bacteria were already present when the pesticides and antibiotics were first applied. When the vulnerable insects and bacteria were killed, resistant varieties had less competition and, therefore, proliferated.e

While natural selection occurred, nothing evolved and, in fact, some biological diversity was lost.

The variations Darwin observed among finches on different Galapagos islands is another example of natural selection producing micro- (not macro-) evolution. While natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest.f Today, some people think that because natural selection occurs, evolution must be correct. Actually, natural selection prevents major evolutionary changes.g

6. Mutations

Mutations are the only known means by which new genetic material becomes available for evolution.a Rarely, if ever, is a mutation beneficial to an organism in its natural environment. Almost all observable mutations are harmful; some are meaningless; many are lethal.b No known mutation has ever produced a form of life having greater complexity and viability than its ancestors.c

7. Fruit Flies

A century of fruit fly experiments, involving 3,000 consecutive generations, gives absolutely no basis for believing that any natural or artificial process can cause an increase in complexity and viability. No clear genetic improvement has ever been observed in any form of life, despite the many unnatural efforts to increase mutation rates.a

8. Complex Molecules and Organs

Many molecules necessary for life, such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, are so incredibly complex that claims they evolved are questionable. Furthermore, those claims lack experimental support.a

There is no reason to believe that mutations or any natural process could ever produce any new organs—especially those as complex as the eye,b the ear, or the brain.c For example, an adult human brain contains over 1014 (a hundred thousand billion) electrical connections,d more than all the electrical connections in all the electrical appliances in the world. The human heart, a ten-ounce pump that will operate without maintenance or lubrication for about 75 years, is another engineering marvel.e

9. Fully-Developed Organs

All species appear fully developed, not partially developed. They show design.a There are no examples of half-developed feathers, eyes,b skin, tubes (arteries, veins, intestines, etc.), or any of thousands of other vital organs. Tubes that are not 100% complete are a liability; so are partially developed organs and some body parts. For example, if a leg of a reptile were to evolve into a wing of a bird, it would become a bad leg long before it became a good wing.c [See Figure 4.]

13. Language

Children as young as seven months can understand and learn grammatical rules.a Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that language is learned only from other humans; humans do not automatically speak. So the first humans must have been endowed with a language ability. There is no evidence language evolved.b

Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees and gorillas to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by editing the animals’ successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer’s hidden promptings.c)

Wild apes have not shown these vocabulary skills, and trained apes do not pass their vocabulary on to others. When a trained animal dies, so does the trainer’s investment. Also, trained apes have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No known evidence shows that language exists or evolves in nonhumans, but all known human groups have language.d

Furthermore, only humans have different modes of language: speaking/hearing, writing/reading, signing, touch (as with braille), and tapping (as with Morse code or tap-codes used by prisoners). When one mode is prevented, as with the loss of hearing, others can be used.e

If language evolved, the earliest languages should be the simplest. But language studies show that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, verb form, and inflection. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler instead of more complex.f Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.g [See Figure 139 on page 261.]

If humans evolved, then so did language. Because all available evidence indicates that language did not evolve, then humans probably did not evolve.

14. Speech

Speech is uniquely human.a Humans have both a “prewired” brain capable of learning and conveying abstract ideas, and the physical anatomy (mouth, throat, tongue, larynx, etc.) to produce a wide range of sounds. Only a few animals can approximate some human sounds.

Because the human larynx is low in the neck, a long air column lies above the vocal cords. This helps make vowel sounds. Apes cannot make clear vowel sounds, because they lack this long air column. The back of the human tongue, extending deep into the neck, modulates the air flow to produce consonant sounds. Apes have flat, horizontal tongues, incapable of making consonant sounds.b

Even if an ape could evolve all the physical equipment for speech, that equipment would be useless without a “prewired” brain for learning language skills, especially grammar and vocabulary.

15. Codes, Programs, and Information

In our experience, codes are produced only by intelligence, not by natural processes or chance. A code is a set of rules for converting information from one useful form to another. Examples include Morse code and braille. Code makers must simultaneously understand at least two ways of representing information, and then establish the rules for converting from one to the other and back again.

The genetic material that controls the physical processes of life is coded information. It also has elaborate transmission, translation, correction, and duplication systems, without which the genetic material would be useless, and life would cease. Therefore, it seems most reasonable that the genetic code, the accompanying transmission, translation, correction, and duplication systems were produced simultaneously in each living organism by an extremely high level of intelligence.a

Likewise, no natural process has ever been observed to produce a program. A program is a planned sequence of steps to accomplish some goal. Computer programs are common examples. Because programs require foresight, they are not produced by chance or natural processes. The information stored in the genetic material of all life is a complex program. Therefore, it appears that a fantastic intelligence created these genetic programs.b

Life contains matter, energy, and informationc. All isolated systems, including living organisms, have specific, but perishable, amounts of information. No isolated system has ever been shown to increase its information content significantly.d Nor do natural processes increase information; they destroy it. Only outside intelligence can significantly increase the information content of an otherwise isolated system. All scientific observations are consistent with this generalization, which has three corollaries:

* Macroevolution cannot occur.e
* Outside intelligence was involved in the creation of the universe and all forms of life.f
* Life could not result from a “big bang.”g

18. Vestigial Organs

Some structures in humans were once thought to have no function but to have been derived from functioning organs in claimed evolutionary ancestors.a They were called vestigial organs. As medical knowledge has increased, at least some function has been discovered for all alleged vestigial organs.b For example, the human appendix was once considered a useless remnant from our evolutionary past. The appendix seems to play a role in antibody production and protects part of the intestine from infections and tumor growths.c Indeed, the absence of true vestigial organs implies evolution never happened.

19. Two-Celled Life?

Many single-celled forms of life exist, but no known forms of animal life have 2, 3, 4, or 5 cells.a The forms of life with 6–20 cells are parasites, so they must have a complex animal as a host to provide such functions as digestion and respiration. If macroevolution happened, one should find many transitional forms of life with 2–20 cells—filling the gap between one-celled and many-celled organisms.

20. Embryology

Evolutionists have taught for over a century that as an embryo develops, it repeats an evolutionary sequence. In other words, in a few days an unborn human repeats stages that supposedly took millions of years for mankind. Another well-known example of this ridiculous teaching is that embryos of mammals have “gill slits,” because mammals supposedly evolved from fish. (Yes, that’s faulty logic.) Embryonic tissues that resemble “gill slits” have nothing to do with breathing; they are neither gills nor slits. Instead, that embryonic tissue develops into parts of the face, bones of the middle ear, and endocrine glands.

Embryologists no longer consider the superficial similarities between a few embryos and the adult forms of simpler animals as evidence for evolution.a Ernst Haeckel, by deliberately falsifying his drawings,b originated and popularized this incorrect but widespread belief. Many modern textbooks continue to spread this false idea as evidence for evolution.c

23. Fossil Gaps

If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record.a At the most fundamental level, a big gap exists between forms of life whose cells have nuclei (eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, and fungi) and those that don’t (prokaryotes such as bacteria and blue-green algae).b Fossil links are also missing between numerous plants,c between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates (animals without backbones), among insects,d between invertebrates and vertebrates (animals with backbones),e between fish and amphibians,f between amphibians and reptiles,g between reptiles and mammals,h between reptiles and birds,i between primates and other mammals,j and between apes and other primates.k In fact, chains are missing, not links. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly it is safe to conclude these gaps are real; they will never be filled.l

24. Missing Trunk

The evolutionary tree has no trunk. In the earliest part of the fossil record (generally the lowest sedimentary layers of Cambrian rock), life appears suddenly, full-blown, complex, diversified,a and dispersed—worldwide.b Evolution predicts that minor variations should slowly accumulate, eventually becoming major categories of organisms. Instead, the opposite is found. Virtually all of today’s plant and animal phyla—including flowering plants,c vascular plants,d and vertebratese—appear at the base of the fossil record. In fact, many more phyla are found in the Cambrian than exist today.f Complex species, such as fish,g worms, corals, trilobites, jellyfish,h sponges, mollusks, and brachiopods appear suddenly, with no sign anywhere on earth of gradual development from simpler forms. Insects, a class comprising four-fifths of all known animals (living and extinct), have no evolutionary ancestors.i The fossil record does not support evolution.j

25. Out-of-Place Fossils

Frequently, fossils are not vertically sequenced in the assumed evolutionary order.a For example, in Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive hoofprints of horses were found in rocks dating back to the dinosaurs.b Hoofprints of some other animal are alongside 1,000 dinosaur footprints in Virginia.c A leading authority on the Grand Canyon published photographs of horselike hoofprints visible in rocks that, according to the theory of evolution, predate hoofed animals by more than a 100 million years.d Dinosaur and humanlike footprints were found together in Turkmenistane and Arizona.f Sometimes, land animals, flying animals, and marine animals are fossilized side-by-side in the same rock.g Dinosaur, whale, elephant, horse, and other fossils, plus crude human tools, have reportedly been found in phosphate beds in South Carolina.h Coal beds contain round, black lumps called coal balls, some of which contain flowering plants that allegedly evolved 100 million years after the coal bed was formed.i In the Grand Canyon, in Venezuela, in Kashmir, and in Guyana, spores of ferns and pollen from flowering plants are found in Cambrianj rocks—rocks supposedly deposited before flowering plants evolved. Pollen has also been found in Precambriank rocks deposited before life allegedly evolved.

Petrified trees in Arizona’s petrified forest contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are reputedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants which bees require) supposedly evolved almost a 100 million years later.l Pollinating insects and fossil flies, with long, well-developed tubes for sucking nectar from flowers, are dated 25 million years before flowers are assumed to have evolved.m Most evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/insectinamber.jpg)

Figure 12: Insect in Amber. The best-preserved fossils are encased in amber, protected from air and water and buried in the ground. Amber, a golden resin (similar to sap or pitch) usually from conifer trees such as pines, may also contain other preservatives. No transitional forms of life have been found in amber, despite evolutionary-based ages of 1.5–300 million years. Animal behaviors, unchanged from today, are seen in three-dimensional detail. For example, ants in amber show the same social and work patterns as ants today.

Experts bold enough to explain how these fossils formed say that hurricane-force winds must have snapped off trees at their trunks, causing huge amounts of resin to spill out and act like flypaper. Debris and small organisms were blown into the sticky resin which was later covered by more resin and finally buried. (Part II of this book will show that such conditions arose during the flood.)

In a clean-room laboratory, 30–40 dormant, but living, bacteria species were removed from intestines of bees encased in amber from the Dominican Republic. When cultured, the bacteria grew! [See “Old DNA, Bacteria, and Proteins” on page 33.] This amber is claimed to be 25–40 million years old, but I suspect it formed at the time of the flood, only thousands of years ago. Is it more likely that bacteria can be kept alive thousands of years or many millions of years? Metabolism rates, even in dormant bacteria, are not zero.

26. Ape-Men?

For over a century, studies of skulls and teeth have produced unreliable conclusions about man’s origin.a Also, fossil evidence allegedly supporting human evolution is fragmentary and open to other interpretations. Fossil evidence showing the evolution of chimpanzees, supposedly the closest living relative to humans, is nonexistent.b

Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated.c

* It is now universally acknowledged that Piltdown “man” was a hoax, and yet, it was in textbooks for more than 40 years.d
* Before 1977, evidence for Ramapithecus was a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. We now know these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakeye and others in a form resembling part of the human jaw.f Ramapithecus was just an ape.g [See Figure 13.]
* The only remains of Nebraska “man” turned out to be a pig’s tooth. [See Figure 14.]
* Forty years after he discovered Java “man,” Eugene Dubois conceded that it was not a man, but was similar to a large gibbon (an ape). In citing evidence to support this new conclusion, Dubois admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thigh bones of apes found in the same area.h
* Many experts consider the skulls of Peking “man” to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man.i Its classification, Homo erectus, is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created.j
* The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis were discovered in 1986. They showed that this animal clearly had apelike proportionsk and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo).l
* The australopithecines, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are quite distinct from humans. Several detailed computer studies of australopithecines have shown that their bodily proportions were not intermediate between man and living apes.m Another study of their inner ear bones, used to maintain balance, showed a striking similarity with those of chimpanzees and gorillas, but great differences with those of humans.n Likewise, their pattern of dental development corresponds to chimpanzees, not humans.o One australopithecine fossil—a 31/2-foot-tall, long-armed, 60-pound adult called “Lucy”—was initially presented as evidence that all australopithecines walked upright in a human manner. However, studies of Lucy’s entire anatomy, not just a knee joint, now show this is very unlikely. She probably swung from the treesp and was similar to pygmy chimpanzees.q The australopithecines are probably extinct apes.r
* For about 100 years the world was led to believe Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. This false idea was based upon some Neanderthals with bone diseases such as arthritis and rickets.s Recent dental and x-ray studies of Neanderthals suggest they were humans who matured at a slower rate and lived to be much older than people today.t Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man are now considered completely human. Artists’ drawings of “ape-men,” especially their fleshy portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence.u

Furthermore, the techniques used to date these fossils are highly questionable. [See pages 31–37.]

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Figure 13: Ramapithecus. Some textbooks still claim Ramapithecus is man’s ancestor, an intermediate between man and some apelike ancestor. This mistaken belief resulted from piecing together, in 1932, fragments of upper teeth and bones into the two large pieces shown in the upper left corner. This was done so the teeth resembled the parabolic arch of man, shown in the upper right. In 1977, a complete lower jaw of Ramapithecus was found. The true shape of the jaw was not parabolic, but rather U-shaped, distinctive of apes.

(picture of supposed Nebraska man purposefully eliminated)

Figure 14: Nebraska Man. Artists’ drawings, even those based on speculation, powerfully influence the public. Nebraska man was mistakenly based on one tooth of an extinct pig. Yet in 1922, The Illustrated London News published this picture showing our supposed ancestors. Of course, no fossil evidence could support the image conveyed here of a naked man carrying a club.

27. Fossil Man

Bones of many modern-looking humans have been found deep in undisturbed rocks that, according to evolution, were formed long before man began to evolve. Examples include the Calaveras skull,a the Castenedolo skeletons,b Reck’s skeleton,c and others.d Remains, such as the Swanscombe skull, the Steinheim fossil, and the Vertesszöllos fossil, present similar problems.e Evolutionists almost always ignore these remains.

Life Is So Complex That Chance Processes, Even over Billions of Years, Cannot Explain Its Origin.

28. Chemical Elements of Life

The chemical evolution of life, as you will see in the next few pages, is ridiculously improbable. What could improve the odds? One should begin with an earth having high concentrations of the key elements comprising life, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.a However, as one more closely examines these elements, the more unlikely evolution appears.

Carbon. Rocks that supposedly preceded life have very little carbon.b One must imagine a toxic, carbon-rich atmosphere to supply the needed carbon if life evolved. For comparison, today’s atmosphere holds only 1/80,000th of the carbon that has been on the earth’s surface since the first fossils formed. [See Table 6 on page 171.]

Oxygen. No theory has been able to explain why earth’s atmosphere has so much oxygen. Too many chemical processes should have absorbed oxygen on an evolving earth.c Besides, if the early earth had oxygen in its atmosphere, compounds (called amino acids) needed for life to evolve would have been destroyed by oxidation.d But if there had been no oxygen, there would have been no ozone (a form of oxygen) in the upper atmosphere. Without ozone to shield the earth, the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would quickly destroy life.e The only known way for both ozone and life to be here is for both to come into existence simultaneously—in other words, by creation.

Nitrogen. Clays and various rocks absorb nitrogen. Had millions of years passed before life evolved, the sediments that preceded life should be filled with nitrogen. Searches have never found such sediments.f

Basic chemistry does not support the evolution of life.g

32. Genetic Distances

Similarities between different forms of life can now be measured with sophisticated genetic techniques.

Proteins. “Genetic distances” can be calculated by taking a specific protein and examining the sequence of its components. The fewer changes needed to convert a protein of one organism into the corresponding protein of another organism, supposedly the closer their relationship. These studies seriously contradict the theory of evolution.a

An early computer-based study of cytochrome c, a protein used in energy production, compared 47 different forms of life. This study found many contradictions with evolution based on this one protein. For example, according to evolution, the rattlesnake should have been most closely related to other reptiles. Instead, of these 47 forms (all that were sequenced at that time), the rattlesnake was most similar to man.b Since this study, experts have discovered hundreds of similar contradictions.c

DNA and RNA. Comparisons can also be made between the genetic material of different organisms. The list of organisms that have had all their genes sequenced and entered in databases, such as “GenBank,” is doubling each year. Computer comparisons of each gene with all other genes in the database show too many genes that are completely unrelated to any others.d Therefore, an evolutionary relationship between genes is highly unlikely. Furthermore, there is no trace at the molecular level for the traditional evolutionary series: simple sea life fish amphibians reptiles mammals.e Each category of organism appears to be almost equally isolated.f

Humans vs. Chimpanzees. Evolutionists say that the chimpanzee is the closest living relative to humans. For two decades (1984–2004), evolutionists and the media claimed that human DNA is about 99% similar to chimpanzee DNA. These statements had little scientific justification, because they were made before anyone had completed sequencing human DNA and long before sequencing chimpanzee DNA had begun.

Chimpanzee and human DNA have now been completely sequenced and rigorously compared. The differences, which total about 4%, are far greater and more complicated than evolutionists suspected.g Those differences include about “thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertions/deletions, and various chromosomal rearrangements.”h Although its only 4%, a huge DNA chasm separates humans from chimpanzees.

Finally, evolutionary trees, based on the outward appearance of organisms, can now be compared with the organisms’ genetic information. They conflict in major ways.i

33. Genetic Information

The genetic information in the DNA of each human cell is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books.a Even if matter and life (perhaps a bacterium) somehow arose, the probability that mutations and natural selection produced this vast amount of information is essentially zero.b It would be analogous to continuing the following procedure until 4,000 books were produced:c

a. Start with a meaningful phrase.

b. Retype it, but make some errors and insert a few letters.

c. See if the new phrase is meaningful.

d. If it is, replace the original phrase with it.

e. Return to step “b.”

To produce just the enzymes in one organism would require more than 1040,000 trials.d (To understand how large 1040,000 is, realize that the visible universe has fewer than 1080 atoms in it.)

Since 1970, evolutionists have referred to large segments of DNA as “junk DNA,” because it supposedly had no purpose and was left over from our evolutionary past. We now know this “junk” explains much of the complexity of organisms. Use of the term “junk DNA” reflected past ignorance.e

Quote

The Elephant in the Living Room

Writer George V. Caylor interviewed Sam, a molecular biologist. George asked Sam about his work. Sam said he and his team were scientific “detectives,” working with DNA and tracking down the cause of disease. Here is their published conversation.

G: “Sounds like pretty complicated work.”

S: “You can’t imagine how complicated!”

G: “Try me.”

S: “I’m a bit like an editor, trying to find a spelling mistake inside a document larger than four complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. Seventy volumes, thousands and thousands of pages of small print words.”

G: “With the computer power, you can just use ‘spell check’!”

S: “There is no ‘spell check’ because we don’t know yet how the words are supposed to be spelled. We don’t even know for sure which language. And it’s not just the ‘spelling error’ we’re looking for. If any of the punctuation is out of place, or a space out of place, or a grammatical error, we have a mutation that will cause a disease.”

G: “So how do you do it?”

S: “We are learning as we go. We have already ‘read’ over two articles in that encyclopedia, and located some ‘typo’s’. It should get easier as time goes by.”

G: “How did all that information happen to get there?”

S: “Do you mean, did it just happen? Did it evolve?”

G: “Bingo. Do you believe that the information evolved?”

S: “George, nobody I know in my profession truly believes it evolved. It was engineered by ‘genius beyond genius,’ and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book. Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise. A bit like Neil Armstrong believing the moon is made of green cheese. He's been there!”

G: “Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?”

S: “No. It all just evolved.”

G: “What? You just told me — ?”

S: “Just stop right there. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold on to two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don’t believe in evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures—everything would stop. I’d be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn’t earn a decent living.”

G: “I hate to say it, Sam, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

S: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind’s worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the ‘elephant in the living room’.”

G: “What elephant?”

S: “Design. It’s like the elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn’t there!”

George V. Caylor, “The Biologist,” The Ledger, Vol. 2, Issue 48, No. 92, 1 December 2000, p. 2. (www.ontherightside.com) Printed with permission.

34. DNA Production and Repair

DNA cannot function without at least 75 preexisting proteins,a but proteins are produced only at the direction of DNA.b Because each needs the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the other.c The components of these manufacturing systems must have come into existence simultaneously. This implies creation.

When a cell divides, its DNA is copied, sometimes with errors. Each animal and plant has machinery that identifies and corrects most errors;d if it did not, the organism would deteriorate and become extinct. If evolution happened, which evolved first, DNA or its repair mechanism? Each requires the other.

35. Handedness: Left and Right

Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides. In living things, nucleotides are always “right-handed.” (They are called “right-handed” because a beam of polarized light passing through them rotates like a right-handed screw.) Nucleotides rarely form outside life, but when they do, half are left-handed, and half are right-handed. If the first nucleotides formed by natural processes, they would have “mixed-handedness” and therefore could not evolve life’s genetic material. In fact, “mixed” genetic material cannot even copy itself.a

Each type of amino acid, when found in nonliving material or when synthesized in the laboratory, comes in two chemically equivalent forms. Half are right-handed, and half are left-handed—mirror images of each other. However, amino acids in life, including plants, animals, bacteria, molds, and even viruses, are essentially all left-handed.b No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or right-handed variety. The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero.c

A similar observation can be made for a special class of organic compounds called “sugars.” In living systems, sugars are all right-handed. Based on our present understanding, natural processes produce equal proportions of left-handed and right-handed sugars. Because sugars in living things are right-handed, random natural processes apparently did not produce life.

If any living thing took in (or ate) amino acids or sugars with the wrong handedness, the organism’s body could not process it. Such food would be useless, if not harmful. Because evolution favors slight variations that enhance survivability and reproduction, consider how beneficial a mutation might be that switched (or inverted) a plant’s handedness. “Inverted” (or wrong-handed) trees would proliferate rapidly, because they would no longer provide nourishment to bacteria, mold, or termites. “Inverted” forests would fill the continents. Other “inverted” plants and animals would also benefit and would overwhelm the balance of nature. Why do we not see such species with right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars? Similarly, why are there not more poisonous plants? Why don’t beneficial mutations permit most carriers to defeat their predators? Beneficial mutations are rarer than evolutionists believe. [See “Mutations” on page 8.]

37. Metamorphosis

Most insects (87%) undergo complete metamorphosis; that is, a larva (such as a caterpillar) builds a cocoon or chrysalis around itself. Its body inside then disintegrates into a thick, pulplike liquid. Days, weeks, or months later, the adult insect emerges—one that is dramatically different (as shown in Table 1), amazingly capable, and often beautiful, such as a butterfly. Food, habitat, and behavior of the larva also differ drastically from those of the adult.

Evolution claims that:

Mutations slightly alter an organism’s genetic material which later generations inherit. On rare occasions the alterations are beneficial, enabling those offspring to reproduce more of themselves and the improved genetic material. [Supposedly] after many generations, dramatic changes, even new organs, accumulate.

If this were true, each organism must be able to reproduce and must be superior, in some sense, to its ancestors. How then could metamorphosis evolve in many stages?a

What mutations could improve a larva? Certainly none that destroyed its nerves, muscles, eyes, brain, and most other organs, as occurs within a cocoon. So even if a larva improved, it later ends up as “mush.” From an evolutionary standpoint, liquefying complex organs is a giant step backwards. As Michael Pitman wryly noted,

Maggots will more or less dissolve themselves when developing into a fly. Was the process pre-programmed from the first “production run”? Or was the ancestral fly a dissolved maggot?b

The millions of changes inside the thick liquid never produce something survivable or advantageous in the outside world until the adult completely forms. How did the genetic material for both larva and adult develop? Which came first, larva or adult? What mutations could transform a crawling larva into a flying monarch butterfly that can accurately navigate 3,000 miles using a brain the size of a pin head?c Indeed, why should a larva evolve in the first place, because it cannot reproduce?d

Charles Darwin wrote,

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.e

Based on metamorphosis alone, evolution “breaks down.”

Obviously, the vast information that directs every stage of a larva’s and an adult’s development, including metamorphosis, must reside in its genetic material at the beginning. This fits only creation.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/monarchmetamorphosis.jpg)

Figure 15: Metamorphosis. Many animals experience an amazing transformation that refutes evolution. One example is the monarch butterfly. As a 2-week-old caterpillar (left), it builds a chrysalis around itself (center). Then its complex organs disintegrate. From an evolution perspective, this should cause its extinction—a thousand times over. Two weeks later, a beautiful butterfly emerges with different and even more remarkable capabilities (right). Some people might believe a complex machine, such as an automobile, evolved by natural processes, but if they saw that machine disintegrate and quickly reemerge as an airplane, only the most naive and unscientific would still believe natural processes could produce such marvelous designs.

38. Symbiotic Relationships

Many different forms of life are completely dependent upon each other. Examples include fig trees and the fig gall wasp,a the yucca plant and the yucca moth,b many parasites and their hosts, and pollen-bearing plants and the honeybee. Even members of the honeybee family, consisting of the queen, workers, and drones, are interdependent. If one member of each interdependent group evolved first (such as the plant before the animal, or one member of the honeybee family before the others), it could not have survived. Because all members of the group obviously have survived, they must have come into existence at essentially the same time. In other words, creation.

39. Sexual Reproduction

If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, an unbelievable series of chance events must have occurred at each stage.

a. The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have completely and independently evolved at each stage at about the same time and place. Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reproductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct.

b. The physical, chemical, and emotional systems of the male and female would also need to be compatible.a

c. The millions of complex products of a male reproductive system (pollen or sperm) must have an affinity for and a mechanical, chemical,b and electricalc compatibility with the eggs of the female reproductive system.

d. The many intricate processes occurring at the molecular level inside the fertilized egg would have to work with fantastic precision—processes scientists can describe only in a general sense.d

e. The environment of this fertilized egg, from conception through adulthood and until it also reproduced with another sexually capable adult (who also “accidentally” evolved), would have to be tightly controlled.

f. This remarkable string of “accidents” must have been repeated for millions of species.

Either this series of incredible and complementary events happened by random, evolutionary processes, or sexual reproduction was designed by intelligence.

Furthermore, if sexual reproduction evolved, the steps by which an embryo becomes either a male or female should be similar for all animals. Actually, these steps vary among animals.e

Evolution theory predicts nature would select asexual rather than sexual reproduction.f But if asexual reproduction (splitting an organism into two identical organisms) evolved before sexual reproduction, how did complex sexual diversity arise—or survive?

Finally, to produce the first life form would be one miracle. But for natural processes to produce life that immediately had the capability to reproduce itself would be a miracle on top of a miracle.g

(Figure 16 purposefull eliminated)

Figure 16: Male and Female Birds. Even evolutionists admit evolution seems incompatible with sexual reproduction.

40. Immune Systems

How could immune systems of animals and plants have evolved? Each immune system can recognize invading bacteria, viruses, and toxins. Each system can quickly mobilize the best defenders to search out and destroy these invaders. Each system has a memory and learns from every attack.

If the many instructions that direct an animal’s or plant’s immune system had not been preprogrammed in the organism’s genetic system when it first appeared on earth, the first of thousands of potential infections would have killed the organism. This would have nullified any rare genetic improvements that might have accumulated. In other words, the large amount of genetic information governing the immune system could not have accumulated in a slow, evolutionary sense.a Obviously, for each organism to have survived, all this information must have all been there from the beginning. Again, creation.

(Figure 17 purposefully eleminated)

Figure 17: White Blood Cell. A white blood cell is stalking the green bacterium, shown at the lower right. Your health, and that of many animals, depends on the effectiveness of these “search-and-destroy missions.” Consider the capabilities and associated equipment this white blood cell must have to do its job. It must identify friend and foe. Once a foe is detected, the white blood cell must rapidly locate and overtake the invader. Then the white blood cell must engulf the bacterium, destroy it, and have the endurance to repeat this many times. Miniaturization, fuel efficiency, and compatibility with other members of the body are also key requirements. The equipment for each function requires careful design. Unless all this worked well from the beginning of life, a requirement that rules out evolution, bacteria and other agents of disease would have won, and we would not be here to marvel at these hidden abilities in our bodies.

A few “stem cells” in your bone marrow produce more than 100 billion of these and other types of blood cells every day. Each white blood cell moves at up to 30 microns (almost half the diameter of a human hair) each minute. So many white blood cells are in your body that their total distance traveled in one day would circle the earth twice.

41. Living Technology

Most complex phenomena known to science are found in living systems—including those involving electrical, acoustical, mechanical, chemical, and optical phenomena. Detailed studies of various animals also have revealed certain physical equipment and capabilities that the world’s best designers, using the most sophisticated technologies, cannot duplicate. Examples of these designs include molecular-size motors in most living organisms;a advanced technologies in cells;b miniature and reliable sonar systems of dolphins, porpoises, and whales; frequency-modulated radar and discrimination systems of bats;c efficient aerodynamic capabilities of hummingbirds; control systems, internal ballistics, and combustion chamber of bombardier beetles;d precise and redundant navigational systems of many birds, fish, and insects;e and especially the self-repair capabilities of almost all forms of life. No component of these complex systems could have evolved without placing the organism at a selective disadvantage until the component’s evolution was complete. All evidence points to intelligent design.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/arctictern.jpg)

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/cockpit.jpg)

Figure 18: Arctic Tern Migration Routes and Cockpit. The Arctic Tern, a bird of average size, navigates across oceans, as shown above, with the skill normally associated with navigational equipment in modern intercontinental aircraft. A round trip for the Tern might be 22,000 miles. The Tern’s “electronics” are highly miniaturized, extremely reliable, maintenance free, and easily reproduced. Furthermore, this remarkable bird needs no training. If the equipment in the lower picture could not have evolved, how could the Tern’s more amazing “equipment” have evolved?

Equally amazing is the monarch butterfly that flies thousands of miles from breeding grounds as far north as Canada to wintering grounds as far south as Mexico. Processing information in a brain the size of a pin head, it navigates using a magnetic compass and, to a lesser extent, the Sun.

Life Science Conclusions

When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, the “evolutionary tree” had only a few gaps. Believers in his new theory thought these gaps would be filled as scientific knowledge increased. Just the opposite has happened. As science progressed, these “missing links” have multiplied enormously, and the obstacles to “bridging” these gaps have become even more obvious. For example, in Darwin’s day, all life fell into two categories (or kingdoms): animals and plants. Today, it is generally accepted that life falls into five radically different kingdoms, only two of which are animals and plants. (None of the five include viruses, which are complex and unique in their own way.) In the 1800s, the animal kingdom was divided into four animal phyla; today there are about forty.

Darwin suggested that the first living creature evolved in a “warm little pond.” Today, almost all evolutionary biologists will privately admit that science has no explanation for how life evolved. We now know that the chance formation of the first living cell is a leap of gigantic proportions, vastly more improbable than for bacteria to evolve into humans. In Darwin’s day, a cell was thought to be about as simple as a ping-pong ball. Even today, most evolutionists think bacteria—one of the first forms of life to evolve—are simple. However, bacteria are marvelously integrated and complex manufacturing facilities with many mysteries yet to be understood, such as bacterial motors and communication among bacteria. Furthermore, cells come in two radically different types—those with a nucleus and those without. The evolutionary leap from one to the other is staggering to imagine.

The more evolutionists learn about life, the greater complexity they find. A century ago there were no sophisticated microscopes. Consequently, gigantic leaps from single- to multiple-cell organisms were grossly underestimated. Development of the computer has also given us a better appreciation of the brain’s intricate electronics, extreme miniaturization, and vast storage capabilities. The human eye, which Darwin admitted made him shudder, was only a single jump in complexity. [See Endnote 9b on page 53.] We now know there are at least a dozen radically different kinds of eyes, each requiring similar jumps if evolution happened. Likewise, the literal leap we call “flight” must have evolved not once, but on at least four different occasions: for birds, some insects, mammals (bats), and reptiles (pterosaurs). Fireflies produce light without heat, a phenomenon called bioluminescence. Other species, including fish, crustaceans, squids, plants, bacteria, and fungi, also have lighting systems. Did all these remarkable capabilities evolve independently?

Before 1977, it was thought that sunlight provided the energy for all life. We now know that some organisms, living at widely separated locations on the dark ocean floor, use only chemical and thermal energy. For one energy-conversion system to evolve into another would be like changing, by thousands of rare accidents, the wood-burning heating systems of widely separated homes to electricity—but slowly, one accident each year. The occupants would risk freezing every winter. How such a system could evolve on different ocean floors, without solar energy, and in a cold, diluting environment has yet to be explained.

If evolution happened, many other giant leaps must also have occurred: the first photosynthesis, cold-blooded to warm-blooded animals, floating marine plants to vascular plants, placental mammals to marsupials, egg-laying animals to animals that bear live young, insect metamorphosis, the transition of mammals to the sea (whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, and sea cows), the transition of reptiles to the sea (plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs), and on and on.

Gaps in the fossil record are well known. A century ago evolutionists argued that these gaps would be filled as knowledge increased. The same gaps persist, and most paleontologists now admit that those predictions failed. Of course, the most famous “missing link” is between man and apes, but the term is deceiving. There is not one missing link, but thousands—a long chain—if the evolutionary tree were to connect man and apes with their many linguistic, social, mental, and physical differences.

Scientific advancements have shown us that evolution is an even more ridiculous theory than it seemed in Darwin’s day. It is a theory without a mechanism. Not even appeals to long periods of time will allow simple organisms to “jump gaps” and become more complex and viable. In fact, as the next section will show, long periods of time make such leaps even less likely.

All the breeding experiments that many hoped would demonstrate macroevolution have failed. The arguments used by Darwin and his followers are now discredited or, at best, in dispute, even among evolutionists. Finally, research in the last several decades has shown that the requirements for life are incredibly complex. Just the design that most people can see around them obviously implies a designer. Nevertheless, evolutionists still argue against this design by, oddly enough, using arguments which they spent a great deal of time designing. The theory of organic evolution is invalid.

As we leave the life sciences and examine the astronomical and physical sciences, we will see many other serious problems. If the Earth, the solar system, our galaxy, the universe, or even heavier chemical elements could not have evolved, as now seems to be the case, then organic evolution could not even begin.

44. Earth: The Water Planet

The amount of water on Earth greatly exceeds that known on or within any other planet in the solar system. Liquid water, which is essential for life and has unique and amazing properties, covers 70% of Earth’s surface. Where did all Earth’s water come from?

If the Earth and solar system evolved from a swirling cloud of dust and gas, practically no water would reside near Earth’s present orbit. Any water (liquid or ice) that close to the Sun would vaporize and be blown by solar wind to the outer reaches of the solar system,a as we see happening with water vapor in the tails of comets.

Did comets or meteorites deliver Earth’s water? Comets, which are about 38% water (by mass), could not have brought much water to Earth, because comets contain too much heavy hydrogen, relatively rare in Earth’s oceans. Comets also contain too much argon. If comets were the source of only 1% of Earth’s water, then, using evolutionists’ assumptions, our atmosphere would contain 400 times more argon than it does.b The few types of meteorites that contain considerable water also have too much heavy hydrogen.c [Pages 208–255 explain why comets and some types of meteorites contain so much water and heavy hydrogen. Heavy hydrogen is described on page 216.]

These observations have caused some to conclude that water was transported from the outer solar system to Earth by objects that no longer exist.d If so, many of these “water tankers” should have collided with the other inner planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars), producing water characteristics similar to those of Earth. In fact, their water characteristics are not like those on Earth.e Instead of imagining “water tankers” that all disappeared, perhaps we should ask if the Earth was created with its water already present.

45. Molten Earth?

For decades, textbooks have taught that the early Earth was molten, because it formed by meteoritic bombardment. If so, the heat released by the impacts would have melted the entire Earth for hundreds of millions of years.a Had Earth ever been molten, dense, nonreactive chemical elements such as gold would have sunk to Earth’s core. Gold is 70% denser than lead, yet is found at the Earth’s surface.b Therefore, the entire Earth was never molten and did not form by meteoritic bombardment.

Radioactive dating of certain zircon minerals also contradicts a molten Earth. Trace elements within those zircons show that the zircons formed on a cold Earth (less than 212°F).c However, according to radioactive dating, those zircons formed on an extremely young Earth, when, according to evolutionists, it should have been molten (exceeding 1,800°F)—an obvious contradiction. Either the molten Earth idea or the radioactive dating method is wrong; perhaps both ideas are wrong.

Meteorites contain much more of the element xenon than Earth’s surface rocks, relative to other noble (inert) gases such as helium, neon, and argon. Had Earth formed by meteoritic bombardment, Earth’s surface rocks would have a different composition, and our atmosphere would contain up to ten times more xenon than it has.d If Earth did not evolve by meteoritic bombardment, it may have begun as one large body. [See “Melting the Inner Earth” on pages 356–358.]

46. Evolving Planets?

Contrary to popular opinion, planets should not form from just the mutual gravitational attraction of particles orbiting the Sun.a Orbiting particles are much more likely to be scattered or expelled by their gravitational attraction than they are to be permanently pulled together. Experiments have shown that colliding particles almost always fragment rather than stick together.b (Similar difficulties exist in trying to form a moon from particles orbiting a planet.)

Despite these problems, let us assume that pebble-size to moon-size particles somehow evolved. “Growing a planet” by many small collisions will produce an almost nonspinning planet, because spins imparted by impacts will be largely self-canceling.c

The growth of a large, gaseous planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune) far from the central star is especially difficult for evolutionists to explain for several reasons.d

a. Gases dissipate rapidly in the vacuum of outer space, especially the lightest two gases—hydrogen and helium, which comprise most of the mass of the giant planets.

b. Because gas molecules orbiting a star do not gravitationally pull in (or merge with) other gas molecules in the orbiting ring, a rocky planet, about ten times larger than Earth, must first form to attract all the gas gravitationally. This must happen very quickly, before the gas dissipates.e (Jupiter’s hydrogen and helium is 300 times more massive than the entire Earth.)

c. Stars like our Sun—even those which evolutionists say are young—do not have enough orbiting hydrogen or helium to form one Jupiter.f

Computer simulations show that Uranus and Neptune could not evolve anywhere near their present locations.g The planets that are found outside our solar system also contradict the theories for how planets supposedly evolve. [See “Have Planets Been Discovered Outside the Solar System?” on page 290.]

Based on demonstrable science, gaseous planets and the rest of the solar system did not evolve.

50. Faint Young Sun

If, as evolutionists teach, the solar system evolved from a spinning dust and gas cloud 4.5 billion years ago, the slowly condensing Sun would have radiated 25–30% less heat during its first 600 million years than it radiates today.a (A drop in the Sun’s radiation of only a few percent would freeze all our oceans.) Had this happened anytime in the past, let alone for 600 million years, the ice’s mirrorlike surfaces would have reflected more of the Sun’s radiation into outer space, cooling Earth even more in a permanent, runaway deep-freeze. If so, all agree that life could not have evolved.

Evolutionists first tried to solve this “faint young Sun” problem by assuming Earth’s atmosphere once had up to a thousand times more heat-trapping carbon dioxide than today. No evidence supports this and much opposes it.b Actually, large amounts of carbon dioxide on a cool Earth would have produced “carbon dioxide ice clouds high in the atmosphere, reflecting the Sun’s radiation into outer space and locking Earth into a permanent ice age.”c

A second approach assumes Earth’s atmosphere had a thousand times more ammonia and methane, other heat-trapping gases. Unfortunately, sunlight quickly destroys both gases. Besides, ammonia would readily dissolve in water, making oceans toxic.d

A third approach assumes Earth had no continents, had much more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, and rotated once every 14 hours, so most clouds were concentrated at the equator. With liquid water covering the entire Earth, more of the Sun’s radiation would be absorbed, raising Earth’s temperature slightly. All three assumptions are questionable.

Evolutionists have never explained in any of these approaches how such drastic changes could occur in almost perfect step with the slow increase in the Sun’s radiation. Until some evidence supports such “special pleadings,” it does not appear the Sun evolved.e

If the Sun, a typical and well-studied star, did not evolve, then why presume that all other stars did?

51. Mountains of Venus

Venus must have a strong crust to support its extremely high, densea mountains. One mountain, Maat Mons, rises higher than Earth’s Mount Everest does above sea level. Because Venus is relatively near the Sun, its atmosphere is 860°F—so hot its surface rocks must be weak or “tarlike.” (Lead melts at 622°F and zinc at 787°F.) Only if Venus’ subsurface rocks are cold and strong can its mountains defy gravity. This allows us to draw two conclusions, both of which contradict major evolutionary assumptions.

First, evolutionists assume planets grew (evolved) by the gradual accumulation of rocky debris falling in from outer space, a process called gravitational accretion. Heat generated by a planet’s worth of impacts would have left the rocky planets molten. However, Venus was never molten. Had it been, its hot atmosphere would have prevented its subsurface rocks from cooling enough to support its mountains. So Venus did not evolve by gravitational accretion.

Secondly, evolutionists believe the entire solar system is billions of years old. If Venus were billions of years old, its atmospheric heat would have “soaked” deeply enough into the planet to weaken its subsurface rocks. If so, not only could Venus’ crust not support mountains, the hot mountains themselves could not maintain their steep slopes. Venus must be relatively young.

(Figure 24 purposefully left out)

Figure 24: Maat Mons on Venus. If Venus’ mountains were composed of lighter material, they would “float” in the denser rock below, similar to an iceberg floating in denser liquid water. (Mountains on Earth are buoyed up, because they have a density of about 2.7 gm/cm3 and “float” in rock that is about 3.3 gm/cm3.) Data from the Magellan spacecraft that orbited and mapped Venus for several years showed that Venus’ mountains are composed of rock that is too dense to “float.” So what supports them? It must be Venus’ strong crust—despite Venus’ extremely hot atmosphere. This implies Venus is not old and did not evolve.

55. Second Law of Thermodynamics

If the entire universe is an isolated system, then, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the energy in the universe available for useful work has always been decreasing. However, as one goes back in time, the energy available for useful work would eventually exceed the total energy in the universe, which, according to the first law of thermodynamics, remains constant. This is an impossible condition, implying the universe had a beginning.a

A further consequence of the second law is that when the universe began, it was more organized and complex than it is today—not in a highly disorganized and random state as assumed by evolutionists and proponents of the big bang theory.b

56. Big Bang?

The big bang theory, now known to be seriously flawed,a was based on three observations: the redshift of light from distant stars, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and the amount of helium in the universe. All three have been poorly understood.

Redshift. The redshift of starlight is usually interpreted as a Doppler effect;b that is, stars and galaxies are moving away from Earth, stretching out (or reddening) the wavelengths of light they emit. Space itself supposedly expands—so the total potential energy of stars, galaxies, and other matter increases today with no corresponding loss of energy elsewhere.c Thus, the big bang violates the law of conservation of energy, probably the most important of all scientific laws.

Conservation of energy is violated in another important way. If there was a big bang, distant galaxies should not just be receding from us, they should be decelerating. Measurements show the opposite; they are accelerating from us. [See sidebar titled “Dark Thoughts.”]

Many objects with high redshifts seem connected, or associated, with other objects of low redshifts. They could not be traveling at such different velocities and remain connected for long. [See “Connected Galaxies” and “Galaxy Clusters” on page 37.] For example, many quasars have very high redshifts, and yet they statistically cluster with galaxies having low redshifts.d Sometimes, quasars seem to be connected to galaxies by threads of gas.e Many quasar redshifts are so great that the massive quasars would need to have formed too soon after the big bang—a contradiction of the theory.f

Finally, redshifted light from galaxies has some strange features inconsistent with the Doppler effect. If redshifts are from objects moving away from Earth, one would expect redshifts to have continuous values. Instead, redshifts tend to cluster at specific, evenly-spaced values.g Much remains to be learned about redshifts.

CMB. All matter radiates heat, regardless of its temperature. Astronomers can detect an extremely uniform radiation, called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, coming from all directions. It appears to come from perfectly radiating matter whose temperature is 2.73 K—nearly absolute zero. Many incorrectly believe that the big bang theory predicted this radiation.h

Matter in the universe is highly concentrated into galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters—as far as the most powerful telescopes can see.i Because the CMB is so uniform, many thought it came from evenly spread matter soon after a big bang. But such uniformly distributed matter would hardly gravitate in any direction; even after tens of billions of years, galaxies and much larger structures would not evolve. In other words, the big bang did not generate the CMB.j [See pages 274–276.]

Helium. Contrary to what is commonly taught, the big bang theory does not explain the amount of helium in the universe; the theory was adjusted to fit the amount of helium.k Ironically, the lack of helium in certain types of stars (B type stars)l and the presence of boron and beryllium in “older” starsm contradicts the big bang theory.

A big bang, for all practical purposes, would produce only hydrogen and helium, so the first generation of stars to somehow form after a big bang should consist of only hydrogen and helium. Some of these stars should still exist, but despite extensive searches, none has been found.n

Other Problems. If the big bang occurred, we should not see massive galaxies at such great distances, but such galaxies are seen. [See “Distant Galaxies” on page 271.] A big bang should not produce highly concentratedo or rotating bodies.p Galaxies are examples of both. Nor should a big bang produce galaxies with the spacings among them that are actually observed.q Also, a large volume of the universe should not be—but evidently is—moving sideways, almost perpendicular to the direction of apparent expansion.r

If a big bang occurred, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been made. For every charged particle in the universe, the big bang should have produced an identical particle but with the opposite electrical charge.s (For example, the negatively charged electron’s antiparticle is the positively charged positron.) Only trivial amounts of antimatter have ever been detected, even in other galaxies.t

Dark Thoughts

For decades, big bang theorists said that the amount of mass in a rapidly expanding universe must be enough to prevent all matter from flying apart; otherwise, matter could not come together to form stars and galaxies. Estimates of the universe’s actual mass always fell far short of that minimum amount. This “missing mass” is often called “dark matter,” because no one could see it or even detect it. Actually, “missing mass” had to be “created” to preserve the big bang theory. [See “Missing Mass” on page 28.] The media’s frequent reference to “dark matter” enshrined it in the public’s consciousness, much like the supposed “missing link” between apes and man.

The big bang has struck again. The big bang theory also predicts that the universe’s expansion must be slowing, just as a ball thrown up must slow as it moves away from the Earth. For decades, cosmologists tried to measure this deceleration. The shocking result is now in—and the answer has been rechecked in many ways. The universe’s expansion is not decelerating; it is accelerating!v To preserve the theory, something must again be invented. Some energy source that overcomes gravity must continuously accelerate stars and galaxies away from each other. This energy, naturally enough, is called “dark energy.”

Neither “dark matter” (created to hold the universe together) nor “dark energy” (created to push the universe apart) can be seen, measured, or tested.w We are told that “most of the universe is composed of invisible dark matter and dark energy.”x Few realize that both mystical concepts were devised to preserve the big bang theory.

Rather than cluttering textbooks and the public’s imagination with statements about things for which no objective evidence exists, wouldn’t it be better to admit that the big bang is faulty? Of course. But big bang theorists want to preserve their reputations, careers, and world view. If the big bang is discarded, only one credible explanation remains for the origin of the universe and everything in it. That thought sends shudders down the spines of many evolutionists. (Pages 274–276 give an explanation for the expansion, or “stretching out,” of the universe.)

If a big bang occurred, what caused the bang? Stars with enough mass become black holes, so not even light can escape their enormous gravity. How then could anything escape trillions upon trillions of times greater gravity caused by concentrating all the universe’s mass in a “cosmic egg” that existed before a big bang?u

If the big bang theory is correct, one can calculate the age of the universe. This age turns out to be younger than objects in the universe whose ages were based on other evolutionary theories. Because this is logically impossible, one or both sets of theories must be incorrect.y All these observations make it doubtful that a big bang occurred.z

57. Missing Mass

Imagine seeing several rocks in outer space, moving radially away from Earth. If the rocks were simultaneously blasted away from Earth, their masses, changing velocities, and distances from Earth would have a very precise mathematical relationship with each other. When a similar relationship is checked for billions of observable galaxies, an obvious conclusion is that these galaxies did not explode from a common point in a huge “big bang.”a It is even more obvious that if such an explosion occurred, it must have been much, much less than billions of years ago.

Evolutionists try to fix this problem in two ways. They assume the universe is filled with at least ten times as much matter as can be seen. This is maintained even though three decades of searching for this “missing mass” have turned up nothing other than the conclusion that it does not exist.b

A second “fix attempt” assumes that the rocks (or, in the real problem, all particles in the universe) were briefly, almost magically, accelerated away from some point. This process, called “inflation,” supposedly reached speeds billions of trillions of times faster than the speed of light. An instant later, and for no apparent reason, inflation stopped. All this happened by an unknown, untestable phenomenon—not by a blast. Then this matter became controlled by gravity after it reached just the right speed to give the universe an age (based on one set of assumptions) of about 13.7 billion years.c Such flights of imagination and speculation are common in the field of cosmology.

59. Interstellar Gas

Detailed analyses have long indicated that neither stars nor planets could form from interstellar gas clouds.a To do so, either by first forming dust particlesb or by direct gravitational collapse of the gas,c would require vastly more time than the alleged age of the universe. An obvious alternative is that stars and planets were created.

60. Fast Binaries

In our galaxy, about 60% of all stars are grouped in closely spaced pairs called “binaries.” Fortunately, our Sun does not have a binary partner. If it did, temperatures on Earth would vary too much to support life. The mutual gravitational attraction between stars in a binary pair causes them to orbit each other, just as the Moon orbits Earth. The closer paired stars are to each other, the faster they orbit. Their orbits do not change appreciably, even over long periods of time.

Two particular stars are so close that they orbit each other every 11 minutes! This implies their centers are about 80,000 miles apart.a By way of comparison, our Sun, a typical star, is more than 800,000 miles in diameter. Other close binaries are also known.b

The theory of stellar evolution was developed by arranging (on paper) different types of stars in a sequence according to brightness and color. Stellar evolutionists believe stars slowly change from one type to another. However, scientists have never observed such changes, and many stars do not fit this pattern. According to stellar evolution, a star’s volume, late in its lifetime, expands to about a million times that of our Sun and finally collapses to become a small star about the size of Earth (a white dwarf) or even smaller (a neutron star).

Only such tiny stars could have their centers 80,000 miles apart and still orbit each other. Obviously, these fast binary stars did not evolve from larger stars, because larger stars orbiting so closely would collide. If two stars cannot evolve into a condition that has them orbiting each other every 11 minutes, one wonders whether stars evolve at all.

61. Star Births? Stellar Evolution?

Evolutionists claim that stars form from swirling clouds of dust and gas. For this to happen, vast amounts of energy, angular momentum, and residual magnetism must be removed from each cloud. This is not observed today, and astronomers and physicists have been unable to explain, in an experimentally verifiable way, how it could happen.a

The most luminous stars in our galaxy (so-called “O” stars) are “burning fuel” hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our Sun. This is so rapid that they must be quite young on an evolutionary time scale. If these stars evolved, they should show easily measurable characteristics such as extremely high rates of rotation and enormous magnetic fields. Because these characteristics are not observed, it seems quite likely these stars did not evolve.

If stars evolve, star births should about equal star deaths. Within our Milky Way Galaxy alone, about one star dies each year and becomes an expanding cloud of gas and dust.b Deaths of more massive stars are much brighter, more violent explosions called “supernovas.” Star births, on the other hand, would be accompanied by the appearance of new starlight not present on the many photographic plates made decades earlier. Instruments which could detect dust falling into and forming supposedly new stars have not done so.c Actually, stars that some astronomers believe are very new are expelling matter. We have seen hundreds of stars die, but we have never seen a star born.d

Also, stars are found where astronomers agree they could not evolve, near the center of our galaxy. These short-lived stars orbit a massive black hole, where gravity is so strong that gas and dust clouds could never evolve into a star. Instead, the black hole’s massive gravity would pull such clouds (supposedly evolving stars) apart.e

Nor could stars have evolved in globular clusters, where up to a million stars occupy a relatively small volume of space. [See Figure 144 on page 277.] Wind and radiation pressure from the first star in the cluster to evolve would have blown away most of the gas needed to form subsequent stars in the cluster.f In other words, if stars evolved, we should not see globular clusters, yet our galaxy has about 200 globular clusters. For so many stars to be packed so tightly together requires that they all came into existence at about the same time.

Poor logic is involved in arguing for stellar evolution, which is assumed in estimating the age of stars. These ages are then used to establish a framework for stellar evolution. That is circular reasoning.g

In summary, there is no evidence that stars evolve, there is much evidence that stars did not evolve, and there are no experimentally verifiable explanations for how they could evolve and seemingly defy the laws of physics.h

Stellar Nursery, or Is the Emperor Naked?

The popular media frequently claim that stars are actually seen evolving and that pictures of these stellar nurseries prove it. Impressive pictures of the Eagle Nebula are usually shown. Many people accept the claim without asking themselves, “Do the pictures contain anything that shows stars evolving?” Of course not. If stars were evolving, other physical measurements could confirm it. Where are those measurements? Silence.

This willingness to accept what others tell us reminds one of the tale in which citizens told their naked emperor he was nicely dressed. Rather than believing or reporting what their eyes clearly told them, people preferred to accept what others said—or at least not object. Better not disagree or even ask questions; it could be embarrassing.

Why do some astronomers say stars are evolving? Until recently, the atmosphere prevented astronomers from seeing infrared radiations from space. Then in the late 1960s, satellites outside the atmosphere made infrared sky surveys that showed some surprisingly warm clouds of dust and gas in our galaxy. Several things could cause this heating. Perhaps a dim star (a brown dwarf) is behind the cloud, or maybe something nearby exploded. Those who struggled to understand how stars evolved had a different interpretation: “Gravity is collapsing the cloud, raising its temperature. In thousands of years, it will become a star.” Still other interpretations are possible.

NASA’s claim in 1995 that these pictures (Figure 25) showed hundreds to thousands of stars forming was based on the speculative “EGG-star formation theory.” It has recently been tested independently with two infrared detectors that can see inside the dusty pillars. Few stars were there, and 85% of the pillars had too little dust and gas to support star formation. “The new findings also highlight how much astronomers still have to learn about star formation.” [Ron Cowen, “Rethinking an Astronomical Icon: The Eagle’s EGG, Not So Fertile,” Science News, Vol. 161, 16 March 2002, pp. 171–172.]

What prevents stellar evolution? Just as the Sun’s gravity does not pull planets into the Sun, gravity does not automatically pull gas and dust into a tight ball that then ignites as a star. Each cloud of dust and gas in space has a specific amount of kinetic and potential energy, angular momentum, and magnetic energy that must be removed for even a slight collapse. Evidence of that removal is missing. Furthermore, any collapse would only increase the cloud’s temperature and pressure, which, in turn, would expand the cloud. For more details on these processes, see “Interstellar Gas,” “Star Births?, Stellar Evolution” beginning on page 29, and especially all related endnotes starting on page 86.

If someone tells you that the emperor is well dressed, ask questions and insist on seeing real evidence.

65. Index Fossils

In the early 1800s, some observers in Western Europe noticed that certain fossils are usually preserved in sedimentary rock layers that, when traced laterally, typically lie above other types of fossils. Decades later, after the theory of evolution was proposed, many concluded that the lower organism must have evolved before the upper organism. These early geologists did not realize that a hydrodynamic mechanism, liquefaction, helped sort organisms in that order during the flood. [For an explanation, see pages 158–168.]

Geologic ages were then associated with each of these “index fossils.” Those ages were extended to other animals and plants buried in the layer of the index fossil. For example, a coelacanth fossil, an index fossil, dates its layer at 70,000,000 to 400,000,000 years old. [See Figure 28.] Today, geologic formations are almost always dated by their fossil contenta—which, as stated above, assumes evolution. Yet, evolution is supposedly shown by the sequence of fossils. Because this reasoning is circular,b many discoveries, such as living coelacanths,c–e were unexpected. [See “Out-of-Place Fossils” on page 12.]

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/coelacanth.jpg)

Figure 28: 70,000,000-Year-Old Fish? Thought to be extinct for 70,000,000 years, the coelacanth [SEE la kanth] was first caught in 1938, deep in the Indian Ocean, northwest of Madagascar. Rewards were then offered for coelacanths, so hundreds were caught and sold. In 1998, they were also found off the coast of Indonesia.c How could two groups of coelacanths, separated by 6,000 miles, survive for 70,000,000 years but leave no fossils?

Before coelacanths were caught, evolutionists incorrectly believed the coelacanth had lungs, a large brain, and four bottom fins about to evolve into legs.d Evolutionists reasoned that the coelacanth, or a similar fish, crawled out of a shallow sea and filled its lungs with air, becoming the first four-legged, land animal. Millions of students have been erroneously taught that this fish was the ancestor of all amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals, including people. (Was your ancestor a fish?)

J. L. B. Smith, a well-known fish expert from South Africa who studied the first two captured coelacanths, nicknamed the coelacanth “Old Fourlegs” and wrote a book by that title in 1956. However, in 1987, a German team filmed six coelacanths in their natural habitat. Were they crawling on all fours in a shallow sea? Did they have lungs and a large brain? Not at all.e

Before 1938, evolutionists dated any rock containing a coelacanth fossil as at least 70,000,000 years old. It was an index fossil. Today, evolutionists frequently express amazement that coelacanth fossils look so much like captured coelacanths—despite more than 70,000,000 years of evolution.f If that age is correct, billions of coelacanths would have lived and died. Some should have been fossilized in younger rock and be displayed in museums. Their absence implies that coelacanths have not lived for 70,000,000 years.

67. Geologic Column

Practically nowhere on Earth can one find the so-called “geologic column.”a Most “geologic periods” are missing at most continental locations. Only 15–20% of Earth’s land surface has even one-third of these periods in the correct order.b Even within the Grand Canyon, 150 million years of this imaginary column are missing. Using the assumed geologic column to date fossils and rocks is fallacious.

68. Old DNA, Bacteria, and Proteins?

DNA. When an animal or plant dies, its DNA begins decomposing.a Before 1990, almost no one believed DNA could last 10,000 years.b This limit was based on measuring DNA disintegration rates in well-preserved specimens of known age such as Egyptian mummies. DNA has now been reported in supposedly 17-million-year-old magnolia leavesc and 11–425-million-year-old salt crystals.d Dozens of plants and animals have left their DNA in sediments claimed to be 30,000–400,000-years-old.e DNA fragments are also said to be in alleged 80-million-year-old dinosaur bones buried in a coal bedf and in the scales of a 200-million-year-old fossilized fish.g DNA is frequently reported in insects and plants encased in amber, both assumed to be 25–120 million years old.h

These discoveries have forced evolutionists to reexamine the 10,000-year limit.i They now claim DNA can be preserved longer if conditions are dryer, colder, and freer of oxygen, bacteria, and background radiation. However, measured disintegration rates of DNA, under these more ideal conditions, do not support this.j

Bacteria. Even living bacterial spores have been recovered, cultured, and identified in intestines of bees preserved in supposedly 25–40-million-year-old amber.k The same bacteria, Bacillus, are found alive in rocks allegedly 250 million and 650 million years old.l Italian scientists have recovered 78 different types of dormant, but living, bacteria in two meteorites that are presumed to be 4.5 billion years old.m If one accepts these old ages for rocks, then they must also accept that some bacteria are practically immortal—an obviously absurd conclusion. (Because these “old” bacteria and the various DNA specimens closely match those of today, little evolution has occurred.)

Proteins. Evolutionists face similar contradictions with proteins,n soft tissue,o and blood compoundsp preserved in dinosaur bones. As with DNA, these remains should not last 70–150 million years, as is claimed for those bones. All this should discredit these old ages.

Most Scientific Dating Techniques Indicate That the Earth, Solar System, and Universe Are Young.

For the last 150 years, the age of the Earth, as assumed by evolutionists, has been doubling at roughly a rate of once every 15 years. In fact, since 1900 this age has multiplied by a factor of 100!

Evolution requires an old Earth, an old solar system, and an old universe. Nearly all informed evolutionists will admit that without billions of years their theory is dead. Yet, hiding the “origins question” behind a vast veil of time makes the unsolvable problems of evolution difficult for scientists to see and laymen to imagine. Our media and textbooks have implied for over a century that these almost unimaginable ages are correct. Rarely do people examine the shaky assumptions and growing body of contrary evidence. Therefore, most people today almost instinctively believe the Earth and universe are billions of years old. Sometimes, these people are disturbed, at least initially, when they see the evidence.

Actually, most dating techniques indicate that the Earth and solar system are young—possibly less than 10,000 years old. Here are some of these points of evidence.

71. Helium

One product of radioactive decay within rocks is helium, a light gas. Helium then enters the atmosphere—at a much faster rate than it escapes the atmosphere. (Large amounts of helium should not escape into outer space, even when considering helium’s low atomic weight.) Radioactive decay of only uranium and thorium would produce all the atmosphere’s helium in only 40,000 years. Therefore, the atmosphere appears to be young.a

72. Lead and Helium Diffusion

Lead diffuses (or leaks) from zircon crystals at known rates that increase with temperature. Because these crystals are found at different depths in the Earth, those at greater depths and temperatures should have less lead. If the Earth’s crust is just a fraction of the age claimed by evolutionists, measurable differences in the lead content of zircons should exist in the top 4,000 meters. Instead, no measurable difference is found.a Similar conclusions are reached based on the helium content in these same zircon crystals.b Because helium escapes so rapidly and so much helium is still in zircons, they (and the Earth’s crust) must be less than 10,000 years old.c

73. Excess Fluid Pressure

Abnormally high oil, gas, and water pressures exist within relatively permeable rock.a If these fluids had been trapped more than 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, leakage would have dropped these pressures far below what they are today. This oil, gas, and water must have been trapped suddenly and recently.b

74. Volcanic Debris

Volcanoes eject almost a cubic mile of material into the atmosphere each year, on average. At this rapid rate, about 10 times the entire volume of Earth’s sedimentary rock should be produced in 4.5 billion years. Actually, only about 25% of Earth’s sediments are of volcanic origin, and much greater volcanic activity existed in the past. No means have been proposed for removing or transforming all the missing volcanic sediments. Therefore, Earth’s sediments seem to be much younger than 4.5 billion years.a

75. River Sediments

More than 27 billion tons of river sediments enter the oceans each year. Probably the rate of sediment transport was much greater in the past as the looser topsoil was removed and as erosion smoothed out Earth’s terrain. Even if erosion has been constant, the sediments now on the ocean floor would have accumulated in only 30 million years. No process has been proposed which can remove 27 billion tons of ocean sediments each year. So the oceans cannot be hundreds of millions of years old.a

76. Continental Erosion

The continents are eroding at a rate that would level them in much less than 25 million years.a However, evolutionists believe fossils of animals and plants at high elevations have somehow avoided this erosion for more than 300 million years. Something is wrong.

77. Dissolved Metals

Rivers are carrying dissolved elements such as copper, gold, lead, mercury, nickel, silicon, sodium, tin, and uranium into the oceans at very rapid rates when compared with the small quantities of these elements already in the oceans. In other words, far fewer metals are dissolved in the oceans than one would expect if a million years had been available for them to enter solution.a There is no known means by which large amounts of these elements can come out of solution. Therefore, the oceans must be much younger than a million years.

78. Shallow Meteorites

Meteorites are steadily falling onto Earth. This rate was probably much greater in the past, because planets have swept from the solar system much of the original meteoritic material. Therefore, experts have, expressed surprise that meteorites are almost always found in young sediments, very near Earth’s surface.a Even meteoritic particles in ocean sediments are concentrated in the topmost layers.b If Earth’s sediments, which average about a mile in thickness on the continents, were deposited over hundreds of millions of years, as evolutionists believe, we would expect to find many deeply buried iron meteorites. Because this is not the case, the sediments were probably deposited rapidly, followed by “geologically recent” meteorite impacts. Also, because no meteorites are found immediately above the basement rocks on which these sediments rest, these basement rocks were not exposed to meteoritic bombardment for any great length of time.

Similar observations can be made concerning ancient rock slides. Rock slides are frequently found on Earth’s surface, but are generally absent from supposedly old rock.c

83. Moon Dust and Debris

If the Moon were billions of years old, it should have accumulated a thick layer of dust and debris from meteoritic bombardment. Before instruments were placed on the Moon, some scientists were very concerned that astronauts would sink into a sea of dust—possibly a mile in thickness.a This did not happen. Very little meteoritic debris is on the Moon. In fact, after examining rocks and dust brought back from the Moon, scientists learned that only about 1/67th of the dust and debris came from outer space. Recent measurements of the influx rate of meteoritic material on the Moon also do not support an old Moon. [For more details, see pages 352–354.]

(Figure 30 purposefully left out)

Figure 30: Moon Dust and Debris. Concern that astronauts and equipment would sink into a sea of dust was so great that two experimental programs (Ranger and Surveyor) were sent to the Moon for a closer look. The problem, which turned out not to exist, arose from the belief that the Moon is billions of years old.

84. Crater Creep

A tall pile of tar will slowly flow downhill, ultimately spreading into a nearly horizontal sheet of tar. Most material, under pressure, “creeps” in this way, although rocks deform very, very slowly.

Calculations show that the growing upward bulges of large crater floors on the Moon should occur to their current extent in only 10,000 to 10,000,000 years.a Large, steep-walled craters exist even on Venus and Mercury, where gravity is greater, and temperatures are hot enough to melt lead. Therefore, creep rates on those planets should be even greater. Most large craters on the Moon, Venus, and Mercury are thought to have formed more than 4,000,000,000 years ago. Because these craters show no sign of “creep,” these bodies seem to be relatively young.

(Figure 31 purposefully left out)

Figure 31: Young Craters. Large craters shown here on the Moon have high, steep walls that should be slowly slumping and deep floors that should be bulging upward. Neither is seen, so these craters appear relatively young. Similar conclusions can be made for Venus and Mercury.

85. Hot Moon

A surprising amount of heat is flowing out of the Moon from just below its surface, and yet the Moon’s interior is relatively cold.a Because it has not yet cooled off, the Moon seems much younger than most people had guessed.

86. Young Comets

As comets pass near the Sun, some of their mass vaporizes, producing a long tail and other debris.a Comets also fragment frequently or crash into the Sunb or planets. Typical comets should disintegrate after several hundred orbits. For many comets this is less than 10,000 years. There is no evidence for a distant shell of cometary material surrounding the solar system, and there is no known way to add comets to the solar system at rates that even remotely balance their destruction.c Actually, the gravity of planets tends to expel comets from the solar system rather than capture them.d So comets and the solar system appear to be less than 10,000 years old. [For more on comets, see “The Origin of Comets” on pages 208–237.]

87. Small Comets

Photographs taken from Earth-orbiting satellites show small, ice-filled comets striking Earth’s upper atmosphere at an average rate of one every three seconds.a [See Figure 32.] Each comet adds 20–40 tons of water to the Earth’s atmosphere. If this influx began when evolutionists say the Earth started to evolve, all our oceans would have come from small comets. Actually, impact rates were undoubtedly greater in the past, because the planets have swept many of these comets from the solar system. Therefore, small comets would have placed much more water on Earth than is here today. Obviously, this did not happen, so oceans look young. [See also pages 215 and 223.]

(Figure 32 purposefully left out)

Figure 32: Small Comets. The Dynamic Explorer satellite took this picture in ultraviolet light showing small comets (the dark spots) colliding with Earth’s upper atmosphere. The comets begin to break up 800 miles above the Earth’s surface, then frictional heating vaporizes the pieces and their descent stops at an elevation of about 35 miles. The water vapor, which soon dissipates, blocks ultraviolet light from Earth, producing the dark spots. The northern lights are shown by the halo.

88. Hot Planets

Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune each radiate away more than twice the heat energy they receive from the Sun.a Uranusb and Venusc also radiate too much heat. Calculations show it is very unlikely that this energy comes from nuclear fusion,d radioactive decay, gravitational contraction, or phase changese within those planets. This suggests that these planets have not existed long enough to cool off.f

89. Solar Wind

The Sun’s radiation applies an outward force on particles orbiting the Sun. Particles less than about a 100,000th of a centimeter in diameter should have been “blown out” of the solar system if it were billions of years old. Yet these particles are still orbiting the Sun.a Conclusion: the solar system appears young.

90. Poynting-Robertson Effect

Dust particles larger than about a 100,000th of a centimeter in diameter form a large disk-shaped cloud that orbits the Sun between the orbits of Venus and the asteroid belt. This cloud produces the so-called “zodiacal light.”a Forces acting on these particles should spiral most of them into the Sun in less than 10,000 years. (This is called the Poynting-Robertson effect.) Known forces and sources of replenishment cannot maintain this cloud, so the solar system is probably less than 10,000 years old.

This is how the Poynting-Robertson effect works: Rain falling on a speeding car tends to strike the front of the car and slow it down slightly. Similarly, the Sun’s rays that strike particles orbiting the Sun tend to slow them down, causing them to spiral into the Sun. Thus, the Sun’s radiation and gravity act as a giant vacuum cleaner that pulls in about 100,000 tons of nearby micrometeoroids per day. Disintegrating comets and asteroids add dust at less than half the rate at which it is being destroyed.b

A disintegrating comet becomes a cluster of particles called a meteor stream. The Poynting-Robertson effect causes smaller particles in a meteor stream to spiral into the Sun more rapidly than larger particles. After about 10,000 years, these orbits should be visibly segregated by particle size. Because this segregation is generally not seen, meteor streams are probably a recent phenomenon.c

Huge quantities of microscopic dust particles also have been discovered around some stars.d Yet, according to the theory of stellar evolution, those stars are many millions of years old, so that dust should have been removed by stellar wind and the Poynting-Robertson effect. Until some process is discovered that continually resupplies vast amounts of dust, one should consider whether the “millions of years” are imaginary.

94. Galaxy Clusters

Hundreds of rapidly moving galaxies often cluster tightly together. Their relative velocities, as inferred by the redshifts of their light, are so high that these clusters should be flying apart, because each cluster’s visible mass is much too small to hold its galaxies together gravitationally.a Because galaxies within clusters are so close together, they have not been flying apart for very long.

A similar statement can be made concerning many stars in spiral galaxies and gas clouds that surround some galaxies.b These stars and gas clouds have such high relative velocities that they should have broken their “gravitational bonds” long ago if they were billions of years old. If the redshift of starlight always indicates a star’s velocity, then a billion-year-old universe is completely inconsistent with what is observed. If redshifts can be caused by phenomena other than a star’s velocity, much of current astronomical thinking is wrong.

These observations have led some to conclude, not that the universe is young, but that unseen, undetected mass is holding these stars and galaxies together. For this to work, the hidden mass, sometimes called dark matter, must be 10–100 times greater than all visible mass, and the hidden mass must be in the right places. However, many experiments have shown that the needed “missing mass” does not exist.c Some researchers are still searching, because the alternative is a young universe. [See “Missing Mass” on page 28.]

Conclusion

All dating techniques, especially the few that suggest vast ages, presume that a process observed today has proceeded at a known, but not necessarily constant, rate. This assumption may be grossly inaccurate. Projecting present processes and rates far back in time is more likely to produce errors than extrapolation over a much shorter time. Furthermore, a much better understanding usually exists for dating “clocks” that show a young Earth and a young universe.

This contrary evidence understandably disturbs those who have always been told that the Earth is billions of years old. Can you imagine how disturbing such evidence is to confirmed evolutionists?

Earth Sciences
The Earth Has Experienced a Worldwide Flood.
Noah’s Ark Probably Exists.a

The precise location of the Ark is an open question. While most sightings point to Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, consideration should also be given to a few nearby mountains in western Iran. The following are the more credible claimed sightings. Some are undoubtedly mistaken. The search continues.

(Figure 34 and 35 purposefully left out)

Figure 35: Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey. The 17,000-foot peak of Greater Ararat is just above my head. Even in August, snow and ice cover the top 3,000 feet. For one week in 1990, this Soviet helicopter and its crew flew our eight-man team over and around Ararat. Evaporation from the ice cap produces clouds around the peak for most of the day—complicating the search for the Ark. Another difficulty is the hostility between Kurds who live in this region and the Turkish government. Both sides claim control over the mountain and insist that only their exploration permits are valid.

95. Ancient Historians

Ancient historians, such as Josephus, the Jewish-Roman historian, and his earlier historical sources, wrote that the Ark existed. Marco Polo also wrote that the Ark was reported to be on a mountain in greater Armenia. From A.D. 200 to 1700, more than a dozen other Christian and Jewish leaders wrote that the Ark was still preserved, although few claimed to have seen it.

96. British Scientists

In about 1856, three skeptical British scientists and two Armenian guides climbed Mount Ararat to show that the Ark did not exist. Allegedly, the Ark was found, and the British scientists threatened to kill the guides if they reported it. Years later, one of the Armenians (then living in the United States) and one of the British scientists independently reported they had found the Ark.

97. James Bryce

Sir James Bryce, a noted British scholar and traveler of the mid-nineteenth century, conducted extensive library research concerning the Ark. He became convinced that the Ark was preserved on Mount Ararat. Finally, in 1876, he climbed Ararat and found, at the 13,000-foot level (2,000 feet above the timberline), a piece of hand-tooled wood, four feet long, that he believed might be from the Ark.

98. Turkish Commissioners

In 1883, a series of newspaper articles reported that a team of Turkish commissioners, while investigating avalanche conditions on Mount Ararat, unexpectedly came upon the Ark projecting out of melting ice after an unusually warm summer. They claimed they entered and examined part of the Ark.

99. George Hagopian

In an unusually warm summer (about 1904), a 10-year-old Armenian boy, George Hagopian, and his uncle climbed Mount Ararat and supposedly reached the Ark. The boy climbed on top of it and described the structure as a flat-bottomed, petrified barge without nails. It had many windows on top, each “big enough for a cow to walk through.” [See Figures 37 and 39.] Two years later, Hagopian again visited the Ark. Shortly before his death in 1972, his detailed testimony was tape recorded. This recording has undergone voice analyzer tests which indicated his account was quite credible.a

100. Russian Pilot

A Russian pilot flying over Ararat in World War I (1916) thought he saw the Ark. News of his discovery reached the Czar, who sent two large expeditions to the site. The soldiers found and explored the boat, but before they could report to the Czar, the Russian Revolution of 1917 began. Their report disappeared, and the soldiers scattered. Some eventually reached the United States and Canada. Although a much later magazine account had a few fictional elements, further investigations have confirmed the primary details.a In February 2000, Joseph Kulik, an alleged expedition member, was interviewed. Details he provided duplicate those in other accounts.b

101. Ed Davis

In July 1943, Ed Davis, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was stationed in Iran. There he developed a close friendship with some Lur tribesmen who said they knew the location of Noah’s Ark. (The Lurs are related to the Kurds.) When Davis asked to see the Ark, they first took him to their village. There Davis claims he saw items from the Ark: a cage door, latches, a metal hammer, dried beans, shepherd staffs, oil lamps, bowls, and pottery jars still containing honey. This Muslim tribe considered it a religious duty to prevent outsiders from seeing the Ark, even if killing was necessary. However, their close friendship with Davis made him an exception.

(Figure 36 purposefully left out)

Figure 36: Ed Davis with Elfred Lee in 1986. Artist Elfred Lee (right) drew this picture based on the claimed eyewitness account of Ed Davis (left). In 1970, Lee also drew a picture of the Ark in the presence of another claimed eyewitness, George Hagopian. (The Ark depicted on page 46 is based on Lee’s drawing for Hagopian.) Because both Hagopian and Davis were present as Lee made each drawing, they requested many on-the-spot changes. As Lee was completing Davis’ drawing, he suddenly realized that each man was describing the same object. This, Lee said, made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

Tribal leader Abas-Abas and his seven sons took Davis on a three-day climb up the northeast side of what Davis thought was Mount Ararat. (Based on Davis’ description of his trip, he probably was on a mountain in northwestern Iran.)a Steep, slick rocks, made worse by cold rain, prevented them from getting closer than one-half mile from the Ark. Two broken portions of the Ark, lying on their sides and one-third of a mile apart, were visible during moments when fog and clouds lifted. Wooden beams, three decks, and rooms were seen. Abas-Abas told Davis other details: the Ark’s wood was extremely hard; wooden pegs were used in its construction instead of nails; its large, side door opened from the bottom outward (like a garage door); and the human quarters consisted of 48 compartments in the middle of the top deck. In 1986, several dozen Ark researchers questioned Davis extensively, and in 1989 he passed a lie detector test.b (On two occasions, once in his home, I also questioned Davis.)

The CIA’s “Ararat Anomaly”

In 1974, during a private meeting with William Colby, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I asked if he was aware of the claimed sightings of Noah’s Ark. He said he was not. After summarizing several “sightings,” I stated that a dangerous and expensive search, for an object with profound international importance, could be done safely and cheaply with technology Colby controlled. Perhaps the CIA already had information in its files that could help in this search.

Weeks later, I was contacted by a man I will call H.S. He said that Director Colby asked him to see if any information could be provided. In our discussions, H.S. asked many questions. About a year later he called to say his work was completed and to invite me to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In his office, H.S. said he had examined all photography of the Mount Ararat region. He could not be sure if an object he was seeing was the Ark or a rock. I asked H.S. if, after studying the information on the various claimed sightings, he thought the Ark was on Ararat. He said, “Yes.” I asked why, because he had just told me that no photographs clearly showed the Ark. H.S. responded, “There is too much smoke for there not to be fire.” I had great confidence in his candor. Suggestions that any agency of the U.S. government would (or could for long) withhold conclusive evidence that Noah’s Ark exists are implausible.

[For interesting details on what follows, see Timothy W. Maier, “Anomaly or Noah’s Ark?” Insight, 20 November 2000, pp. 10–14, 25–27.] The CIA calls this object the “Ararat Anomaly.” It was first photographed by a fixed-wing aircraft in 1949 and later by a U-2 in 1956. Satellites photographed it in 1973, 1976, 1990, and 1992. Some of the low-resolution, 1949 photographs have been released to the public, thanks to the efforts of law professor Porcher Taylor. In 1999 and 2000, private funds paid for the best private sector satellite (IKONOS) to photograph the object at a resolution of 1 meter. (Some CIA photographs had a 6-inch resolution—enough magnification to see a soccer ball from space.)

Insight asked seven diverse photo analysts to independently study the available low-resolution photographs. Two analysts said it was likely a rock, four said it could be a man-made object, and one called the evidence inconclusive. Some factors considered were: shape, dimensions, shadows, color, thermal characteristics, nearby snow and rock patterns, and possible movement of the object.

I suspect it is not the Ark, because it has too little in common with the most credible sightings, especially its specific location on Ararat. Nevertheless, whenever the Turkish government finally gives permission, an expedition needs to go to the location of the “Ararat Anomaly” (39.703°N, 44.275°E) and dig into the ice. Unfortunately, during recent years, the Kurdish rebellion in eastern Turkey and the Turkish military’s iron control have prevented access to important areas on Mount Ararat.

102. George Greene

George Greene, an oil geologist, reportedly took several photographs of the Ark in 1953 from a helicopter. After returning to the United States, Greene showed his photographs to many people but could not raise financial backing for a ground-based expedition. Finally, he went to South America where he was killed. Although his pictures have not been found, more than 30 people have given sworn, written testimony that they saw these photographs that clearly showed the Ark protruding from melting ice at the edge of a precipice.

103. Gregor Schwinghammer

Gregor Schwinghammer claims he saw the Ark from an F-100 aircraft in the late 1950s, while assigned to the 428th Tactical Flight Squadron based in Adana, Turkey. Schwinghammer said it looked like an enormous boxcar lying in a gully high up on Mount Ararat. He said U-2 pilots had photographed it.

Note: Many others claim to have seen the Ark. Some stories are of questionable validity, and others are inconsistent with many known details. Only the most credible are summarized above.

Many of the Earth’s Previously Unexplained Features Can Be Explained by a Cataclysmic Flood.

The origin of each of the following is a subject of controversy within the earth sciences. Each has many aspects inconsistent with standard explanations. Yet all appear to be consequences of a sudden and unrepeatable event—a cataclysmic flood whose waters erupted from interconnected, worldwide subterranean chambers with an energy release exceeding the explosion of 10 billion hydrogen bombs. Consequences of this event included the rapid formation of the features listed below. The mechanisms involved are well-understood.

Part II: Fountains of the Great Deep

If a culture ignored, for any reason, an event as cataclysmic as a global flood, major errors or misunderstandings would creep into science and society. One of the first would be the explanation for fossils. Typically, Fossil A lies below Fossil B, which lies below Fossil C, etc. If flood explanations were weak or disallowed, then evolution would provide an answer: Organism A turned into B which later turned into C. Fossil layers would represent vast amounts of time. Other geologic features could then be easily fit into that time frame. With so much time available, possible explanations multiply—explanations not easily tested in less than a million years. A century after Darwin, evolutionary explanations would be given for the universe, chemical elements, heavenly bodies, earth, and life. Part I of this book shows that these ideas are false.

Part II will show, in ways an interested layman can understand, the flaws in these geologic explanations and that a global flood, with vast and unique consequences, did occur. For example, coal, oil, and methane did not form over hundreds of millions of years; they formed in months. Fossils and layered strata did not form over a billion years; they formed in months. The Grand Canyon did not form in millions of years; it formed in weeks. Earth’s major mountains did not form over hundreds of millions of years; each formed in hours. These statements may appear shocking, until one has examined the evidence in Part II. If you feel there must be experts who can refute this scientific evidence, then see pages 344–346. You will be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to accept that sincere and fair debate offer—a standing offer since 1980.

Ironically, some leading creationists who believe in a global flood have contributed to its frequent rejection by advocating unsound mechanisms for the flood. They have failed to clearly answer people’s most basic questions: “Where did so much water come from, and where did it go?”

One such explanation is the canopy theory. (Pages 306–314 examine its many problems.) Others, who know these problems, have proposed an equally weak explanation called “catastrophic plate tectonics.” Basically, it is the flawed plate tectonic theory speeded up a millionfold by unworkable mechanisms and assumed miracles. Unfortunately, authors of these flood explanations have declined to compare and publish joint critiques of our respective theories.

Past failure to answer honest flood questions opened the door to evolution and old-earth beliefs. Answering those questions will begin to (1) reestablish the flood as earth’s defining geological event, and (2) reverse serious errors that have crept into science and society. Don’t be surprised at how catastrophic the flood was. Just follow the evidence.

(Figure 41 purposefully left out)

Figure 41: Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon, awesome and inspiring when viewed from its rim, is even more so from the air. From above, new insights become obvious. For example, have you ever wondered how the Grand Canyon formed? The standard answer for over a century has been that primarily the Colorado River and side streams carved out the Grand Canyon over millions of years. If that happened, wouldn’t you expect to find a gigantic river delta where the Colorado River enters the Gulf of California? It’s not there. Nor can geologists find it anywhere else. Where did all the dirt—1,000 cubic miles of it—go?

If you look carefully near the center of the picture, you will see four segments of this river. Compare the thin river with the canyon’s vast expanse. Is it possible for that river’s relatively small amount of water to carve such a huge canyon—one of the seven wonders of the natural world? If so, why did it not happen on dozens of faster and larger rivers? How could side streams have cut the many large side canyons without a large, steady water source? After studying far broader issues in this section, you will see a gigantic water source and a surprisingly simple, but complete, explanation for the Grand Canyon’s rapid formation and where the dirt went.

The Hydroplate Theory: An Overview

New evidence shows that the earth has experienced a devastating, worldwide flood, whose waters violently burst forth from under the earth’s crust. Standard “textbook” explanations for many of earth’s major features are scientifically flawed. We can now explain, using well-understood phenomena, how this cataclysmic event rapidly formed so many features. These and other mysteries, listed below, are best explained by an earthshaking event, far more catastrophic than almost anyone has imagined.

* The Grand Canyon and Other Canyons
* Mid-Oceanic Ridge
* Continental Shelves and Slopes
* Ocean Trenches (pages 136–155)
* Earthquakes
* Magnetic Variations on the Ocean Floor
* Submarine Canyons
* Coal and Oil Formations
* Methane Hydrates
* Ice Age
* Frozen Mammoths (pages 178–205)
* Major Mountain Ranges
* Overthrusts
* Volcanoes and Lava
* Geothermal Heat
* Strata and Layered Fossils (pages 158–168)
* Limestone (pages 170–175)
* Metamorphic Rock
* Plateaus
* Salt Domes
* Jigsaw Fit of the Continents
* Changing Axis Tilt
* Comets (pages 208–237)
* Asteroids and Meteoroids (pages 240–255)

Each appears to be a consequence of a sudden and unrepeatable event—a global flood whose waters erupted from interconnected, worldwide subterranean chambers with an energy release exceeding the explosion of 30 trillion hydrogen bombs. When the hydroplate theory is explained later in this chapter, it will resolve the parade of mysteries described in the next few pages. A subsequent chapter is devoted to each topic highlighted in blue. All 24 topics could be expanded into separate chapters.

But first, what is a hydroplate? Before the global flood, considerable water was under earth’s crust. Pressure increases in this subterranean water ruptured that crust, breaking it into plates. The escaping water flooded the earth and allowed continents and preflood mountains to sink. Because hydro means water, those crustal plates will be called hydroplates. Where they broke, how they moved, and hundreds of other details and evidence—all consistent with the laws of physics—constitute the hydroplate theory and explain to a great extent why the earth looks as it does.

A Few of the Mysteries

The Grand Canyon and Other Canyons. See Figure 41.

Mid-Oceanic Ridge. One of our planet’s most dramatic features, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, was discovered in the 1950s. It wraps around the earth and is the world’s longest mountain range—46,000 miles. [See Figure 42 on page 103.] Unlike most mountains, it is composed of a type of rock called basalt. Because most of the ridge lies on the ocean floor, relatively few people know it exists. How did it get there? Why is it primarily on the ocean floor? Why does it intersect itself in a Y-shaped junction in the Indian Ocean? The portion in the Atlantic Ocean is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Is it just a coincidence that it splits the Atlantic from north to south and is perpendicular to and bisected by the equator? If Europe, Africa, and the Americas were once connected, how did they break apart?

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Figure 42: World Ocean Floor. Notice the characteristic margins of each continent. Seaward from each ocean beach is a shallow, gradually sloping continental shelf, then a relatively steep drop, called the continental slope. This strange pattern is worldwide. Why? For a better look at the typical shape of this margin, see Figure 45 on page 103. Also notice the different characteristics of (1) the continents and ocean basins, and (2) the Atlantic and Pacific basins. Ninety East Ridge is so named because it lies almost exactly along 90ºE longitude. Its straightness, 3,000-mile length, and curious north-south orientation aimed at the Himalayas are important clues to past events on earth. (Note: As one moves toward polar regions on this type of map projection, east-west distances are stretched and do not reflect true distances.)

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Figure 43: “Unlevel” Sea Level. An amazing technological development “reveals” details on the ocean floor. The U.S. Navy’s SEASAT satellite measured with a radar altimeter the satellite’s distance above the ocean’s surface with an accuracy of several inches! “Sea level” is far from level. Instead, the ocean’s surface “humps up” over mountains on the ocean floor and depresses over trenches. The gravitational attraction of the Hawaiian Islands, for example, pulls the surrounding water toward it. This raises sea level there about 80 feet higher than it would be otherwise. The satellite’s data have been color coded to make this spectacular picture of the ocean’s surface. Darker areas show depressions in sea level. Notice that the ocean surface is depressed over long scars, called fracture zones, running generally perpendicular to the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Which theory explains this: the plate tectonic theory or the hydroplate theory? Also consider the nearly intersecting fracture zones in the South Pacific. Which theory explains them?

Plate tectonics, currently the most popular theory in earth science, offers unsatisfactory answers to these and other questions. According to this theory, earth’s crust is composed of a dozen or so plates,1 each 30–60 miles thick. They move with respect to each other, about an inch per year—the rate a fingernail grows. Continents and oceans ride on top of these plates. Sometimes a continent, such as North America, is on more than one plate. For example, different parts of North America, separated by the San Andreas Fault running up through California, are sliding past each other. Supposedly, material deep inside the earth is rising toward the crest of the entire Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Once it reaches the crest, it moves laterally away from the ridge. This claimed motion is similar to that of a conveyor belt rising from under a floor and then moving horizontally along the floor. However, many little-known problems, discussed below, accompany plate tectonics.

Cutting across the Mid-Oceanic Ridge at almost right angles are hundreds of long cracks, called fracture zones. Whenever the axis of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge is offset, it is always along a fracture zone. [See Figure 43 on page 103.] Why? According to plate tectonics, plates move parallel to fracture zones. But fracture zones are not always parallel. Sometimes they are many degrees “out of parallel.”2 Several fracture zones practically intersect! How then can solid plates be bounded by and move in the direction of these fracture zones? Can a train move on tracks that aren’t parallel? Notice the white arrows in Figure 43 showing nearly intersecting fracture zones.

In many places on the Atlantic and Pacific floors, segments of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge overlap for about 10 miles. These are called overlapping spreading centers.3 [See Figure 44.] If plates are moving away from the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, then the distance between overlapping segments must be increasing. However, overlapping regions are always near each other.

Three of the most perplexing questions in the earth sciences today are barely verbalized in classrooms and textbooks: “What force moves plates over the globe? By what mechanism? What is the energy source?” The hydroplate theory gives a surprisingly simple answer. It involves gravity, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and water—lots of it.

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Figure 44: Overlapping Spreading Centers. Bold lines represent the axes of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. According to plate tectonics, the ocean floor is moving in the direction of the hollow arrows—away from the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. If so, in which direction is point B moving? If B is stationary, and A is moving east, why is there no fault between them? What could possibly be happening at C and D if the plate tectonic theory is correct?

Continental Shelves and Slopes. Why do the edges of all continents have such distinctive and similar slopes? [See Figures 42 and 45.]

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Figure 45: Continental Margin. The typical shape of ocean-continent boundaries is shown here. The actual continental boundary is generally considered to be halfway down the continental slope. Compare this figure with Figure 42 on page 103, and notice that Asia and North America would become connected by a wide land bridge if sea level were lowered about 300 feet. Australia and Asia would be almost connected. Sediments and sedimentary rock are shown in yellow.

Ocean Trenches. Ocean trenches are long, narrow depressions on the ocean floor, some of which are several times deeper than the Grand Canyon. They can be seen in the western Pacific in Figures 42, 43, and 81. Plate tectonics claims a trench forms when a plate dives down into the mantle, a process advocates call subduction. How this dive begins is never explained. This would be similar to pushing a 30-mile-thick shovel into the ground. What pushes a continental-size plate down at such a steep angle? If subduction occurs, why do instruments detect almost no distortion of the horizontal sedimentary layers in trenches? Worse yet, if any plate reached a depth of only several miles, the pressure would be so great that frictional forces would exceed the rock’s strength. Therefore, large-scale sliding of a slab by pushing, pulling, or dragging should be impossible. [See page 355.] This is similar to trying to push our 30-mile-thick shovel, now squeezed in the jaws of a vise, down farther. It may break, buckle, deform, or crush, but it will not slip.Earthquakes. A major goal of earthquake research is to predict earthquakes. Normally, the best way to predict something is to understand how it works. However, earthquakes are poorly understood. Consequently, much effort is spent trying to learn what precedes an earthquake. Three apparent precursors are an abrupt change in water depth in wells, swelling of the ground, and sudden irregularity in local geyser eruptions.4

Plate tectonic theory claims earthquakes occur when plates rub against each other, temporarily lock, and then periodically jerk loose. If so, why are some powerful earthquakes far from plate boundaries?5 Why do local earthquakes sometimes occur when water is forced into the ground after large water reservoirs are built and filled?6

Shallow earthquakes sometimes displace the ground horizontally along a fault, as occurred along the San Andreas Fault during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Western California slid northward relative to the rest of North America. Because the San Andreas Fault has several prominent bends, this movement could not have been going on for millions of years, as proponents of plate tectonics claim. Just as two interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle cannot slip very far relative to each other, neither can both sides of a curved fault. Furthermore, if slippage has occurred along the San Andreas Fault for millions of years, adjacent rock should be hot due to frictional heating. This heat has not been found by drilling into the fault.7 Evidently, movement has not occurred for that length of time and/or the walls of the fault were lubricated.

Deep earthquakes occur at depths of 250–400 miles where pressures are so great that cracks should not be able to open. Also, temperatures should be so uniformly high that rock would not break, but would deform (like putty). So any concentrated stress that might trigger a deep earthquake should deform rocks instead, slowly and quietly. How then do deep earthquakes occur?8

Magnetic Variations on the Ocean Floor. At a few places along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, magnetic patterns on one side of the ridge are almost a mirror image of those on the other side. The plate tectonic theory gained wide acceptance in the 1960s when this surprising discovery was misinterpreted.

Some people proposed that these variations were caused by periodic “reversals” of the earth’s magnetic poles, although there is no theoretical understanding of how that could happen. Supposedly, over millions of years, molten material rises at the ridge, solidifies, and then moves in opposite directions away from the ridge. As the magma solidifies, its magnetic orientation locks in the orientation of the earth’s magnetic field at the time. Thus, a record of past “flips” of earth’s magnetic field is preserved in the rocks at different distances from the ridge.

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Figure 46: Magnetic Anomalies. Notice the fluctuations in magnetic intensity as one moves across the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. The so-called “reversals” are simply regions of lower magnetic intensity. Why should the intensity usually be greatest along the crest of the ridge?

That explanation is wrong, as detailed magnetic maps clearly show. There are no magnetic reversals on the ocean floor, and no compass would reverse direction if brought near an alleged “reversed” band. However, as one moves across the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, magnetic intensities fluctuate, as shown in Figure 46. Someone merely drew a line through these fluctuations and labeled everything below this average intensity as a “reversal.” The false but widespread impression exists that these slight deviations below the average represent a reversed magnetic field millions of years ago. Calling these fluctuations “reversals” causes one to completely miss a more likely explanation for the magnetic anomalies.

Although textbooks show these so-called “reversals” as smooth bands paralleling the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, there is nothing smooth about them. Some “bands” are even perpendicular to the ridge axis—the opposite of what plate tectonics predicts. Also, the perpendicular “bands” correspond to fracture zones.9 The hydroplate theory offers an explanation for these magnetic anomalies.

On the continents, rapid but limited changes in earth’s magnetic field have occurred. Lava cools at known rates, from the outside of the flow toward its center. Magnetic particles floating in lava align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field. When the lava cools and solidifies, that orientation becomes fixed. Knowing this cooling rate and measuring the changing direction of the magnetic fields throughout several solidified lava flows, we can see that at one time the earth’s magnetic field changed rapidly—by up to 6 degrees per day for several days.10

Submarine Canyons. The ocean floor has several hundred canyons, some of which exceed the Grand Canyon in both length and depth. One submarine canyon is ten times longer (2,300 miles), so long it would stretch nearly across the United States. Most of these V-shaped canyons are extensions of major rivers. Examples include the Amazon Canyon, Hudson Canyon, Ganges Canyon, Congo Canyon, and Indus Canyon. What could gouge out canyons 15,000 feet below sea level? Perhaps ancient rivers cut these canyons when the ocean floor was higher or sea level was lower. If so, how did that happen? Swift rivers supposedly cut most continental canyons. However, currents measured in submarine canyons are much too slow, generally less than one mile per hour. Frequently, the flow is in the wrong direction. Submarine landslides or currents of dense, muddy water sometimes occur. However, they would not form long, branching patterns that characterize river systems and submarine canyons. Furthermore, experiments with thick, muddy water in submarine canyons have not demonstrated any canyon-cutting ability.

Coal and Oil Formations. Large fossilized trees are found near the North and South Poles.11 In Antarctica, some trees are 24 feet long and 2 feet thick! Nearby are 30 layers of anthracite (or high-grade) coal, each 3–4 feet thick.12 Buried redwood forests, with trees more than 100 feet long and root structures showing they grew in place, are found on Canadian islands well inside the Arctic Circle.13 Much oil is also found inside the Arctic Circle. Was it once warm enough for trees to grow inside Antarctica or the Arctic Circle? If so, how could so much vegetation grow where it is nighttime 6 months of the year? Were these cold lands once at temperate latitudes? Not according to plate tectonics, which places both regions near their present latitudes when their now-fossilized forests were growing.14

Methane Hydrates. Some bacteria live without oxygen. They feed on organic matter and produce methane gas, a combustible fuel. Since the 1970s, methane has been discovered in ice lying on, or hundreds of feet below, the deep ocean floor off coastlines. The ice molecules form tiny cagelike structures containing one or more methane molecules. The total energy value of this methane-ice combination, called methane hydrate, may be twice that in all the world’s known coal, oil, and natural gas combined!15

Ice Age. An ice age implies extreme snowfall which, in turn, requires cold temperatures and heavy precipitation. Heavy precipitation can occur only if oceans are warm enough to produce equally heavy evaporation. How could warm oceans exist with cold atmospheric temperatures?

Another problem is stopping an ice age once it begins—or beginning a new ice age after one ends. As glaciers expand, they reflect more of the Sun’s radiation away from earth, lowering temperatures and causing glaciers to grow even more. Eventually the entire globe should freeze. Conversely, if glaciers shrink, as they have in recent decades, the earth should reflect less heat into space, warm up, and melt all glaciers forever.

Frozen Mammoths. Fleshy remains of about 50 elephant-like animals called mammoths, and a few rhinoceroses, have been found frozen and buried in Siberia and Alaska. One mammoth still had identifiable food in its mouth and digestive tract. To reproduce this result, one would have to suddenly push a well-fed elephant (dead or alive) into a very large freezer that had, somehow, been precooled to -150°F. Anything less severe would result in the animal’s internal heat and stomach acids destroying the food. If the animal remained alive for more than a few minutes, one would not expect to find food in its mouth. What could cause such a large and sudden temperature drop? Even if the Sun suddenly stopped shining, the earth’s temperature would not drop rapidly enough to produce such effects. Finally, these giant animals would have to be buried in what was presumably frozen ground—quite a trick.

How could large herds of elephant-like animals, each requiring much food, live in the Arctic? Even if the Arctic were warm, the lack of winter sunlight would allow far less vegetation to grow than is needed to sustain so many large animals. Today the average January temperature in northern Siberia is -28°F. Your nose gets cold after a few minutes in +32°F weather. Consider how you would feel if your nose were a 6-foot-long trunk and the average temperature were a frigid 60°F colder for weeks. Where would you, or a mammoth, find drinking water?

Major Mountain Ranges. How did mountains form? Major mountains are often crumpled like an accordion. [See Figure 48.] Satellite photos of mountain ranges show that some resemble rugs that have been pushed against walls. But what force could push a long, thick slab of rock and cause it to buckle and sometimes fold back on itself? Even if a large enough force could be found to overcome the friction at the base of the slab, that force would crush the end being pushed before movement could even begin. Consequently, a mountain would not form.

We can see, especially in mountains and road cuts, thinly layered rocks folded like doubled-over phone books. Other “bent” rocks are small enough to hold in one’s hand. The tiny, crystalline grains in those folds are not stretched. So how could brittle rock, showing little evidence of heating or cracking, fold? Rocks are strong in compression but weak in tension. Therefore, their stretched outer surfaces should easily fracture. Bent rocks, found worldwide, often look as if they had the consistency of putty when they were compressed. They must have been squeezed and folded soon after the sediments were laid down, but before they hardened chemically. What squeezed and folded them?

(Figure 48 purposefully left out)

Figure 48: Buckled Mountains. Textbooks and museums frequently refer to some uplifting force that formed mountains. Can you see that an uplifting force, by itself, could not cause this pattern? Horizontal compression was needed to buckle these sedimentary layers near the Sullivan River in southern British Columbia, Canada. The layers must have been soft, like wet sand, at the time of compression. Today, surface rocks are brittle.

Overthrusts. A similar problem exists for large blocks of rock called overthrusts that appear to have slid horizontally over other rocks for many miles. Such large sliding blocks should have considerable rubble under them. Many have none.

Standard geology has never adequately explained why overthrusts occur. Again, anything pushing a large slab of rock with enough force to overcome frictional resistance would crush the slab before it would move. [See the technical note on page 355.] Those who appreciate this problem simply say that the pore pressure of water in the rocks lubricated the sliding, and perhaps the slab slid downhill. What is overlooked is that rocks do not contain nearly enough water to do this, and overthrusted blocks are seldom on steep slopes.

Volcanoes and Lava. Erupting lava usually exceeds 2,000°F. Where does it come from, and why is it so hot? The earth’s mantle and inner core are essentially solid. Only the outer core, which lies 1,800–3,200 miles below the earth’s surface, is a liquid. The standard explanation is that lava (called magma when it is inside the earth) originates in hot pockets, called magma chambers, at depths of about 60 miles. How could magma escape to the surface? A key fact to remember is that at depths greater than about 5 miles, pressures are so great that all empty channels through which magma might rise should be squeezed shut. Even if a crack could open, the magma must rise through colder rock. Unless this happened quite rapidly, magma would cool, solidify, and plug up the crack. Also, heat diffuses. So what concentrated enough heat to create the “hot pockets” and melt the vast volumes of rock that erupted in the past?

On the Columbia Plateau in the northwestern United States, 64,000 square miles of lava, with an average depth of 2/3 mile, spilled out rapidly under water.16 On the Deccan Plateau in western India, 200,000 square miles have been flooded with lava to an average depth of 3/4 mile. In southwestern Siberia, lava deposits are many times larger. The floor of the Pacific has even larger examples. Escaping magma at the Ontong-Java Plateau, on the floor of the western Pacific, was 25 times more extensive than on the Deccan Plateau. How did so much magma form, and how did it get out?

The world’s two deepest holes in hard basement rock are on the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia and in Germany’s northeastern Bavaria.17 They were drilled to depths of 7.5 miles and 5.7 miles, respectively. (Such deep holes, when quickly filled with water or dense mud, will stay open.) Neither hole reached the basalt underlying the granite continents. Deep in the Russian hole, to everyone’s surprise, was hot, salty water flowing through crushed granite.18 Why was the granite crushed? In the German hole, the drill encountered cracks throughout the lower few miles. All contained salt water having concentrations about twice that of seawater. Remember, surface waters cannot seep deeper than 5 miles, because the weight of overlying rock squeezes shut even microscopic flow channels. While geologists are mystified by this deep salt water, the hydroplate theory provides a simple answer.

Another surprise at these drill sites was the greater-than-expected increase in the granite’s temperature with increased depth. This raises the question of why the earth’s crust is so hot.

Geothermal Heat. Heat inside the earth is called geothermal heat. In general, the deeper man has gone into the earth—first in deep caves and mines and later with drills—the hotter the rock gets. What is the origin of geothermal heat? As children, most of us were taught the early earth was molten. Later, we were told the earth slowly grew (evolved) by meteoritic impacts whose energy made the earth molten.

This popular story has several problems. First, the rate of temperature increase with depth, called the temperature gradient, varies at different locations by a factor of six.19 This is true even when considering only continental rock far from volcanoes. The deep drilling in Russia and Germany encountered rock so much hotter than expected that each project was terminated earlier than planned. If the earth has been cooling for billions of years, one would expect very uniform temperature increases with depth. Unusually hot or cold regions should not exist, because heat diffuses from hotter to colder regions.

Had the earth ever been molten, denser materials would have sunk toward the earth’s center, and lighter materials would have floated to the surface. One should not find dense, fairly nonreactive metals, such as gold, at the earth’s surface. [See “Molten Earth?” on page 79.] Even granite, the basic continental rock, is a mixture of many minerals with varying densities. If melted granite slowly cooled, a “layer cake” of vertically sorted minerals would form instead of granite. So earth’s crust was never molten.

Mathematical solutions for heat conduction in spheres, such as the earth, are well known. These solutions can incorporate many facts, such as the earth’s thermal properties, radioactive heat generation, and temperatures at the earth’s surface. Such analyses are hopelessly inconsistent with the “molten-earth” story and “billions of years of cooling.” [See “Molten Earth?” on page 25 and “Rapid Cooling” on page 35.] What then generated geothermal heat, and why does it vary so widely?

Strata. Earth’s crust is frequently stratified with layered rock (or strata) composed of cemented sediments. These layers, called sedimentary rock, are typically uniform, parallel, vast in area, thin, and tipped at all angles within mountains and under valleys. Often one layer rests on another having a completely different texture, color, and mineral content. What global process could have sorted and cemented these sediments? Present processes do not.

Why are strata so uniform in hardness? If truckloads of sand and other dry sediments were dumped on your yard and bags of cement were placed in another pile, anyone would have difficulty mixing them uniformly. Without a uniform mixture of cementing agent, concrete (and sedimentary rock) would quickly crumble.

Limestone. A typical cementing agent in sedimentary rock is calcium carbonate (CaCO3)—commonly called limestone. Any geologist or mineralogist who stops to think about it should realize the earth has too much limestone, at least based on present processes. Sediments and sedimentary rock on the continents average about a mile in thickness. Between 10 and 15% of this is limestone.20 How did so much limestone form—much of it quite pure? Limestone, without the impurities that normally drift in, suggests rapid burial. Most limestone is in vast layers, tens of thousands of square miles in area and hundreds of feet thick. Today, limestone forms either by precipitating out of seawater or by sea creatures manufacturing limestone shells and corals. In either case, oceans supply limestone sediments, but oceans already contain about as much dissolved limestone as they can possibly hold. So where did all the limestone come from, especially its calcium and carbon, which are relatively rare outside of limestone?

Metamorphic Rock. Rocks change structurally and chemically when their temperatures and/or pressures exceed certain high values. The new rock is called a metamorphic rock. For example, limestone becomes marble (a metamorphic rock) when its temperature exceeds 1,600°F and the confining pressure corresponds to the weight of a 23-mile-high column of rock. Diamonds, another metamorphic rock, form under confining pressures corresponding to the weight of a 75-mile-high column of rock and 1,600°F.21 Most metamorphic rocks were formed in the presence of water, often flowing water.22 What caused the extreme temperature, pressure, and abundance of water?

The standard answer is that the original rock, such as limestone, was heated and compressed under a tall mountain or deep in the earth. Later, either the mountain eroded away or the deep rock rose to the earth’s surface. That would take millions of years. It is difficult to imagine mountains 23 or 75 miles high, because the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest, is only 51/2 miles high. Raising buried layers of rock 23 or 75 miles to the earth’s surface is even more difficult to explain, but with millions of years supposedly available to do it, few consider it a problem; fewer still address the problem. Ignored in this standard explanation is the frequent requirement for water, sometimes flowing water. Surface water, remember, cannot seep deeper in rock than about 5 miles, and even at 5 miles, water hardly flows. Metamorphic rock is a giant enigma.

Plateaus. Plateaus are relatively flat regions of extensive area that have been uplifted more than 500 feet relative to surrounding regions. Professor George C. Kennedy explains the problems associated with plateaus quite well.

The problem of the uplift of large plateau areas is one which has puzzled students of the Earth’s crust for a very long time. ... Given an Earth with sialic [granitic] continents floating in denser simatic [basaltic] substratum, what mechanism would cause a large volume of low standing continents to rise rapidly a mile in the air? Furthermore, evidence from gravity surveys suggests that the rocks underlying the Colorado plateau are in isostatic balance, that is, this large area is floating at its correct elevation in view of its mass and density. Recent seismic evidence confirms this, in that the depth to the M discontinuity [the Moho, which will be explained later] under the Colorado plateau is approximately 10 kilometers [6 miles] greater than over most of continental North America. Thus, appropriate roots of light rock extend into the dense substratum to account for the higher elevation of the Colorado plateau. We have then a double-ended mystery, for the Colorado plateau seems to have grown downward at the same time that its emerged part rose upward. This is just as startling as it would be to see a floating cork suddenly rise and float a half inch higher in a pan of water. To date, the only hypothesis to explain the upward motion of large regions like the Colorado plateau is that of convection currents. Slowly moving convection currents in the solid rock, some 40 to 50 kilometers [25 to 30 miles] below the surface of the Earth, are presumed to have swept a great volume of light rock from some unidentified place and to have deposited it underneath the Colorado plateau. A total volume of approximately 2,500,000 cubic miles of sialic rock is necessary to account for the uplift of the Colorado plateau. While it is not hard to visualize rocks as having no great strength at the high pressures and temperatures existing at depths of 40 to 50 kilometers, it is quite another matter to visualize currents in solid rock of sufficient magnitude to bring in and deposit this quantity of light material in a relatively uniform layer underneath the entire Colorado plateau region.

The Tibetan plateaus present a similar problem, but on a vastly larger scale. There, an area of 750,000 square miles has been uplifted from approximately sea level to a mean elevation of roughly three miles, and the Himalayan mountain chain bordering this region has floated upward some five miles, and rather late in geologic time, probably within the last 20,000,000 years. The quantity of light rock which would need to be swept underneath these plateaus by convection currents to produce the effects noted would be an order of magnitude greater than that needed to uplift the Colorado plateau, that is approximately 25,000,000 cubic miles. Even more troublesome than the method of transporting all this light rock at shallow depths below the surface of the Earth is the problem of its source. The region from which the light rock was moved should have experienced spectacular subsidence, but no giant neighboring depressions are known. A lesser but large problem is how such enormous quantities of light rock can be dispersed so uniformly over so large an area.23

Salt Domes. At many locations, layers of salt are buried up to several miles below the earth’s surface, in layers 100,000 square miles in area and in other places a mile in thickness. Often a salt layer has bulged up several miles, like a big underground bubble, to form a salt dome. Large salt deposits are not being laid down today, even in the Great Salt Lake. What concentrated this much salt? Surprisingly large salt deposits lie under the Mediterranean Sea. A codiscoverer of this huge deposit claims the Mediterranean must have evaporated 8–10 times to deposit so much salt.24 His estimate is probably low, but even so, why didn’t each refilling of the Mediterranean basin dissolve the salt residue left from prior evaporations, allowing currents to remove the redissolved salt from the basin?

Jigsaw Fit of the Continents. For centuries, beginning possibly with Francis Bacon in 1620, many have marveled at the apparent jigsaw fit of the continents bordering the Atlantic. It is only natural that bold thinkers, such as Alfred Wegener in 1912, would propose that the continents were once connected as shown in Figure 49, and somehow they broke apart and moved to their present positions. But would continents, which often extend offshore hundreds of miles to the edge of the continental shelf, really fit together as shown in textbooks? Distances are distorted when a globe is flattened into a two-dimensional map. Therefore, to answer this question, I formed two plates on a globe, matching the true shape and curvature of the continents. [See Figure 50.]

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Figure 49: Continental Fit Proposed by Edward Bullard. Can you identify four distortions in this popular explanation of how the continents once fit together? First, Africa was shrunk in area by 35%. Second, Central America, southern Mexico, and the Caribbean Islands were removed. Third, a slice was made through the Mediterranean, and Europe was rotated counterclockwise and Africa was rotated clockwise. Finally, North and South America were rotated relative to each other. (Notice the rotation of the north-south and east-west lines.) Overlapping areas are shown in black.

The classical fit (Figure 49), proposed by Sir Edward Bullard, appears at first glance to be a better fit of the continents than my plates. However, notice in Figure 49’s caption the great “latitude” Bullard took in juggling continents. Were these distortions made to improve the fit? Few, if any, textbooks inform us of these distortions.

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Figure 50: Continental Plates Made on a Globe. Notice that the fit of the actual continents is not as good as Bullard proposed. [See Figure 49.]

Instead of fitting the continents to each other, notice in Figure 51 how well they each fit the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The hydroplate theory proposes that:

a. These continents were once in the relative positions shown in Figure 51.

b. They were connected by rock that was rapidly crushed, eroded, and transported worldwide by erupting subterranean water.

c. As these eroded sediments were deposited, they trapped and buried plants and animals. The sediments became today’s sedimentary rock; buried organisms became fossils.

d. The continents quickly slid on a layer of water (rapid continental drift) away from what is now the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and came to rest near their present locations.

Details and evidence will be given later.

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Figure 51: Continental Plates on a Globe. By far the best fit of the continents is with the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—not with other continents, as shown in Figure 50.

Layered Fossils. Fossils rarely form today, because dead plants and animals decay before they are buried in enough sediments to preserve their shapes. We certainly do not observe fossils forming in layered strata that can be traced over thousands of square miles. So how did so many fossils form? It will soon become apparent why animals and plants were trapped and buried in sediments that were quickly cemented to form the fossil record and why fossils of sea life are on every major mountain range.

Changing Axis Tilt. George F. Dodwell served as the Government Astronomer for South Australia from 1909 to 1952. In the mid-1930s, he became interested in past changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis. He collected 66 astronomical measurements made over a 4,000-year period. During those years, the tilt of the earth’s axis smoothly decayed from 25°10' to its present value of 23°27'. Based on the shape of the decay curve, Dodwell estimated that this axis shift began in about the year 2345 B.C.25

Although the gravitational forces of the Sun, Moon or planets can change the tilt of the earth’s axis, such changes are much slower than Dodwell measured. Extraterrestrial bodies striking the earth would provide an abrupt change in axis orientation, not the steady pattern of decay Dodwell measured. Furthermore, only a massive and fast asteroid striking the earth at a favorable angle would tilt the axis this much. The resulting pressure pulse would pass through the entire atmosphere and quickly kill most air-breathing animals—a recent extinction without evidence.

Comets, Asteroids, and Meteorites. These strange bodies, sometimes called “the mavericks of the solar system,” have several remarkable similarities with planet earth. About 38% of a comet’s mass is frozen water. Water is rare in the universe, but both common and concentrated on earth—sometimes called “the water planet.” Much of the remaining 62% of each comet’s mass is dust, primarily the crystalline mineral olivine. Solid material that formed in space would not be crystalline. Olivine is probably the most abundant of the more than 2,000 known minerals on earth. Asteroids and meteorites are rocks similar in many ways to earth rocks. Surprisingly, some meteorites contain salt crystals, liquid water, and living bacteria. Some asteroids appear to have the residue of plant life.

Summary. These are a few of the mysteries associated with the 24 topics listed on page 102. The hydroplate theory will explain these mysteries and tie together the causes and effects of this dramatic, global catastrophe.

How to Evaluate Theories

To explain scientifically an unobserved event that cannot be repeated, we must first assume the conditions existing before that event. From these assumed starting conditions, we then try to determine what should happen according to the laws of physics. Three criteria should then be used to evaluate the proposed explanation.

Criterion 1: Process. If we can explain all relevant observations better than any other proposed explanation, confidence in our explanation increases. However, if these starting conditions and the operation of physical laws (or known processes) should have produced results that are not present, then confidence in our explanation decreases.

For example, a frequent and intriguing question is, “What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?” (We will not address that question now, but will use it to show how to evaluate scientific theories attempting to explain unobserved and unrepeatable events.) Some dinosaur extinction theories assume large climatic changes. While many types of climate variation might kill all dinosaurs, we must also (by Criterion 1) look at other consequences of large climatic changes. Flowering plants and many small animals are even more vulnerable to large climatic changes. Because most plants and animals did not become extinct with the dinosaurs, “climatic change” theories for dinosaur extinctions are weakened.

Criterion 2: Parsimony. (Parsimony here means “the use of few assumptions.”) If a few assumptions allow us to explain many things, then confidence in the explanation will be great. Conversely, if many assumptions are used to explain a few observations, or if we must continually add new assumptions or modify our proposed theory as new observations are made, then we should have little confidence in the explanation.

For example, some say a large asteroid or comet struck the earth and killed all the dinosaurs. Supposedly, the asteroid or comet, containing the rare element iridium, kicked up a worldwide dust cloud that blocked sunlight for several years, reduced photosynthesis on earth, and choked off the dinosaurs’ food chain. Support for this theory comes from layers of clay in Europe, New Zealand, and elsewhere containing iridium. Iridium-rich layers are found near many dinosaur fossils and are dated, using evolutionary assumptions, as about 65 million years old. An asteroid or comet striking the earth might explain the worldwide extinction of the dinosaurs and widespread iridium layers near many dinosaur fossils. In other words, one starting condition (an impact of a large asteroid or comet) explains two important observations: dinosaur extinctions and iridium layers. This is good.

But there are some hidden assumptions. While most meteorites contain iridium, it has not been detected in asteroids or comets. So advocates of the impact theory must assume that asteroids or comets have large amounts of iridium (or that meteorites came from asteroids). Other iridium-rich layers have since been discovered too far above and below the layer thought to mark the extinction of the dinosaurs. Further studies have found few iridium-rich layers near known impact craters. (Surprisingly, scientists later learned that airborne particles expelled by volcanoes contain considerable iridium and other rare chemical elements in the iridium-rich layers.)26

Also, many marine plants require daily sunlight.27 How could they have survived a global dust cloud that killed the dinosaurs? Each problem can be solved by making new assumptions. However, by Criterion 2, this reduces our confidence in the theory.

Criterion 3: Prediction. A legitimate theory allows us to predict unusual things we should soon see if we look in the right places and make the right measurements. Verified predictions will greatly increase our confidence in an explanation. Published predictions are the most important test of any scientific theory. Few evolutionists make predictions.

What predictions can be made based on the “climatic variation” and “impact” theories? Few, if any, have been made publicly. This does not inspire confidence in these explanations. Rarely do predictions accompany explanations of ancient, unobserved events.

Some predictions can be associated with the impact theory. For example, a very large impact crater should be found whose age corresponds to the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Extinctions and fossils of many forms of life should concentrate near the crater or, at least, in the hemisphere containing the crater. However, it is recognized that other fossils and extinctions that accompanied the dinosaurs’ demise are uniformly distributed worldwide,28 a point worth remembering.

For several years, no suitable crater could be found.29 Finally, in 1990, an impact site was proposed on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, centered near the village of Chicxulub (CHICK shoo loob). Evolutionists initially dated the site as 40–50 million years before dinosaurs became extinct. No crater shape was visible. Later, a buried crater was claimed based on slightly circular magnetic and gravitational patterns, much imagination, and the desire to explain dinosaur extinctions. Impact advocates then redated the region and, in effect, predicted that drilling in and around Chicxulub would reveal an iridium layer and a buried impact crater. Later drilling projects found neither.30

Other dinosaur extinction theories have even more problems. Our purpose in this section is not to settle this issue but to show how scientific reasoning should be applied to unobserved, nonreproducible events. Incidentally, another theory on dinosaur extinction will soon become obvious—a theory involving a global flood and the harsh conditions afterward. [For more on dinosaurs, see “What about the Dinosaurs?” on page 288.]

Scientific explanations are never certain or final, and the overused word “prove” is never justified except possibly in mathematics or a court of law. Science is even less certain when dealing with ancient, unrepeatable events, because other starting conditions might work as well or better than the proposed starting conditions. Perhaps we have overlooked a physical consequence or have improperly applied the laws of physics. Certainly we can never consider all the possibilities or have all the data.

So to try to scientifically understand unobservable, unrepeatable events, we should consider many sets of starting conditions, estimate the consequences of each based on physical laws, and then see how well those consequences meet the above three criteria. Ancient records, such as legends or the Mosaic account in the Bible, do not give scientific support for the truth or falsity of an ancient event. Such records may provide important historical support to those with confidence in a particular ancient record. This, however, is not science. Here in Part II, we will focus on science.

Two Common Questions

Those not familiar with the behavior of high-pressure fluids sometimes raise two questions.

1. How could rock float on water? The crust did not float on water; water was trapped and sealed under the crust. (Pillars also helped support the crust.) The crust was like a thin slab of rock resting on and covering an entire waterbed. As long as the water mattress does not rupture, a dense slab will rest on top of less-dense water. Unlike a waterbed’s seal, which is only a thin sheet of rubber, the chamber’s seal was compressed rock almost 10 miles thick. Pressures in the crust 5 miles or more below the earth’s surface are so great that the rock can deform like highly compressed, extremely stiff putty. The slightest crack or opening, even around a small chunk of rock, could not open from below.

2. Temperatures increase with depth under the earth’s surface. Subterranean water at a depth of about 10 miles would have been extremely hot. Wouldn’t all life on earth have been scalded if that water flooded the earth? No. Events related to the flood generated today’s geothermal heat. To understand why and to see why life was not scalded, one must first understand tidal pumping and supercritical water (SCW). One should also understand, as explained on page 302, why continents and preflood mountains sank as the subterranean water escaped.

Tidal Pumping. Tides in the subterranean water lifted the massive crust twice daily. Each tidal lift transferred energy from the earth’s spin to the crust. At low tides, the crust settled, compressing and heating the pillars. Calculations show that temperatures in the subterranean chamber steadily rose, generating some of the heat under the earth’s surface today. Some gases and minerals dissolved in this hot, high-pressure, liquid water, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), salt (NaCl), and quartz (SiO2). (In a few chapters, you will see why dissolved quartz petrified some wood and cemented flood sediments into sedimentary rocks.)

SCW. At a pressure of one atmosphere—also called 1.0 bar or 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch)—liquid water boils at a temperature slightly above 212°F (100°C). As pressure increases, the boiling temperature rises. At a pressure of 220.6 bars (3,200 psi) the boiling temperature is 705°F (374°C). Above this pressure-temperature combination, water becomes supercritical and cannot boil. SCW has other interesting and important properties.

After centuries of tidal pumping, the subterranean water exceeded the critical temperature (705°F). The initial pressure in the 10-mile-deep subterranean chamber would have been about 4,270 bars (62,000 psi)—well above the critical pressure. As the temperature increased, pressure also grew—and the crust stretched.

SCW can dissolve much more salt (NaCl) per unit volume than normal water—up to about 840°F (450°C). At higher temperatures, all salt precipitates out.31 (In a few pages, this fact will help explain how so much salt was concentrated on the earth and how salt domes formed.)

Most hot liquids cool primarily by evaporation from their surfaces.32 SCW consists of microscopic liquidlike clusters dispersed within water vapor. The rate those hot clusters and most hot objects cool off depends on their total surface area. The smaller a particle is, the larger its surface area is relative to its volume, so more of its heat can be quickly transferred to its surroundings. The liquid in SCW has an area-to-volume ratio that is a trillion times greater (1012) than that of water that might have covered the earth’s surface. Consequently, the liquid in SCW cools almost instantaneously if its pressure drops. This is because the myriad of liquid clusters, each surrounded by vapor, can simultaneously evaporate. A typical SCW cluster at 300 bars and 716°F (380°C) consists of 5–10 molecules with a volume of only 27–33 cubic angstroms. These liquidlike clusters break up and reform continuously.33

This explains how the escaping supercritical liquid transferred its energy into supercritical vapor. How did the vapor lose its energy and cool? Rapid expansion. A remarkable characteristic of supercritical fluids is that a small decrease in pressure produces a large change in volume. So as the SCW flowed toward the base of the rupture, its pressure dropped and the vapor expanded and cooled. As it expanded, it pushed on the surrounding fluid (gas and liquid), giving all fluid downstream greater kinetic energy.

Eventually the horizontally flowing liquid-gas mixture began to flow upward through the rupture. As the fluid rose, its pressure dropped to almost zero in seconds. The 5,000-fold expansion resembled a focused explosion of indescribable magnitude, accelerating the mixture, including rocks and dirt, into the vacuum of space.

In summary, during the flood SCW accelerated out of the chamber and up through a globe-encircling rupture in the crust—as from a ruptured pressure cooker. This tremendous acceleration expanded the spacing between water molecules, allowing flash evaporation, sudden cooling, and even greater expansion, acceleration, and cooling. Therefore, most of the extreme thermal energy in the subterranean water ended up not as heat at the earth’s surface but as extreme kinetic energy in “all the fountains of the great deep.” As you will see, these velocities were high enough to launch much material into outer space—the final dumping ground for most of the energy in the SCW.

Phases of the Hydroplate Theory: Rupture, Flood, Drift, and Recovery

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Figure 54: Rupture Phase of the Flood. This 46,000-mile-long rupture encircled the earth near what is now the Mid-Oceanic Ridge.

Rupture Phase. The increasing pressure in the subterranean water stretched the overlying crust, just as a balloon stretches when the pressure inside increases. Eventually, this shell of rock reached its failure point. Failure began with a microscopic crack at the earth’s surface. Because stresses in such cracks are concentrated at each end of the crack, each end grew rapidly—at about 2 miles per second.34 Within seconds, this crack penetrated down to the subterranean chamber and then followed the path of least resistance around the earth. The ends of the crack, traveling in opposite directions, circled the earth in 2–3 hours.35 Initial stresses were largely relieved when one end of the crack ran into the path left by the other end. In other words, the crack traveled a path that intersected itself at a large angle, forming a “T” or “Y” somewhere on the opposite side of the earth from where the rupture began.

As the crack raced around the earth, the 10-mile-thick crust opened like a rip in a tightly stretched cloth. Pressure in the subterranean chamber immediately beneath the rupture suddenly dropped to nearly atmospheric pressure. Supercritical water exploded with great violence out of the 10-mile-deep “slit” that wrapped around the earth like the seam of a baseball.

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Figure 55: Jetting Fountains. For a global perspective of what this may have looked like, see page 99.

All along this globe-circling rupture, whose path approximates today’s Mid-Oceanic Ridge,36 a fountain of water jetted supersonically into and far above the atmosphere. Much of the water fragmented into an “ocean” of droplets that fell as rain great distances away. This produced torrential rains such as the earth has never experienced—before or after.

Some jetting water rose above the atmosphere where it froze and then fell on various regions of the earth as huge masses of extremely cold, muddy “hail.” That hail buried, suffocated, and froze many animals, including some mammoths. [For details, see “Frozen Mammoths” on pages 178–205.] The most powerful jetting water and rock debris escaped the earth’s gravity and became the solar system’s comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. [For details, see “The Origin of Comets” on pages 208–237, and “The Origin of Asteroids and Meteoroids” on pages 240–256.]

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Figure 56: Flood Phase. Sediments in the escaping water increased until their volume nearly equaled the volume of water gushing out. These suspended particles quickly settled and buried plants and animals in a chaotic mixture. During this phase, a phenomenon called liquefaction sorted sediments, animals, and plants into horizontal layers that are more uniform and cover a much larger area than sedimentary layers laid down today. Traces of these dead organisms are called fossils. Global liquefaction is explained on pages 158–168.

Flood Phase. Each side of the rupture was basically a 10-mile-high cliff. Compressive, vibrating37 loads in the bottom half of the cliff face greatly exceeded the rock’s crushing strength, so the bottom half of the cliff continuously crumbled, collapsed, and spilled out into the jetting fountains. That removed support for the top half of the cliff, so it also fragmented and fell into the pulverizing supersonic flow. Consequently, the 46,000-mile-long rupture rapidly widened to an average of about 800 miles all around the earth.

About 35% of the eroded sediments were from the basalt of the chamber floor.38 Sediments swept up in the escaping flood waters gave the water a thick, muddy consistency. These sediments settled out over the earth’s surface in days, trapping and burying many plants and animals, beginning the process of forming the world’s fossils.

The rising flood waters eventually blanketed the water jetting from the rupture, although water still surged out of the rupture. Because today’s major mountains had not yet formed, global flooding covered the earth’s relatively smooth topography.

As explained on page 112, salt precipitated out of the supercritical subterranean water before the flood began, blanketing the chamber floor with solid, but mushy, salt. Much of it was swept out of the chambers by the escaping water, ending up as layers of salt in the flood deposited sediments. As other sediments, which were all denser, blanketed the pasty, low-density salt, an unstable arrangement arose, much like having a layer of light oil beneath a denser layer of water. A slight jiggle will cause the lighter layer below to flow up as a plume through the denser layer above. In the case of salt, that plume is called a salt dome.

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Figure 57: Salt Dome. Just as a cork released at the bottom of a swimming pool will float up through water, wet salt can float up through denser sediments. It begins when a small part of a wet salt layer rises. That causes other salt in the layer to flow horizontally and then up into a rising plume, called a salt dome. If the salt and sediments are mushy and saturated with water, friction offers little resistance. The upturned (or bowl-shaped) layers next to the salt dome can become traps in which oil collects, so understanding salt domes has great economic value.

The water’s pressure decreased as it rose out of the subterranean chamber. Because high-pressure liquids can hold more dissolved gases than low-pressure liquids, gases quickly escaped. A similar process occurs when a pressurized can of carbonated beverage is opened, quickly releasing bubbles of dissolved carbon dioxide. From the subterranean waters, the most significant gas that came out of solution was carbon dioxide. This venting accompanied the precipitation of limestone. [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 170–175.]

Flooding uprooted most of earth’s abundant vegetation and transported it to regions where it accumulated in great masses. [Pages 158–168 explain how this vegetation was collected and sorted into thin layers within the sediments.] Later, at the end of the continental-drift phase, buried layers of vegetation were rapidly compressed and heated, precisely the conditions that laboratory experiments have shown will form coal and oil.41 The flood phase ended with the continents near the positions shown in Figure 51 and the top frame of Figure 61.

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Figure 58: Continental-Drift Phase of the Flood.

Continental-Drift Phase. Material within the earth is compressed by overlying rock. Rock’s slight elasticity gives it springlike characteristics.42 The deeper the rock, the more weight above, so the more tightly compressed the “spring”—all the way down to the center of the earth.

The rupture path continuously widened during the flood phase. [See Figure 59e.] Eventually, the width was so great, and so much of the surface weight had been removed, that the compressed rock beneath the exposed floor of the subterranean chamber sprung upward. [See Figure 59f.]

As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, creating slopes on either side, the granite hydroplates started to slide downhill. This removed even more weight from what was to become the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. As weight was removed, the floor rose faster and the slopes increased, so the hydroplates accelerated, removing even more weight, etc. The entire Atlantic floor rapidly rose almost 10 miles.

As the first segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, it helped lift adjacent portions of the chamber floor just enough for them to become unstable and spring upward. This process continued all along the rupture path, forming the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Also formed were fracture zones and the strange offsets the ridge has at fracture zones.43 Soon afterward, magnetic anomalies (Figure 46 on page 104) developed.44

For a day or so, the sliding hydroplates were almost perfectly lubricated by water still escaping from beneath them. This process resembled the following:

A long train sits at one end of a very long, level track. If we could somehow just barely lift the end of the track under the train and the wheels were frictionless, the train would start rolling downhill. Then we could lift the track even higher, causing the train to accelerate even more. If this continued, the high-speed train would eventually crash into something. The long train of boxcars would suddenly decelerate, compress, crush, and “jackknife.”

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/paintedmid-oceanridge.jpg)

Figure 60: Birth of Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Continental plates accelerated away from the widening Atlantic. (Recall that the rupture encircled the earth, and escaping subterranean water widened that rupture about 400 miles on each side of the rupture, not just on what is now the Atlantic side of the earth but also on the Pacific side. Thus, the plates on opposite sides of the Atlantic could slide at least 400 miles away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge.45 In the next chapter, dramatic events occurring simultaneously in the Pacific will be explained.)

Eventually, the drifting—actually, accelerating—hydroplates ran into resistances of two types. The first happened as the water lubricant beneath each sliding plate was depleted. The second occurred when a plate collided with something. As each massive hydroplate decelerated, it experienced a gigantic compression event—buckling, crushing, and thickening each plate.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/driftphaseanimation.jpg)

Figure 61: Computer Animation of the Continental-Drift Phase. The top frame shows one side of the earth at the end of the flood phase. Because the rupture encircled the earth, a similar eroded gap existed between the continental plates on the other side of the globe. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge rose first in the Atlantic, hours or days before the ridge traveled to and rose in what is now the Pacific. This caused the hydroplates to accelerate downhill on a layer of lubricating water, away from the widening Atlantic and into the gap on the opposite side of the earth.

The continental-drift phase ended (bottom frame) with the dramatic compression event that squeezed up the earth’s major mountains. These six frames simply rotate the present continents about today’s polar axis. Therefore, greater movement occurs at lower latitudes. Movement begins from where the continents best fit against the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (see Figure 51 on page 109) and ends near their present locations.

Not shown are consequences of the compression event. For example, the compression squeezed and thickened continents, shortening the widths of the major continents and widening the Atlantic. Of course, postflood mountains thickened the most, but nonmountainous regions thickened as well. Regions that did not thicken are now part of the shallow ocean floor. [See Figure 42 on page 103.]

While it may seem strange to think of squeezing, thickening, and shortening granite, one must understand the gigantic forces required to decelerate sliding continental plates. If compressive forces are great enough, granite deforms (much like putty) on a global scale. On a human scale, however, one would not see smooth, puttylike deformation; instead, one would see and hear blocks of granite fracturing and sliding over each other. Some blocks would be the size of a small state or province, many would be the size of a house, and even more would be the size of a grain of sand. Friction at all sliding surfaces would generate heat. At great depths, this would melt rock. Liquid rock (magma) would squirt up and fill spaces between the blocks. This is seen in most places where basement rocks are exposed, as in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (Figure 65 on page 120) and the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon (Figure 66 on page 120).

To illustrate this extreme compression, imagine yourself in a car traveling at 45 miles per hour. You gently step on the brake as you approach a stop light and brace yourself by straightening and stiffening your arms against the steering wheel. You might feel 15 pounds of compressive force in each arm, about what you would feel lifting 15 pounds above your head with each hand. If we repeated your gentle deceleration at the stop light, but each time doubled your weight, the compressive force in your arms would also double each time. After about six doublings, especially if you were sitting on a lubricated surface, your arm bones would break. If your bones were made of steel, they would break after nine doublings. If your arm bones were one foot in diameter and made of granite, a much stronger material, 17 doublings would crush them. This compression would be comparable to that at the top of each decelerating hydroplate. The compression at the base of the hydroplate exceeded the crushing strength of granite, even before the deceleration, simply due to the weight of overlying rock. Consequently, the compression event at the end of the continental-drift phase easily and continually crushed and thickened each hydroplate for many minutes. Mountains were quickly squeezed up. The earth’s crust took on the thickness variations we see today.46

Mountains formed and overthrusts occurred as the weaker portions of the hydroplates crushed, thickened, and buckled. The new postflood continents rose out of the flood waters, allowing water to drain into newly opened ocean basins. For each cubic mile of land that rose out of the flood waters, one cubic mile of flood water could drain. (Note: the volume of all land above sea level is only one-tenth the volume of water on earth.)

As explained earlier, the forces acting during this dramatic event were not applied to stationary (static) continents resting on other rocks. The forces were dynamic, produced by rapidly decelerating hydroplates riding on lubricating water that had not yet escaped from beneath them.

Naturally, the long axis of each buckled mountain was generally perpendicular to its hydroplate’s motion—that is, parallel to the portion of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge from which it slid. So the Rocky Mountains, Appalachians, and Andes have a north-south orientation.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/quarry.jpg)

Figure 62: Buckling. The upward buckling of a deep, rock floor has been observed. A limestone quarry floor buckled upward in Yorkshire, England in 1887.39 The explanation is quite simple. Shale, which lay beneath the floor, consists of platelike particles that can slide over each other like playing cards in a deck. The weight of the quarry’s walls squeezed shale toward the center of the quarry, increasing the pressure on the quarry floor. Once the slightest upward buckling began, the limestone floor weakened, allowing the shale to push up even more.

In the flood cataclysm, the “quarry” was 10 miles deep, hundreds of miles wide, and 46,000 miles long. The high upward pressure on the “exposed” portion of the subterranean chamber floor was no longer balanced by the weight of the crust pressing down. Therefore, that portion of the chamber floor increasingly bulged upward, as happened in the quarry. Eventually, the hydroplates, still resting on a layer of water, began to slide downhill, away from the rapidly rising bulge. This removed even more weight from the chamber floor, accelerating its upward bulging. Today, the upbuckled region is the globe-encircling Mid-Oceanic Ridge.

Friction at the base of skidding hydroplates generated immense heat, enough to melt rock, produce huge volumes of magma, and begin earth’s volcanic activity. Crushing produced similar effects, as broken and extremely compressed blocks and particles slid past each other. The deeper the sliding, the greater the pressure pushing the sliding surfaces together, and the greater the frictional heat generated. In some regions, high temperatures and extreme pressures from the compression event formed metamorphic rock, such as marble and diamonds. Where heat was most intense, rock melted. High-pressure magma squirted up through cracks between broken blocks. Sometimes magma escaped to the earth’s surface, producing volcanic activity and “floods” of lava outpourings (called flood basalts) as seen on the Columbia and Deccan Plateaus.

Other magma collected under the earth’s surface in pockets, now called magma chambers. When magma escapes from these chambers, volcanoes erupt. The heat remaining today is called geothermal heat. (Sources of even greater amounts of magma will be explained in the next chapter.)

Some subterranean water also flowed up into cracks in the crushed granite. This explains the concentrated salt water discovered in cracks deep under Russia and Germany. (Recall that surface water cannot penetrate down to those depths. This alone implies that subsurface water was its source.) Now we can understand why the water’s salt concentration in these cracks was about twice that of seawater. By mixing the salty, subterranean water that escaped during the flood with an approximately equal volume of preflood surface water (which had little dissolved salt), the salt concentration of our present oceans would be achieved.

As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Atlantic floor rose, mass had to shift within the earth toward the Atlantic. Subsidence occurred on the opposite side of the earth, especially in the western Pacific where granite plates buckled downward, forming trenches. [For details and evidence, see “The Origin of Oceanic Trenches” on pages 136–155.]

Surrounding the Pacific is the “ring of fire,” containing the best-known concentration of volcanic activity on earth. Within the “ring of fire,” hidden on the floor of the Pacific, are vast, thick lava flows and tens of thousands of ancient volcanoes. Frictional heating caused by high-pressure movements under the Pacific floor generated these lava outpourings that covered the hydroplate.

Therefore, the western Pacific floor is littered with volcanic cones composed of minerals typically found in granite and basalt. Continental crust has been discovered under the Pacific floor. [See Endnote 11 on page 150, and the prediction on page 145.]

Recovery Phase. Where did the water go? When the compression event began on a particular hydroplate, the plate crushed, thickened, buckled, and rose out of the water.50 As it did, the flood waters receded.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/recoveryphase.jpg)

Figure 63: Recovery Phase of the Flood.

Simultaneously, the upward-surging, subterranean water was “choked off” as the plates settled onto the subterranean chamber floor. With the water source shut off, the deep, newly-opened basins between the continents became reservoirs into which the flood waters returned.

As you will recall, the floors of these deep reservoirs were initially part of the basalt floor of the subterranean chamber, about 10 miles below the earth’s surface. Consequently, sea level soon after the flood was several miles lower than it is today. This provided land bridges between continents, facilitating animal and human migration for perhaps several centuries.

Sediments, mixed with organic matter and its bacteria, were swept with draining flood waters onto the new ocean floors. There, the bacteria fed on the organic matter and produced methane. Since then, much of this methane combined with cold, deep ocean waters to become vast amounts of methane hydrates along coastlines.

Flood waters draining down the steep continental slopes eroded deep channels, especially downstream of drainage channels which are now major rivers. Today, we call these deep channels submarine canyons.

After the flood, hydroplates rested on portions of the former chamber floor, and oceans covered most other portions. Because the thickened hydroplates applied greater pressure to the floor than did the water, the hydroplates slowly sank into the chamber floor over the centuries, causing the deep ocean floor to rise. (Imagine covering half of a waterbed with a cloth and the other half with a thick metal plate. The sinking metal plate will lift the cloth.)

As sea level rose in the centuries after the flood, animals were forced to higher ground and were sometimes isolated on islands far from present continental boundaries. Classic examples of this are finches and other animals Charles Darwin found on the Galapagos Islands, 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador. Today, those islands are the only visible remains of a submerged South American peninsula. Darwin believed the finches were blown there during a giant storm. Even if Darwin’s unlikely storm happened, both a male and female finch, rugged enough to survive the traumatic trip, must have ended up on each island.

The more sediments continents carried and the thicker continents grew during the compression event, the deeper they sank. This also depressed the Moho. Newly formed mountains sank even more, slowly depressing the Moho beneath them to 20–30 miles below the earth’s surface. [See Figure 64.] The Moho and mantle under the ocean floor rose along with the ocean floor. This is why continental material is so different from oceanic material and why the Moho is so deep beneath mountains and yet so shallow beneath the ocean floor.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v311/randers/moho.jpg)

Figure 64: Typical Cross Section of Today’s Continents and Oceans. Notice the relative depths of the Moho. It is deepest under major mountains and shallowest under the ocean floor. Although some boundaries are uncertain, most of these general characteristics are well established. Notice also that large pockets of water may be under major mountains.

Many other things were far from equilibrium after the continental-drift phase. Over the centuries, the new mountain ranges and thickened continental plates settled slowly toward their equilibrium depth—just as a person’s body sinks into a waterbed. Sinking mountains increased the pressure under the crust on both sides of mountain ranges, so weaker portions of the overlying crust fractured and rose, forming plateaus. In other words, as continents and mountains sank, plateaus rose. This explains the otherwise strange aspects of plateaus noted by George Kennedy on page 107.

It also explains why plateaus are adjacent to major mountain ranges. For example, the Tibetan Plateau, the largest in the world, is next to the most massive mountain range in the world—the Himalayas. The Tibetan Plateau covers 750,000 square miles and rose to an elevation of about 3 miles. The Colorado Plateau, next to the Rocky Mountains, and the Columbia Plateau, next to the Cascade Mountains, are other dramatic examples.

Earth Roll. The sudden formation of major mountains altered the spinning earth’s balance,53 causing the earth to slowly roll about 35°–45°. The preflood North Pole moved to what is now central Asia.54 (The shift produced a 6° precession of the earth’s axis that Dodwell discovered from studying almost 100 ancient astronomical measurements made over the last 4,000 years.) This is why coal,11 dinosaur fossils,55 and other temperate fossils56 are found near today’s South Pole. Many researchers have also discovered vast dinosaur and mammoth remains inside the Arctic Circle. All were at temperate latitudes before the flood.

The direction and magnitude of the roll are also shown by animals and plants that today live at specific temperate latitudes but whose fossils are found inside the Arctic Circle. Remains of a horse, bear, beaver, badger, shrew, wolverine, rabbit, and considerable temperate vegetation are found on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, inside the Arctic Circle. Such animals and plants today require temperatures about 27°F warmer in the winter and 18°F warmer in the summer.57 Also found are remains of “large lizards, constrictor snakes, tortoises, alligators, tapirs, and flying lemurs—now found only in Southeast Asia.”58 Isotopic studies of the cellulose in redwood trees on Axel Heiberg Island, just west of Ellesmere Island, show that they grew in a climate similar to that of today’s coastal forests of Oregon (35° farther south in latitude).59

Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island have the largest known contrast between current temperatures and inferred ancient temperatures based on fossils. Both islands straddle 85°W longitude. Therefore, regions near this longitude experienced large northward shifts following the flood. The preflood North Pole rolled south near 95°E longitude while the region presently occupied by today’s North Pole rolled north near 85°W longitude. Also implied is a roll of at least 35°. Physics53 and geology54 give a similar picture.

An ancient historical record tells of a catastrophic flood and an apparent earth roll. Charles Berlitz reports that early Jesuit missionaries in China located a 4,320-volume work “compiled by Imperial Edict” and containing “all knowledge.” It states,

The Earth was shaken to its foundations. The sky sank lower toward the north. The sun, moon, and stars changed their motions. The Earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upward with violence and overflowed the Earth. Man had rebelled against the high gods and the system of the Universe was in disorder. 60

Endnote 53 explains why the Asian sky began “sinking” toward the north immediately after the flood.

Canyons. Drainage of the waters that covered the earth left every continental basin filled to the brim with water. Some of these postflood lakes lost more water by evaporation and seepage than they gained by rainfall and drainage from higher elevations. Consequently, they shrank over the centuries. A well-known example was former Lake Bonneville, part of which is now the Great Salt Lake.

Through rainfall and drainage from higher terrain, other lakes gained more water than they lost. Thus, water overflowed each lake’s rim at the lowest point on the rim. The resulting erosion at that point on the rim allowed more water to flow over it. This eroded the cut in the rim even deeper and caused much more water to cut it faster. Therefore, the downcutting accelerated catastrophically. Eventually, the entire lake dumped through a deep slit which we today call a canyon. These waters spilled into the next lower basin, causing it to breach its rim and create another canyon. It was like falling dominoes. The most famous canyon of all, the Grand Canyon, formed primarily by the dumping of what we will call Grand Lake. It occupied the southeast quarter of Utah, parts of northeastern Arizona, as well as small parts of Colorado and New Mexico. [See the map on page 130.] Grand Lake, standing at an elevation of 5,700 feet above today’s sea level, quickly eroded its natural dam 22 miles southwest of what is now Page, Arizona. In doing so, the western boundary of former Hopi Lake (elevation 5,950 feet) was eroded, releasing waters that occupied the present valley of the Little Colorado River. In only a few weeks, more water spilled over northern Arizona than is in all five Great Lakes combined.61

A Picture with a Story

Here at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, rock cliffs are exposed for up to 2,700 feet above the Gunnison River. Their marble-cake appearance comes from melted rock, primarily quartz, that was forced up through cracks in the darker rock.51 To appreciate the size of this cliff, notice the trees, 10 –15 feet tall, at the top of the cliff.

Now, let’s put aside all prior opinions and ask, “What must happen to cause this marble-cake pattern?” First, deep magma must be present or be produced.

(Figure 65 purposefully left out)

Second, the black rock must be fractured. This obviously takes gigantic forces acting over a large area, but the forces must be of a special kind. A tensile (stretching) force would produce one or at most a few evenly spaced cracks. At the instant of breakage, each broken piece would scatter. (Try breaking something by pulling on it. Upon breaking, the two pieces will fly apart.) This leaves us with only one viable type of force— compression.52

If compressive forces acted equally in all directions, no breaks would occur. For example, deep sea creatures, living under high compressive pressure (inside and out), are not crushed. Also not crushed are many delicate pieces of pottery and other objects found in sunken vessels on the ocean floor.

If compressive forces acted slowly but were almost evenly balanced, slight but slow movements would occur at the atomic level, a phenomenon called “creep.” The rock would slowly flow like putty, until the forces balanced.

Some channels (or cracks) are wider than others. Normally, the largest channels provide the least resistance to the flow, and all the magma from below should have spilled out through them. (Pump a liquid into a closed container until it cracks. You will see only one or at most a few major cracks, not many little cracks.) If the magma had been contained in a chamber below, just waiting for a crack to appear, the first crack should release all the magma, unless it solidified on its way up through the colder rock. But if all cracks occurred at once, then magma would fill most cracks. All of this leaves us with one conclusion for how the fractures occurred—rapid crushing.

Next, magma must rapidly squirt up through the cracks in the black rock. If it happened slowly, or even at the rate a river flows, the front edge of the upward flowing magma would solidify (freeze), stopping the flow. If water is dissolved in any molten rock, its melting or freezing temperature is lowered considerably. Therefore, liquid quartz with dissolved water could better survive the cold, upward journey.

Each individual channel (or vein) at the Black Canyon has a fairly uniform thickness. This reveals that the liquid’s pressure exceeded the rock’s pressure by nearly the same amount all along the channel. Again, this would not happen if the flow were slow or its consistency like cold tar.

This marble-cake appearance is exposed for at least 50 miles along the Gunnison River, so the compressive force must have been about the same over at least those 50 miles. Magma, if it came from one spot below, would tend to escape through the shortest cracks leading to the surface. Instead, magma has filled cracks over a 50 mile range. Consequently, the magma source and any water was probably spread over a large area directly below.

Because similar structures are seen where other deep basement rocks are exposed, these gigantic forces either “cropped up” many times at different places or this happened once on a continental or global scale. The parsimony criterion (looking for the simplest explanation) leads us to favor one big event. We will call this the compression event.

(Figure 66 purposefully left out)

Figure 66: Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon. The same marble-cake pattern exists in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, but with less color contrast than at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

We can conclude that this crustal rock was rapidly crushed over a wide area. Magma, and probably dissolved water, spread out below, were then quickly injected up through the cracks.

In studying this effect—an immense layer of “marble-cake rock”—we tried to deduce its cause. One can easily err when reasoning from effect back to cause. Another approach, that of reasoning from cause to effect, unfortunately requires starting assumptions. We began this on page 110 with two assumptions and then looked at their logical consequences. When “cause-to-effect reasoning” is consistent with “effect-to-cause reasoning,” as it is here, confidence in our conclusion increases greatly.

Sediments from the Grand Canyon were spread a hundred or so miles on either side of the present Colorado River, downstream from the Canyon. Today, these sediments, composed of rounded boulders mixed with clay, are exposed where streams have cut channels 100–200 feet deep. The rounded boulders show that they were transported by high-velocity water. The unsorted mixture of clay and boulders indicate that the turbulent water suddenly slowed, depositing the unsorted mixture.

With thousands of large, high lakes after the flood, and a lowered sea level, many other canyons were carved. Some are now covered by the raised ocean. It appears that (1) the Mediterranean “Lake” dumped into the lowered Atlantic Ocean and carved a canyon at the Strait of Gibraltar, (2) “Lake California” filling the Great Central Valley of California carved a canyon (now largely filled with sediments) under what is now the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and (3) the Mediterranean Sea or the Black Sea carved out the Bosporus and Dardanelles.

PREDICTION 3: The crystalline rock under Gibraltar, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and the Golden Gate bridge will be found to be eroded into a V-shaped notch. (This prediction concerning the Bosporus and Dardanelles, first published in 1995, was confirmed in 1998.)62

PREDICTION 4: The Global Positioning System (GPS) measures plate velocities with ever increasing accuracy as data accumulates and equipment improves. Because the earth’s crust is shifting toward equilibrium, today’s plate velocities will be found to be very gradually decreasing.

Earthquakes. The flood produced great mass imbalances on earth, and this causes earthquakes. Continents sank into the mantle and lifted ocean floors. These movements are slowly approaching their equilibrium positions. Shifting material63 throughout the earth is the root cause of earthquakes and slowly shifting continents. Both phenomena have been misinterpreted as supporting plate tectonics. (The following chapter explains this in greater detail.)

These powerful forces have different consequences at different depths. Some minerals suddenly rearrange their atoms into denser packing arrangements when the temperature and pressure rise above certain thresholds. This produces chains of microscopic implosions a few hundred miles below the earth’s surface.64 Because the flood occurred only about 5,000 years ago, temperatures are not uniformly hot at these depths.

Shallow earthquakes involve a different phenomenon.65 Trapped, subterranean water, unable to escape during the flood, slowly seeps up through cracks and faults formed during the crushing of the compression event. (Seismographs on the Pacific Ocean floor have measured tremors with these characteristics.)66 The higher this water migrates through a crack, the more its pressure exceeds that in the walls of the crack trying to contain it. Consequently, the crack spreads and lengthens. (So before an earthquake, the ground often bulges slightly, water levels sometimes change in wells, and geyser eruptions may become more irregular.) Simultaneously, stresses build up in the crust, again driven ultimately by gravity and mass imbalances at the end of the flood. Once compressive stresses have risen enough, the cracks have grown enough, and the frictional locking of cracked surfaces has diminished enough, sudden movement occurs. Water acts as a lubricant. (Therefore, frictional heat is not found along the San Andreas Fault.) Sliding friction instantaneously heats the water, converts it to steam at an even higher pressure, and initiates a runaway process called a shallow earthquake. [For more details, see “The Origin of Oceanic Trenches” on pages 136–155.]

Ice Age. As mentioned on page 105, an ice age requires cold continents and warm oceans. Some currents of water exiting the rupture were hot. Also, sliding hydroplates generated frictional heat as did movements within the earth resulting from the rising Atlantic and subsiding Pacific Ocean. Floods of lava spilling out, especially onto the Pacific floor, became vast reservoirs of heat that maintained elevated temperatures in certain ocean regions for centuries—the ultimate and first “El Niño.”67 Warm oceans produced high evaporation rates and heavy cloud cover.

Temperatures drop as elevation increases. For example, for every mile one climbs up a mountain, the air becomes about 28°F colder.68 Therefore, after the flood, the elevated continents were colder than today. Conversely, lowered sea levels meant warmer oceans. Also, volcanic debris in the air and heavy cloud cover shielded the earth’s surface from much of the Sun’s rays.

At higher latitudes and elevations, such as the newly elevated and extremely high mountains, this combination of high precipitation and low temperatures produced very heavy snow falls—perhaps 100 times those of today. Large temperature differences between the cold land and warm oceans generated high winds that rapidly transported moist air up onto the elevated, cool continents where heavy snowfall occurred, especially over glaciated areas. As snow depths increased, periodic and rapid movements of the glaciers occurred in “avalanche fashion.” During summer months, rain caused some glaciers to partially melt and retreat, marking the end of that year’s “ice age.”

(Figure 67 purposefully left out)

Figure 67: Kashmir Basin Today. Consider whether this bowl-shaped region rose several miles in a few hours, carrying in its basin flood waters and fish. If so, the potential existed for “Lake Kashmir” to later overflow its rim and quickly carve a huge canyon, leaving the Jhelum River as a remnant of that event.

While legends and geological facts are consistent with this scenario, two questions remain. What could quickly lift the Himalayas, the most massive mountain range on earth? Can conventional geology explain these geological facts?

This chapter has answered the first question. Details below address the second question. The Grand Canyon and numerous other canyons are prime exhibits showing they too are best explained by a similar catastrophic event. Wouldn’t it be nice if eye witnesses could confirm this event? Consider the legend described below.

Kashmir, a disputed territory high on the borders of northern India and Pakistan, has an interesting geological and cultural history. Half of Kashmir’s seven million people live in an oval valley, the size of Delaware, more than one mile above sea level. That valley is surrounded high mountains containing fossils of sea life. Rain falling into this bowl-shaped region eventually enters the Jhelum River which flows out between almost vertical canyon walls, 7,000 feet high, in a channel cut through the rim of the bowl.

Many Hindu legends are written in The Nilamata Purana. Verses 138–180 tell of a vast, ancient lake that once filled this valley and contained a demonic sea monster who ate people. Hindu gods decided to help the people by cutting an outlet for the lake’s waters through the surrounding mountains. Once the lake drained, the hero killed the immobilized monster. Since then, the lake’s bottom has been a fertile home for the people of Kashmir, most of whom know this story.

Geologists now realize that the valley once held a giant lake! The thinly layered strata of clay, limestone, and shale containing microscopic sea shells, show that the valley was once under water. Was this just a lucky guess by the ancient writers of The Nilamata Purana myth? Did they understand geology and create a story to fit the evidence? They would have needed a microscope to see much of the evidence. Perhaps some truth lies behind this myth.

Geologists claim that the entire region, including the bordering Himalayan Mountains, rose during the past 15,000,000 years. If so, the fossils on top should have eroded, because erosion occurs rapidly in mountainous terrain subject to many freezing-thawing cycles.

Why did this region rise? How could a lake—and fish—accumulate in a high, remote, draining valley? Even if the valley’s outlet had not yet formed, why would a large lake form at that cold, high elevation? Snow or glaciers might accumulate but rarely a large lake. At high elevations, evaporation rates are generally faster and precipitation rates slower. (Today, the world’s largest lake a mile or higher above sea level is Lake Titicaca,69 astride the border of Bolivia and Peru. Kashmir’s ancient lake was probably larger.) Because those events supposedly happened millions of years before humans evolved, why does a human account, historical or mythical, speak of the lake and the cutting of the canyon?

The hydroplate theory unifies, clarifies, and provides additional details to this cultural and geological picture. During the compression event, as moving continents suddenly crushed, thickened, and buckled to varying degrees, the Himalayan Mountains rose. As the waters drained off the continents, every bowl-shaped basin became a lake, regardless of elevation. Kashmir’s lake was immediately full and could have held fish. Later, after people migrated to the region, the lake breached part of its boundary and quickly cut its canyon. Today, the Jhelum River is a remnant of that lake. Undoubtedly, other canyons of the world, including the Grand Canyon, formed in a similar way.

The Origin of Oceanic Trenches

SUMMARY: Deep folds, thousands of miles long and several miles deep, lie on the floor of the western Pacific Ocean, directly opposite the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The plate tectonic theory claims that plates drifting on the earth’s surface dive into the earth and drag down the folds. Many reasons will be given why this cannot happen.

As the flood increasingly altered earth’s balanced, spherical shape, gravity increasingly tried to squeeze the earth back toward a more spherical shape. Once a “tipping point” was reached, that portion of the subterranean chamber floor with the most overlying rock removed rose suddenly, almost 10 miles, to become the Atlantic floor. This caused the Pacific floor to subside and buckle inward, producing folds, called oceanic trenches. Measurements and discoveries near trenches confirm this subsidence and the absence of diving plates. Shifts of material throughout the earth produced gigantic amounts of volcanic activity, especially on the western Pacific floor. Slight mass imbalances remain, so earthquakes now occur and continents steadily shift—not drift—toward the trench region of the western Pacific.

Imagine standing at the edge of something that reminds you of the Grand Canyon, but this “canyon” is several times deeper. Its walls are almost as steep as the Grand Canyon’s, but the view across the 60-mile-wide depression is never obstructed by intermediate land forms. This “canyon” is thousands of miles longer than the Grand Canyon and does not have sharp bends. Such depressions, called oceanic trenches, are often shaped like long arcs that connect at cusps. Oceanic trenches would be the leading natural wonders of the world, if water did not hide them. (Average ocean depth is 2.5 miles; the deepest trench is 6.86 miles below sea level.) Sixteen trenches are concentrated on the western Pacific floor. What concentrated so many trenches, and why in the Western Pacific?

Drifting vs. Shifting

The distinction between drifting and shifting is subtle but important. A box drifts on the sea, but a box shifts in the back of a truck. Drifting is a continuing movement on or in a fluid, often for a great distance, while shifting is a slight, limited, but significant lateral movement on or in a solid. Drifting is caused by a steady, unyielding, outside force, while shifting is usually caused by gravity and a sudden change in equilibrium. Drifting requires a continuing energy source, but shifting requires a disturbing event. The plate tectonic theory says continents steadily drift. The hydroplate theory says crustal plates drifted rapidly, but briefly, on a layer of escaping, high-pressure water near the end of the flood. This drifting produced imbalances. Since then, these and other imbalances caused by the flood sporadically shift continents and everything below.

Surprisingly, trenches contain shallow-water fossils.1

Materials [including fossils] which are usually supposed to be deposited only in shallow water have actually been found on the floor of some of the deep trenches.2

Why are such unlikely fossils in a remote part of the ocean—a thousand times deeper than one would expect?

Most of the earth’s crust is vertically balanced, like blocks of ice floating in a pan of water. Large, dense blocks sink in, while lighter blocks “float” higher up. This is called isostatic equilibrium. However, oceanic trenches are earth’s most glaring departure from this equilibrium. That may be an important clue about how trenches formed. As various authorities have written:

... trenches are characterized by large negative gravity anomalies. That is, there appears to be a mass deficiency beneath the trenches, and thus something must be holding the trenches down or else they would rise in order to restore isostatic equilibrium. 3

The most striking phenomenon associated with the trenches is a deficiency in gravity ... Measurements of gravity near trenches show pronounced departures from the expected values. These gravity anomalies are among the largest found on earth. It is clear that isostatic equilibrium does not exist near the trenches. The trench-producing forces must be acting ... to pull the crust under the trenches downward!4

In other words, something has pulled, not pushed, trenches down. The downward pull of gravity in and above trenches is less than expected, even after adjusting for the trench’s shape, so less mass exists under trenches than one would expect. It is as if something deep inside the earth “sucked” downward the material directly below trenches. This would reduce the mass below trenches. (If you want to show a slight weight loss, weigh yourself while on a ship sailing over a trench.)

A useful illustration is to think of a slight vacuum, or reduced mass, under trenches. While the term density deficiency is more descriptive and accurate, most people understand the consequence of a partial vacuum which “nature abhors.” That is, nature always tries to move material to fill a vacuum. If one waited long enough, material inside the earth must flow in under trenches to fill this “partial vacuum.” Today, crustal plates move an inch or so each year toward trenches, so this “partial vacuum” is being filled in modern times. Later, we will see where the missing mass under trenches went and what created the “partial vacuum.” Clearly, this filling in has not been going on for long.

(Figures 69 through 82 purposefully left out)

Figure 82: Spin. A spinning body, such as a figure skater or the earth, spins faster if it suddenly becomes more compact about its spin axis. This skater starts a spin with outstretched arms. Then, as she pulls her arms in near her spin axis, she spins so fast she becomes a blur.

Gravity tries to make the earth as compact and round as possible. Earthquakes cause the earth to become more compact and spin slightly faster.6 Therefore, the farther back in time we look, the less compact we should find the earth—at least until we arrive at the time the out-of-balance condition arose. Because earthquakes can occur deep within the earth, the out-of-balance condition affected the entire earth and, as you will see, formed trenches.

A technique called seismic tomography has detected slight density increases under continents. The technique uses earthquake waves to see inside the earth, just as a CAT scan uses x-rays from many angles to see inside your body. Each earthquake radiates waves through the earth. Seismometers located throughout the world receive these waves. Knowing the precise time of arrival and the time of an earthquake, each wave’s average velocity along a specific path can be calculated. After many earthquakes and knowing the average velocity along tens of thousands of different paths, a computer can estimate the wave speed at every point inside the earth. Higher than normal speed implies either colder or denser rock at that point. Earthquake waves travel faster under continents. Some increases in speed are too great to be caused entirely by colder temperatures.5

Almost 90% of all earthquake energy is released under trenches. Earthquakes often occur near sloping planes, called Benioff zones, that intersect a trench. These earthquake zones enter the mantle at 35°–60° angles below the horizontal and extend to depths of about 420 miles.

A fault is a long, deep fracture in the ground along which the opposite sides have slipped relative to each other. During an earthquake, opposite sides of a fault “unlock” and rapid sliding begins. If the side of a fault nearest a distant seismometer moves toward the seismometer, a compression wave will be detected first. If that side moves away from the seismometer, a tension wave will be detected first. By examining the first wave to reach many seismometers, one can deduce the orientation of the fault plane and whether the earthquake was triggered by compression or tension. Earthquakes near trenches are almost always due to horizontal tension failures at right angles to the trench axis.7 Measurements also show that microearthquakes on the ocean floor tend to occur at low tide.8

A prominent feature of all ocean floors is the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. One characteristic of the ridge figures prominently in the two competing theories for how trenches formed. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ridge is cracked in a strange pattern. Some cracks are nearly perpendicular to the ridge axis, while other cracks are parallel to it. Their shapes and orientation are best explained by the stretching of the ridge.9 What would stretch the ridge in two perpendicular directions? (These cracks are easily seen along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge in Figure 42 on page 103.)

More than 20,000 submarine volcanoes, called seamounts, litter the Pacific floor. Some rise almost as high from the surrounding seafloor as Mount Everest rises above sea level. Strangely, the Atlantic has few seamounts. If one plate dives (subducts) beneath another, why aren’t seamounts and soft sediments scraped off the top of the descending plate?

About 2,000 flat-topped seamounts, called tablemounts, are 3,000–6,000 feet below sea level. Evidently, as these volcanoes tried to grow above sea level, wave action planed off their tops. Either sea level was once much lower, or ocean floors were higher, or both. Each possibility raises new and difficult questions.

Enormous amounts of melted basalt, called flood basalts, have spilled out on the earth’s surface. They will help us test theories of trench formation. Typically, such a layer could cover the eastern United States to the height of the Appalachian Mountains—from Atlanta to New York City and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. More than a dozen of these convulsions have occurred at different places on earth, dwarfing in volume the total magma used to form all volcanic cones.

The Hydroplate Theory. [For a more complete description of the hydroplate theory, see pages 102–131.] Toward the end of the flood phase, erosion from escaping high-velocity water had widened the globe-encircling rupture to an average of about 800 miles. Exposed at the bottom of this wide, water-filled gap was the subterranean chamber floor, about 10 miles below the earth’s surface. Before the rupture, the gigantic pressure immediately under the floor corresponded to the weight of almost 10 miles of rock and 3/4 mile of water that pressed down on the floor. Afterward, with 10 miles of rock suddenly gone, only the strength of the chamber floor and 10 miles of water on top of it resisted this upward pressure. Consequently, as the rupture widened, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge suddenly buckled up, as described on pages 114–117.

The continental-drift phase began with hydroplates sliding “downhill” on a layer of water, away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This removed more weight from the rising portion of the subterranean chamber floor, causing it to rise even faster and accelerate the hydroplates even more. (If you are wondering how the hydroplates could slide away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge without meeting large resistances on the opposite side of the earth, see the paragraph “Continental plates ...” on page 115.)

As that part of the chamber floor rose to become the Atlantic floor, it stretched horizontally in all directions, just as a balloon stretches when its radius increases. This stretching produced cracks parallel and perpendicular to the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Because this began in what is now the Atlantic, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and its cracks are the most prominent of the oceanic ridge system.

Obviously, the great confining pressure in the mantle and core did not allow deep voids to open up under the rising Atlantic floor. So even deeper material was “sucked” upward. Throughout the inner earth, material shifted toward the rising Atlantic floor, forming a broader, but shallower, depression on the opposite side of the earth—what is now the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Just as the Atlantic floor stretched horizontally as it rose, the western Pacific floor compressed horizontally as it subsided. Subsidence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans began a startling 20–25 minutes after the Atlantic floor began its rise, the time it takes a seismic wave to pass through the earth. Both movements contributed to the “downhill” slide of hydroplates.

Centered on the Pacific and Indian Oceans is the trench region of the western Pacific. As material beneath the western Pacific was “sucked” down, it buckled downward in places forming trenches. The Atlantic Ocean (centered at 21.5°W longitude and 10°S latitude) is almost exactly opposite this trench region (centered at 159°E longitude and 10°N latitude). [See Figure 81 on page 135.]

A simple, classic experiment illustrates some aspects of this event.

A cup of water is poured into an empty 1-gallon can. The can is heated from below until steam flows out the opening in the top. The heat is turned off, and the cap is quickly screwed on the top of the can, trapping hot steam in the metal can. As the steam cools, a partial vacuum forms inside the can. The can’s walls buckle in, forming wrinkles in the metal—“miniature trenches.”

The upper 5 miles of the earth’s crust is hard and brittle. Below the top 5 miles, the large confining pressure will deform rock if pressure differences are great enough. Consequently, as the western Pacific floor subsided (sank), it buckled into “downward creases,” forming trenches. The hard crust and deformable mantle frequently produced deformations with an “arc and cusp” shape. The brittle crust cracked and slid in many places, especially along paths called Benioff zones.10

(Figure 84 purposefully left out)

Figure 84: Trench Cross Section Based on Hydroplate Theory. Notice that the trench axis will generally not be a straight line. Sediments (green) hide the top of a fault plane that should rise above the floor a few hundred feet at most. Other sediments (not shown) and flood basalts (dark gray) cover most of the western Pacific floor. The three large black arrows show the direction of the rising Atlantic and the forces that downwarped the mantle and hydroplate. Earthquakes occur on the many faults produced, especially in Benioff zones and at low tides. Most volcanoes are not above Benioff zones, but are in the center of the western Pacific where downwarping was greatest.

Deformations throughout the earth slid countless pieces of highly compressed rock over, along, and through each other, generating extreme friction—and, therefore, heat.

To appreciate the heat generated, slide a brick one foot along a sidewalk. Both the brick and sidewalk will warm slightly. Sliding a brick an inch but with a mile of rock squarely on top would melt part of the brick and sidewalk. Earth’s radius is almost 4,000 miles. Place a few thousand of those miles of rock on top of the brick and slide it only one thousandth of an inch. The heat generated would melt the entire brick and much of the sidewalk below.

Small movements deep inside the solid earth would melt huge volumes of minerals, especially those with lower melting temperatures.

Much of this magma squirted up through cracks and flowed on top of the depressed granite hydroplate that formed the western Pacific floor. Researchers have begun to detect this granite under the floors of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.11 Other magma gushed out on the continents as flood basalts. Some magma, unable to escape fast enough, is trapped in pockets called magma chambers.

Let’s suppose the inner earth initially had a more uniform mixture of minerals throughout. Melting, as described above, would cause denser minerals to settle and lighter minerals to rise, a process called gravitational settling. This would generate more heat and produce more melting and gravitational settling—followed by more heating, melting, and settling. After many such cycles, the earth’s core would form with the densest minerals settling to form the solid inner core and the melt rising to form the liquid outer core. [For details and calculations, see pages 356–358.]

This frictional heating, internal melting, and gravitational settling of the denser components would have increased earth’s rotational speed. Today, the earth spins 365.256 times each year, but there are historical reasons for believing a year once had 360 days.12

We saw in Figure 82 that skaters spin faster as they become more compact. Likewise, as denser minerals settled through the magma toward the center of the earth, the inner core spun faster than the outer earth and the melt moved upward. The inner core is still spinning faster (0.4° per year),13 because the liquid outer core allows slippage between the faster inner core and the slower outer earth. Other evidence supports these dramatic events.14

Gravity is the basic driving mechanism that formed trenches and slowly shifts the crust. Gravity always tries to make the earth more spherical.15 If you suddenly removed a bucket of water from a swimming pool (or even a 10-mile-thick layer of rock lying above what is now the Atlantic floor), gravity would act to smooth out the irregularity. Because massive volumes of rock inside the earth do not flow as fast as water in a swimming pool, pressure deficiencies, which we might think of as slight partial vacuums, still exist under trenches. Today—especially at low tide—mantle material flows very slightly in under trenches to reduce these “partial vacuums.” This stretches the crust above, produces extensional earthquakes near trenches, shifts plates toward trenches, and makes the earth measurably rounder.16

Both the hydroplate theory and the plate tectonic theory are explained as their advocates would explain the theories. One should critically question every detail of both theories, and not accept either until the evidence has been weighed.

The Plate Tectonic Theory. The earth’s crust is broken into rigid plates, 30–60 miles thick, each with an area roughly the size of a continent. Some plates carry portions of oceans and continents. Plates move relative to each other over the earth’s surface, an inch or so per year.

(Figure 85 purposefully left out)

Figure 85: Plate Tectonic Explanation for Trenches. Internal heat circulates the mantle causing continental-size plates to drift over the earth’s surface. Consequently, material rises at oceanic ridges (forcing the seafloor to spread), and plates must subduct at oceanic trenches (allowing layered sediments, shown in yellow, to collect). According to plate tectonics, earthquakes occur where subducting plates slide (Benioff zones) and at other plate boundaries. This theory says subducting plates also melt rock, and the magma rises to form volcanoes. [Actually, most volcanoes are not above Benioff zones. If this theory is correct, the yellow sediments hide a cliff face that is at least 30 miles high and the trench axis should be a straight line. W.B.]

Heat is the basic driving mechanism that formed trenches and moves plates. Just as hot water circulates in a pan on a stove, rock circulates inside the earth’s mantle. Heat generated inside the earth by radioactive decay warms some parts of the mantle more than others. The warmer rock expands, becomes less dense (more buoyant), and slowly rises, just as a cork rises when submerged in water. Sometimes, plumes of hot rock rising from the outer core break through the earth’s crust as flood basalts. Conversely, relatively cold rock descends. Rising and descending rock inside the mantle forms circulation cells (convection cells) which drag plates forward. Currents within the mantle rise at oceanic ridges, create new crust, and produce seafloor spreading.

Because new crust forms at oceanic ridges, old crust must be consumed somewhere. This happens when two plates converge. The older plate, having had more time to cool, is denser. Therefore, it sinks below the younger plate and subducts into the mantle, forming a trench. A cold, sinking edge will pull the rest of the plate and enhance circulation in the mantle. Earthquakes occur under trenches when subducting plates slip along Benioff zones. At great depths, subducting plates melt, releasing magma which migrates up to the earth’s surface to form volcanoes. Of course, such slow processes would require hundreds of millions of years to produce what we see today.

Examples of Liquefaction

Quicksand. Quicksand is a simple example of liquefaction. Spring-fed water flowing up through sand creates quicksand. The upward flowing water lifts the sand grains very slightly, surrounding each grain with a thin film of water. This cushioning gives quicksand, and other liquefied sediments, a spongy, fluidlike texture.3

Contrary to popular belief and Hollywood films, a person or animal stepping into deep quicksand will not sink out of sight forever. They will quickly sink in—but only so far. Then they will be lifted, or buoyed up, by a force equal to the weight of the sand and water displaced. The more they sink in, the greater the lifting force. Buoyancy forces also lift a person floating in a swimming pool. However, quicksand’s buoyancy is almost twice that of water, because the weight of the displaced sand and water is almost twice that of water alone. As we will see, fluidlike sediments produced a buoyancy that largely explains why fossils show a degree of vertical sorting and why sedimentary rocks all over the world are typically so sharply layered.

Earthquakes. Liquefaction is frequently seen during, and even minutes after, earthquakes. During the Alaskan Good Friday earthquake of 1964, liquefaction caused most of the destruction within Anchorage, Alaska. Much of the damage during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 resulted from liquefaction. Although geologists can describe the consequences of liquefaction, few seem to understand why it happens. Levin describes it as follows:

Often during earthquakes, fine-grained water-saturated sediments may lose their former strength and form into a thick mobile mudlike material. The process is called liquefaction. The liquefied sediment not only moves about beneath the surface but may also rise through fissures and “erupt” as mud boils and mud “volcanoes.” 4

Strahler says that in a severe earthquake:

... the ground shaking reduces the strength of earth material on which heavy structures rest. Parts of many major cities, particularly port cities, have been built on naturally occurring bodies of soft, unconsolidated clay-rich sediment (such as the delta deposits of a river) or on filled areas in which large amounts of loose earth materials have been dumped to build up the land level. These water-saturated deposits often experience a change in property known as liquefaction when shaken by an earthquake. The material loses strength to the degree that it becomes a highly fluid mud, incapable of supporting buildings, which show severe tilting or collapse.5

These are accurate descriptions of liquefaction, but they do not explain why it occurs. When we understand the mechanics of liquefaction, we will see that liquefaction once occurred continuously and globally for weeks or months during the flood.

Visualize a box filled with small, angular rocks. If the box were so full that you could not quite close its lid, you would shake the box, so the rocks settled into a denser packing arrangement. Now repeat this thought experiment, only this time all space between the rocks is filled with water. As you shake the box and the rocks settle into a denser arrangement, water will be forced up to the top by the “falling” rocks. If the box is tall, many rocks will settle, so the force of the rising water will increase. The taller column of rocks will also provide greater resistance to the upward flow, increasing the water’s pressure even more. The topmost rocks will then be lifted by water pressure for as long as the flow continues.

This is similar to an earthquake in a region having loose, water-saturated sediments. Once upward-flowing water lifts the topmost sediments, weight is removed from the sediments below. The upward flowing water can then lift the second level of sediments. This, in turn, unburdens the particles beneath them, etc. The particles are no longer in solid-to-solid contact, but are suspended in and lubricated by water, so they can easily slip by each other.

Wave-Loading—A Small Example. You are walking barefooted along the beach. As each wave comes in, water rises from the bottom of your feet to your knees. When the wave returns to the sea, the sand beneath your feet becomes loose and mushy. As your feet sink in, walking becomes difficult. This temporarily mushy sand, familiar to most of us, is a small example of liquefaction.

Why does this happen? At the height of each wave, water is forced down into the sand. As the wave returns to the ocean, water forced into the sand gushes back out. In doing so, it lifts the topmost sand particles, forming the mushy mixture.

If you submerged yourself face down under breaking waves but just above the seafloor, you would see sand particles rise slightly above the floor as each wave trough approached. Water just above the sand floor also moves back and forth horizontally with each wave cycle. Fortunately, the current moves toward the beach as liquefaction lifts sand particles above the floor. So sand particles are continually nudged upslope, toward the beach. If this did not happen, beaches would not be sandy.6

Wave-Loading—A Medium-Sized Example. During a storm, as a large wave passes over a pipe buried offshore, water pressure increases above it. This forces more water into the porous sediments surrounding the pipe. As the wave peak passes and the wave trough approaches, pressure over the pipe drops, and the stored, high-pressure water in the sediments flows upward. This lifts the sediments and causes liquefaction. The buried pipe, “floating” upward, sometimes breaks.7

Wave-Loading—A Large Example. On 18 November 1929, an earthquake struck the continental slope off the coast of Newfoundland. Minutes later, transatlantic phone cables began breaking sequentially, farther and farther downslope, away from the epicenter. Twelve cables were snapped in a total of 28 places. Exact times and locations were recorded for each break. Investigators suggested that a 60-mile-per-hour current of muddy water swept 400 miles down the continental slope from the earthquake’s epicenter, snapping the cables.8

This event intrigued geologists. If thick muddy flows could travel that fast and far, they could erode long submarine canyons and do other geological work. Such hypothetical flows, called “turbidity currents,” now constitute a large field of study within geology.

Problems with the 60-mile-per-hour, turbidity-current explanation are:

* water resistance prevents even nuclear-powered submarines from traveling nearly that fast,
* the ocean floor in that area off the coast of Newfoundland slopes less than 2 degrees,
* some broken cables were upslope from the earthquake’s epicenter, and
* nothing approaching a 400 mile landslide has ever been observed—let alone on a 2 degree slope or underwater.

Instead, a large wave, a tsunami,9 would have rapidly radiated out from the earthquake’s epicenter. Below the expanding wave, sediments on the seafloor would have partially liquefied, allowing them to flow downhill.10 This sediment flow loaded and eventually snapped only those cable segments that were perpendicular to the downhill flow. Other details support this explanation.

We can now see that liquefaction occurs whenever water is forced up through loose sediments with enough pressure to lift the topmost sedimentary particles. A gigantic example of liquefaction, caused by many weeks of global wave-loading, will soon follow.

Liquefaction During the Flood

The flooded earth had enormous, unimpeded waves—not just normal waves, but waves generated by undulating hydroplates. (The reasons for vibrating or fluttering hydroplates will be explained in the chapter on comets.) Also, a flooded earth would have no coastlines, so friction would not destroy waves at the beach. Instead, waves would travel around the earth, often reinforcing other waves.

During the flood, water was forced into the seafloor in two ways. First, water is slightly compressible,11 so water in the saturated sediments below a wave peak was compressed like a stiff spring. Second, and more importantly, under wave peaks, water was forced, not only down into the sediments below, but laterally through the sediments, in the direction of decreasing pressure. As the wave height diminished, local pressure was reduced and both effects reversed, producing upward flowing water. Water almost completely surrounded each sediment particle deposited on the ocean floor during the flood, giving each particle maximum buoyancy. Therefore, sediments were loosely packed and held much water.

Half the time throughout the flood phase, water was pushed down into the sediments, stored for the other (discharge) half-cycle in which water flowed upward. During discharge, liquefaction occurred if the water’s upward velocity exceeded a specific minimum. When it did, interesting things happened.

(Figure 92 left out)

Figure 92: Liquefaction and Water Lenses. The wave cycle begins at the left with water being forced down into the seafloor. As the wave trough approaches, that compressed water is released. Water then flows up through the seafloor, lifting the sediments, starting at the top of the sedimentary column. During liquefaction, denser particles sink and lighter particles (and dead organisms, soon to become fossils) float up—until a liquefaction lens is encountered. Lenses of water form along nearly horizontal paths if the sediments below those horizontal paths are more permeable than those above, so more water flows up into each lens than out through its roof. Sedimentary particles and dead organisms buried in the sediments were sorted and resorted into vast, thin layers.

In an unpublished experiment at Loma Linda University, a dead bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian were placed in an open water tank. Their buoyancy in the days following death depended on their density while living, the build-up and leakage of gases from their decaying bodies, the absorption or loss of water by their bodies, and other factors. That experiment showed that the natural order of settling following death was amphibian, reptile, mammal, and finally bird.16 This order of relative buoyancy correlates closely with “the evolutionary order,” but, of course, evolution did not cause it. Other factors, also influencing burial order at each geographical location, were: liquefaction lenses, which animals were living in the same region, and each animal’s mobility before the flood overtook it.

A thick, horizontal layer of sediments provides high resistance to upward flowing water, because the water must flow through tiny, twisting channels between particles. Great pressure is needed to force water up through such layers. During liquefaction, falling sediments and high waves provide the required high pressure.

If water flows up through a bed of sediments with enough velocity, water pressure will lift and support each sedimentary particle. Rather than thinking of water flowing up through the sediments, think of the sediments falling down through a very long column of water. Slight differences in density, size, or shape of adjacent particles will cause them to fall at slightly different speeds. Their relative positions will change until the water’s velocity drops below a certain value or until nearly identical particles are adjacent to each other, so they fall at the same speed. This sorting produces the sharply-defined layering typical in sedimentary rocks. In other words, vast, sharply-defined layers are unmistakable characteristics of liquefaction and a global flood.

Such sorting also explains why sudden local floods sometimes produce horizontal strata on a small scale.12 Liquefaction can occur as mud settles through the water or as water is forced up through mud.

Figure 93: Liquefaction Demonstration. When the wooden blocks at the top of the horizontal beam are removed, the beam can rock like a teeter-totter. As the far end of the beam is tipped up, water flows from the far tank down through the pipe and up into a container at the left which holds a mixture of sediments. Once liquefaction begins, sedimentary particles fall or rise relative to each other, sorting themselves into layers, each having particles with similar size, shape, and density. Buried bodies with the density of plants and dead animals float up through the sediments—until they reach a liquefaction lens. The same would happen to plants and animals buried during the flood.

Their sorting and later fossilization might give the mistaken impression that organisms buried and fossilized in higher layers evolved millions of years after lower organisms. A “school of thought,” with appealing philosophical implications for some, would arise that claimed changes in living things were simply a matter of time. With so many complex differences among protons, peanuts, parrots, and people, eons of time must have elapsed. With so much time available, many other strange observations might be explained. Some would try to explain even the origin of the universe, including space, time, and matter, using this faulty, unscientific “school of thought.” Of course, these ideas could not be demonstrated (as liquefaction can be), because too much time would be needed.

Water Lenses

An important phenomenon, which will be called lensing, was observed in the sediment tank. Some layers were more porous and permeable than others. If water flowed more easily up through one sedimentary layer than the layer immediately above, a lens of water accumulated between them. Multiple lenses could form simultaneously, one a short distance above the other. Water in these nearly horizontal lenses always flowed uphill.14

Throughout the flood, many water lenses formed and sometimes collapsed with each wave cycle. [See Figure 92.] During liquefaction, organisms floated up into the lens immediately above. Water’s buoyant force is only about half that of liquefied sediments, so a water lens was less able to lift dead organisms into the denser sedimentary layer immediately above the lens. In each geographical region, organisms with similar size, shape, and density (usually members of the same species) often ended up in the same lens. There they were swept by currents for many miles along those nearly horizontal channels.15

Coal. Vegetation lifted by liquefaction into a water lens spread out and formed a buoyant mat pressed up against the lens’ roof. Vegetation mats, composed of thin, flat, relatively impermeable sheets, such as intertwined leaves, ferns, grass, and wood fragments could not push through that roof. These mats also prevented sedimentary grains in the roof from falling to the floor of the lens.

Each vegetation mat acted as a check valve; that is, during the portion of the wave cycle when water flowed upward, the mat reduced the flow upward through the narrow channels in the lens’ roof. During the other half of the wave cycle, when water flowed downward, the mat was pushed away from the roof allowing new water to enter the lens. Therefore, throughout the flood, water lenses with vegetation mats thickened and expanded. Vegetation mats became today’s coal seams, some of which can be traced over 100,000 square miles.

Cyclothems. Sometimes, 50 or more coal seams are stacked one above the other with an important sequence of sedimentary layers separating the coal layers. A typical sequence between coal seams (from bottom to top) is: sandstone, shale, limestone, and finally denser clay graded up to finer clay. These cyclic patterns, called cyclothems, are in the order one would expect from liquefaction: denser, rounder, larger sedimentary particles at the bottom and less dense, flatter, finer sedimentary particles at the top. Cyclothem layers worldwide generally have the same relative order, although specific layers may be absent.

Figure 94: Drifting Footprints. Hundreds of footprints, involving 44 different trackways, were discovered in cross-bedded sandstone layers of northern Arizona. Surprisingly, movement was in one direction, but the toes pointed in another direction—sometimes at almost right angles. These and other details made it clear that the animals, probably amphibians, were walking on the sand bottom of some type of lateral-flowing stream.17 This contradicts the standard story that the cross-bedded sandstone layers were once ancient sand dunes. Almost all trackways moved uphill. Obviously, thick sediments must have gently and quickly blanketed the footprints to prevent their erosion—a vexing problem for evolutionists who try to explain fossilized footprints.

How could this happen? Today, salamanders buried in muddy lake bottoms can “breathe” through their skins and hibernate for months. During liquefaction, salamanderlike animals floated up into a liquefaction lens, where water always flows uphill.14 Footprints could be made on the lens’ floor for minutes, as long as the lens stayed open and no more liquefaction occurred to obscure the footprints. When the water lens slowly drained and its roof settled onto the floor, footprints and other marks were firmly protected.

Fossils. When a liquefaction lens slowly collapsed for the last time, plants and small animals were trapped, flattened, and preserved between the lens’ roof and floor. Even footprints, ripple marks, and worm burrows were preserved at the interface, if no further liquefaction occurred there. A particular lens might stay open through many wave cycles, long after the lens’ floor last liquefied. At other places, the last (and most massive) liquefaction event was caused by the powerful compression event.

Fossils, sandwiched between thin layers, were often spread over a wide surface which geologists call a horizon. Thousands of years later, these horizons gave some investigators the false impression those animals and plants died long after layers below were deposited and long before layers above were deposited. A layer with many fossils covering a vast area was misinterpreted as an extinction event or a boundary between geologic periods.

Early geologists noticed that similar fossils were often in two closely spaced horizons. It seemed obvious that the subtle differences between each horizon’s fossils must have developed during the assumed long time interval between each horizon. Different species names were given to these organisms, although nothing was known about their inability to interbreed—the true criterion for identifying species. Later, in 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism, natural selection, which he claimed accounted for the evolution of those subtle differences. However, if sorting by liquefaction produced those differences, Darwin’s explanation is irrelevant.

Questionable Principles. Early geologists learned that fossils found above or below another type of fossil in one location were almost always in that same relative position, even many miles away. This led to the belief that the lower organisms lived, died, and were buried before the upper organisms. Much time supposedly elapsed between the two burials, because sediments are deposited very slowly today. Each horizon became associated with a specific time, perhaps millions of years earlier (or later) than the horizon above (or below) it. Finding so many examples of “the proper sequence” convinced early geologists they had found a new principle of interpretation, which they soon called the principle of superposition.

Evolutionary geology is built upon this and one other “principle,” the principle of uniformitarianism which states that all geological features can be explained by today’s processes acting at present rates.18 For example, today rivers deposit sediments at river deltas. Over millions of years, thick layers of sediments would accumulate. This might explain the sedimentary rocks we now see.

After considering liquefaction, both “principles” appear seriously flawed. Sediments throughout a tall liquefaction column could have been re-sorted and deposited almost simultaneously by a large-scale process not going on today.

Testing the Theories

How can we compare and test the two conflicting explanations: liquefaction versus uniformitarianism and the principle of superposition over billions of years?

1. Many sedimentary layers extend over hundreds of thousands of square miles. (River deltas, the largest examples of sedimentation today, are only a tiny fraction of that area.) Liquefaction during a global flood would account for the vastness of these layers. Current processes and eons of time do not.

2. One thick, extensive sedimentary layer has remarkable purity. The St. Peter sandstone, spanning about 500,000 square miles in the central United States, is composed of almost pure quartz, similar to sand on a white beach. It is hard to imagine how any geologic process, other than global liquefaction, could achieve this degree of purity over such a wide area.19 Almost all other processes involve mixing, which destroys purity.

3. Streams and rivers deposit sediments along a narrow line, but individual strata are spread over large geographical areas, not along narrow, streamlike paths. Liquefaction during the flood acted on all sediments and sorted them over wide areas in weeks or months.

4. Sedimentary layers are usually sharply defined, parallel, and horizontal. They are often stacked vertically for thousands of feet. If layers had been laid down thousands of years apart, surface erosion would have destroyed this parallelism. Liquefaction, especially liquefaction lenses, explain this common observation.

5. Sometimes adjacent, parallel layers contain such different fossils that evolutionists conclude those layers were deposited millions of years apart, but the lack of erosion shows the layers were deposited rapidly. Liquefaction resolves this paradox.

6. Many communities around the world get their water from deep, permeable, water-filled, sedimentary layers called aquifers. When water drains from an aquifer, the layer collapses, unable to support the overlying rock layers. A collapsed aquifer cannot be replenished, so how were aquifers filled with water in the first place?

Almost all sorted sediments were deposited within water, so aquifers contained water when they first formed. Today, with aquifers steadily collapsing globally, one must question claims that they formed millions of year ago. As described in this chapter, liquefaction sorted sediments relatively recently.

7. Varves are extremely thin layers (typically 0.004 inch or 0.1 mm) which evolutionists claim are laid down annually in lakes. By counting varves, evolutionists believe time can be measured. However, groups of varves contain fossils, such as fish. Fish, lying on the bottom of a lake, would decay long before enough varves could accumulate to bury them. (Besides, dead fish typically float, then decay.) Most fish fossilized in varves have been pressed to the thinness of a piece of paper, as would happen to a fish compressed in a collapsing liquefaction lens.

Also, varves are too uniform, show relatively little erosion, and are deposited over wider areas than where streams enter lakes—where most deposits occur in lakes. Lakes would not produce varves. Varves are better explained by liquefaction.

8. In almost all cases, dead animals and plants quickly decay, are eaten, or are destroyed by the elements. Preservation as fossils requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve their bodily forms. This rarely happens today. When it does, such as in an avalanche or a volcanic eruption, the blanketing layers are rarely water-deposited, are not uniform in thickness, and do not span hundreds of thousands of square miles. Liquefaction provides a mechanism for the rapid, but gentle, burial and preservation of trillions of fossils in sedimentary layers—including fossilized footprints, worm burrows, ripple marks, and jellyfish. [See also “Rapid Burial” on page 11.]

Thousands of fossilized jellyfish have been found in central Wisconsin, sorted to some degree by size into at least seven layers (spanning 10 vertical feet) of coarse-grained sediments.20 Evolutionists admit that a fossilized jellyfish is exceptionally rare, so finding thousands of them in what was coarse, abrasive sand is almost unbelievable. Claiming that it occurred during storms at the same location on seven different occasions, but over a million years, is ridiculous.

What happened? Multiple liquefaction lenses, vertically aligned during the last liquefaction cycle, trapped delicate animals such as jellyfish and gently preserved them as the roof of each water lens settled onto its floor.

9. Many fossilized fish are flattened between extremely thin sedimentary layers. This requires squeezing the fish to the thinness of a sheet of paper without damaging the thin sedimentary layers immediately above and below. How could this happen?

Because dead fish usually float, something must have pressed the fish onto the seafloor. Even if tons of sediments were dumped through the water and on top of the fish, thin layers would not lie above and below the fish. Besides, it would take many thin layers, not one, to complete the burial. Today’s processes seem inadequate.

However, liquefaction would sort sediments into thousands of thin layers. During each wave cycle, liquefaction lenses would simultaneously form at various depths in the sedimentary column. If a fish floated up into a water lens, it would soon be flattened when the lens finally drained.

10. Sediments, such as sand and clay, are produced by eroding crystalline rock, such as granite or basalt. Sedimentary rocks are cemented sediments. On the continents, they average more than a mile in thickness. Today, two-thirds of continental surface rocks are sedimentary; one-third is crystalline.

Was crystalline rock, eroded at the earth’s surface, the source of the original sediments? If it was, the first eroded sediments would blanket crystalline rock and prevent that rock from producing additional sediments. The more sediments produced, the fewer the sediments that could be produced. Eventually, there would not be enough exposed crystalline rock at the earth’s surface to produce all the earth’s sediments and sedimentary rock. Transporting those new sediments, often great distances, is another difficulty. Clearly, most sediments did not come from the earth’s surface. They must have come from powerful subsurface erosion, as explained by the hydroplate theory, when high-velocity waters escaped from the subterranean chamber.

11. Some limestone layers are hundreds of feet thick. The standard geological explanation is that those regions were covered by incredibly limy (alkaline) water for millions of years—a toxic condition not found anywhere on earth today. Liquefaction, on the other hand, would have quickly sorted limestone particles into vast sheets. [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 170–175.]

12. Conventional geology claims that coal layers, sometimes more than a 100 feet thick, first accumulated as 1,000-foot-thick layers of undecayed vegetation. Nowhere do we see that happening today. However, liquefaction would have quickly gathered vegetation buried during the early stages of the flood into thick layers, which would become coal after the confined, oxygen-free heating of the compression event.

13. Coal layers lie above and below a specific sequence of sedimentary layers, called cyclothems. Some cyclothems extend over 100,000 square miles. If coal accumulated in peat bogs over millions of years (the standard explanation), why don’t we see such vast swamps today? Why would a peat bog form a coal layer that was later buried by layers of sandstone, shale, limestone, and clay (generally in that ascending order)? Why would this sequence be found worldwide and sometimes be repeated vertically 50 or more times? To deposit a different sedimentary layer would require a change in environment and/or elevation—and, of course, millions of years. Liquefaction provides a simple, complete explanation.

14. Fossils are sorted vertically to some degree. Evolutionists attribute this to macroevolution. No known mechanism will cause macroevolution, and many evidences refute macroevolution. [See pages 6–21.] Liquefaction, an understood mechanism, would tend to sort animals and plants. If liquefaction occurred, one would expect some exceptions to this sorting order, but if macroevolution happened, no exceptions to the evolutionary order should be found. Many exceptions exist. [See “Out-of-Place Fossils” on page 12.]

15. Animals are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food. However, geological formations frequently contain fossilized animals without fossilized plants.21 How could the animals have survived? Evidently, liquefaction sorted and separated these animals and plants before fossilization occurred.

16. Meteorites are rarely found in deep sedimentary rock. [See “Shallow Meteorites” on page 35.] This is consistent only with rapidly deposited sediments.

Liquefaction During the Compression Event

While liquefaction operated during the flood phase, it acted massively once during the compression event, at the end of the continental-drift phase. [See pages 102–131.]

Visualize a deck of cards sliding across the table. Friction from the table slows the bottom card. That card, in turn, applies a decelerating force on the second card from the bottom. If no card slips, friction will finally decelerate the top card. But if a lubricant somehow built up between any two adjacent cards, the cards above the lubricated layer would slide over the decelerating cards below.

Similarly, decelerating granite hydroplates acted on the bottom sedimentary layer riding on the hydroplate. Each sedimentary layer, from bottom to top, acted in turn to decelerate the topmost layer. As each water-saturated layer decelerated, it was severely compressed. This was similar to suddenly squeezing a wet sponge. The sediments, forced into a denser packing arrangement, released water. Sedimentary particles were crushed, so broken fragments filled the spaces between particles, releasing more water. The freed water, then forced up through the sediments, caused massive liquefaction. As the sedimentary layers decelerated and compressed, they became more and more fluid. Eventually, some layers were so fluid that slippage occurred above them, as in our deck of cards. Below that level, extreme compression and liquefaction caused fossils to float up and collect at this level where sliding was taking place.

The lowest slippage level was the Cambrian-Precambrian interface. Fossils are found almost exclusively above this interface. [See “Missing Trunk” on page 12.] Therefore, evolutionists interpret the Precambrian as about 90% of all geologic time—a vast period, they believe, before life evolved. Again, time is mistakenly measured by sedimentary layers and their fossils.

Figure 95: Grand Canyon Cross Section. The tipped and beveled layers are part of the Precambrian. The beveled plane, at the Cambrian-Precambrian interface, is sometimes called “The Great Unconformity.” A similar, but much smaller, example of tipped and beveled layers is shown in the cross-bedded sandstone in Figure 97. Beveling implies relative motion. Near the top of the Grand Canyon is a 400-foot-thick layer of cross-bedded sandstone. The white arrow points to the quartzite block shown in Figure 96.

In the Grand Canyon, the Cambrian-Precambrian interface is an almost flat, horizontal surface exposed for 26 miles along the Colorado River. Layers above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface are generally horizontal, but layers below are tipped at large angles, and their tipped edges are beveled off horizontally. Evidently, as slippage began during the compression event, layers below the slippage plane continued to compress to the point where they buckled. The sliding sedimentary block above the slippage plane beveled off the still soft layers that were being increasingly tipped by horizontal compression below the slippage plane.

Figure 96: Transported Block. This large block, made of a very hard, dense material called quartzite, was lifted hundreds of feet, transported horizontally, and deposited on layers which, at the time, were soft mud. Other mud layers then blanketed the block. Notice how the layers were deformed below the lower right corner and above the upper left corner. The easiest way to lift and transport such a heavy block is in a liquefied (and therefore, very buoyant), sand/mud/water mixture. The location of the block relative to its source is shown in Figure 95.22

Apparently, this quartzite block was transported in a sliding sedimentary slurry above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface during the compression event. Peak decelerations occurred in the layers below the sliding slurry. This included the quartzite layer. The sudden deceleration and compression tipped those layers up, allowing them to be beveled off by the overriding layers. (Evolutionists explain the absolutely flat Cambrian-Precambrian interface as a result of hundreds of millions of years of erosion.)

Evolutionists have a different interpretation. In their view, tipped, Precambrian layers are remnants of a former mountain range, because mountains today often have steeply tipped layers. [See Figure 48 on page 106.] The tipped layers are horizontally beveled, so evolutionists say the top of the mountain must have eroded away. That, of course, would take a long time. Millions of years are also needed so seas could flood the area, because fossils of sea-bottom life are found just above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface. Within overlying layers, other fossils are found which required different environments, such as deserts and lagoons, so obviously, even more time is needed. (Unlimited time makes the nearly impossible seem possible—if you don’t think too much about mechanisms.)

Cross-bedded sandstone. Sand layers had the greatest water content, because sand grains are somewhat rounded, leaving relatively large gaps for water between the particles. Therefore, sand layers were the most fluid during the massive liquefaction that accompanied the compression event. Deceleration forced the sand forward, displacing the water backward. Horizontally compressed sand layers would have tipped, buckled, and beveled individual layers and blocks of layers, forming what is known as cross-bedded sandstone. [See Figure 97.]

Figure 98: Formation of Liquefaction Plumes and Mounds. (a) During the flood phase, global liquefaction sorted water-saturated sediments into nearly horizontal layers. (b) During the compression event, massive liquefaction caused less dense sand/water mixtures to float up, as plumes, through denser overlying layers. (Figure 57 on page 114 shows a similar phenomenon.) Later, if the surface layers were not cemented as well as the sandstone plume, the surface layers could erode away leaving the plume exposed. (c) If a plume spilled out on the ground, a mound would form.

Liquefaction Plumes and Mounds. The large water content of liquefied sand layers would have made them quite buoyant. Whenever a low-density, fluid layer (such as a water-sand mixture) underlies a denser, liquefied layer, the lighter fluid, if shaken, will float up in plumes through the denser fluid. Sand plumes that penetrated overlying layers are seen in many places on earth. [See Figures 98–100.]

Figure 99: Liquefaction Plume 1. A hundred of these plumes are found in Kodachrome Basin State Reserve in south-central Utah, 10 miles east of Bryce Canyon National Park. I am standing at the bottom left of this tall plume.

Figure 100: Liquefaction Plume 2. This plume can be traced down several hundred feet through the large rock in the bottom half of the picture. The plume grew up from a known horizontal sandstone layer that has identical chemical characteristics.23 After the plume pushed upward, cementing took place, with the sandstone plume becoming harder than the material it penetrated. The plume penetrated softer layers that later eroded away, leaving the plume exposed. [See Figure 98b.] Notice the person waving at the bottom left of this plume.

Some plumes, especially those rising from thick, laterally extensive sand layers, spilled onto the earth’s surface. This spilling-out resembled volcanic action, except water-saturated sand erupted, not lava. Small liquefaction mounds, as they will be called, appear when liquefaction occurs during earthquakes.24 [See Levin’s description on page 158.] Australia’s Ayers Rock (Figure 101) is a large example of this. As with liquefaction plumes, Ayers Rock also connects to a thick sandstone layer far below ground. Hundreds of smaller, but similar, mounds are found throughout the southwestern United States.

Figure 101: Ayers Rock. This popular tourist attraction in central Australia, is 225 miles southwest of Alice Springs. Ayers Rock rises 1,140 feet from the desert floor and has a perimeter of 5.6 miles. Geologists who try to explain the origin of Ayers Rock say its sand came from the Musgrave mountain range 60 miles to the north and was dumped by water at its present spot. Later, they say, erosion carved out its present shape. However, most geologists admit they do not know the origin of Ayers Rock.

Ayers Rock is a huge liquefaction mound. Many large water vents, through which the water in the liquefied sediments drained out of the mound, are found in the sides of Ayers Rock. These vents resemble shallow caves.

Figure 102: Small Water Vents. These water vents are smaller than a pebble; others, such as those in Ayers Rock, are larger than a car. Water vents are quite different from the shallow and smooth bowl-like depressions frequently found on the tops of liquefaction mounds. Wind and rain erosion produced those depressions.

Figure 103: Medium-Size Water Vents. If these holes were places where rock was weakly cemented, similar holes should be on the tops of mounds. Instead, the tops are smooth. Cementing in mounds and cross-bedded sandstone is remarkably uniform and hard, showing that the cement was uniformly dissolved throughout water that saturated the sand.

Liquefaction mounds have holes in their sides showing where water escaped soon after the mounds “erupted.” The channels from which water exited have collapsed except near the mound’s surface where there was much less collapsing stress. Those holes now look like pock marks. Some have claimed they are erosion features from wind and rain. Obviously, wind and rain would smooth out pock marks, not make them. Besides, these “pock marks,” which will be called water vents, are found only in the sides of mounds, not the tops, where they should be if outside erosion formed them.

Long after the flood, water would drain out of mountains and cliffs. Caves would be carved by outward flowing water. New inhabitants to an area would naturally seek out and settle around these plentiful sources of drinking water. (Thus, many ancient cultures believed that water originated in mountains and issued out of caves.)25 Years later, as water sources dwindled, communities would be forced to leave. Prosperous cultures, such as the Anasazi and many cliff-dwellers, would suddenly disappear from an area, causing anthropologists to wonder if disease, war, famine, or drought destroyed those ancient communities.

Figure 104: White Cliffs. An extensive layer of limestone is exposed on both sides of the English Channel: in the cliffs of Normandy, France (top) and the White Cliffs of Dover, England (bottom). This 600–1,000-foot layer extends under the Channel and into England and France. Was this region, and others like it, a shallow sea that slowly accumulated limestone or did the limestone come from subterranean water chambers? Answering this question will provide insight on the geologic history of the entire earth.

The Origin of Limestone

SUMMARY: Too much limestone exists on earth to have been formed, as evolutionists claim, by present processes such as from shelled creatures and corals. Most limestone was deposited as the subterranean water violently escaped to the earth’s surface during the flood. Simultaneously, fresh carbon, needed to rapidly reestablish plant life buried during the flood, was released into the biosphere.

Limestone,1 sometimes called calcium carbonate (CaCO3), accounts for 10–15% of all sedimentary rock.2 Any satisfactory explanation for sedimentary layers and the world’s fossils they contain must also explain the enclosed limestone layers and limestone cement. This requires answering two questions—rarely asked and perhaps never before answered.

* What is the origin of the earth’s limestone? Remarkably, earth’s limestone holds a thousand times more calcium and carbon than today’s atmosphere, oceans, coal, oil, and living matter combined. A simple, visual examination of limestone grains shows that few are ground-up sea shells or corals, as some believe.
* How were sediments cemented to form rocks? Specifically, how were large quantities of cementing agents (usually limestone and silica) produced, transported, and deposited, often quite uniformly, between sedimentary grains worldwide?

Answering these questions in the context of the hydroplate theory will answer another question: What was the source of the carbon dioxide (CO2) needed to reestablish vegetation after the flood? Remember, preflood vegetation was buried during the flood, most of it becoming our coal, oil, and methane deposits.

Limestone Chemistry. Limestone, often difficult to identify by sight, is quickly identified with the “acid test.” If a drop of any acid, such as vinegar, is placed on limestone or a rock containing limestone, it will fizz. The acid combines with the limestone to release fizzing bubbles of CO2 gas. As you will see, limestone and CO2 gas are intimately related.

Another common chemical reaction involving limestone begins when CO2 dissolves in water, forming a weak acid (carbonic acid). If that slightly acidic solution seeps through ground containing limestone, limestone will dissolve until the excess CO2 is consumed. If that solution then seeps into a cave, evaporation and loss of CO2 will reverse the reaction and precipitate limestone, often forming spectacular stalactites and stalagmites.

A third example of this basic reaction is “acid rain.” With the increase in atmospheric CO2 in recent decades, especially downwind from coal-burning power plants, CO2 dissolves in rain forming “acid rain.” Acid rain can harm vegetation and a region’s ecology if not neutralized, for example by coming in contact with limestone.

Finally, limestone sometimes precipitates along the coasts of some eastern Caribbean islands, making their normally clear coastal waters suddenly cloudy white. Studies of this phenomenon have shown that limestone precipitates when CO2 suddenly escapes from carbonate-saturated ground water near the beach.3

To summarize, when liquid water [H2O (l)] containing dissolved (or aqueous) CO2 [CO2(aq)] comes in contact with solid limestone [CaCO3(s)], the limestone dissolves and the chemical reaction moves to the right. Conversely, for every 44 grams of CO2 that escape the solution, 100 grams of limestone precipitate and the reaction moves back to the left. Little temperature change occurs with either reaction.4

A Scenario. Let’s suppose that before the flood the subterranean chamber contained some CO2 and a large amount of limestone, perhaps lining the chamber’s walls. Any gaseous CO2 was quickly “squeezed” into solution by the great pressure from the weight of the crust above the chamber. The subterranean water therefore was acidic, and some of the solid limestone dissolved until the available CO2 was consumed in the reaction written above.

As this subterranean water escaped to the earth’s surface during the flood, the water’s pressure dropped drastically, so CO2 gas and microscopic, milky-white particles of limestone came out of solution. The escaping water scoured out the relatively soft limestone. Considerable CO2 entered the atmosphere, and tiny limestone particles spread throughout the flood waters.

Superimposed on this general pressure decrease were extreme pressure fluctuations from waves and water-hammer action. [See page 222.] Within each tiny volume of liquid, limestone could precipitate as the pressure dropped. An instant later, a nearby pressure jump dissolved even solid chunks of limestone brought up from the subterranean chamber. The turbulent conditions caused carbon to jump back and forth from one side of the above equation to the other. Therefore, fine particles of limestone were precipitated throughout the escaping flood waters.

Limestone’s solubility in the escaping water also decreased, because the water’s pressure dropped enormously. Therefore, some limestone precipitated without releasing CO2. Later, liquefaction sorted all precipitated particles into more uniform layers of limestone. [See pages 158–168.]

Surface waters, especially oceans, are huge reservoirs of CO2. Oceans, lakes, rivers, and ground water hold 50 times more CO2 than our atmosphere. Any excess CO2 entering the atmosphere eventually causes CO2 elsewhere to dissolve in surface waters. In other words, a steady-state equilibrium (i.e., an approximate balance) exists between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and in surface waters.

Sediments, eroded during the initial stages of the flood, settled through the flood waters all over the earth. After most of these waters drained into the newly formed ocean basins, limy (alkaline) water filled and slowly migrated through pore spaces between sedimentary particles.

Plentiful amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere after the flood provided the necessary “food” to help reestablish earth’s plants, including forests. As plants grew and removed CO2 from the atmosphere, surface waters released additional CO2, thereby precipitating more limestone. Limestone that precipitated between loose sedimentary grains cemented them together into rocks.

Tiny particles of precipitated limestone are excellent cementing agents when near-saturation conditions exist. Smaller and more irregular particles of limestone readily dissolve; larger particles grow, sealing cracks and gaps. Precipitation within a closely packed bed of sediments (cementation) occurs more readily than precipitation outside the bed.

Nine observations explained by this scenario:

1. Volcanic Gases. Approximately 20% of all volcanic gases, by volume, is CO2, and 70% is steam.5 This water and CO2 are probably remnants of the subterranean water. If not, what could possibly be the source of the carbon? Carbon is rarely found in basement or igneous rocks.

2. Carbon Distribution. Could today’s surface waters have always been at the earth’s surface while the earth’s limestone slowly precipitated? Not based on the surprising distribution of carbon on earth. Table 6 shows that much more carbon exists in limestone than in all other sources combined.

Here is the problem. The chemical equation on page 170 shows that for every carbon atom precipitated in limestone, a carbon atom is released in CO2. Had all limestone slowly precipitated in surface waters, as much carbon would have been released into the atmosphere as CO2 as was precipitated as limestone. Limestone contains more than 60,000,000 x 1015 grams of carbon. That amount of carbon in the atmosphere and seas would have made them toxic thousand of times over. Today, the atmosphere and seas contain only (720 + 37,400) x 1015 grams of carbon.

How did all of today’s limestone get here? As each molecule of CO2 was released into the escaping flood waters, a molecule of limestone precipitated. That CO2 molecule, driven by large, rapid pressure fluctuations, cycled many times between dissolving and precipitating limestone. Much of the solid limestone in the subterranean chamber before the flood was dissolved and precipitated as the water escaped. In the end, the atmosphere gained enough CO2 to bring the total carbon in the biosphere up to today’s level of (720 + 2,000 + 37,400) x 1015 grams.

Some limestone must also have come from shallow, preflood sea bottoms, because today limestone deposits often contain abundant fossils of corals, crinoids, bryozoans, and foraminifers. These shallow-water animals must have lived before the flood in the presence of limestone. During the flood, that limestone was eroded, transported, and deposited with those animals entombed.

Figure 105: Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. “... one of the most controversial points is how long it takes for a cave such as S.P. [Kartchner Caverns in Arizona] to form. What geologists used to believe was fact, in terms of dating a cave, now is speculation, [cave expert, Jerry] Trout says. ... From 1924 to 1988, there was a visitor’s sign above the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns that said Carlsbad was at least 260 million years old. ... In 1988, the sign was changed to read 7 to 10 million years old. Then, for a little while, the sign read that it was 2 million years old. Now the sign is gone. In short, he says, geologists don’t know how long cave development takes. And, while some believe that cave decorations such as S.P.’s beautiful icicle-looking stalactites take years to form, Trout says that through photo-monitoring, he has watched a stalactite grow several inches in a matter of days.” 7

3. Rapid Stalactite and Stalagmite Formation. Frequently the claim is made that stalactites and stalagmites required millions of years to form. More and more people recognize that this conclusion assumes these limestone formations always grew at today’s extremely slow rate. [See Figure 27 on page 32 and Figure 105.] Under favorable physical and chemical conditions common after the flood, huge stalactites and stalagmites can grow rapidly.

Acidic ground water, more plentiful than ever in the centuries after the flood, frequently seeped into cracks in limestone rocks, dissolved limestone, and formed underground caverns. As ventilation in caverns improved and plant growth removed CO2 from the atmosphere, CO2 escaped from this ground water. Large quantities of limestone precipitated, rapidly forming stalactites and stalagmites worldwide.

4. Organic Limestone. Shallow-water organisms, such as corals, shelled creatures, and some types of algae, remove dissolved limestone from seawater to build hard body parts. (The more abundant the dissolved limestone, the faster the growth rates. Thus, coral growth rates were much higher after the flood.) Because some organisms produce limestone, evolutionists conclude that almost all limestone came from organisms, and hundreds of millions of years are needed to explain thick deposits of limestone. Instead, organic limestone is a result of inorganic limestone, not its cause. Inorganic limestone precipitated rapidly from the subterranean water released during the flood. Surface waters could not have held the 60,000,000 x 1015 grams of carbon needed to produce today’s limestone without making them hundreds of times too toxic for sea life to exist.

We can reject in two other ways the common belief that most limestone has an organic origin. Wave action and predators can fragment shells and other hard parts of marine organisms. However, as fragments become smaller, it is more difficult to break them into smaller pieces. With increasingly smaller pieces, the forces required to break them again become unreasonably large before the pieces reach the size of typical limestone grains.

Finally, organic limestone is structurally different and more intricate than inorganic limestone. Organic limestone crystals are more uniformly sized, oriented, and packaged—characteristics now detectable with high magnification.8 Earth’s vast limestone layers are overwhelmingly inorganic.

In summary, immense amounts of limestone precipitated rapidly during the flood. Seawater contains dissolved inorganic limestone. Corals and shelled creatures take in these dissolved chemicals and produce intricate organic limestone.

Figure 106: Redwall Limestone Exposed in and around the Grand Canyon. Stained red from iron oxide impurities, the 400-feet-thick Redwall Limestone extends over most of northern Arizona. If it formed in a shallow sea (25–50 feet deep), how did such great thicknesses develop? How could another famous limestone formation, the 6-mile-thick Bahamas Bank, form?

5. Thick Limestone Banks. Scattered off the east coast of the United States are thick limestone deposits. Most dramatic is the Bahamas Bank, an area 250 by 800 miles, where “seismic evidence suggests that carbonate strata may extend down as far as 10 kilometers [6 miles].”9

If limestone formed organically in shallow seas (the prevailing view), why would the seafloor slowly subside almost 6 miles to allow these accumulations? Subsidence rates would have to be just right for the millions of years needed for organisms to grow and accumulate to such depths. Besides, the seafloor cannot subside unless the rock below it gets out of the way. That rock would have nowhere to go.

Apparently, the flood waters escaping from under the eastern edge of the North American hydroplate dumped limestone there.10 Similarly, waters escaping from under the western edge of the European hydroplate may have dumped the soft, fine-grained type of limestone known as chalk. Most famous are the exposed layers in England’s White Cliffs of Dover and France’s coast of Normandy. [See Figure 104 on page 169.] While chalk contains a few organic remains, most of it is inorganic.11

6. Dolomite. If a microscopic limestone crystal grows in a magnesium-rich solution, magnesium ions will, under certain conditions, occupy or replace exactly half the calcium ion locations in limestone, forming a common mineral called dolomite.

Geologists frequently refer to “the dolomite problem.” Why is it a problem? Dolomite is not secreted by any known organism. If organisms deposited almost all limestone over hundreds of millions of years, how did dolomite form?

Dolomite is frequently found in contact with limestone and is strangely distributed on earth. It has hardly ever formed in recent times.12 Therefore, magnesium-rich solutions must have been much more abundant when older rocks were deposited.[See Table 7.]

Some geologists reject precipitation of dolomite, because of “the great thicknesses of dolomite rock that are found in the geologic record.”13 Others say that a lot of magnesium-rich water trickled through limestone, but that raises even more problems. How did it trickle so uniformly through such great depths? Why would this “trickling” happen so often near limestone—and primarily in the ancient past? What was the source of the magnesium?

Magnesium ions may have been in the subterranean water, or dolomite and other minerals containing magnesium may have been in the subterranean chamber. Another possibility is that the magnesium came from the chamber floor itself, because basalt contains large amounts of magnesium. In any of these cases, the presence of dolomite near limestone and the even distribution of magnesium throughout what would otherwise be limestone becomes easily understood.

7. Worldwide Cement. Evolutionists believe that most limestone was produced organically in shallow seas, because corals and shelled creatures live in shallow seas, which are generally warmer and have higher evaporation rates. With greater evaporation, the remaining solution is more likely to reach concentrations whereby organisms can produce shells and other forms of limestone.

Organic limestone is primarily produced within 30 degrees of the equator. However, limestone layers and cement are not concentrated near the equator. Rocks are just as likely to be held together with limestone cement at all latitudes. Obviously, whatever produced limestone was global in scope.

8. Silica. After limestone, silica (SiO2) is the second most common cementing agent in rocks. Derived from quartz, silica dissolves only 6 parts per million in pure water at 77°F (25°C). As temperatures rise, more silica goes into solution. At 300°F (150°C), silica concentrations reach 140 parts per million. If a silica-rich solution occupied the pore space between sand grains, silica would precipitate on their solid surfaces as the water cooled, cementing loose grains into rocks.

Only under high pressure can water reach such high temperatures. The hydroplate theory shows how both high temperature and pressure conditions existed at various locations and times during the flood. Frictional sliding of deep rock surfaces generated enormous heat which melted rock, forming magma. These hot surfaces heated deep, high-pressure water containing abundant quartz grains.

Sediments often fell through silica-rich water. Therefore, the cementing solution was frequently in place between deposited sedimentary particles. It is difficult to imagine another scenario in which so much superheated liquid water could dissolve silica, distribute silica-rich solutions worldwide, and then, before they cooled, force them down into sediments where cementing could occur.

Figure 107: Broken Logs in Arizona’s Petrified Forest. How could a petrified log break this way? To petrify, a log must be saturated with silica-rich solutions, probably in a large lake. For a log to snap this cleanly, it must have been petrified before it broke. Being petrified and dense, it would have rested on the lake floor before it broke. For the log to break into many pieces that later reorient themselves, a sharp, powerful blow must have acted on the entire log.

A heavy, petrified log lying on a lake floor seems unlikely to break into many pieces that are later reoriented. However, if the boundary of a large lake were breached, like the collapse of a dam, the lake’s waters would rush out in a torrent, carrying even sunken petrified logs for some distance. As a rapidly moving petrified (brittle) log “crashed” back onto the lake bottom, it would break up, much as an aircraft crashing in a field. Details of this event, which also formed the nearby Grand Canyon, are on page 119.

9. Petrified Forests. As the flood waters drained off the continents, continental basins became lakes. Trees floating in warm postflood lakes sometimes became saturated with silica-rich solutions. Petrification occurred as the water cooled and silica precipitated on cellulose surfaces. Petrification has been duplicated in the laboratory when silica concentrations reach 140 parts per million.15 Arizona’s famous Petrified Forest lies in the center of what was Hopi Lake, while the petrified logs in Utah’s Escalante Petrified Forest and along the Green River both lie in what was Grand Lake. (The sudden emptying of both lakes eroded the Grand Canyon.)

Final Thoughts

We have seen the consequences of the flood at the earth’s surface and below. In this chapter, we saw that earth’s vast limestone deposits are not adequately explained by evolutionary scenarios, but are best explained by the hydroplate theory.

In the next few chapters, we will look far above and see in many ways that the fountains of the great deep—powerful beyond description—expelled muddy water and rocks far into outer space. Some of those rocks, called meteorites, have since fallen back to earth. Those that were in contact with the subterranean water before the flood contain traces of the substances dissolved in that water. Some even contain small quantities of the liquid water and limestone. [See “Meteorites Return Home” on page 249.]

Up until the last few years, meteorites were mishandled in the laboratory, so these traces were lost. Sadly, meteorites were cut open using saws lubricated and cooled by water. The water redissolved the chemical traces in the meteorite and carried them down the drain.

In 2000, a meteorite was discovered containing traces of many salts found in our oceans. As one authority stated, “The salts we found mimic the salts in Earth’s ocean fairly closely.”16 Actually, there was one big difference; limestone traces were a hundred times more abundant than expected.17 Again, this shows that most limestone came from the subterranean water chamber.

Incidentally, some claim this meteorite was from Mars. Before you accept that assertion, please read “Are Some Meteorites from Mars?” on page 248. The so-called “Martian meteorites” all “show evidence of being subjected to liquid water containing carbonate, sulfate, and chloride ...”18 Therefore, rather than coming from Mars, they may have been part of the rock in direct contact with the subterranean water before the flood.

Communications with Dr. C. Stuart Patterson (Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus) have been extremely helpful in developing many ideas in this chapter.

Figure 108: Berezovka Mammoth. This is the most famous of all mammoths, the frozen Berezovka mammoth. He is displayed in the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the struggling position in which he was found near Siberia’s Berezovka River, just inside the Arctic Circle. His trunk and much of his head, reconstructed in this display, had been eaten by predators before scientists arrived in 1901. After a month of excavation, ten pony-drawn sleds hauled most of his cut-up carcass more than 2,000 miles south to the Trans-Siberian Railroad. From there he was taken to St. Petersburg’s Zoological Museum, today’s leading institution for studying frozen mammoths. The handle (extreme bottom center) of the shovel used in the excavation provides the scale. Inches above the handle is Berezovka’s gotcha10, flattened like a long tail of a beaver. While in the museum, I saw this reproductive organ’s condition and realized it helps explain how Berezovka and other frozen mammoths died.

Figure 109: Dima, Baby Mammoth. In 1977, the first of two complete baby mammoths was found—a 6–12-month-old male named “Dima.” His flattened, emaciated, but well-preserved body was enclosed in a lens of ice, 6 feet below the surface of a gentle mountainous slope.1 “Portions of the ice were clear and others quite brownish yellow with mineral and organic particles.”2 Silt, clay, and small particles of gravel were found throughout his digestive and respiratory tracts (trachea, bronchi, and lungs). These details are important clues in understanding frozen mammoths.

Because most mammoths were fat and well fed, Dima may have suffered before death from one of the many problems common to baby elephants. Within their first year of life, 5–36% of elephants die.3

Frozen Mammoths

SUMMARY: Muddy water from the fountains of the great deep went above the atmosphere where it froze into extremely cold hail. Within hours, mammoths, that cannot live in Arctic climates or at Arctic latitudes, were buried alive and quickly frozen as this muddy hail fell back to earth in a gigantic hail storm. (As Endnote 53 on page 128 explains, latitudes changed at the end of the flood.) Past attempts to explain the frozen mammoths ignore many established facts.

For centuries, stories have been told of frozen carcasses of huge, elephant-like animals called mammoths,4 buried in the tundra of northeastern Siberia.5 These mammoths, with curved tusks sometimes more than 13 feet long, were so fresh-looking that many believed they were simply large moles living underground. Some called them “ice-rats.”6 People thought that when mammoths surfaced and saw daylight, they died. Dr. Leopold von Schrenck, Chief of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg, Russia), published the following account in 1869: “The mammoth ... is a gigantic beast which lives in the depths of the earth, where it digs for itself dark pathways, and feeds on earth ... They account for its corpse being found so fresh and well preserved on the ground that the animal is still a living one.”7 Some even thought rapid tunneling by mammoths produced earthquakes.8

This was an early explanation for the frozen mammoths. As people learned other strange details, theories multiplied. Unfortunately, theories that explained some details could not explain others. Some proposed explanations, such as the one above, appear ludicrous today.

To learn what froze the mammoths, we must first understand much of what is known about them. This is summarized immediately below. From this summary we will distill the key details requiring an explanation. Then we will examine nine proposed theories. Initially, many may seem plausible, but their flaws will become apparent when we systematically compare how effectively they explain each detail. We will see that the hydroplate theory, summarized on pages 102–131, best explains all details.

General Description

What is Found. Since 1800, at least 11 scientific expeditions have excavated fleshy remains of extinct mammoths.9 Most fleshy remains were buried in the permafrost of northern Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle. Six were found in Alaska. Only a few complete carcasses have been discovered. Usually, wild animals had eaten the exposed parts before scientists arrived.

If we look in the same region for frozen soft tissue of other animals, we learn that several rhinoceroses have been found, some remarkably preserved. (Table 8 on page 179 summarizes 58 reported mammoth and rhinoceros discoveries.) Other fleshy remains come from a horse,10 a young musk ox,11 a wolverine,12 voles,13 squirrels, a bison,14 a rabbit, and a lynx.15

If we now look for the bones and ivory of mammoths, not just preserved flesh, the number of discoveries becomes enormous, especially in Siberia and Alaska. Nikolai Vereshchagin, Chairman of the Russian Academy of Science’s Committee for the Study of Mammoths, estimated that more than half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along a 600 mile stretch of the Arctic coast.16 Because the typical tusk weighs 100 pounds, this implies that more than 5 million mammoths lived in this small region. Even if this estimate is high or represents thousands of years of accumulation, we can see that large herds of mammoths must have thrived along what is now the Arctic coast. Mammoth bones and ivory are also found throughout Europe, North and Central Asia, and in North America, as far south as Mexico City.

Dense concentrations of mammoth bones, tusks, and teeth are also found on remote Arctic islands. Obviously, today’s water barriers were not always there. Many have described these mammoth remains as the main substance of the islands.25 What could account for any concentration of bones and ivory on barren islands well inside the Arctic Circle? Also, more than 200 mammoth molars were dredged up with oysters from the Dogger Bank in the North Sea.26

Throughout northern Europe, Asia, and parts of North America, we see bones of many other animals along with those of mammoths. A partial listing includes: tiger,27 antelope,28 camel, horse, reindeer, giant beaver, giant ox, musk sheep, musk ox, donkey, badger, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, fox, giant bison, lynx, leopard, wolverine, Arctic hare, lion, elk, giant wolf, ground squirrel, cave hyena, bear, and many types of birds. Friend and foe, as well as young and old, are found together. Carnivores are sometimes buried with herbivores. Were their deaths related? Rarely are animal bones preserved. Preservation of so many different types of animal bones suggests a common explanation.

Finally, corings, 100 feet into Siberia’s permafrost, have recovered sediments mixed with ancient DNA of mammoths, bison, horses, other temperate animals, and the lush vegetation they require. Nearer the surface, these types of DNA are absent, but DNA of meager plants able to live there today are present.29 The climate must have suddenly and permanently changed to what it is today.

Mammoth Characteristics and Environment. The common misconception that mammoths lived in areas of extreme cold comes primarily from popular drawings of mammoths living comfortably in snowy, Arctic regions. The artists, in turn, were influenced by earlier opinions based on the mammoth’s hairy coat, thick skin, and a 3.5-inch layer of fat under the skin. However, animals with these characteristics do not necessarily live in cold climates. Let’s examine these characteristics more closely.

Hair. The mammoth’s hairy coat no more implies an Arctic adaptation than a woolly coat does for a sheep. The mammoth lacked erector muscles that fluff up an animal’s fur and create insulating air pockets. Neuville, who conducted the most detailed study of mammoth skin and hair, wrote: “It appears to me impossible to find, in the anatomical examination of the skin and [hair], any argument in favor of adaptation to the cold.”30 Long hair on a mammoth’s legs hung to its toes.31 Had it walked in snow, snow and ice would have caked on its hairy “ankles.” Each step into and out of snow would have pulled or worn away the “ankle” hair. All hoofed animals living in the Arctic, including the musk ox, have fur, not hair, on their legs.32 Fur, especially oily fur, holds a thick layer of stagnant air (an excellent insulator) between the snow and skin. With the mammoth’s greaseless hair, much more snow would touch the skin, melt, and increase the heat transfer 10–100 fold. Later refreezing would seriously harm the animal.

Skin. Mammoth and elephant skin are similar in thickness and structure.33 Both lack oil glands, making them vulnerable to cold, damp climates. Arctic mammals have both oil glands and erector muscles—equipment absent in mammoths.34

Fat. Some animals living in temperate zones, such as the rhinoceros, have thick layers of fat, while many Arctic animals, such as reindeer and caribou, have little fat. Thick layers of fat under the skin simply show that food was plentiful. Abundant food implies a temperate climate.

Elephants. The elephant—a close approximation to the mammoth35—lives in tropical or temperate regions, not the Arctic. It requires “a climate that ranges from warm to very hot,” and “it gets a stomach ache if the temperature drops close to freezing.”36 Newborn elephants are susceptible to pneumonia and must be kept warm and dry.37 Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with 37 elephants, lost all but one due to cold weather.38

Water. If mammoths lived in an Arctic climate, their drinking water in the winter must have come from eating snow or ice. A wild elephant requires 30–60 gallons of water each day.39 The heat needed to melt snow or ice and warm it to body temperature would consume about half a typical elephant’s calories. Unlike other Arctic animals, the trunk would bear much of this thermal stress. Nursing elephants require about 25% more water.

Salt. How would a mammoth living in an Arctic climate satisfy its large salt appetite? Elephants dig for salt using their sharp tusks.40 In rock-hard permafrost this would be almost impossible, summer or winter, especially with the curved tusks of the mammoth.

Nearby Plants and Animals. The easiest and most accurate way to determine an extinct animal’s or plant’s environment is to identify familiar animals and plants buried nearby. For the mammoth, this includes rhinoceroses, tigers, bison, horses, antelope,41 and temperate species of grasses. All live in warm climates. Some burrowing animals are frozen, such as voles, who would not burrow in rock-hard permafrost. Even larvae of the warble fly have been found in a frozen mammoth’s intestine—larvae identical to those found in tropical elephants today.42 No one argues that animals and plants buried near the mammoths were adapted to the Arctic. Why do so for mammoths?

Temperature. The average January temperature in northeastern Siberia is about -28°F, 60°F below freezing! During the Ice Age, it was colder. The long, slender trunk of the mammoth was particularly vulnerable to cold weather. A six-foot-long nose could not survive even one cold night, let alone an eight-month-long Siberian winter. For the more slender trunk of a young mammoth, the heat loss would be deadly. An elephant usually dies if its trunk is seriously injured.43

Cold temperatures today are one problem, but six months of little sunlight during Arctic winters is quite another. While some claim that mammoths were adapted to the cold environment of Alaska and Siberia, vegetation, adapted or not, does not grow during the months-long Arctic night. In those regions today, vegetation is covered by snow and ice ten months each year. Mammoths had to eat—voraciously. Elephants in the wild spend about 16 hours a day foraging for food in relatively lush environments, summer and winter.45

Sudden Freezing and Rapid Burial. Before examining other facts, we can see three curious problems. First, northern Siberia today is cold, dry, and desolate. How could millions of mammoths and many other animals feed themselves? But if their surroundings were more temperate and moist, why did the climate change?

Second, the well-preserved mammoths and rhinoceroses must have been completely frozen soon after death or their soft internal parts would have quickly decomposed. Guthrie has written that an unopened animal continues to decompose long after a fresh kill, even in very cold temperatures, because its internal heat can sustain microbial and enzyme activity as long as the carcass is completely covered with an insulating pelt.46 Because mammoths had such large reservoirs of body heat, the freezing temperatures must have been extremely low.

Finally, their bodies were buried and protected from predators, including birds and insects. Such burials could not have occurred if the ground were perpetually frozen as it is today. Again, this implies a major climate change, but now we can see that it must have changed dramatically and suddenly. How were these huge animals quickly frozen and buried—almost exclusively in muck, a dark soil containing decomposed animal and vegetable matter?

Muck. Muck is a major geological mystery. It covers one-seventh of the earth’s land surface—all surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Muck occupies treeless, generally flat terrain, with no surrounding mountains from which the muck could have eroded. Russian geologists have in some places drilled through 4,000 feet of muck without hitting solid rock. Where did so much eroded material come from? What eroded it?

Oil prospectors, drilling through Alaskan muck, have “brought up an 18-inch-long chunk of tree trunk from almost 1,000 feet below the surface. It wasn’t petrified—just frozen.”47 The nearest forests are hundreds of miles away. Williams describes similar discoveries in Alaska:

Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface at Prudhoe Bay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this area they discovered an ancient tropical forest. It was in frozen state, not in petrified state. It is between 1,100 and 1,700 feet down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each other, just as though they had fallen in that position.48

How were trees buried under a thousand feet of hard, frozen ground? We are faced with the same series of questions we first saw with the frozen mammoths. Again, it seems there was a sudden and dramatic change in climate accompanied by rapid burial in muck, now frozen solid.

Figure 111: Fossil Forest, New Siberian Islands. Vast, floating remains of forests have washed up on the New Siberian Islands, well inside the Arctic Circle and thousands of miles from comparable forests today. This driftwood was washed ashore on Bolshoi Lyakhov Island, one of the New Siberian Islands. The wood was probably buried under the muck that covers northern Siberia. North flowing Siberian rivers, during early summer flooding, eroded the muck, releasing the buried forests. “Fossil wood,” as it is called, is a main source of fuel and building material for many Siberians.

Figure 112: Fossil Forest, Kolyma River. Here, driftwood is at the mouth of the Kolyma River, on the northern coast of Siberia. Today, no trees of this size grow along the Kolyma. Leaves, and even fruit (plums), have been found on such floating trees.44 One would not expect to see leaves and fruit if these trees had been carried far by rivers.

The Benkendorf Mammoth.52 In May 1846, a surveyor named Benkendorf and his party camped along Siberia’s Indigirka River. The spring thaw and unusually heavy rains caused the swollen river to erode a new channel. Benkendorf noticed a large object bobbing slowly in the water. As the “black, horrible, giantlike mass was thrust out of the water [they] beheld a colossal elephant’s head, armed with mighty tusks, with its long trunk moving in an unearthly manner, as though seeking something lost therein.” They tried to pull the mammoth to shore with ropes and chains but soon realized that its hind legs were anchored, actually frozen, in the river bottom in a standing position.

Twenty-four hours later, the river bottom thawed and eroded, freeing the mammoth. A team of 50 men and their horses pulled the mammoth onto dry land, 12 feet from shore. The 13-foot-tall, 15-foot-long beast was fat and perfectly preserved. Its “widely opened eyes gave the animal an appearance of life, as though it might move in a moment and destroy [them] with a roar.” They removed the tusks and opened its full stomach containing “young shoots of the fir and pine; and a quantity of young fir cones, also in a chewed state ...” Hours later and without warning, the river bank collapsed, because the river had slowly undercut the bank. The mammoth was carried off toward the Arctic Ocean, never to be seen again.

The Berezovka Mammoth. The most famous, accessible, and studied mammoth is a 50-year-old53 male, found in a freshly eroded bank, 100 feet above Siberia’s Berezovka River in 1900. A year later an expedition, led by Dr. Otto F. Herz, painstakingly excavated the frozen body and transported it to the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.54 [See Figure 108 on page 177.]

Berezovka was upright, although his back was excessively humped and his straightened hind legs were rotated forward at the hips into an almost horizontal position. This strange, contorted position was further exaggerated by his raised and spread front legs. Several ribs, a shoulder blade, and pelvis were broken.55 Amazingly, the long bone in his right foreleg was crushed into about a dozen pieces, without noticeably damaging surrounding tissue.56 His shaggy, wirelike hair, some of it 20 inches long, was largely intact.57 His erect gotcha10 was horizontally flattened.58 (This organ in an elephant is round, S-shaped, and never horizontal.)59

What can we conclude from these unusual details? To crush a slender rod, which the long leg bones resemble, requires axial compression while the rod (or bone) is encased in some material that prevents bending and snapping. To demonstrate this, place a long, straight stick vertically on a table and see how difficult it is to compress and break it into a dozen or so pieces. Instead, it will snap at the weakest point. If the stick has a slight bend, as do the long leg bones, crushing becomes almost impossible. Something must prevent the stick or bone from bending as the compressive load is applied. Evidently, Berezovka’s leg bone was severely compressed along its length while encased in some fairly rigid medium.60

Slow suffocation of males can produce penile erection.61 Tolmachoff concluded that, “The death [of Berezovka] by suffocation is proved by the erected male genital, a condition inexplicable in any other way.”62 But why was the gotcha10 horizontally flattened? It had to be pressed between two horizontal surfaces, one of which was probably his abdomen. Again, considerable vertical compression must have acted throughout some medium that encased the entire body.

Suffocation is also implied with four other frozen giants in this region. Vollosovitch (Table 8) concluded that his second buried mammoth, found with a penile erection on Bolshoi Lyakhov Island, also suffocated.63 A third example is provided by Dima, whose “pulmonary alveoli suggested death by asphyxia” after “great exertion just before death.”64 The Pallas rhinoceros also showed symptoms of asphyxiation.

The blood-vessels and even the fine capillaries were seen to be filled with brown coagulated blood, which, in many places still preserved its red colour. This is exactly the kind of evidence we look for when we want to know whether an animal has been drowned or suffocated. Asphyxia is always accompanied by the gorging of the capillaries with blood.65

Von Schrenck’s rhinoceros was found with expanded nostrils and an open mouth. Investigators concluded, “that the animal died from suffocation, which it tried to avoid by keeping the nostrils wide asunder.”66 In all, three mammoths and two rhinoceroses apparently suffocated. No other cause of death has been shown for the remaining frozen giants.67

Sanderson describes another strange aspect of Berezovka.

Much of the head, which was sticking out of the bank, had been eaten down to the bone by local wolves and other animals, but most of the rest was perfect. Most important, however, was that the lips, the lining of the mouth and the tongue were preserved. Upon the last, as well as between the teeth, were portions of the animal’s last meal, which for some almost incomprehensible reason it had not had time to swallow. The meal proved to have been composed of delicate sedges and grasses ...68

Another account states that the mammoth’s “mouth was filled with grass, which had been cropped, but not chewed and swallowed.”69 The grass froze so rapidly that it still had “the imprint of the animal’s molars.”70 Hapgood’s translation of a Russian report mentions eight well-preserved bean pods and five beans found in its mouth.71

Twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetation were removed from the Berezovka mammoth and analyzed by Russian scientist, V. N. Sukachev. He identified more than 40 different species of plants: herbs, grasses, mosses, shrubs, and tree leaves. Many no longer grow that far north; others grow both in Siberia and as far south as Mexico. Dillow draws several conclusions from these remains:

* The presence of so many varieties [of plants] that generally grow much to the south indicates that the climate of the region was milder than that of today.
* The discovery of the ripe fruits of sedges, grasses, and other plants suggests that the mammoth died during the second half of July or the beginning of August.
* The mammoth must have been overwhelmed suddenly with a rapid deep freeze and instant death. The sudden death is proved by the unchewed bean pods still containing the beans that were found between its teeth, and the deep freeze is suggested by the well-preserved state of the stomach contents and the presence of edible meat [for wolves and dogs].72

At normal body temperatures, stomach acids and enzymes break down vegetable material within an hour. What inhibited this process? The only plausible explanation is for the stomach to cool to about 40°F in ten hours or less.73 But because the stomach is protected inside a warm body (96.6°F for elephants), how cold must the outside air become to drop the stomach’s temperature to 40°F? Experiments have shown that the outer layers of skin would have had to drop suddenly to at least -175°F!74

Independently, Sanderson concluded, “The flesh of many of the animals found in the muck must have been very rapidly and deeply frozen, for its cells [had] not burst75 ... Frozen-food experts have explained that to do this, starting with a healthy, live specimen, you must suddenly drop the temperature of the air surrounding it down to a point well below minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit.”76

The ice layer directly under the Berezovka mammoth contained some hair still attached to his body. Below his right forefoot was “the end of a very hairy tail ... of a bovine animal, probably [a] bison.”77 Also under the body were “the right forefoot and left hind foot of a reindeer ... The whole landslide on the Berezovka [River] was the richest imaginable storehouse of prehistoric remains.”78 In the surrounding, loamy soil was an antelope skull,79 “the perfectly preserved upper skull of a prehistoric horse to which fragments of muscular fibre still adhered,”80 tree trunks, tree fragments, and roots.81 This vegetation differed from the amazingly well-preserved plants in the mammoth’s mouth and stomach.

Geographical Extent. We should also notice the broad geographical extent over which these strange events occurred. [See map on page 178.] They were probably not separate, unrelated events. As Sir Henry Howorth stated:

The instances of the soft parts of the great pachyderms being preserved are not mere local and sporadic ones, but they form a long chain of examples along the whole length of Siberia, from the Urals to the land of the Chukchis [the Bering Strait], so that we have to do here with a condition of things which prevails, and with meteorological conditions that extend over a continent.

When we find such a series ranging so widely preserved in the same perfect way, and all evidencing a sudden change of climate from a comparatively temperate one to one of great rigour, we cannot help concluding that they all bear witness to a common event. We cannot postulate a separate climate cataclysm for each individual case and each individual locality, but we are forced to the conclusion that the now permanently frozen zone in Asia became frozen at the same time from the same cause.82

Actually, northern portions of Asia, Europe, and North America contain “the remains of extinct species of the elephant [mammoth] and rhinoceros, together with those of horses, oxen, deer, and other large quadrupeds.”83 So the event may have been even more widespread than Howorth believed.

Rock Ice. In Alaska and Siberia, scientists have found a strange type of massive ice in and under the muck containing mammoth remains.84 Tolmachoff called it rock ice.85 Rock ice often has a yellow-tinge and contains round or elongated bubbles. Some bubbles are connected, while others, an inch or so long, are vertically streaked.86 When exposed to the Sun, rock ice, showed “a polyhedral, granular structure at the surface, and these granules could usually be easily rubbed off with the finger.”87 It looked “like compacted hail.”88 Mammoth remains have been found above, below, beside, partially in,89 and, in one case, within90 rock ice.

Horizontal layers of rock ice are most easily seen in bluffs along the Arctic coast and nearby rivers.91 Some subsurface ice layers are more than 2 miles long and 150 feet thick.92 A several-foot-thick layer of structureless clay or silt is sometimes above the rock ice. How was this clay or silt deposited? If it settled out of a lake or stream, as normally happens, it should have many thin layers, but it does not. Furthermore, the slow settling of clay and silt through water should provide enough time for the water to melt all the ice below. Sometimes rock ice contains plant particles93 and thin layers of sand or clay. Had the water frozen in a normal way, the dirt would have settled out and the vegetable matter would have floated upward. Obviously, this rock ice froze rapidly and was never part of a lake or stream.

Several feet beneath the Berezovka mammoth was a layer of rock ice, sloping more than 180 feet down to the river. Herz and Pfizenmayer,94 after digging into it, reported perhaps the strangest characteristic of rock ice.

Deeper down in the cliff the ice becomes more solid and transparent, in some places entirely white and brittle. After remaining exposed to the air even for a short time this ice again assumes a yellowish-brown color and then looks like the old ice.95

Obviously, something in the air (probably oxygen) reacted chemically with something in the ice. Why was air (primarily oxygen and nitrogen) not already dissolved in the ice? Just as liquid water dissolves table salt, sugar, and many other solids, water also dissolves gases in contact with it. For example, virtually all water and ice on earth are nearly saturated with air. Had air been dissolved in Herz’s rock ice before it suddenly turned yellowish-brown, the chemical reaction would have already occurred.

Table 9 compares the characteristics of rock ice with those of the three generic types of ice. A careful study of this table suggests that rock ice is a Type 3 ice. Because such thick layers of rock ice still exist, an enormous amount of water probably froze while moving through cold air or outer space.

Yedomas and Loess. In Siberia, frozen mammoths are frequently found in strange hills, 30–260 feet high, which Russian geologists call yedomas. For example, the mammoth cemetery, containing remains of 156 mammoths, was in a yedoma.96 [See line 49, Table 8, page 179.] It is known that these hills were formed under cold, windy conditions, because they are composed of a powdery, homogeneous soil, honeycombed with thick veins of ice. Sometimes the ice, which several Russian geologists have concluded was formed simultaneously with the soil, accounts for 90% of the yedoma’s volume.97 Some yedomas contain many broken trees “in the wildest disorder.”98 The natives call them “wood hills” and the buried trees “Noah’s wood.”99Yedoma soil is similar to muck.100 It contains tiny plant remains, is high in salt and carbonate,101 and has more than two and a half times the carbon that is in all the world’s tropical forests!102 The Berezovka mammoth was found in a similar soil.103

Figure 114: A Yedoma. These Siberian hills, called yedomas, are honeycombed with ice. The ice and soil layering seen within yedomas (for example, left of the man) suggests that high winds accompanied the deposition of the material. Remains of forests, mammoths, and other animals are frequently found in yedomas.

The ice and mud were not deposited as hills. Instead, they were deposited as one thick layer. Later, as the ice began to melt in spots, water collected in the depressions, accelerating the melting near them. What is now left, after thousands of years of summer melting, are these hills. Because some yedomas are 200 feet tall, the initial deposition in the windy environment was at least 200 feet thick.

This soil has been identified as loess104 (a German term, pronounced “LERSE”). Little is known about its origin. Most believe it is a windblown deposit spread under cold, glacial conditions over huge regions of the earth. However, Siberia was scarcely glaciated, and normal winds would deposit loess too slowly to protect so many frozen animals from predators. Loess often blankets formerly glaciated regions, such as Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Alaska. It lacks internal layering (stratification) and is found at all elevations—from just above sea level to hillsides at 8,000 feet elevation. Because loess is at many elevations and its tiny particles are not rounded by thousands of years of exposure to water and wind, some have proposed that loess came recently from outer space.105 Loess, a fertile soil rich in carbonates, has a yellow tinge caused by the oxidation of iron-bearing minerals since it was deposited.106 China’s Yellow River and Yellow Sea are so named because of the loess suspended in them. Why is there an apparent relationship between frozen mammoths, yedomas, and loess?

Figure 115: Extensive Loess Deposits. Another property of loess is its ability to maintain a vertical cliff. This is seen here in agricultural terraces in northern China, south of Huang Ho. Some historians have persuasively argued that the loess deposits helped establish early Chinese civilization, because the fertility of loess soil allows two and sometimes three crops a year—without fertilizers. Homes, even furniture, have been carved out of loess hillsides, sometimes 200 feet underground. Entire villages are cut into loess cliffs. Several million people have lived in loess dwellings. While such homes are cheap, insulated, militarily defensible, and may last for generations, they are unstable and dangerous. The 1920 Kansu earthquake, for example, resulted in 180,000 deaths, primarily from the collapse of loess dwellings.115

Conclusion. This brief survey raises several intriguing but perplexing problems. How could mammoths have lived at Arctic latitudes? What killed them, and how were they buried in such a peculiar manner? Some must have frozen within hours after their deaths, because significant decay or mutilation by scavengers did not occur. However, just before the mammoths were frozen, during that late summer or early fall, conditions in Siberia were not cold. What happened?

Evidence Requiring an Explanation

Summarized below are the hard-to-explain details which any satisfactory theory for the frozen mammoths should explain.

Abundant Food. A typical wild elephant requires about 330 pounds of food per day. Therefore, vast quantities of food were needed to support the estimated 5,000,000 mammoths that lived in just a small portion of northern Siberia. Adams’ mammoth, discovered in 1799, “was so fat ... that its belly hung below its knees.”107 How was abundant food available inside the Arctic Circle, especially during winter months when the Sun rarely shines?

Warm Climate. Abundant food requires a temperate climate—much warmer than northern Siberia today. Only a small percentage of the food found in Berezovka’s mouth and stomach grows near the Arctic Circle today. Furthermore, the flower fragments in its stomach show that it died during warm weather. Despite the popular misconception, the mammoth was a temperate—not an Arctic—animal.

Away From Rivers. Although most frozen remains are found along river banks where excavations occur naturally, some frozen remains are found far from rivers.

Yedomas and Loess. Frozen mammoths are frequently found in yedomas and loess. What accounts for this and the strange properties of yedomas and loess?

Elevated Burials. Mammoth and rhinoceros bodies are often found on the highest levels of generally flat, low plateaus.108 Examples include dense concentrations of mammoth and rhinoceros remains in yedomas and the interior of Arctic islands. Dima was discovered in a mountainous region.

Multi-Continental. Soft parts of large animals have been preserved over a 3,000-mile-wide zone spanning two continents. It is unlikely that many unrelated local events would produce such similar results over such a broad geographical area.

Rock Ice. Strange, granular ice containing clay, sand, and a large volume of air pockets is sometimes found near frozen mammoths. It apparently is a Type 3 ice. [See Table 9 on page 185.]

Frozen Muck. Mammoth carcasses are almost exclusively encased in frozen muck.109 Also buried in muck are huge deposits of trees and other animal and vegetable matter. The origin of muck is a mystery.

Sudden Freezing. Some frozen mammoths and rhinoceroses had food preserved in their mouths, stomachs, or intestines.110

Suffocation. At least three mammoths and two rhinoceroses suffocated. No other cause of death has been established for the remaining frozen giants.

Dirty Lungs. Dima’s digestive and respiratory tract contained silt, clay, and small particles of gravel. Evidently, soon before he died, Dima breathed air and/or ate food containing such matter.

-150°F. Temperatures surrounding some mammoths must have plunged below -150°F.

Large Animals. The frozen remains are usually of the larger, stronger animals such as mammoths and rhinoceroses.

Summer-Fall Death. Vegetation in the stomachs and intestines of preserved mammoths implies that they died in late summer or early fall,111 perhaps in August112 or even late July.113

Animal Mixes. Bones of many types of animals, friends and foes, are frequently found near the mammoths.

Upright. Several frozen mammoths, and even mammoth skeletons,114 were found upright. Despite this posture, the Berezovka mammoth had a broken pelvis and shoulder blade, and a crushed leg. Surprisingly, he was not lying on his side in a position of agony.

Vertical Compression. The crushed leg bone and horizontally flattened gotcha10 of the Berezovka mammoth show severe vertical compression after death. Dima was also compressed and flattened.

Seventeen pieces of the problem are now before us. Fitting this centuries-old jigsaw puzzle together will be the final task. As you will see, clever and imaginative proposals have been made, but most address only a few pieces of the frozen-mammoth puzzle.

What Happened?

Two strange, but admittedly secondary, reports may relate to the frozen-mammoth problem. Each is so surprising that one might dismiss it as a mistake or hoax, just as with any single report of a frozen and buried mammoth. However, because both reports are so similar yet originated from such different sources, it is probably best to reserve judgement. Each report was accepted as credible and published by an eminent scientific authority. Each involved the sudden freezing of a river in apparent defiance of the way bodies of water freeze. Each contained frozen animals in transparent ice, yet natural ice is rarely transparent. Each discovery was in a cold, remote part of the world. One was in the heart of Siberia’s frozen-mammoth country.

The brief reports will be given exactly as they were written and translated. The first was published by the former Soviet Academy of Sciences. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, recalled this report (as best he could remember it) in the first paragraph of his preface to The Gulag Archipelago. Unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn did not give the report’s date, so I began a difficult search. The report was finally located in Moscow’s Lenin State Library.

Y. N. Popov, author of this report, was discussing the scientific importance of finding mammals frozen in Siberia. He then described some frozen fish:

There are some cases of finds of not only dead mammals, but also fishes, unfortunately lost for science. In 1942, during road construction in the Liglikhtakha River valley (the Kolyma Basin) an explosion opened a subterranean lens of transparent ice encasing frozen specimens of some big fishes. Apparently the explosion opened an ancient river channel with representatives of the ancient ichthyological fauna [fish]. The superintendent of construction reported the fishes to be of amazing freshness, and the chunks of meat thrown out by the explosion were eaten by those present.118

The second report comes from M. Huc, a missionary traveler in Tibet in 1846. Sir Charles Lyell, often called the “father of geology,” also quoted this same story in the eleventh edition of his Principles of Geology. After many of Huc’s party had frozen to death, survivors pitched their tents on the banks of the Mouroui-Oussou (which lower down becomes the famous Blue River). Huc reported:

At the moment of crossing the Mouroui-Oussou, a singular spectacle presented itself. While yet in our encampment, we had observed at a distance some black shapeless objects ranged in file across the great river. No change either in form or distinctness was apparent as we advanced, nor was it till they were quite close that we recognized in them a troop of the wild oxen. There were more than fifty of them encrusted in the ice. No doubt they had tried to swim across at the moment of congelation [freezing], and had been unable to disengage themselves. Their beautiful heads, surmounted by huge horns, were still above the surface; but their bodies were held fast in the ice, which was so transparent that the position of the imprudent beasts was easily distinguishable; they looked as if still swimming, but the eagles and ravens had pecked out their eyes.124

Any explanation for these strange discoveries must recognize that streams freeze from the top down.125 The ice formed insulates the warmer liquid water below. The thicker the ice grows, the harder it is for the liquid’s heat to pass up through the ice layer and into the cold air. Freezing a stream fast enough to trap more than fifty upright oxen in the act of swimming across, seems impossible, especially because a stream’s velocity, and thus its tendency to freeze, varies considerably across its width. Freezing a river so fast that many large fish are frozen, edible, and underground, defies belief. However, the similarities with the frozen mammoths are so great that these reports may be related. A possible explanation will follow shortly.

Theories Attempting to Explain Frozen Mammoths

Nine theories have been proposed to explain the frozen-mammoth puzzle. Each will be described below as an advocate would.

Fruitful theories answer not only the obvious, initial questions but also solve perplexing and seemingly unrelated problems. As we unravel the frozen-mammoth mystery, we may answer broader questions and even uncover a sequence of dramatic, global events.

Robust theories also provide details that generate surprising and testable predictions. Keep this in mind as we examine all nine explanations. With each, ask yourself, “What predictions can this theory make?” If few predictions are forthcoming, the theory is probably weak.116 If theories could not be published unless they included numerous details and specific predictions, we would be mercifully spared many distractions and false ideas.

Hydroplate Theory. [For a more complete description of the hydroplate theory, read pages 102–131.] The rupture of the earth’s crust passed between what is now Alaska and Siberia in minutes. Jetting water from the “fountains of the great deep” first fell as rain. During the next few hours, subterranean water that went above the atmosphere, where the effective temperature is several hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit,117 fell as hail. Some animals were suddenly buried, suffocated, frozen, and compressed by tons of cold, muddy ice crystals from the gigantic “hail storm.” The mud in this ice prevented it from floating as the flood waters submerged these regions after days and weeks. Blankets of supercold ice, hundreds of feet thick, insulated and preserved many animals during the flood phase. After mountains were suddenly pushed up, the earth’s balance shifted, the earth “rolled,” so Alaska and Siberia moved from a temperate latitude to their present position. [For details, see Endnote 53 on page 128.] As the flood waters drained off the continents, the icy graves in warmer climates melted, and the flesh of those animals decayed. However, many animals, buried in what are now permafrost regions, were preserved.

These conclusions can be reached quite simply. The evidence showing compression and suffocation of the frozen mammoths implies rapid burial. Rapid burial and sudden freezing suggest a supercold “ice dump.”

compression + suffocation = rapid burial

rapid burial + sudden freezing = an “ice dump”

Lake Drowning Theory.119 No catastrophe occurred. The well-preserved mammoths, with food in their stomachs and between their teeth, died suddenly, probably from asphyxiation resulting from drowning in a partially frozen lake, river, or bog. Such burials can preserve animal—and even human—tissue for thousands of years.

Crevasse Theory. Some mammoths fell into ice crevasses or deep snowdrifts. This protected them from predators, while ice preserved them for thousands of years.120

Mud Burial Theory. In Siberian summers, the top foot or so of tundra thaws, so larger animals, even men, can easily become stuck—standing upright. Herds of mammoths, rhinoceroses, and buffalo made summer migrations to northern Siberia and Alaska. Some became stuck in this mud; others were overwhelmed and suffocated in mudslides. Still others died for various reasons and were then buried in slow mudflows during several summer thaws. Sudden cold spells—sometimes followed by long, cold winters—froze and preserved many mammoths.121

River Transport Theory. Mammoths and other animals lived farther south in the temperate zone of Asia where food was abundant. Flooding rivers floated their remains from Central Siberia on the north-flowing rivers.122

Extinction-by-Man Theory. Man exterminated mammoths, just as man almost exterminated the buffalo. Man, in hunting mammoths, pursued and pushed them north into Siberia and Alaska. There they died from harsh weather, lack of food, or the direct killing by man.123

Bering Barrier Theory. As ice accumulated on continents during the last Ice Age, sea level was lowered by 300 feet and the Bering Strait was closed. This newly created land bridge allowed people and animals, including mammoths, to migrate between Siberia and Alaska and onto Arctic islands. Because the warmer Pacific waters could no longer mix through the Bering Strait with the cold Arctic Ocean, the Pacific waters became even warmer and the Arctic waters even colder. The resulting heavy evaporation from the Pacific caused extreme snow falls on higher, colder land masses north of the Bering barrier. Mammoths and others were buried in severe snow storms early one fall. As the Ice Age ended, heavy rains washed soil down on top of compacted snow deposits, forming rock ice. Some frozen mammoths and rock ice are still preserved. Since this last Ice Age, glacial melting raised sea levels and reestablished the Bering Strait.126

Shifting Crust Theory. Before the last Ice Age, the Hudson Bay was at the North Pole. Siberia and Alaska were farther south and supported abundant vegetation and large herds of mammoths. As vast amounts of ice accumulated at what had been the North Pole, the crust on the spinning earth became unbalanced and slid, moving Siberia northward. Because the earth is slightly flattened at the poles and bulges at the equator, the shifting crust produced many ruptures. Volcanic gas was thrown above the atmosphere where it cooled and descended as a supercold “blob.” Airborne volcanic dust lowered temperatures on earth and caused phenomenal snow storms. Mammoths and other animals living in Siberia and Alaska were suddenly frozen and buried in extremely cold snow. Some are still preserved.127

Meteorite Theory. At the end of the last Ice Age, a large iron meteorite hit earth’s atmosphere. The resulting heat temporarily melted the top layers of the frozen tundra, causing mammoths to sink into muck. Poor visibility caused others “to blunder to their deaths in icy bogs.”128

Details Relating to the Hydroplate Theory

1. circlegreen.jpg ImageAbundant Food. Winter sunlight inside the Arctic Circle is so scarce that vegetation hardly grows, regardless of temperature. How could mammoths survive during even a warm winter? (The shifting crust theory, explained on page 190, recognizing this problem of feeding millions of mammoths during winter months, says the earth’s crust shifted, moving Siberia and Alaska north. However, the claimed force would be completely inadequate to slide the entire earth’s crust—rock on rock.)

Mammoths were living at temperate latitudes before the flood. As major mountains suddenly formed toward the end of the flood, the earth became slightly unbalanced and rolled. The preflood North Pole shifted from what is now central Asia. This roll also explains why dinosaur remains are found inside Antarctica and the Arctic Circle. [See Endnote 53 on page 128 for details and evidence.]

2. circlegreen.jpg ImageYedomas and Loess. (These terms are explained on page 185. Pages 170-175 explain why the subterranean water was saturated with carbon dioxide.) The extreme pressure in the subterranean chamber accelerated the escaping carbon-rich water to supersonic speeds, rapidly eroding the rock bounding the chamber and rupture. Eroded dirt particles of various sizes were swept up by the water expelled into and above the atmosphere. As you will see, the higher a muddy droplet rose, the more likely it was to lose the larger particles carried inside. Therefore, droplets that rose above the atmosphere and froze contained the powdery dirt particles that comprise yedoma hills and the world’s loess.

First, visualize a water droplet jetting up through the atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure drops as it goes higher, so some water evaporates from its surface. Evaporation cools the droplet, just as evaporating perspiration cools a person. Gusts of air and water vapor strike the droplet from differing directions, each time dragging its surface around toward the opposite, or downstream side. This creates a strong and complicated circulation within the droplet and chaotic waves on its surface. Sometimes the droplet fragments into two or more pieces, but the smaller each piece becomes, the stronger the molecular forces (the surface tension) holding it together.

In the droplet are many tiny dirt particles. The flow within the droplet carries the smaller particles more smoothly than larger particles,139 while the larger particles are sometimes shaken out of the buffeted droplet. When the droplet finally freezes high above the atmosphere, only the smallest dirt particles remain. Being encased in ice, they are protected from water erosion that would round and smooth their sharper corners.

Much of this dirty ice fell to earth in a giant hail storm as the flood began. High winds ripped up trees and pulverized vegetation that mixed with the fallen, muddy hail. Animals froze and suffocated. When the ice melted, it left behind tiny, angular dirt particles (now called loess) and dissolved salts. Years later, the muddy hail began melting in many isolated locations. Water, collected in these depressions during the summer, accelerated nearby melting. Today’s hilly yedomas remain. Therefore, in Arctic regions where little summer melting occurs, the loess, salt, vegetation, and mammoth remains were largely preserved in cold yedomas.

Loess is commonly found near formerly glaciated areas. It is especially abundant downwind of Ice Age drainage channels, such as the Mississippi River. In warmer climates, wind often removed the loess, rain leached salts from the soil, and the organic material decayed.

Before the flood, the subterranean water, sealed off from the atmosphere, contained no dissolved air. As the “fountains of the great deep” exploded up through the atmosphere, rapid and steady evaporation from the rising liquid forced gases away from, rather than toward, each rising liquid particle. Therefore, the water that froze above the atmosphere had little dissolved air but much carbon dioxide. Both froze to become a mixture of water ice and frozen carbon dioxide, or “dry ice.”

Ice absorbs air very slowly, especially the inner portion of a large volume of falling ice particles, so little air was absorbed as the muddy hail fell to earth. Once the ice was on the warm ground, some “dry ice” and water ice slowly evaporated as white clouds. As the ice depth increased to perhaps several hundred feet, these clouds billowed up through gaps between the ice particles, forcing out any air that might have been between them. Eventually, the weight of the topmost layers of ice essentially sealed the lower ice from the air above. This is why Herz saw the ice under Berezovka turn yellow-brown as the ice first contacted and reacted chemically with air.

The Ice Age followed the flood. Since then, the surface of the ground in Alaska and Siberia melts slightly each summer. In some parts of Alaska and Siberia, this included several feet of rock ice. When a layer of this dirty ice melted, the water drained away, leaving particles of dirt and vegetation behind. This remaining clay and silt provided an insulating blanket, causing less ice to melt each succeeding year. Most of the unsorted clay and silt above rock ice came from melted rock ice.

5. circlegreen.jpg ImageSuffocation. Suffocation could have occurred three ways: (a) being buried alive in muddy hail, (b) breathing too much carbon dioxide gas from evaporating “dry ice,” or (c) freezing lung tissue so oxygen could not diffuse into the blood and carbon dioxide could not diffuse out of the blood.

6. circlegreen.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. The jetting fountains of the great deep produced extreme winds. Dirt filled the atmosphere for a few hours before rain and ice reached Dima. This is why the entire digestive and respiratory tract of this well-preserved mammoth contained silt, clay, and small particles of gravel.

7. circlegreen.jpg Image-150°F, Large Animals. Almost all the energy of a falling hail particle ends up accelerating air circlegreen.jpg Imagedownward, not heating the particle.143 The result was violent downdrafts of cold air.

Larger, stronger animals, such as mammoths and rhinoceroses, best withstood the driving rain and cold wind as they sought safety. Their larger bodies allowed them to better tolerate noxious gases such as carbon dioxide. (Smaller animals process the air they breathe faster, and would suffocate sooner.) Mammoths and rhinoceroses were still standing as the colder hail began piling up at various places—hail whose temperature was about -150°F, corresponding to the temperature above the atmosphere. This supercold ice pressing against their bodies rapidly froze even their internal organs.

Some muddy hail fell to the bottoms of streams, rivers, and lakes. It did not float, because it contained dirt. Its extreme coldness absorbed so much heat that lakes, streams, and the animals therein, quickly froze. [See “What Happened?” on page 188. Cold muddy hail froze those streams and lakes, not cold air.]

8. circlegreen.jpg ImageUpright, Vertical Compression. The massive, violent hail storm buried mammoths circlegreen.jpg Imageand rhinoceroses alive, many standing up and compressed from all sides. Babies, such as Dima, were flattened. Exposed parts of adult bodies, unsupported by bone, were vertically flattened. Sometimes even strong bones were crushed by axial compression. Encasement in muddy ice maintained the alignment of Berezovka’s leg bone as it was crushed lengthwise.

Ice slowly flows downhill as, for example, in glaciers. Such a flow, pushing Berezovka’s body tail first, would explain his forward swept hind legs, humped back, displaced vertebrae, and spread front legs bent at the “ankles.”

9. circlegreen.jpg ImageOther/Fossils. The hydroplate theory states that the frozen animals were buried in muddy hail as the flood began. During the following months, sedimentary layers and their fossils were deposited on top of this ice and sorted by liquefaction. [See pages 158–168.]

This is a severe test for this theory, because a few crude geologic maps of Siberia imply that marine fossils lie within several miles of the frozen remains. How accurate are these geologic maps in this relatively unexplored region, and what deposits lie directly beneath frozen carcasses? (If dead mammoths floated on the flood waters, their flesh would not be preserved, but their bones might be found above marine fossils, coal, etc.)

Sedimentary layers generally extend over large areas and sometimes contain distinctive fossils. One can construct a plausible geologic map of an area (a) if many deep layers are exposed, as for example in the face of a cliff, (b) if similar vertical sequences of fossils and rock types are found in nearby exposures, and (c) if no intervening crustal movement has occurred. If all three conditions are satisfied, then it is reasonable to assume that the layers with similar distinctive fossils are connected. To my knowledge, such layers have not been found beneath any frozen mammoth.

Nor is there any known report of marine fossils, layered strata, limestone deposits, or coal seams directly beneath any frozen-mammoth or rhinoceros remains. Tolmachoff, in his chapter on the geology of the Berezovka site, wrote that “Marine shells or marine mammals have never been discovered in [deposits having frozen mammoths].”145 Also, Hern von Maydell, reporting on his third frozen mammoth, wrote, “despite my thorough search, not a single shell or fossil was found.”146 Beneath the Fairbanks Creek mammoth, sediments down to bedrock contained no marine fossils, layered strata, coal seams, or limestone.147

10. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Radiocarbon. According to the hydroplate theory, all frozen mammoths and rhinoceroses died simultaneously. However, the radiocarbon ages vary. [See Table 8 on page 179.] For an explanation of radiocarbon dating and its assumptions, see pages 283–285. Those pages explain why 40,000 radiocarbon years (RCY) is a typical radiocarbon age for most frozen remains, and why 40,000 radiocarbon years probably correspond to about 5,000 actual years. A slight amount of contamination of the remains, for example by ground water, would lower their radiocarbon age considerably, especially something living as the flood began. This probably explains why different parts of the first Vollosovitch mammoth had widely varying radiocarbon ages—29,500 and 44,000 RCY. One part of Dima was 40,000 RCY, another was 26,000 RCY, and “wood found immediately around the carcass” was 9,000–10,000 RCY. The lower leg of the Fairbanks Creek mammoth had a radiocarbon age of 15,380 RCY, while its skin and flesh were 21,300 RCY.148 The two Colorado Creek mammoths had radiocarbon ages of 22,850 +/- 670 and 16,150 +/- 230 years. Because a bone fragment at one burial site fit precisely with a bone at the other site 30 feet away, and the soil had undergone considerable compression and movement, both mammoths probably died simultaneously.

Details Relating to the Lake Drowning Theory

11. circlered.jpg ImageAbundant Food. Lack of winter sunlight inside the Arctic Circle would choke off the mammoth’s food supply each winter, even if temperatures were warm or the mammoth was “adapted” to the cold.

12. circlered.jpg ImageWarm Climate. Vegetation in the digestive tracts of frozen mammoths shows they died in a mild climate during the late summer or early fall when frozen lakes or rivers would not exist. Many weeks of freezing temperatures are needed to form ice thick enough for a large, hoofed animal to venture far enough from shore to drown.

13. circleyellow.jpg ImageYedomas and Loess, Multi-Continental, Frozen circleyellow.jpg ImageMuck, Upright. The lake drowning theory does not circleyellow.jpg Imageexplain why mammoths, yedomas, and loess are related, why these peculiar circleyellow.jpg Imageevents occurred over such wide areas on two continents, where so much muck originated, why muck has sometimes buried forests, why yedomas contain so much carbon, or why so many mammoth bodies and skeletons were found upright.

14. circlered.jpg ImageRock Ice. The ice near several carcasses was not lake or river ice. It was Type 3 ice, not Type 1 ice.

15. circleyellow.jpg ImageSudden Freezing, -150°F. Yes, burial in peat bogs can retard circlered.jpg Imagebacterial decay and preserve bodies for thousands of years. However, only a rapid and extreme temperature drop can stop the destructive activity of enzymes and stomach acids.

16. circleyellow.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. Drowning in a lake would not force gravel into Dima’s lungs. Nor would silt, clay, and gravel work its way throughout Dima’s intestines after a sudden drowning.

17. circlered.jpg ImageAnimal Mixes. If mammoths occasionally fell through ice on an arctic lake, why are the bones of so many temperate animals found together? Why do prey lie near their predators? Large, hoofed animals seldom venture out on frozen lakes.

18. circleyellow.jpg ImageVertical Compression. Falling into a lake would not produce the vertical compression found in Dima and Berezovka.

Details Relating to the Crevasse Theory

19. circlered.jpg ImageAbundant Food. Same as item 11.

20. circlered.jpg ImageWarm Climate. The contents of Berezovka’s stomach showed that he lived in a warm climate, not one containing ice crevasses. Furthermore, tree fragments and roots were found beneath him. Trees do not grow near icy crevasses. Glacial climates prevent tree growth. Many animals and plants buried in northern Siberia and Alaska live only in temperate climates today. Besides, mammoths were not Arctic animals.

21. Yedomas and Loess, Multi-Continental, circleyellow.jpg ImageSuffocation, Vertical Compression. circleyellow.jpg ImageThe crevasse theory does not explain why circleyellow.jpg Imagemammoths, yedomas, and loess are related, why yedomas contain so much carbon, why these peculiar events circleyellow.jpg Imageoccurred over such wide areas on two continents, why some of these huge animals suffocated, or what compressed Dima and Berezovka vertically.

22. circleyellow.jpg ImageElevated Burial. Falling into a crevasse or being transported downhill in a glacier would not herd mammoths up onto islands or up near the higher elevations of flat, low plateaus. Crevasses form on steep slopes only.

23. circlered.jpg ImageRock Ice. Mammoths are sometimes buried near Type 3 ice. Crevasses have only Type 2 ice.

24. circleyellow.jpg ImageFrozen Muck. Frozen mammoths are found primarily in frozen muck, not ice. Where did all the muck come from, and why are so many large trees buried in it?

25. circleyellow.jpg ImageSudden Freezing. Let us assume that after Berezovka had eaten beans at the base of a glacier, he climbed up to a crevasse, fell in, and died. His stomach acids and enzymes would have destroyed his food in a few hours. Because crevasses are not at the base of glaciers, Berezovka’s long trip up the glacier and subsequent freezing must have been unbelievably rapid to prevent this destruction. Besides, what could motivate a grazing beast to climb a long, steep, icy slope?

26. circlered.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. Falling into a crevasse would not put gravel in Dima’s lungs or silt, clay, and gravel throughout Dima’s intestines.

27. -150°F. circlered.jpg ImageSnow is a surprisingly good insulator, as those who have lived in igloos know. Also, transferring heat from a solid object, such as a mammoth’s body, to stagnant air is a slow process. Both conditions would exist if a mammoth fell into a crevasse. Steep crevasse walls would shield the body from cold winds, and glacial ice and stagnant air would insulate the mammoth from sharp drops in the outside temperature. Eventually, the carcass would freeze, but the residual heat in its huge body would delay freezing and cause putrefaction. Hoyle’s comment, therefore, comes as no surprise:

I have been informed that, today, when reindeer fall down crevasses in the Greenland ice, they are subsequently found to be in an unpleasantly putrefied condition. It seems that, no matter how cold the air is, the body heat of the dead animal is sufficient to promote bacterial decomposition.149

Warmer internal organs, such as the stomach, experience even more decay. Furthermore, this theory cannot begin to explain a sudden temperature drop to -150°F.

28. circlered.jpg ImageLarge Animals. The crevasse theory does not explain why primarily larger animals fell into icy crevasses and froze. Actually, the larger the animal, the greater its internal heat and the more the animal should decay.

29. circlered.jpg ImageAnimal Mixes. If an occasional mammoth fell into an ice crevasse, why are bones of so many kinds of animals found together? While some might argue that an adult mammoth climbed up a glacier, why would a rhinoceros or a baby such as Dima do so? A heavy, low-slung rhinoceros could not walk in deep snow. Beavers, squirrels, and birds do not fall into crevasses, but all have been found near mammoths.

30. circleyellow.jpg ImageUpright. Herz, who excavated and analyzed the Berezovka mammoth, felt it had fallen into a crevasse, because it had several broken bones, was frozen, and was found in an upright, although contorted, position. Normally, with a broken pelvis, a broken shoulder, a few broken ribs, and a crushed leg bone, he should have been lying on his side. However, a fall would rarely break bones in different parts of the body. To break so many bones requires many large forces acting from different directions. A blow received from a fall might explain a few fractures, but probably not all, especially the aligned, crushed fracture of the leg.

31. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Glaciers. Only a few mountains in northeastern Siberia show evidence of former glaciers.

Details Relating to the Mud Burial Theory

32. circlered.jpg ImageAway From Rivers, Elevated Burials. A very large mudslide, such as circleyellow.jpg Imagemight occur near a river bank, is required to suffocate and bury large animals. Yet frozen remains of mammoths and rhinoceroses are sometimes found in the interior of hilly islands, or on high ground far from rivers and river mud. Besides, northern Siberian rivers transport relatively little mud.150 Mud moves slowly, if at all, on cold, flat, low plateaus. Rhinoceroses do not live far above the level of rivers or oceans.

33. circleyellow.jpg ImageYedomas and Loess, Multi-Continental, Frozen Muck, -150°F. circleyellow.jpg ImageThe mud burial theory does not explain why mammoths,circleyellow.jpg Image yedomas, and loess are related, why yedomas contain so much carbon, why these peculiar circlered.jpg Imageevents occurred over such wide areas on two continents, where so much muck originated, why it contains buried forests, or why temperatures dropped rapidly to -150°F.

34. circlered.jpg ImageRock Ice. Burial in mud that later froze would produce Type 1 ice, not Type 3 ice.

35. circlered.jpg ImageSudden Freezing. The coldest a mud flow could be is 32°F. The air would be even warmer. If Berezovka had been encased in mud, a good insulator, his stomach contents would have taken about 20 times longer to cool enough to stop acids and enzymes from destroying the vegetable matter in his stomach. In other words, burial in even cold, flowing mud could not freeze a mammoth rapidly enough. Even if the atmospheric temperature dropped to -200°F after the mammoth was buried, freezing would not be rapid enough to overcome the mud’s insulating effect.

36. circleyellow.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. One researcher used the mud burial theory to explain why Dima had silt, clay, and small particles of gravel throughout his respiratory and digestive tract.151 While these particles might enter the upper digestive tract, they would not enter the lungs and lower digestive tract. Such particles would need to be in the air for some time, as would occur during sustained high winds.

37. circlered.jpg ImageAnimal Mixes. Many animals, such as beavers, marmots, voles, and squirrels, whose bones lie near frozen mammoths, do not create enough ground pressure to sink into mud.

38. circleyellow.jpg ImageUpright. The upright Berezovka mammoth suffocated. Burial in a mudslide might explain his suffocation, but it would not explain his upright posture. Becoming stuck in shallow mud might explain the upright posture, but it would not explain the suffocation. The Benkendorf mammoth and others were also upright. [See Table 8 on page 179.]

39. circleyellow.jpg ImageVertical Compression. Burial in a typical mud flow would not flatten Dima or produce the severe vertical compression found in Berezovka.

40. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Feet. Elephants rarely become stuck in mud, because their feet expand as weight is placed on them and narrow as they are lifted. In northern Siberia only a thin layer of soil thaws in the summer.

41. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Mouth. A large animal trapped in mud would probably live for hours, if not days. Therefore, food should not be preserved in its mouth and digestive tract, as occurred for a rhinoceros and several mammoths.

42. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Scavengers. Large animals buried in mud flows should frequently show marks of scavengers on the top parts of their bodies where mud had not yet reached. No known report has described such a pattern.

43. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Rhinoceroses. Rhinoceroses and babies (such as Dima) do not migrate as this theory proposes.

Details Relating to the River Transport Theory

44. circlered.jpg ImageAway From Rivers, Yedomas and Loess, Multi-Continental, Frozen Muck, -150°F, circleyellow.jpg ImageLarge Animals, Vertical Compression. circleyellow.jpg ImageThe river transport theory does not explain why frozen mammoths are not exclusively circleyellow.jpg Imagefound along rivers, why circlered.jpg Imagemammoths, yedomas, and loess are related, why these peculiar events circlered.jpg Imageoccurred over such wide areas on two continents, why yedomas contain so much carbon, where circleyellow.jpg Imageso much muck originated, why muck has sometimes buried forests, why temperatures suddenly dropped to -150°F, why primarily the larger animals were frozen and preserved, or what caused the vertical compression in Dima and Berezovka.

45. circleyellow.jpg ImageElevated Burials. Rivers would not deposit large carcasses on the higher levels of plateaus. A few mammoths are found 1,000 feet above nearby rivers.152

46. Rock Ice. circlered.jpg ImageWith the river transport theory, one would expect to find Type 1 ice, not Type 3 ice.

47. circleyellow.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. If Dima drowned, silt and clay might have entered his lungs, but not gravel. Nor would drowning distribute those particles throughout his intestines.

48. circleyellow.jpg ImageSummer-Fall Deaths. How could so many animals, washed far north by rivers, get buried and preserved in hard, frozen muck? Even if flooding rivers buried mammoths under sediments that permanently froze the following winter, their bodies would have decayed after a summer or fall death. Besides, river flooding usually occurs in the spring, not late summer or fall, and rivers do not deposit muck. The organic component in muck would separate and float to the surface.

49. circleyellow.jpg ImageUpright. Mammoths, transported by rivers, would not be deposited upright, as some were.

50. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Fossils. No fossils of water animals have been reported in deposits containing frozen mammoths.153

51. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/South. Teeth and tusks of mammoths found south of Siberia differ considerably from those in Siberia. Therefore, the frozen mammoths are not from the south.

52. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Float. Cold Siberian and Alaskan rivers would minimize the buildup of gas in a decaying carcass. This is why “bodies ordinarily do not float in very cold water.”154 Even if these remains floated for hundreds of miles, why were some found along very short rivers flowing directly into the Arctic Ocean?155 Why was their long hair not worn off? Why were frozen mammoths found on the New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean, more than 150 miles from the mainland? Their bones do not show the wear associated with transport or water erosion. If an unusually strong river carried floating carcasses to these islands, the carcasses should have been found only along beaches. Instead, remains are found in the interior of islands, the largest of which is 150 miles long and 75 miles wide.156

53. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Alaskan Rivers. Parts of six frozen mammoths have been found in Alaska, far from where rivers could originate even if temperatures were warm.

54. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Swimmers. Elephants are, and presumably mammoths were, excellent swimmers.

Details Relating to the Extinction-by-Man Theory

55. circlered.jpg ImageAbundant Food. There is little precedent for believing that man would push any animal population into a harsh environment having little food. Only Dima, a baby, appeared underfed. Most frozen mammoths, complete enough to evaluate, were well fed.

56. circleyellow.jpg ImageYedomas and Loess, -150°F, Large Animals, Vertical Compression. circlered.jpg ImageThe extinction-by-man theory does not explain the relationship between circlered.jpg Imagemammoths, yedomas, and loess, the circleyellow.jpg Imagesudden drop in temperature to -150°F, the vertical compression circleyellow.jpg Imagefound in Dima and Berezovka, or the preservation of larger, harder to freeze, animals.

57. circleyellow.jpg ImageElevated Burials. Even if man pushed these animals north into Siberia and Alaska, why would a disproportionate number be buried on the higher elevations of generally flat plateaus?

58. circlered.jpg ImageRock Ice. With this theory, one would expect Type 1 or 2 ice, not Type 3 ice.

59. circlered.jpg ImageFrozen Muck. If man killed the mammoths, how were they and even forests buried under frozen muck? Where did so much muck come from?

60. circleyellow.jpg ImageSuffocation. If humans killed mammoths and rhinoceroses, why did at least five suffocate?

61. circlered.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. Being hunted by man would not explain silt, clay, and small gravel particles in Dima’s respiratory and digestive tracts.

62. circlered.jpg ImageAnimal Mixes. Mammoth remains are often found near bones of animals that man would probably not have simultaneously pursued. Examples include rhinoceroses, horses, tigers, badgers, bears, wolves, hyenas, lynxes, etc. Why would a hunted horse be frozen?157 Today, wild horses live only in mild climates.

63. Upright. Mammoths killed by man would not be found standing up, especially in muck.

64. Other/No Human Signs. circleyellow.jpg ImageIt is doubtful that primitive man could have exterminated the formidable, even dangerous, mammoth in a remote, frigid, and vast region. Yes, man almost exterminated the less imposing buffalo—with guns in a temperate climate. No human remains (even bones or teeth), no weapons (arrows or knives), and no other artifacts (pottery, utensils, or art) have been found alongside frozen mammoth and rhinoceros remains. Besides, most primitive arrows and spears would do little damage after penetrating the mammoth’s thick skin and fat layers. Nor are the distinctive marks of man’s ax or knife clearly seen on mammoth bones and ivory. If man exterminated mammoths, some signs of human activity should occasionally be found among the millions of mammoth remains. To capture or kill large animals, humans often dig deep pits. This would be extremely difficult in permafrost.

65. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Unpopulated. Humans in today’s heavily populated areas might try to exterminate mammoths and rhinoceroses. But why would man do this thousands of years ago in barren and sparsely populated regions of northern Siberia?

66. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Logic. Humans do not travel to desolate regions for food, especially food difficult to preserve and transport. Even if man occupied these regions, less dangerous and more desirable game was available. In Africa today, man has no great desire for elephant or rhinoceros meat. In fact, before the day of the rifle and the ivory market, man generally avoided these huge African animals. If man killed the mammoth for its ivory tusks, why did he kill the rhinoceros? Why were so many valuable tusks left behind?

67. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/DNA Shift. Corings into the Siberian permafrost have shown a sudden change in DNA with depth. Below a certain level, DNA is from mammoths and lush, temperate vegetation. Above that level, the DNA matches Siberian vegetation today. As one writer concluded:

The DNA documents a dramatic shift from a landscape of mostly herbaceous plants to dominant shrubs and mosses. ... This lends credibility to the idea that environmental change associated with climatic events was responsible [for extinction of the mammoth], not human hunting, as many have claimed.158

68. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/South. Same as item 51.

Details Relating to the Bering Barrier Theory

69. Abundant Food, Warm Climate.circlered.jpg Image This theory places the mammoth extinction at the peak of circleyellow.jpg Imagethe last Ice Age when northern Siberia and Alaska would have had a colder climate and even less vegetation. During the dark, winter months, the needed food and drinking water would not have been available inside the Arctic Circle, and yet mammoths were well fed. Many animal and plant species buried there live only in temperate climates today.

70. circleyellow.jpg ImageYedomas and Loess. Soils washed down on top of ice would show stratification and some sorting of particles by size. Loess, in contrast, consists of very fine and uniform particles. In yedomas, ice and loess are mixed. Besides, yedomas contain too much carbon.

71. Multi-Continental,circleyellow.jpg Image -150°F, Vertical Compression. The Bering barrier theory does circlered.jpg Imagenot explain why these peculiar events occurred over such circleyellow.jpg Imagewide areas on two continents, the rapid drop in temperature to -150°F, or the vertical compression found in Dima and Berezovka.

72. circleyellow.jpg ImageRock Ice. This theory might explain buried layers of glacial ice (Type 2 ice), but it does not explain rock ice (Type 3 ice).

73. circlered.jpg ImageFrozen Muck. If a gigantic snow storm buried many mammoths, why are almost all carcasses encased in frozen muck? Where does so much muck come from, and why are forests buried under muck?

74. circleyellow.jpg ImageSuffocation. Animals caught in a sudden snow storm would die of starvation and exposure, not suffocation. Although an avalanche might cause suffocation, avalanches would not occur in flat terrain.

75. circleyellow.jpg ImageDirty Lungs. Sudden snowfalls would remove dust from the air and bury other dirt particles under a blanket of snow. How then did silt, clay, and gravel enter Dima’s digestive and respiratory tracts?

76. circleyellow.jpg ImageLarge Animals. Sudden snow storms would preferentially entomb and freeze smaller animals.

77. circleyellow.jpg ImageOther/Winds. Prevailing winds at the Bering Strait blow to the east. Therefore, storms from the Pacific should dump snow primarily on Alaska, not Siberia. However, 90% of all known frozen mammoths and all known frozen rhinoceroses are in Siberia.

Final Thoughts

Earth science students are frequently discouraged from considering alternative explanations such as we have examined concerning the frozen mammoths. Too often, students are told what to think, rather than taught how to think. Why is this?

Before the field of geology began in the early 1800s, a common explanation for major geological features was a global flood. Early geologists were hostile to such explanations for three reasons. First, many geologists were opposed to the Bible, which spoke of a global flood. Second, flood explanations seemed, and sometimes were, scientifically simplistic. Finally, because a global flood is an unrepeatable catastrophe, it cannot be studied directly.

Rather than appear closed-minded by disallowing flood explanations, a more subtle approach was simply to disallow global catastrophes. This removed all three objections and was more justifiable, because modern science requires experimental repeatability. By definition, catastrophes are rarely repeated, extremely large, and difficult to reproduce. The flaw in this exclusionary logic is that catastrophes can occur, involve many phenomena, and leave widespread wreckage and strange details that require an explanation. (You have seen many relating to frozen mammoths.) Most of these phenomena are testable and repeatable on a smaller scale. Some are so well tested and understood that mathematical calculations and computer simulations can be made at any scale.

How were catastrophes disallowed? Professors in the new and growing field of geology were primarily selected from those who supported the anticatastrophe principle. These professors did not advance students who espoused catastrophes. An advocate of a global flood was branded a “biblical literalist” or “fuzzy thinker”—not worthy of an academic degree. Geology professors also influenced, through the peer review process, what papers could be published. Textbooks soon reflected their orthodoxy, so few students became “fuzzy thinkers.” This practice continues to this day, because a major criterion for selecting professors is the number of their publications.

This anticatastrophe principle is called uniformitarianism. For the last 170 years, it has been summarized by the phrase, “The present is the key to the past.” In other words, only processes observable today and acting at present rates can be used to explain past events. Because some catastrophes, such as large impacts from outer space, are now fashionable, many now recognize uniformitarianism as a poor and arbitrary assumption.160

This presents a dilemma. Because uniformitarianism is foundational to geology, should the entire field be reexamined? Uniformitarianism was intended to banish the global flood. Will the death of uniformitarianism allow scholarly consideration of evidence that implies a global flood? Most geologists object to such a possibility. They either deny that a problem exists or hope it will go away. Some try to redefine uniformitarianism to mean that only the laws of physics observed today can be used to explain past geological events—an obvious principle of science long before uniformitarianism was sanctified. [See Endnote 18 on page 168.] The problem will not go away, but will fester even more until enough geologists recognize that catastrophes have never been the problem. Early geologists simply, and arbitrarily, wanted to exclude the global flood, not catastrophes.161

Ruling out catastrophes in general (and the flood specifically), even before all facts are in, has stifled study and understanding. The “frozen-mammoth issue” is one of many examples. Disallowing catastrophes also produces a mind-set where strange observations are ignored, or considered unbelievable, rather than viewed as possibly important diagnostic details worthy of testing and consideration.

Table 11 on page 191 is a broad target for anyone who wishes to grapple with ideas. Notice that it invites, not suppresses, critiques. All theories should be subject to critique and refinement. We can focus on the more likely theories, on any misunderstandings or disagreements, on diagnostic details that need further verification, and on the expensive process of testing predictions. With theories and their predictions clearly enumerated, field work becomes more exciting and productive. Most important, those who follow us will have something to build upon. They will not be told what to think.

The Origin of Comets

SUMMARY: Past explanations for how comets began have serious problems. After a review of some facts concerning comets, a new explanation for comet origins will be proposed and tested. It appears that the “fountains of the great deep” and the power of expanding, high-pressure, supercritical water exploding into the vacuum of space launched comets throughout the solar system as the flood began. Other known forces would have assembled the expelled rocks and muddy droplets into larger bodies resembling comets in size, number, density, composition, spin, texture, strength, chemistry (organic and inorganic), and orbital characteristics. After a comparison of theories with evidence, problems with the previous explanations will become apparent.

Figure 119: Arizona’s Meteor Crater. Comets are not meteors. Comets are like giant, dirty, exceedingly fluffy “snowballs.” Meteors are rock fragments, usually dust particles, falling through the atmosphere. “Falling stars” streaking through the sky at night are often dust particles thrown off by comets years ago. In fact, every day we walk on comet dust. House-size meteors have formed huge craters on Earth, the Moon, and elsewhere. Meteors that strike the ground are renamed “meteorites,” so the above crater, 3/4 of a mile wide, should be called a “meteorite” crater.

On the morning of 14 December 1807, a huge fireball flashed across the southwestern Connecticut sky. Two Yale professors quickly recovered 330 pounds of meteorites, one weighing 200 pounds. When President Thomas Jefferson heard their report, he allegedly said, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.” Jefferson was mistaken, but his intuition was no worse than ours would have been in his time. Today, many would say, “The Moon’s craters show that it must be billions of years old” and “What goes up must come down.” Are these simply mistakes common in our time?

As you read this chapter, test such intuitive ideas and alternate explanations against evidence and physical laws. Consider the explosive and sustained power of the “fountains of the great deep.” You may also surmise why the Moon is peppered with craters, as if someone had fired large buckshot at it. Question: Are comets “out of this world”?

Comets may be the most dynamic, spectacular, variable, and mysterious bodies in the solar system. They even contain organic matter which many early scientists concluded came from “decomposed organic bodies.”1 Today, a popular belief is that comets brought life to Earth. Instead, comets may have traces of life from Earth.2

Comets orbit the Sun. When closest to the Sun, some comets travel more than 350 miles per second. Others, at their farthest point from the Sun, spend years traveling less than 15 miles per hour. A few comets travel so fast they will escape the solar system. Even fast comets, because of their great distance from Earth, appear to “hang” in the night sky, almost as stationary as the stars. Comets reflect sunlight and fluoresce (glow). They are brightest near the Sun and sometimes visible in daylight.

A typical comet, when far from the Sun, resembles a dirty, misshapen snowball, a few miles across. About 38% of its mass3 is frozen water—but this ice is extremely light and fluffy, with much empty space between ice particles. The rest is dust and various chemicals. As a comet approaches the Sun, a small fraction of the snowball (or nucleus) evaporates, forming a gas and dust cloud, called a coma, around the nucleus. The cloud and nucleus together are called the head. The head’s volume can be larger than a million Earths. Comet tails are sometimes more than an astronomical unit (AU) in length (93,000,000 miles), the Earth-Sun distance. One tail was 3.4 AU long—enough to stretch around Earth 12,500 times.4 Solar wind pushes comet tails away from the Sun, so comets traveling away from the Sun move tail-first.

Figure 120: Nucleus of Halley’s Comet. When this most famous of all comets last swung by the Sun in 1986, five spacecraft approached it. From a distance of a few hundred miles, Giotto, a European Space Agency spacecraft, took six pictures of Halley’s black, 9 x 5 x 5 mile, potato-shaped nucleus. This first composite picture of a comet’s nucleus showed 12–15 jets venting gas at up to 30 tons per second. (Venting and tail formation occur only when a comet is near the Sun.) The gas moved away from the nucleus at almost a mile per second to become part of the comet’s head and tail. Seconds after these detailed pictures were taken, Giotto slammed into the gas, destroying the spacecraft’s cameras.

Comet tails are extremely tenuous—giant volumes of practically nothing. Stars are sometimes observed through comet heads and tails; comet shadows on Earth, even when expected, have never been seen. One hundred cubic miles of comet Halley’s tail contains much less matter than in a cubic inch of air we breathe—and is even less dense than the best laboratory vacuum.

In 1998, a spacecraft orbiting the Moon detected billions of tons of water ice mixed with the soil in deep craters near the Moon’s poles. As one writer visualized it,

Comets raining from the sky left pockets of frozen water at the north and south poles of the moon, billions of tons more than previously believed, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have found.5

Comets are a likely source, but this raises perplexing questions. Ice should evaporate from almost everywhere on the Moon faster than comets currently deposit it, so why does so much ice remain?6 Also, ice seems to have been discovered in permanently shadowed craters on Mercury,7 the closest planet to the Sun. Ice that near the Sun is even more difficult to explain.

Fear of comets as omens of death existed in most ancient cultures.8 Indeed, comets were called “disasters,” which in Greek means “evil” (dis) “star” (aster). Why fear comets and not other more surprising celestial events, such as eclipses, supernovas, or meteor showers? When Halley’s comet appeared in 1910, some people worldwide panicked; a few even committed suicide. In Texas, police arrested men selling “comet-protection” pills. Rioters then freed the salesmen. Elsewhere, people quit jobs or locked themselves in their homes as the comet approached.

Comets are rapidly disappearing. Some of their mass is “burned off” each time they pass near the Sun, and they frequently collide with planets, moons, and the Sun. Comets passing near large planets often are torn apart or receive gravity boosts that fling them, like a slingshot, out of the solar system forever. Because we have seen so many comets die, we naturally wonder, “How were they born?”

Textbooks and the media confidently explain, in vague terms, how comets began. Although comet experts worldwide know those explanations lack details and are riddled with scientific problems, most experts view the problems, which few others appreciate, as “future research projects.”

To learn the probable origin of comets, we should:

a. Understand these problems. (This will require learning how gravity moves things in space, often in surprising ways.)

b. Learn a few technical terms related to comets, their orbits, and their composition.

c. Understand and test seven major theories for comet origins.

Only then will we be equipped to decide which theory best explains the origin of comets.

Gravity: How and Why Most Things Move

Figure 121: Near and Far Sides of the Moon. The same side of the Moon always faces Earth during the Moon’s monthly orbit. Surprisingly, the near and far sides of the Moon are quite different. Almost all deep moonquakes are on the near side.9 The surface of the far side is rougher, while the near side has most of the Moon’s volcanic features, lava flows, dome complexes, and giant, multiringed basins. Lava flows (darker regions) have smoothed over many craters on the near side.10

Some have proposed that the Moon’s crust must be thinner on the near side, so lava can squirt out more easily on the near side than on the far side. However, no seismic, gravity, or heat flow measurements support that hypothesis, and the deeper lunar interior is cold and solid. The Moon’s density throughout is almost as uniform as that of a billiard ball,11 showing that little distinctive crust exists. Not only did large impacts form the giant basins, but much of their impact energy melted rock and generated lava flows. This is why the lava flows came after the craters formed. These impacts appear to have happened recently. [See “Hot Moon” on page 36.]

Contemporaries of Galileo misnamed these lava flows “maria” (MAHR-ee-uh), or “seas,” because these dark areas looked smooth and filled low-lying regions. Maria give the Moon its “man-in-the-moon” appearance. Of the Moon’s 31 giant basins, only 11 are on the far side.12 (See if you can flip 31 coins and get 11 or fewer tails. Not too likely. It happens only about 7% of the time.) Why should the near side have so many more giant impact features, almost all the maria, and almost all deep moonquakes?13 Opposite sides of Mars and Mercury are also different.14

If the impacts that produced these volcanic features occurred slowly from any or all directions other than Earth, both near and far sides would be equally hit. If the impacts occurred rapidly (within a few weeks), large impact features would not be concentrated on the near side unless the projectiles came from Earth. Evidently, the impactors came from Earth. Of course, large impacts would kick up millions of smaller rocks that would themselves create impacts or go into orbit around the Moon and later create other impacts—even on Earth. Today, both sides of the Moon are saturated with smaller craters. Can we test this conclusion that the large lunar impactors came from Earth?

Yes. The Moon as a whole has relatively few volatile elements, including nitrogen, hydrogen, and the noble gases. Surprisingly, lunar soil is rich in these elements, which implies their extralunar origin. Furthermore, the relative abundances of isotopes of these elements in lunar soils correspond not to the solar wind but to what is found on Earth.15 This further supports the conclusion that most impactor mass came from Earth. If large impactors came from Earth recently, most moonquakes should be on the near side, and they should still be occurring. They are.

Gravity pulls us toward Earth’s surface. This produces friction, a force affecting and slowing every movement we make. Since we were babies, we have assumed everything behaves this way. Indeed, none of us could have taken our first steps without friction and the downward pull of gravity. Even liquids (such as water) and gases (such as air) create a type of friction called drag, because gravity also pulls liquids and gases toward Earth’s solid surface.

In space, things are different. If we were orbiting Earth, its gravity would still act on us, but we would not feel it. We might think we were “floating” when, in fact, we would be falling. In a circular orbit, our velocity would carry us away from Earth as fast as we fell.

As another example, in 1965 astronaut James McDivitt tried to catch up (rendezvous) with an object orbiting far ahead of him. He instinctively increased his speed. However, this added speed moved his orbit higher and farther from Earth where gravity is weaker and orbital velocities are slower. Thus, he fell farther behind his target. Had he temporarily slowed down, he would have changed his orbit, lost altitude, sped up, and traveled a shorter route. Only by slowing down could he catch up—essentially taking a “shortcut.”

All particles attract each other gravitationally. The more massive and the closer any two particles are to each other, the greater their mutual attraction. To determine the gravitational pull of a large body, one must add the effects of all its tiniest components. This seems a daunting task. Fortunately, the gravitational pull of a distant body behaves almost as if all its mass were concentrated at its center of mass—as our intuition tells us.

But what if we were inside a “body,” such as the universe, a galaxy, or Earth? Intuition fails. For example, if Earth were a hollow sphere and we were inside, we would “float” ! The pull from the side of the spherical shell nearest us would be great because it is close, but more mass would pull us in the opposite direction. In 1687, Isaac Newton showed that these pulls always balance.16

Tides. A water droplet in an ocean tide feels a stronger gravitational pull from the Sun than from the Moon. This is because the Sun’s huge mass (27 million times greater than that of the Moon) more than makes up for the Sun’s greater distance. However, ocean tides are caused primarily by the Moon, not the Sun. This is because the Sun pulls the droplet and the center of the Earth toward itself almost equally, while the much closer Moon pulls relatively more on either the droplet or center of the Earth (whichever is nearer). We best see this effect in tides, because the many ocean droplets slip and slide so easily over each other. (To learn more about what causes tides, see page 347.)

Tidal effects act everywhere on everything: gases, liquids, solids—and comets. When a comet passes near a large planet or the Sun, the planet or Sun’s gravity pulls the near side of the comet with a greater force than the far side. This difference in “pulls” stretches the comet and sometimes tears it apart. If a comet passes very near a large body, it can be pulled apart many times; that is, pieces of pieces of pieces of comets are torn apart as shown in Figure 122.

Figure 122: Weak Comets. Tidal effects often tear comets apart, showing that comets have almost no strength. Two humans could pull apart a comet nucleus several miles in diameter. In comparison, the strength of an equally large snowball would be gigantic. In 1992, tidal forces dramatically tore comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into 23 pieces as it passed near Jupiter. Two years later, the fragments, resembling a “flying string of pearls” strung over 180,000,000 miles, returned and collided with Jupiter. A typical high-velocity piece released about 5,000 hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy and became a dark spot, larger than Earth, visibly drifting for days in Jupiter’s atmosphere. We will see that Jupiter, with its huge gravity and tidal effects, is a comet killer.

Spheres of Influence. The Apollo 13 astronauts, while traveling to the Moon, dumped waste material overboard. As the discarded material, traveling at nearly the same velocity as the spacecraft, moved slowly away, the spacecraft’s gravity pulled the material back. To everyone’s surprise, it orbited the spacecraft all the way to the Moon.17 When the spacecraft was on Earth, Earth’s gravity dominated things near the spacecraft. However, when the spacecraft was far from Earth, the spacecraft’s gravity dominated things near it. The region around a spacecraft, or any other body in space, where its gravity can hold an object in an orbit, is called its sphere of influence.

An object’s sphere of influence expands enormously as it moves farther from massive bodies. If, for many days, rocks and droplets of muddy water were expelled from Earth in a supersonic jet, the spheres of influence of the rocks and water would grow dramatically. The more the spheres of influence grew, the more mass they would capture, so the more they would grow, etc.18

A droplet engulfed in a growing sphere of influence of a rock or another droplet with a similar velocity might be captured by it. However, a droplet entering a body’s fixed sphere of influence with even a small relative velocity would seldom be captured.19 This is because it would gain enough speed as it fell toward that body to escape from the sphere of influence at about the same speed it entered.

Earth’s sphere of influence has a radius of about 600,000 miles. A rock inside that sphere is influenced more by Earth’s gravity than the Sun’s. A rock entering Earth’s sphere of influence at only a few feet per second would accelerate toward Earth. It could reach a speed of almost 7 miles per second, depending on how close it came to Earth. Assuming no collision, gravity would whip the rock partway around Earth so fast it would exit Earth’s sphere of influence about as fast as it entered—a few feet per second. It would then be influenced more by the Sun and would enter a new orbit about the Sun.20

Exiting a sphere of influence is more difficult if it contains a gas, such as an atmosphere or water vapor. Any gas, especially a dense gas, slows an invading particle, perhaps enough to capture it. Atmospheres are often relied upon to slow and capture spacecraft. This technique, called aerobraking, generates much heat. However, if the “spacecraft” is a liquid droplet, evaporation cools the droplet, makes the atmosphere denser, and makes capture even easier.

A swarm of mutually captured particles will orbit their common center of mass. If the swarm were moving away from Earth, the swarm’s sphere of influence would grow, so fewer particles would escape by chance interactions with other particles. Particles in the swarm, colliding with gas molecules, would gently settle toward the swarm’s center of mass. How gently? More softly than large snowflakes settling onto a windless, snow-covered field. More softly, because the swarm’s gravity is much weaker than Earth’s gravity. Eventually, most particles in this swarm would become a rotating clump of fluffy ice particles with almost no strength. The entire clump would stick together, resembling a comet’s nucleus in strength, size, density, spin, composition, texture, and orbit. The pressure in the center of a comet nucleus 3 miles in diameter is about what you would feel under a blanket here on Earth.

In contrast, spheres of influence hardly change for particles in nearly circular orbits about a planet or the Sun. Even on rare occasions when particles pass very near each other, capture does not occur. This is because they seldom collide and stick together, their relative velocities almost always allow them to escape each other’s sphere of influence, their spheres of influence rarely expand, and gases are not inside these spheres to assist in capture. Forming stars, planets, or moons by capturing21 smaller orbiting bodies is far more difficult than most people realize.22

How Comets Move

Most comets travel on long, oval paths called ellipses that bring them near the Sun and then swing them back out into deep space. [See Figure 127 on page 221.] The point nearest the Sun on an elliptical orbit is called its perihelion. At perihelion, a comet’s speed is greatest. After a comet passes perihelion and begins moving away from the Sun, its velocity steadily decreases until it reaches its farthest point from the Sun—called its aphelion. (This is similar to the way a ball thrown up into the air slows down until it reaches its highest point.) Then the comet begins falling back toward the Sun, gaining speed until it again reaches perihelion.

Figure 123: What Is Jupiter’s Family? About 60% of all short-period comets have aphelions 4–6 AU from the Sun. (A comet’s aphelion is its farthest point from the Sun.) Because Jupiter travels in a nearly circular orbit that lies near the center of that range (5.2 AU from the Sun), those comets are called “Jupiter’s family.” (Comets in Jupiter’s family do not travel with Jupiter; those comet and Jupiter have only one orbital characteristic in common—aphelion distance.) Is Saturn, which lies 9.5 AU from the Sun, collecting a family? See the “aphelion scale” directly above each planet.

Why should comets cluster into families defined by aphelions? Why is Jupiter’s family so large? No doubt, Jupiter’s gigantic size has something to do with it. Notice how large Jupiter is compared to other planets and how far each is from the Sun. (Diameters of the Sun and planets are magnified relative to the aphelion scale.)

Short-Period Comets. Of the almost 1,000 known comets, 205 orbit the Sun in less than 100 years. They are called short-period comets, because the time for each to orbit the Sun once, called the period, is short—less than 100 years.23 Short-period comets usually travel near Earth’s orbital plane, called the ecliptic. Almost all (190) are prograde; that is, they orbit the Sun in the same direction as the planets. Surprisingly, about 60% of all short-period comets have aphelions near Jupiter’s orbit.24 They are called Jupiter’s family. [See Figure 123.]

To better understand what is meant by “Jupiter’s family,” look briefly at Figure 128 on page 223. While comets A, B, and C orbit the Sun, only A and B are in Jupiter’s family, because their farthest point from the Sun, their aphelion, is near Jupiter’s orbit.

How Jupiter collected its large family of comets presents major problems, because comets falling toward the Sun from the outer solar system would be traveling too fast as they zip inside Jupiter’s orbit. To slow them down so they could join Jupiter’s family would require such great deceleration forces that the comets would have to pass very near planets. But those near passes could easily tear comets apart or eject them from the solar system.25

Also, comets in Jupiter’s family run an increased risk of colliding with Jupiter or planets in the inner solar system, or being expelled from the solar system by Jupiter’s gigantic gravity. Therefore, they have a life expectancy of only about 12,000 years.26 This presents three possibilities: (1) Jupiter’s family formed less than about 12,000 years ago, (2) the family is resupplied rapidly by unknown processes, or (3) the family had many more comets prior to about 12,000 years ago—perhaps thousands of times as many. Options (2) and (3) present a terrible collection problem. In other words, too many comets cluster in Jupiter’s family, precisely where few should gather or survive for much longer than about 12,000 years. Why?

Long-Period Comets. Of the 659 comets with periods exceeding 700 years, fewer than half (47%) are prograde, while the rest (53%) are retrograde, orbiting the Sun “backwards”—in a direction opposite that of the planets. Because no planets have retrograde orbits, we must ask why so many long-period comets are retrograde, while few short-period comets are.

Intermediate-Period Comets. Only 50 comets have orbital periods between 100 and 700 years. So we have two completely different populations of comets—short-period and long-period—plus a few in between.

Figure 124: An Early Lesson in Conservation of Energy. At the top of his swing, my grandson, Preston, has a minimum of kinetic energy (energy of motion) but a maximum of potential energy (energy of height). At the bottom of his swing, where he moves the fastest, he will have converted potential energy into kinetic energy. In between, he has some of both.

Eventually, friction converts both forms of energy into heat energy, slowing the swing, and making Preston unhappy. Comets also steadily exchange kinetic and potential energy, but do so with essentially no frictional loss.

Energy. A comet falling in its orbit toward the Sun exchanges “height above” the Sun for additional speed—just as a ball dropped from a tall building loses elevation but gains speed. Moving away from the Sun, the exchange reverses. A comet’s energy has two parts: potential energy, which increases with the comet’s distance from the Sun, and kinetic energy, which increases with speed. Kinetic energy is converted to potential energy as the comet moves away from the Sun. The beauty of these exchanges is that the sum of the two energies never changes if the comet is influenced only by the Sun; the total energy is conserved (preserved).

However, if a comet orbiting the Sun passes near a planet, energy is transferred between them. What one gains, the other loses; the energy of the comet-planet pair is conserved. A comet falling in the general direction of a planet gains speed, and therefore, energy; moving away from a planet, it loses speed and energy. We say the planet’s gravity perturbs (or alters) the comet’s orbit. If the comet gains energy, its orbit lengthens. The closer the encounter and more massive the planet, the greater the energy exchange. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 318 times more massive than Earth and causes most large perturbations. In about half of these planetary encounters, comets gain energy, and in half they lose energy.

Figure 125: Energies of Long-Period Comets. The tall red bar represents 465 comets with extremely high energy—comets that travel far from the Sun, such as 2,000 AU, 10,000 AU, 50,000 AU, or infinity. These comets, traveling on long, narrow ellipses that are almost parabolas, are called near-parabolic comets. Those who believe this tall bar locates the source of comets usually represent this broad (actually infinite) range as “50,000 AU” and say comets are falling in from those distances. Because near-parabolic comets fall in from all directions, this possible comet source is called the “Oort shell” or “Oort cloud,” named after Jan Oort who proposed its existence in 1950. (No one has detected the Oort cloud with a telescope or any sensing device.)28 Actually, we can say only that 71% of the long-period comets, those represented by the red bar, are falling in with similar and very large energies.

As a comet “loops in” near the Sun, it interacts gravitationally with planets, gaining or losing energy. The green line represents parabolic orbits, the boundary separating elliptical orbits from hyperbolic orbits (i.e., closed orbits from open orbits). If a comet gains enough energy to nudge it to the right of the green line, it will be expelled from the solar system forever. This happened with the few outgoing hyperbolic comets represented by the short, black bar. Incoming hyperbolic comets have never been seen 29—a very important point. About half of all comets will lose energy with each orbit, so their orbits shorten, making collisions with the planets and Sun more likely and vaporization from the Sun’s heat more rapid. So with each shift to the left (loss of energy), a comet’s chance of survival drops. Few long-period comets would survive the many gravity perturbations needed to make them short-period comets. However, there are about a hundred times more short-period comets than one would expect based on all the gravity perturbations needed.30 (Short-period comets would be far to the left of the above figure.)

If planetary perturbations acted on a steady supply of near-parabolic comets for millions of years, the number of comets in each interval should correspond to the shape of the yellow area.31 The small number of actual comets in that area (shown by the blue bars) indicates the deficiency of near-parabolic comets that have made subsequent trips into the inner solar system. Question: Where are the many comets that should have survived their first trip but with slightly less energy? Hasn’t enough time passed for them to show up? After only millions of years, blue bars should more or less fill the yellow area. Figure 125 shows us that the evidence which should be clearly seen if comets have been orbiting the Sun for only millions of years—let alone billions of years—does not exist. In other words, near-parabolic comets have not been orbiting the Sun for millions of years.

Notice the tall red bar. If these 465 near-parabolic comets had made many previous orbits, their gravitational interaction with planets would have randomly added or subtracted considerable energy, flattening and spreading out the red bar. As you can see, near-parabolic comets are falling in for the first time.32 Were they launched in a burst from near the center of the solar system, and are they just now returning to the planetary region again, falling back from all directions? If so, how did this happen?

* The horizontal axis represents 1/a, a proxy for energy per unit mass. The term “a” is a comet’s semimajor axis. Each cell has a width of 10-3(1/AU).

If a comet gains enough energy (and therefore speed), it will escape the solar system. Although the Sun’s gravity pulls on the comet as it moves away from the Sun, that pull may decrease so fast with distance that the comet escapes forever. The resulting orbit is not an ellipse (a closed orbit), but a hyperbola (an open orbit). (See Figure 126.) The precise dividing line between ellipses and hyperbolas is an orbit called a parabola. Most long-period comets travel on long, narrow ellipses that are almost parabolas. They are called near-parabolic comets. If they had just a little more velocity, they would permanently escape the solar system on hyperbolic orbits.

Figure 126: A Shot Fired Around the World. Imagine standing on a tall mountain rising above the atmosphere. You fire a bullet horizontally. If its speed is just right, and very fast, it will “fall” at the same rate the spherical Earth curves away. The bullet would be launched in a circular orbit (blue) around Earth. In other words, the bullet would “fall” around the Earth continuously. Isaac Newton first suggested this surprising possibility in 1687. It wasn’t until 1957 that the former Soviet Union demonstrated this with a satellite called Sputnik I.

If the bullet were launched more slowly, it would eventually hit the Earth. If the bullet traveled faster, it would be in an oval or elliptical orbit (red).27 With even more speed, the orbit would not “loop around” and close on itself. It would be an “open” orbit; the bullet would never return. The green orbit, called a parabolic orbit, represents the boundary between open and closed orbits. With any greater launch velocity, the bullet would travel in a hyperbolic orbit; with any less, it would be in an elliptical orbit. These orbits will be discussed in more detail later. Understanding them will help us discover how comets came to be.

Separate Populations. Few comets with short periods will ever change into near-parabolic comets, because the large boost in energy needed is apt to “throw” a comet across the parabola boundary, expelling it permanently from the solar system. The energy boost would have to “snuggle” a comet up next to the parabola boundary without crossing it.33 Likewise, few long-period comets will become short-period comets, because comets risk getting killed with each near pass of a planet. This would be especially true if such dangerous activity went on for millions of years in the “heavy traffic” of the inner solar system.

While all planets travel near Earth’s orbital plane (the ecliptic), long-period and intermediate-period comets have orbital planes inclined at all angles. However, short-period comets usually travel near the ecliptic. Comet inclinations change only slightly with most planet encounters.34 Because very few short-period comets can become long-period comets, and vice versa, most must have begun in their current category.

Comet Composition

Until a spacecraft lands on a comet’s nucleus and returns samples to Earth for analysis, much will remain unknown about comets. However, light from a comet can identify some of the gas and dust in its head and tail.

Light Analysis. Each type of molecule, or portion thereof, absorbs and gives off specific colors of light. The color combination, seen when this light passes through a prism or other instrument to reveal its spectrum, identifies some components in the comet. Even light frequencies humans cannot see can be analyzed in the tiniest detail. Some components, like sodium, are easy to identify, but others, such as chlorine, are difficult, because the light they emit is dim or masked by other radiations. Curved tails in comets have the same light characteristics as the Sun, and therefore are reflecting sunlight. In space, only solid particles reflect sunlight, so we know that these curved tails are primarily dust. Also detected in comets are water, carbon dioxide, argon,35 and many combinations of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Probably, some molecules in comets, such as water and carbon dioxide, have broken apart and recombined to produce many other compounds. Comets contain methane and ethane. On Earth, bacteria produce almost all methane, and ethane comes from methane. How could comets originating in space get high concentrations of these compounds?36

Mars’ atmosphere also contains small amounts of methane. Because solar radiation should destroy that methane within a few hundred years, something within Mars must be producing methane. (Martian volcanoes are not, because Mars has no active or recent volcanoes. Nor do comets today deliver methane fast enough to replace what solar radiation is destroying.)37 Does this mean that bacterial life is in Martian soil?38 Probably. Later in this chapter, a surprising explanation will be given.

Dust particles in comets vary in size from pebbles to specks smaller than the eye can detect. How dust could ever form in space is a recognized mystery.39 Light analysis shows that the atoms in comet dust are arranged in simple, repetitive, crystalline patterns, primarily that of olivine,40 the most common of the 2,000 known minerals on Earth. In fact, the particular type of olivine in comet dust appears to be rich in magnesium, as is the olivine in rocks beneath oceans and in continental crust. In contrast, dust between stars (interstellar dust) has no repetitive atomic patterns; it is not crystalline, and certainly not olivine.

Crystalline patterns form because atoms and ions tend to arrange themselves in patterns that minimize their total energy. An atom whose temperature and pressure allow it to move about will eventually find a “comfortable” slot next to other atoms that minimizes energy. (This is similar to the motion of marbles rolling around on a table filled with little pits. A marble is most “comfortable” when it settles into one of the pits. The lower the marble settles, the lower its energy, and the more permanent its position.) Minerals in rocks, such as in the mantle or deep in Earth’s crust, have been under enough pressure to develop a crystalline pattern.41

Deep Impact Mission. On 4 July 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft fired an 820-pound “bullet” into comet Tempel 1, revealing as never before the composition of a comet’s surface layers.42 The cometary material blasted into space included:

a. silicates, which constitute about 95% of the Earth’s crust and contain considerable oxygen—a rare commodity in space

b. crystalline silicates that could not have formed in frigid (about -450°F) outer space unless the temperature reached 1,300°F and then slowly cooled under some pressure

c. minerals that form only in liquid water, such as calcium carbonates (limestone) and clays

d. organic material of unknown origin

e. sodium, which is seldom seen in space

f. very fine dirt—like talcum powder—that was “tens of meters deep” on the comet’s surface

Comet Tempel 1 is fluffy and extremely porous. It contains about 60% empty space, and has “the strength of the meringue in lemon meringue pie.”43

Stardust Mission. In July 2004, NASA’s Stardust mission passed within 150 miles of the nucleus of comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt 2”), caught dust particles from its tail, and returned them to Earth in January 2006. The dust was crystalline, contained “abundant organics,” “abundant water,” and many chemical elements common on Earth but rare in space: magnesium, calcium, aluminum, and titanium. Crystalline material—minerals—should not form in the cold, weightlessness of outer space.44 What can explain the observations of these two space missions?

What is “interstellar dust”? Is it dust? Is it interstellar? While some of its light characteristics match those of dust, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have shown that those characteristics have a much better match with dried, frozen bacteria and cellulose—an amazing match.45

Dust, cellulose, and bacteria may be in space, but each raises questions. If it is dust, how did dust form in space? “Cosmic abundances of magnesium and silicon [major constituents of dust] seem inadequate to give interstellar dust.”46 A standard explanation is that exploding stars (supernovas) produced dust. However, each second, supernovas radiate the energy of about 10 billion suns, so any expelled dust or nearby rocks would vaporize. If it is cellulose, the most abundant organic substance on Earth, how could such a large, complex molecule form in space?47 Vegetation is one-third cellulose; wood is one-half cellulose. Finally, bacteria are so complex it is absurd to think they formed in space. How could they eat, keep from freezing, or avoid being destroyed by ultraviolet radiation?

Is all “interstellar dust” interstellar? Probably not. Starlight traveling to Earth passes through regions of space that absorb specific wavelengths of light. The regions showing the spectral characteristics of cellulose and bacteria may lie within or surround the solar system. Some astronomers mistakenly assume that because much absorption occurs in interstellar space, little occurs in the solar system.

Heavy Hydrogen. Water molecules (H2O) have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. A hydrogen atom contains one proton in its nucleus. On Earth, about one out of 6,400 hydrogen nuclei has, in addition to its proton, a neutron, making that hydrogen—called heavy hydrogen, or deuterium—twice as heavy as normal hydrogen.

Surprisingly, in comets, one out of 3,200 hydrogen atoms is heavy—twice the richness, or concentration, of that in water on Earth.48 The concentration of heavy hydrogen in comets is 20–100 times that of interstellar space and the solar system as a whole.49 Evidently, comets came from an isolated reservoir. Many efforts by comet experts to deal with this problem are simply unscientific guesswork. No known naturally occurring process will greatly increase or decrease the heavy hydrogen concentration in comets.

Details Requiring an Explanation

Summarized below are the hard-to-explain details which any satisfactory theory for the origin of comets should largely explain.

Formation Mechanism. Experimentally verified explanations are needed for how comets formed and acquired water, dust particles of various sizes, and many chemicals.

Ice on Moon and Mercury. Large amounts of water ice are in permanently shadowed craters near the poles of the Moon, and probably on planet Mercury.

Crystalline Dust. Comet dust is primarily crystalline.

Near-Parabolic Comets. Most near-parabolic comets falling toward the Sun are doing so for the first time. [See Figure 125.]

Random Perihelion Directions. Comet perihelions are scattered on all sides of the Sun.

No Incoming Hyperbolic Orbits. Although a few comets leave the solar system on hyperbolic orbits, no incoming hyperbolic comets are known. That is, no comets are known to come from outside the solar system.

Small Perihelions. Perihelions of long-period comets are concentrated near the Sun, in the 1–3 AU range, not randomly scattered over a larger range.

Orbit Directions and Inclinations. About half the long-period comets have retrograde orbits (orbit in a direction opposite to the planets), whereas all planets, and almost all short-period comets, are prograde. Short-period comets have orbital planes near Earth’s orbital plane, while long-period comets have orbital planes inclined at all angles.

Two Separate Populations. Long-period comets are quite different from short-period comets. Even millions of years and many gravitational interactions with planets would rarely change one kind into the other.

Jupiter’s Family. Jupiter recently collected a large family of comets, each with a surprisingly short life expectancy of about 12,000 years.26 How did this happen? [See Figure 123 on page 212.]

High Loss Rates of Comets. Comets are being destroyed, diminished, or expelled from the solar system at rates that place difficult constraints on some theories.

Composition. Comets are primarily water, silicate dust (such as olivine), carbon dioxide, sodium, and many combinations of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. They contain limestone, clays, and some compounds found in or produced by life, such as methane.

Heavy Hydrogen. The high concentration of heavy hydrogen in comets means comets did not come from today’s known hydrogen sources—in or beyond the solar system.

Small Comets. What can explain the strange characteristics of small comets: including their abundance and proximity to Earth but not to Mars? Small comets have never been seen impacting Mars.

Missing Meteorites. Meteor streams are associated with comets and have similar orbits. Meteorites are concentrated in Earth’s topmost sedimentary layers, so they must have fallen recently, after most sediments were deposited.53 [See “Shallow Meteorites” on page 35.] Comets may have arrived recently as well.

Recent Meteor Streams. As comets disintegrate, their dust particles form meteor streams which orbit the Sun. After about 10,000 years, solar radiation should segregate particles by size. Because little segregation has occurred, meteor streams, and therefore comets, must be recent. [See “Poynting-Robertson Effect” on page 36.]

Crater Ages. Are the ages of Earth’s impact craters consistent with each comet theory?

Hydroplate Theory. Comets are literally out of this world. As the flood began, the extreme pressure in the interconnected, subterranean chambers and the power of supercritical water exploding into the vacuum of space launched about 50,000 comets, totaling less than 1% of the water in the chambers. (These numbers will be derived later.) This water was rich in heavy hydrogen.

As subterranean water escaped, the chambers’ pillars were crushed and broken. Also, the 10-mile-high walls along the rupture were unstable, because granitic rock is not strong enough to support a cliff greater than 5 miles high. The bottom portions of the walls were crushed into large blocks which were swept up and launched by the “fountains of the great deep.” Carried up with the water were eroded dirt particles, pulverized organic matter (especially cellulose from preflood forests), and even bacteria.

Droplets in this muddy mixture froze quickly in outer space. The expanding spheres of influence of the larger rocks captured more and more ice particles which later gravitationally merged to form comets. Some comets and rocks hit the near side of the Moon directly and formed large basins. Those impacts produced lava flows and debris which then caused secondary impacts. Water vapor condensed in the permanent shadows of the Moon’s polar craters.

Hyperbolic comets never returned to the solar system. Near-parabolic comets now being detected are returning to the inner solar system for the first time. Comets launched with slower velocities received most of their orbital velocity from Earth’s orbital motion. They are short-period comets with elliptical, prograde orbits lying near the Earth’s orbital plane. Since the flood, many short-period comets have been gravitationally pulled into Jupiter’s family. Comets launched with the least velocity are small comets. [For a more complete description of the hydroplate theory, see pages 102–131.]

Exploded Planet Theory.54 Consistent with Bode’s “law,”55 a tenth planet once existed 2.8 AU from the Sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It exploded about 3,200,000 years ago, spewing out comets and asteroids. Many fragments collided with other planets and moons, explaining why some planets and moons are cratered primarily on one side. The fragments visible today are those that avoided the disturbing influence of planets: those launched on nearly circular orbits (asteroids) and those launched on elongated ellipses (comets). This theory also explains the origin of asteroids and some similarities between comets and asteroids.

Volcanic Eruption Theory.56 The large number of short-period comets, as compared with intermediate-period comets, requires their recent formation near the center of the solar system. Volcanic eruptions, probably from the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) or their moons, periodically launch comets. Jupiter’s large, recently-acquired family suggests that Jupiter was the most recent planet to erupt. The giant planets are huge reservoirs of hydrogen, a major constituent of comets. New eruptions continuously replenish comets being rapidly lost through collisions with planets or moons, evaporation when passing near the Sun, and ejection from the solar system.

Oort Cloud Theory.57 As the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago, a cloud of about 1012 comets also formed approximately 50,000 AU from the Sun58—more than a thousand times farther away than planet Pluto and about one-fifth the distance to the nearest star. Stars passing near the solar system perturbed parts of this Oort cloud, sending randomly oriented comets on trajectories that pass near the Sun. This is why calculations show so many long-period comets falling into the inner solar system from about 50,000 AU away. As a comet enters the planetary region (0–40 AU from the Sun), the gravity of planets, especially Jupiter, either adds energy to or removes energy from the comet. If energy is added, the comet is usually thrown from the solar system on a hyperbolic orbit. If energy is removed, the comet’s orbital period is shortened. With so many comets in the initial cloud (1012), some survived many passes through the inner solar system and are now short-period comets.Revised Oort Cloud Theory.59 As the solar system began 4.5 billion years ago, all comets formed in a comet nursery near or just beyond the outer giant planets. Because these comets were relatively near the Sun, passing stars could not eject them from the solar system. As with planets, these early comets all had prograde orbits near the plane of the ecliptic. Perturbations by the giant planets gave some comets short periods with prograde orbits near the ecliptic plane. Other perturbations ejected other comets out to form and resupply an Oort cloud, 50,000 AU from the Sun. Over millions of years, passing stars have circularized these latter orbits. Then other passing stars perturbed some Oort cloud comets back into the planetary region, as described by the original Oort cloud theory. Therefore, large numbers of near-parabolic comets are still available to fall into the inner solar system from about 50,000 AU away. An unreasonably large number of comets did not have to begin in the Oort cloud 4.5 billion years ago (where, after a few billion years, passing stars, galactic clouds, and the galaxy itself would easily strip them from the cloud). Short-period comets cannot come from the Oort cloud.

Meteor Stream Theory.71 When particles orbiting the Sun collide, they exchange some energy and momentum. If the particles are sufficiently absorbent (squishy), their orbits become more similar.72 After millions of years, these particles form meteor streams. Water vapor condenses on the particles in the meteor streams as they pass through the cold, outer solar system. Thus, icy comets form continuously. This is why so many meteor streams have cometlike orbits, and why more short-period comets exist than an Oort cloud could provide.

Interstellar Capture Theory.73 Comets form when the Sun occasionally passes through interstellar gas and dust clouds. As seen from the Sun, gas and dust particles stream past the Sun. The Sun’s gravity deflects and focuses these particles around and behind the Sun. There they collide with each other, lose velocity, enter orbits around the Sun, and merge into distinct swarms of particles held together by their mutual gravity. These swarms become comets with long and short periods, depending on how far the collisions were from the Sun.

To form comets in space, should we start with water as a solid, liquid, or gas?

Gas. In space, gases (such as water vapor) will expand into the vacuum if not gravitationally bound to some large body. Gases by themselves would not contract to form a comet. Besides, the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation breaks water vapor into hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), and hydroxyl (OH). Comets would not form from gases.

Solid. Comets might form by the combining of smaller ice particles, including ice condensed as frost on microscopic dust grains that somehow formed. However, one icy dust grain could not capture another unless their speeds and directions were nearly identical and one of the particles had a rapidly expanding sphere of influence or a gaseous envelope. Because ice molecules are loosely bound to each other, collisions among ice particles would fragment, scatter, and vaporize them—not merge them.

Liquid. Large rocks and muddy water were expelled by the “fountains of the great deep.” The water would partially evaporate, leave dirt behind, rapidly radiate its heat to cold outer space, and freeze. (Outer space has an effective temperature of nearly absolute zero, -460°F.) The dirt crust encasing the ice would prevent complete evaporation. (Recall that the nucleus of Halley’s comet was black, and a comet’s tail contains dust particles.)

High-velocity water escaping from the subterranean chamber would erode dirt and rocks of various sizes. Water vapor would concentrate around the larger rocks escaping from Earth. These “clouds” and expanding spheres of influence would capture other nearby particles moving at similar velocities. Comets would quickly form.76

Other reasons exist for concluding that water in a gas or solid state cannot form comets.77 Water from the “fountains of the great deep” meets all requirements.

2. circlegreen.jpg ImageCrystalline Dust. Sediments eroded by high-velocity water escaping from the subterranean chamber would be crystalline, some of it magnesium-rich olivine.

3. circleyellow.jpg ImageNear-Parabolic Comets. Because the same event launched all comets from Earth, those we see falling from the farthest distance (near-parabolic comets) are falling back for the first time and with similar energy. Other comets, launched with slightly more velocity, will soon be detected.

If the comets represented by the red bar in Figure 125 on page 213 are falling in from distances of 50,000 AU, their orbital periods are about 4 million years. How then could they have been launched from anywhere in the solar system if the flood began only about 5,000 years ago?

The distance (50,000 AU) is in error.28 Comets more than about 12 AU from the Sun cannot be seen, so both the distances they have fallen and their orbital periods must be calculated from the small portions of their orbits that can be observed. Both calculations are extremely sensitive to the mass of the solar system. If this mass has been underestimated by as little as about 17 parts in 10,000 (about the mass of two Jupiters), the true distance would be 585 AU and the period only 5,000 years.79

Where might the missing mass be hiding? Probably not in the planetary region. The masses of the Sun, planets, and some moons are well known, because masses in space can be accurately measured if something orbits them and the orbit is closely observed.81 However, if extra mass is thinly spread within 40–600 AU from the Sun (beyond Pluto’s orbit), only objects outside 40 AU would be gravitationally affected. (Recall the hollow sphere result on page 210.) That mass, depending on its distribution, could considerably shorten the periods of near-parabolic comets, because they spend 99% of their time at least 40 AU from the Sun.

Comet Ikeya-Zhang travels about 100 AU from the Sun and last returned to the inner solar system in March 2002. It is the one periodically observed comet that ventures most deeply into this region, 40–600 AU from the Sun. Its previous return was in January 1661, 341.13 years earlier. However, its orbital period, based on the accepted mass of the solar system, should have been 366.95 years. The simplest explanation for this 25.82-year discrepancy is that some extra mass is about 40 AU from the Sun.

Comet Herschel-Rigollet, which ventures 57 AU from the Sun, has the second longest period. It last returned in August 1939, 4.2 years ahead of schedule based on the traditional mass of the solar system. It too seems to have encountered extra mass beyond 40 AU.82

What if two comet sightings, a century or more apart, were of comets which we assumed had such long periods that they should not be the same comet, but whose orbits were so similar they probably were the same comet? We might suspect that both sightings were of the same comet, and it encountered some extra mass beyond 40 AU that pulled it back much sooner than expected. Twelve “strange pairs” are known, suggesting that extra, unseen mass beyond Pluto’s orbit affects long-period comets but is not felt within the planetary region. These “strange pairs” are explained in Figure 127 and Table 15.

This “missing” mass could be composed of particles as small as gas molecules up to asteroid-size objects 100 miles wide. They would be difficult to detect with our best telescopes. However, with recent technical advances, dozens of large, asteroid-size objects are being discovered each year beyond Neptune’s orbit. They are called transneptunian objects. So far, 923 have been discovered. Of course, no one knows their total number or mass.

Much is unknown about the distant region 40–600 AU from the Sun. For example, spacecraft launched from Earth many years ago are now entering that region’s inner fringes. These spacecraft are experiencing a slight, but additional, gravity-like acceleration toward the Sun. So far, efforts to explain this acceleration have failed. While its magnitude is too small to give near-parabolic comets 5,000-year periods, the effect is strengthening as the spacecraft begin to penetrate this region.83

Figure 127: An Orbit’s Fingerprint. A comet’s orbit closely approximates an ellipse. Each ellipse and its orientation in space are specified by five numbers, two of which are shown above. The first, i, is the angle of inclination—the angle the plane of the ellipse makes with Earth’s orbital plane. A second number, q, measures in astronomical units (AU) the distance from the Sun to the perihelion. The other three numbers (e, w, and W) need not be defined here but are explained in most books on orbital mechanics or astronautics.

In the last 920 years, almost 1,000 different comets have been observed accurately enough to calculate these five numbers. Surprisingly, 12 pairs of comets have very similar numbers. Could some “strange pairs” really be the same comet on two successive orbits? The estimated period (the far right column in Table 15), the time to complete one orbit, for each member of the “strange pair” is so extremely long they should not be the same comet. However, if the comets were all different, the chance of any two randomly-selected comets having such similar orbits is about one out of 100,000.80 The chance of getting at least 12 “strange pairs” from the vast number of possible pairings is about one out of 7,000. If the solar system’s mass has been slightly underestimated, orbital periods are much shorter. If so, some “strange pairs” are almost certainly the same comet, and the estimated period (far right column) is wrong. Other reasons are given in this chapter for believing that a slight amount of extra mass exists in the solar system. It should be approximately the mass of about 70 Jupiters but spread thinly outside the planetary region—where long-period comets spend most of their time.

Each pair of rows in Table 15 describes two sightings of comets with remarkably similar orbits. The far left column tells when, to the nearest tenth of a year, the comet passed perihelion. The next five columns specify the comet’s orbit. The bottom two pairs may be the same comet seen in 1097, 1538, and 1947.

4. circlegreen.jpg ImageRandom Perihelion Directions. Comets were launched in almost all directions, because the generally north-south rupture encircled the rotating Earth.

5. circlegreen.jpg ImageOrbit Directions and Inclinations, Two Separate Populations. A ball tossed in any direction circlegreen.jpg Imagefrom a high-speed train will, to an observer on the ground, initially travel almost horizontally and in the train’s direction of travel. Likewise, low-velocity comets launched in any direction from Earth received most of their orbital velocity from Earth’s high, prograde velocity (18.5 miles per second) about the Sun. Earth, by definition, has zero angle of inclination. This is why almost all short-period comets, those launched with low velocity, are prograde and have low angles of inclination.

Comets launched with greater velocities than Earth’s orbital velocity traveled in all directions. Most are long-period comets with randomly inclined orbital planes. Prograde comets launched with the highest velocities escaped the solar system, because they had the added velocity of Earth’s motion. This is why so many of the remaining long-period comets are retrograde. [See Table 12 on page 212.] (Almost all other bodies orbiting the Sun are prograde: planets, asteroids, transneptunian objects, meteoroids, and short-period comets.)

While this explains how two populations formed, one must ask if comets could be launched from Earth with enough velocity to blast through the atmosphere, escape Earth’s gravity, and enter large, even retrograde, orbits.

To escape Earth’s gravity and enter only a circular orbit around the Sun requires a launch velocity of 7 miles per second. However, to produce near-parabolic, retrograde orbits requires a launch velocity of 33 miles per second! Earth’s atmosphere would offer little resistance at such speeds. In seconds, the jetting fountains would push the thin atmosphere aside, much as water from a firehose quickly penetrates a thin wall.

Water pressurized by only the weight of 10 miles of rock would launch comets from Earth’s surface at a mere 0.5 mile per second. However, calculations show that two powerful effects, (1) water hammers and (2) expanding gases from supercritical water, would do the job. The energy for this second effect comes from the Moon’s orbit and the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. All this is explained on page 112.

Water Hammers. During the early days of the subterranean chamber’s collapse, giant water hammers would create enormous pressures. Today, water hammers occur, often with a loud bang, when fluid flowing in a pipe is suddenly stopped (or slowed) by a closing (or narrowing) valve—a device, such as a faucet, that controls the flow. A water hammer is similar to the collision of a long train with an immovable object. The faster and more massive the train (or volume of water), the greater the compression (or pressure jump) throughout the pipe. A water hammer concentrates energy, just as a hammer striking a nail concentrates energy. A moving hammer can produce forces many times greater than a resting hammer.

The subterranean chamber acted as the pipe. What was the valve? Once the water began to escape upward through any crack, a chain reaction would begin. The escaping flow from the chamber would start collapsing pillars (explained in Figure 53), beginning with those nearest the crack. Adjacent pillars, suddenly carrying additional loads, would also collapse like a house of cards. The crust would vibrate (flutter) in complex, wavelike patterns, like a flag held horizontally in a strong wind. Each narrowing of the chamber’s thickness would, in effect, partially close a valve, slow trillions of tons of water, and create a water hammer.

Forces familiar to us will not compress water much. However, the weight of 10 miles of rock resting on the trapped subterranean water would compress it by about 14%.84 Water, compressed by the vibrating crust, would act as trillions of springs. Those “springs” and the massive fluttering crust would have primary vibrational periods of about a minute. In other words, vibrations closed “valves” which created water hammers which created more vibrations, etc. Most people have heard water pipes banging or have seen pipes burst when only a few cubic feet of water were slowed. Imagine the excruciating pressures from rapidly slowing a “moving underground ocean.”85

What Is Flutter?

Flutter occurs when a fluid flows over a solid surface, such as the wing of an airplane or a flat plate, and initiates a vibration. If (a) a fluid flows along a wing or plate and continuously “thumps” or pushes a deflected wing or plate back toward its neutral position, and (b) the “thumping” frequency approaches any natural frequency of the wing or plate, large, potentially damaging oscillations can occur. This is called flutter.

Water beneath the crust would have allowed the crust to vibrate, and a hydroplate’s large area would have given it great flexibility. Flowing water below the vibrating crust would have produced water hammers that “thumped” the crust at each of its natural frequencies. Undulations in the crust would have rippled throughout the crust, producing other water hammers and more undulations.

Figure 128: Adoption into Jupiter’s Family of Comets. If comets were launched from anywhere in the inner solar system, many, such as comets A and B, would have aphelions within a few astronomical units (AU) of Jupiter’s orbit. Comets spend much of their time near aphelion, where they move very slowly. There they often receive gentle gravitational pulls (green arrows) of long duration, toward Jupiter’s orbit, 5.2 AU from the Sun.

Comet C’s aphelion is far beyond the outermost planet. (At this figure’s scale and based on any Oort cloud theory, Comet C would be 1/5 mile from where you are sitting.) Comet C steadily gains speed as it falls toward the inner solar system for thousands of years, crossing Jupiter’s orbit at tremendous speed. To slow C down enough to join Jupiter’s family would require such powerful forces that the comet would be torn apart, as shown in Figure 122 on page 211. (Comets are fragile.) Could many smaller gravitational encounters pull C into Jupiter’s family? Yes, but close encounters are rare, and about half of these encounters would speed the comet up and probably throw it out of the solar system. Once in Jupiter’s family, the average comet has a life expectancy of only about 12,000 years.26

Clearly, comets must have originated recently from the inner solar system (the home of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) to join Jupiter’s family. Such comets could not have come from beyond Jupiter’s orbit.

6. circlegreen.jpg ImageJupiter’s Family. A bullet, when fired straight up, slows to almost zero velocity near the top of its trajectory—its farthest point from Earth. A comet also moves very slowly near its aphelion. If a comet’s aphelion is ever near Jupiter during any orbit, Jupiter’s large gravity will pull the nearly stationary comet steadily toward Jupiter. Because a comet spends a relatively long time near its farthest point, Jupiter’s gravity acts strongly for an equally long time, gently pulling the nearly stationary comet toward Jupiter’s orbit. Even a comet’s orbital plane is slowly but steadily aligned with Jupiter’s. Thus, aphelions of short-period comets tend to be pulled toward Jupiter’s nearly circular orbit, regardless of whether the aphelion is inside, outside, above, or below that circle. The closer a comet’s aphelion is to Jupiter’s orbit, the more likely it is that the comet will be rapidly drawn toward Jupiter’s orbit. 128

One can think of Jupiter’s mass as being spread out in a hoop that coincides with Jupiter’s orbit. (This “hoop analogy” simplifies the analysis of many long-term gravitational effects.) Comets feel more pull toward the nearest part of the hoop.

My statistical examination of all historical sightings of every orbit (almost 500) of every comet in Jupiter’s family confirms this effect. The hydroplate theory places the source of comets at Earth—well inside Jupiter’s orbit. Therefore, many comets reach their slowest speeds within a few astronomical units of Jupiter’s hoop. Thousands of years of gentle gravitational tugs by this hoop have gathered Jupiter’s family. Although Jupiter sometimes destroys comets or ejects them from the solar system, many comets in its family remain, because they were recently launched. A similar but weaker effect is forming Saturn’s family. [See Figure 123.]

7. circlegreen.jpg ImageComposition, Heavy Hydrogen. When “the fountains of the great circlegreen.jpg Imagedeep” erupted, many rocks were crushed, eroded, sometimes reduced to clay, and mixed with carbonate-rich, salty, subterranean water—which contained sodium, because salt (NaCl) contains sodium. Organic compounds, including methane and ethane, are found in comets, because this water contained pulverized vegetation from preflood forests, as well as bacteria and other traces of life, from within hundreds of miles of the globe-encircling rupture.

Comets are rich in heavy hydrogen, because the water in the subterranean chambers was isolated from other water in the solar system. Our oceans have half the concentration of heavy hydrogen that comets have. So if the subterranean chambers held half the water in today’s oceans (as assumed on page 111), then almost all heavy hydrogen came from the subterranean chambers.

Page 214 lists six surprising materials discovered on comet Tempel 1 by the Deep Impact mission in 2005. Only the hydroplate theory seems to explain the fluffy, porous texture of comets, and items a–e on page 214: crystalline silicates, clays, calcium carbonates, organic material, sodium, oxygen, and, of course, liquid water. Dust particles brought back to Earth by the Stardust Mission in 2006 were also crystalline and contained “organics” and “water.”

Item f (thick surface layers of very fine dirt with the consistency of talcum powder) is probably loess, a type of dirt composed of fine particles in the muddy ice that formed comets. Each time Tempel 1 came near the Sun in its 51/2-year orbital period, more of the ice on the comet’s surface sublimated, leaving behind the imbedded powdery dirt. Loess is described in more detail on pages 185 and 190.

8. circlegreen.jpg ImageSmall Comets. Muddy droplets launched with the slowest velocities could not move far from Earth, so their smaller spheres of influence produced small comets. Their orbits about the Sun tend to intersect Earth’s orbit more in early November than mid-January. Because small comets have been falling on Earth for only about 5,000 years, little of our oceans’ water came from them—or from any comets. Few small comets can reach Mars.

9. circlegreen.jpg ImageRecent Meteor Streams, Crater Ages. Disintegrating comets produce meteor circlegreen.jpg Imagestreams. If meteor streams were older than 10,000 years, the particles in a meteor stream would be sorted by size. [See “Poynting-Robertson Effect” on page 36.] Because this is not seen, meteor streams and comets must be younger than 10,000 years. Only the hydroplate theory claims comets began this recently. Impact craters on Earth are also young.

10. circlegreen.jpg ImageOther/Enough Water. Did the subterranean chamber have enough water to supply all the comets the solar system ever had?

Consider these facts. First, the oceans contain 1.43 x 109 cubic kilometers of water. Also, Marsden and Williams’ Catalogue of Cometary Orbits (1996 edition) lists 124 periodic comets—comets observed on at least two different passages into the inner solar system. (Halley’s comet, for example, has been observed on 30 consecutive orbits dating back to 239 B.C.) In recorded history, 790 other comets have been observed with enough detail to calculate orbits. So we know of 914 comets. (Small comets and fragments of a few comets that have been torn apart by passing too close to the Sun are numerous. However, their mass is only about 1% of the mass of all known comets combined, so they will not be considered here.)

Some comets escaped from the solar system—either directly at launch, or later when perturbed by a planet’s gravity. Other comets have never been counted, because they never came close enough to Earth in modern times to be seen, or because they collided with the Sun or a planet. So let’s presume 50,000 comets were launched.

The average radius of a short-period comet nucleus is about 4.9 kilometers.86 If comet Tempel 1 (the most accurately measured comet to date) is representative of all comets, then comet densities are about 0.62 gram per cubic centimeter, and about 38% of a comet’s mass is water.3 If the subterranean chamber contained half of the water now in the oceans, then less than one-hundredth of the subterranean water was expelled as comets.

Details Relating to the Exploded Planet Theory

13. circleyellow.jpg ImageFormation Mechanism. Explosions produce a wide range of fragment sizes. Rock fragments from an exploded planet would vary from the size of dust up to maybe a quarter of the planet itself. The rocks seen in comets and on asteroids are much more uniform in size. Also, comet dust is mixed uniformly within comet ice. How would a planet, before exploding, have dust mixed within its water?

14. circlered.jpg ImageIce on Moon and Mercury. It is highly unlikely that billions of tons of ice from a distant explosion 3,200,000 years ago would still survive and be found in craters on the Moon and Mercury.

15. circlered.jpg ImageJupiter’s Family. If comets suddenly formed 3,200,000 years ago, why would Jupiter’s large family now have so many comets with life spans of only about 12,000 years?

16. circleyellow.jpg ImageComposition. If comets formed as this theory claims, why would they have organic matter, including methane and ethane? Vegetation and bacteria could not live in the cold, dim asteroid belt, 2.8 AU from the Sun. This theory does not explain any of the discoveries of the Stardust mission or the six discoveries of the Deep Impact mission listed on page 214.

17. circleyellow.jpg ImageSmall Comets. Comets originating 2.8 AU or farther from the Sun 3.2 million years ago would not concentrate small comets at Earth’s orbit today. Certainly, they would not tend to strike Earth ten times more frequently in early November than in mid-January.

18. circlered.jpg ImageMissing Meteorites. If comets are as old as this theory claims, many more iron meteorites should have been found below the topmost layers of the Earth’s sediments.

19. circleyellow.jpg ImageRecent Meteor Streams. See item 9 above.

20. circlered.jpg ImageCrater Ages. If a planet exploded 3,200,000 years ago, many craters on Earth should have corresponding ages. Even if one accepts evolutionary dating techniques, craters do not cluster at that age, or at any age.87

21. circlered.jpg ImageOther/Scattering. The total mass of all asteroids is less than 0.05% of the Earth’s mass. Combining all asteroids would hardly produce a planet.

Exploding and dispersing a typical planet requires enormous energy.88 Even if a planet composed of pure TNT suddenly exploded, it would collapse back upon itself because of the large, mutual gravitational attraction of all its pieces. Napier and Dodd have shown that no known chemical, gravitational, or plausible nuclear source of energy appears capable of exploding and scattering any known planet.89 A head-on collision between two planets at 2.8 AU could provide the needed energy but would not evenly disperse comet-size chunks or give them the energy distribution shown in Figure 125 on page 213.

Details Relating to the Volcanic Eruption Theory

22. circlered.jpg ImageFormation Mechanism, Crystalline Dust. The giant planets, circlered.jpg Imagebasically big balls of frigid gas, have essentially no dust. They are also too cold to have powerful volcanoes.

23. circlered.jpg Image Ice on Moon and Mercury. Same as item 14.

24. circleyellow.jpg ImageRandom Perihelion Directions, Orbit Directions and Inclinations. circlered.jpg ImageA few, relatively brief, volcanic eruptions from planets or moons would launch primarily prograde comets in specific directions with similar orbital planes and perihelion directions. Instead, long-period comets, about half being retrograde, have randomly oriented orbital planes and perihelions.

The most violent volcanic eruption seen anywhere in the solar system occurred not on Earth, but on Io, Jupiter’s moon. The energy released was less than a thousandth of the energy needed to launch even a few comets from Io. Besides, Io was expelling sulfur dioxide, not water.90 Eruptions from volcanoes, anywhere, would lose too much energy in passing up through narrow volcanic conduits and vents. High pressures cannot build up unless the increase in pressure is contained by a solid. The surfaces of gaseous planets are obviously not solid.

25. circlered.jpg ImageSmall Perihelions. Long-period comets have perihelions concentrated in the 1–3 AU range. Had they been launched from a giant planet (those lying 5–30 AU from the Sun), their perihelions would be farther from the Sun.

26. circleyellow.jpg ImageHigh Loss Rates of Comets. Vsekhsvyatsky, this theory’s leading advocate, by assuming billions of years of comet accumulation, estimated that at least 1020 grams of comets are expelled from the solar system each year.91 Other cometary material should have been lost by evaporation and collisions. On Earth, all volcanoes combined eject only about 3 x 1015 grams of material into the atmosphere each year.92 Therefore, according to this theory, cometary material is being lost from the solar system thousands of times faster than Earth’s volcanoes are ejecting material only a few miles above Earth’s surface.

Matter expelled from a planet or moon might later collect gravitationally into a comet if a large amount of it traveled together. However, volcanoes eject small amounts of matter over wide angles. Ejected material must also travel far enough from the planet to have a large sphere of influence. For the giant planets, this is difficult. Jupiter’s escape velocity, for example, is 38 miles per second. Astronomers have never seen matter being permanently expelled from a giant planet.

27. circlered.jpg ImageComposition, Heavy Hydrogen. The giant planets are primarily gas—hydrogen circlered.jpg Imageand helium. Those planets do not have the higher concentrations of heavier elements that are in comets. Comets are 20 times richer in heavy hydrogen than Jupiter and Saturn. If oxygen, carbon, silicon, magnesium, nitrogen, sodium, and other relatively heavy elements in comets came from any giant planets, they must have come from deep within, where they would sink. Eruptions from deep within gaseous planets would be easily suppressed by viscous drag. If comets came from any giant planets or their barren moons, why would comets have organic compounds, such as methane and ethane? This theory does not explain any of the six discoveries of the Deep Impact mission listed on page 214.

28. circlered.jpg ImageSmall Comets. See item 17.

29. circleyellow.jpg ImageRecent Meteor Streams. See item 9 on page 224.

Details Relating to the Original Oort Cloud Theory

30. circlered.jpg ImageFormation Mechanism, Heavy Hydrogen. According to this circlered.jpg Imagetheory, comets began, as did the rest of the solar system, as a cloud of dust and gas (including water vapor) orbiting the Sun. If so, the concentration of heavy hydrogen in comets should be 20 times less, typical of the rest of the solar system.

Supposedly, solar radiation never broke apart (or dissociated) the water vapor, because it was shielded by other dust particles. Water vapor could then condense as frost on the dust. However, in a virtual vacuum, dust particles coated with ice would have tiny, relatively fixed spheres of influence, so they would not capture each other to form larger clusters—let alone comets—even over billions of years. Instead, rare collisions would scatter particles held together by their weak mutual gravity. No experimental evidence has shown how, in the vacuum of space and in less than several billion years, many billions of tons of particles can merge into even one comet—much less 1012 comets. (A similar problem exists for planets.) Also unexplained is how interstellar dust formed.

31. circlered.jpg ImageIce on Moon and Mercury. Same as item 14.

32. circlered.jpg ImageCrystalline Dust. Dust that formed in outer space should be noncrystalline. Comet dust is crystalline. Therefore, comet dust did not form in outer space as this theory assumes.

33. circlered.jpg ImageNear-Parabolic Comets. If comets have been falling in from an Oort cloud for only a few million years, let alone since the solar system supposedly evolved 4.5 billion years ago, many long-period comets should be coming in for the second, third ... or one hundredth time. There is a recognized lack of such comets. [See Figure 125 on page 213.]

Some believe we do not see second-pass comets because the Oort cloud was perturbed recently. This overlooks the presence of many comets in Jupiter’s family and the absence of a perturbing star. [See item 44 below.]

34. circlered.jpg ImageRandom Perihelion Directions. If a passing star did stir up the Oort cloud, causing many comets to fall toward the Sun, comet perihelions should cluster on the same side of the Sun. Actually, comet perihelions lie in all directions.93

35. circlered.jpg ImageNo Incoming Hyperbolic Orbits. If passing stars or other gravitational disturbances “shake” comets from an Oort cloud, some of those comets should have obvious hyperbolic orbits as they enter the planetary region. None has been reported, so there is probably no Oort cloud.

Comets that formed around other stars should also be ejected by passing stars. Such interstellar comets should enter our solar system every year or two—on hyperbolic orbits. Because incoming comets with hyperbolic orbits have never been seen, the formation processes described above probably do not happen. Leading advocates of the Oort cloud theory acknowledge this problem.29

36. circlered.jpg ImageSmall Perihelions. Using the scale in Figure 128 on page 223, visualize comets in an Oort cloud 1/5 of a mile from the blue circle (less than an inch in diameter) representing the inner solar system. Perturbations from a passing star would not be precise and delicate enough to cluster comet perihelions inside the relatively tiny blue circle.

Fernández94 and Weissman95 showed, using Oort cloud theories, that perihelions of near-parabolic comets would not cluster in the 1–3 AU range (inside “the blue dot”), yet they do. Instead, the number of perihelions would increase as their distance from the Sun increases.

37. circleyellow.jpg ImageOrbit Directions and Inclinations. Explaining how planets evolved is difficult enough, but at least they have some common features such as prograde orbits in planes near the ecliptic—all within 40 AU of the Sun. To also evolve comets 50,000 AU from the Sun, moving in randomly oriented planes, and with some in retrograde orbits, would require even more mysterious processes. Most long-period retrograde comets that “evolved” into short-period comets should still be retrograde. Few short-period comets are retrograde.

Long-period comets are inclined at all angles and rarely become short-period comets. A slight majority of observed long-period comets are retrograde. However, almost all short-period comets are prograde and lie near Earth’s orbital plane. Gravitational interactions with planets might decrease the periods, but are unlikely to change retrograde orbits at all inclinations into prograde orbits near Earth’s orbital plane.

38. circlered.jpg ImageTwo Separate Populations. An Oort cloud only 10,000 AU away would be too tightly bound to the Sun to allow enough stellar perturbations for this theory to work. If the cloud were 50,000 AU away, passing stars and galactic clouds would disperse the Oort cloud in a few billion years. Fernández recommended a distance of 25,000 AU, because it allows the most comets to pass through the inner solar system after 4.5 billion years. Only these comets might become short-period comets. But even if planetary perturbations continued for as long as one wished, only about 1% of the short-period comets we see would be produced. Notice that 25,000 AU is inconsistent with Oort’s 50,000–150,000 AU estimate that gave birth to this theory.

39. circlered.jpg ImageJupiter’s Family. Comets falling in from 50,000 AU would reach very high speeds. The only way to slow them down enough to join Jupiter’s family is by gravitational interactions with planets. However, tidal effects would tear most comets apart or fling them out of the solar system. Those that slowed down over many orbits would continually risk colliding with planets and moons while slowly vaporizing with each passage near the Sun. Few comets would join Jupiter’s family.

Comets in Jupiter’s family have an average life span of only about 12,000 years. They could not have accumulated over millions of years.

40. circleyellow.jpg ImageComposition. Same as item 16 on page 224.

41. circlered.jpg ImageSmall Comets. See item 17 on page 224.

42. circleyellow.jpg ImageRecent Meteor Streams. See item 9 on page 224.

43. circleyellow.jpg ImageCrater Ages. If an Oort cloud were populated with about 1012 comets 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth should have been heavily bombarded. The farther back in time, the greater the bombardment rate. Craters and other evidence of this bombardment should be increasingly visible in the deeper sedimentary rock layers. Instead, craters are almost exclusively found in surface layers.

44. circlered.jpg ImageOther/Missing Star. If a passing star deflected comets in an Oort cloud toward the Sun, where is that star? Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away, or 270,000 AU. It, and the two stars gravitationally bound to it, could not have stirred up an Oort cloud, because they are moving toward the Sun, not away from it. A study that projected stellar motion back 10 million years found that no star would have come within 3 light-years of the Sun. Therefore, no star would have stirred up an Oort cloud 0.8–1.5 light-years away during the last 10 million years.96

Another Possibility: Creation

Some might say comets were created along with the Sun, Moon, and stars, but that view cannot by itself qualify as a scientific theory. Good scientific theories relate and explain, through well-established cause-and-effect relationships (the laws of physics), many otherwise strange observations. Little, if any, historical or scientific evidence supports or refutes the proposal that comets were created in the beginning. Claiming that comets were created out of nothing raises many questions about strange comet characteristics and patterns. The simplest explanation that is consistent with the laws of physics and explains many diverse, otherwise puzzling, observations is probably the best—regardless of the starting point. [See “How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific?” on page 260.]

Final Thoughts

People are surprised at how many theories try to explain comet origins. Ironically, most theories explain the facts better than the theory currently in vogue—the Oort cloud theory. Having only one theory taught or popularized by the media, usually as a fact, leads to its dominance and continuation as the only theory taught—despite a growing number of scientific problems.

Thomas Kuhn wrote the preeminent book on how science works.107 In it, he shows that such monopolies continue in science, often for centuries, until startling new evidence arises along with a theory that better explains all the evidence. Then a slow reeducation process begins, accompanied by hostility from those whose income, power, pride, and prestige are rooted in the old theory or paradigm.

If, as you drove across the country following a map, you found more and more details contradicting your map, you might suspect that you made a wrong turn somewhere. Admitting a mistake may be difficult, and backtracking and finding the correct road can consume time and fuel. In science, paradigm shifts are costly and slow, damage some reputations and businesses, and even destroy major world views of certain segments of society. Fundamental changes in thinking are strenuously resisted by some, but are inevitable if the scientific evidence supports those changes.

Theories must be based on evidence, but new evidence that helps explain comet origins is rare and expensive. In 2014, the European Space Agency hopes to have the Rosetta spacecraft orbit comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, take measurements, and place instruments on it. If successful, Rosetta will provide the critical information needed to test many theories described in this chapter. The greatest advances in understanding usually come from testing conflicting predictions of better theories.108 This will require landing softly on a comet and sending data, and ultimately samples, back to Earth.

New evidence spawns new theories, and the testing cycle begins again. However, when only one explanation is taught and seldom questioned, the cycle stops. In science, we should never think we have a final or proven answer.

The Origin of Asteroids and Meteoroids

SUMMARY: The “fountains of the great deep” launched rocks as well as muddy water. As rocks moved farther from Earth, Earth’s gravity became less significant to them, and the gravity of nearby rocks became increasingly significant. Consequently, many rocks, assisted by their mutual gravity and surrounding clouds of water vapor, merged to become asteroids. Isolated rocks in space are meteoroids. Drag forces caused by water vapor and thrust forces produced by the radiometer effect concentrated asteroids in what is now the asteroid belt. The so-called mavericks of the solar system (asteroids, meteoroids, and comets) resulted from the same event.

Asteroids, also known as minor planets, are rocky bodies orbiting the Sun. Their orbits usually lie between those of Mars and Jupiter, a region called the asteroid belt. The largest asteroid, Ceres, is almost 600 miles in diameter and has about one-fourth the volume of all asteroids combined. Orbits of almost 30,000 asteroids have been calculated. Many more asteroids have been detected, some less than 40 feet in diameter. A few that cross the Earth’s orbit would do great damage if they ever collided with Earth.

Two explanations are given for the origin of asteroids: (1) they were produced by an exploded planet, and (2) a planet failed to evolve completely. Experts recognize the problems with each explanation and are puzzled. The hydroplate theory offers a simple and complete—but quite different—solution that also answers other questions.

Exploded-Planet Explanation. Smaller asteroids are more numerous than larger asteroids, a pattern typical of fragmented bodies. Seeing this pattern led to the early belief that asteroids are remains of an exploded planet.

Meteorites, Meteors, and Meteoroids

In space, solid bodies smaller than an asteroid but larger than a molecule are called “meteoroids.” They are renamed “meteors” as they travel through Earth’s atmosphere, and “meteorites” if they hit the ground.
Later, scientists realized that all the fragments combined would not make up one small planet.3 Besides, too much energy is needed to explode and scatter even the smallest planet. [See Item 21 on page 225.]

Failed-Planet Explanation. The currently popular explanation for asteroids is that they are bodies that did not merge to become a planet. Never explained is how, in nearly empty space, matter merged to form these rocky bodies in the first place.4 Also, because only vague explanations have been given for how planets formed, claiming to understand how one planet failed to form lacks credibility. [See Items 43–46 on pages 24–26. In general, orbiting rocks do not merge to become either planets or asteroids. Special conditions are required, as explained on page 211 and Endnote 21 on page 231.] Today, collisions and near collisions fragment and scatter asteroids, just the opposite of this “failed-planet explanation.” In fact, during the 4,600,000,000 years evolutionists say asteroids have existed, asteroids would have had so many collisions that they should be much more fragmented than they are today.5

Hydroplate Explanation. Asteroids are composed of rocks expelled from Earth. The size distribution of asteroids does show that at least part of a planet fragmented. Although an energy source is not available to explode and disperse an entire Earth-size planet, the “fountains of the great deep” with its supercritical water (explained on page 112), could have launched one 2,300th of the Earth—the mass of all asteroids combined. Astronomers have tried to describe the exploded planet, not realizing they were standing on 99.95% of it—too close to see it.6

As flood waters escaped from the subterranean chambers, pillars, forced to carry more and more of the weight of the overlying crust, were crushed and broken. Also, the almost 10-mile-high walls of the rupture were unstable, because rock is not strong enough to support a cliff more than 5 miles high. As lower portions of the walls were crushed, large blocks7 were swept up and launched by the jetting fountains. Unsupported rock in the top 5 miles also fragmented. The smaller the rock, the faster it accelerated and the farther it went, just as a rapidly flowing stream carries smaller dirt particles faster and farther.

Water droplets in the fountains partially evaporated and quickly froze. Large rocks had large spheres of influence (page 211) which grew as the rocks traveled away from Earth. Larger rocks became “seeds” around which other rocks and ice collected as spheres of influence expanded. Spheres of influence grew even more as mass concentrated around the “seeds.” Clumps of rocks became asteroids.

Question 1: Why did some clumps of rocks and ice in space become asteroids and others become comets?

Imagine living in a part of the world where heavy frost settled each night, but the Sun shone daily. After many decades, would the countryside be buried in hundreds of feet of frost?

The answer depends on several things besides the obvious need for a large source of water. If dark rocks initially covered the ground, the Sun would heat them during the day. Frost from the previous night would tend to evaporate. However, if the sunlight was dim or the frost was thick (thereby reflecting more sunlight during the day), little frost would evaporate. More frost would accumulate the next night. Frost thickness would increase every 24 hours.

Now imagine living on a newly formed asteroid. Its spin would give you day-night cycles. After sunset, surface temperatures would plummet toward nearly absolute zero (-460°F), because asteroids do not have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere for long. Without an atmosphere to insulate the asteroid, the day’s heat would quickly radiate, unimpeded, into outer space. Conversely, when the Sun rose, its rays would have no atmosphere to warm, so temperatures at the asteroid’s surface would rise rapidly.

As the “fountains of the great deep” launched rocks and water droplets, evaporation in space dispersed an “ocean” of water molecules and other gases throughout the inner solar system. Gas molecules that struck the cold side of your spinning asteroid would become frost.8 Sunlight would usually be dim on rocks in larger, more elongated orbits. Therefore, little frost would evaporate during the day, and the frost’s thickness would increase. Your “world” would become a comet. However, if your “world” orbited relatively near the Sun, its rays would evaporate each night’s frost, so your “world” would remain an asteroid.

Heavier rocks could not be launched with as much velocity as smaller particles (dirt, water droplets, and smaller rocks). The heavier rocks merged to become asteroids, while the smaller particles, primarily water, merged to become comets, which generally have larger orbits. No “sharp line” separates asteroids and comets.

Question 2: Wasn’t asteroid Eros found to be primarily a large, solid rock?

A pile of dry sand here on Earth cannot maintain a slope greater than about 30 degrees. If it were steeper, the sand grains would roll downhill. Likewise, a pile of dry pebbles or rocks on an asteroid cannot have a slope exceeding about 30 degrees. However, 4% of Eros’ surface exceeds this slope, so some scientists concluded that much of Eros must be a large, solid rock. This conclusion overlooks the possibility that ice is present between some rocks and acts as a weak glue—as predicted above. Ice in asteroids would also explain their low density. Endnote 7 gives another reason why asteroids are probably flying rock piles.

Question 3: Objects launched from Earth should travel in elliptical, cometlike orbits. How could rocky bodies launched from Earth become concentrated in almost circular orbits about 2.8 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun?

Gases, such as water vapor and its components,9 were abundant in the inner solar system for many years after the flood. Hot gas molecules striking each asteroid’s hot side were repelled with great force. This jetting action was like air rapidly escaping from a balloon, applying a thrust in a direction opposite to the escaping gas. Cold molecules striking each asteroid’s cold side produced less jetting. This jetting action, efficiently powered by solar energy, helped concentrate asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.10 [See Figures 130 and 131.]

Figure 130: Radial Thrust and Drag Acted on Asteroids. (Sun, asteroid, gas molecules, and orbit are not to scale.) The “fountains of the great deep” launched rocks and muddy water from Earth. The larger rocks, assisted by water vapor and other gases within the spheres of influence of these rocks, captured other rocks and ice particles. Those growing bodies that were primarily rocks became asteroids.

The Sun heats an asteroid’s near side, while the far side radiates its heat into cold outer space. Therefore, large temperature differences exist on opposite sides of each rocky, orbiting body. The slower the body spins, the darker the body,11 and the closer it is to the Sun, the greater the temperature difference. (For example, temperatures on the sunny side of our Moon reach a searing 260°F, while on the dark side temperatures can drop to a frigid -280°F.) Also, gas molecules (small blue circles) between the Sun and asteroid, especially those coming from very near the Sun, are hotter and faster than those on the far side of an asteroid. Hot gas molecules hitting the hot side of an asteroid bounce off with much higher velocity and momentum than cold gas molecules bouncing off the cold side. Those impacts slowly expanded asteroid orbits until too little gas remained in the inner solar system to provide much thrust. The closer an asteroid was to the Sun, the greater the outward thrust. Gas molecules, densely concentrated near Earth’s orbit, created a drag on asteroids. My computer simulations have shown how gas, throughout the inner solar system for years after the flood, herded asteroids into a tight region near Earth’s orbital plane—an asteroid belt. Thrust primarily expanded the orbits. Drag circularized orbits and reduced their angles of inclination.

Figure 131: The Radiometer Effect. This well-known novelty, called a radiometer, demonstrates the unusual thrust that pushed asteroids into their present orbits. Sunlight warms the dark side of each vane more than the light side. The partial vacuum inside the bulb approaches that found in outer space, so gas molecules travel relatively long distances before striking other molecules. Gas molecules bounce off the hotter, black side with greater velocity than off the colder, white side. This turns the vanes away from the dark side.

The black side also radiates heat faster when it is warmer than its surroundings. This can be demonstrated by briefly placing the radiometer in a freezer. There the black side cools faster, making the white side warmer than the black, so the vanes turn away from the white side. In summary, the black side gains heat faster when in a hot environment and loses heat faster when in a cold environment. Higher gas pressure always pushes on the warmer side.

Question 4: Could the radiometer effect push asteroids 1–2 astronomical units (AU) farther from the Sun?

Each asteroid began as a swarm of particles orbiting each other within a large sphere of influence. Because a swarm’s volume was quite large, the radiometer pressure acted over a large area, so the thrust force was large. Because the volume’s density was small, the swarm rapidly accelerated—much like a feather placed in a gentle breeze. Also, the Sun’s gravity 93,000,000 miles from the Sun (the Earth-Sun distance) is 1,600 times weaker than Earth’s gravity here on Earth.12 So pushing a swarm of rocks and debris farther from the Sun was surprisingly easy, especially in the frictionless environment of space.

Question 5: Why are 4% of meteorites almost entirely iron and nickel? Also, why do meteorites rarely contain quartz, which constitutes about 27% of granite?

Pillars were formed in the subterranean chamber when the thicker portions of the crust were squeezed downward onto the chamber floor. Twice daily, for centuries, these pillars were stretched and compressed by tides in the subterranean water. This gigantic heating process steadily raised pillar temperatures. [See “What Triggered the Flood?” on page 300.] As explained in Figure 132, temperatures eventually reached 1,300°F., sufficient to melt quartz and allow iron and nickel to settle downward and become concentrated in the pillar tips. (Quartz, the first major mineral in granite to melt, would dissolve or drip into the subterranean water.) A similar gravitational settling process concentrated iron and nickel in the Earth’s core. [See “Melting the Inner Earth” on page 356.]

Evolutionists have great difficulty explaining iron-nickel meteorites. First, everyone recognizes that a powerful heating mechanism must first melt at least some of the parent body from which the iron-nickel meteorites came, so iron and nickel can sink and be concentrated. How this could have occurred in the weak gravity of extremely cold asteroids has defied explanation.14 Second, the concentrated iron and nickel, which evolutionists visualize in the core of a large asteroid, must then be excavated and blasted into space. Available evidence shows this has not happened.15

Figure 132: Hot Meteorites. Most iron-nickel meteorites display Widmanstätten patterns. That is, if an iron-nickel meteorite is cut and its face is polished and then etched with acid, the surface has the strange crisscross pattern shown above. This indicates that temperatures throughout those meteorites were once 1,300°F.13 Why were so many meteoroids, drifting in cold space, at one time so uniformly hot? An impact would not produce such uniformity, nor would a blowtorch. The heating a meteor experiences in passing through the atmosphere is barely felt more than a fraction of an inch beneath the surface. If radioactive decay provided the heat, certain daughter products should be present; they are not. Question 5 explains how these high temperatures were probably reached.

Question 6: Aren’t meteoroids chips from asteroids?

This commonly-taught idea is based on an error in logic. Asteroids and meteoroids have some similarities, but that does not mean one came from the other. Maybe a common event produced both asteroids and meteoroids.

Also, three major discoveries suggest that meteoroids came not from asteroids, but from Earth.

Two Interpretations

With a transmission electron microscope, Japanese scientist Kazushige Tomeoka identified several major events in the life of one meteorite. Initially, this meteorite was part of a much larger parent body orbiting the Sun. The parent body had many thin cracks, through which mineral-rich water cycled. Extremely thin mineral layers were deposited on the walls of these cracks. These deposits, sometimes hundreds of layers thick, contained calcium, magnesium, carbonates, and other chemicals. Mild thermal metamorphism in this rock shows that temperatures increased before it experienced some final cracks and was blasted into space.26

Hydroplate Interpretation. Earth was the parent body of all meteorites, most of which came from pillars. [Pages 300–304 explain how, why, when, and where pillars formed.] Twice a day before the flood, tides in the subterranean water compressed and stretched these thin pillars. Compressive heating occurred and cracks developed. Just as water circulates through a submerged sponge that is squeezed and stretched, mineral laden water circulated through cracks in pillars for years before they broke up. Pillar fragments, launched into space by the fountains of the great deep, became meteoroids. [The presence of calcium, magnesium, and carbonates in the water helps explain why Earth has so much limestone. See pages 170–175.] In summary, water did it.

Tomeoka’s (and Most Evolutionists’) Interpretation. Impacts on an asteroid generated many cracks in the rock that was to become this meteorite. Ice was deposited on the asteroid. Impacts melted the ice, allowing liquid water to circulate through the cracks and deposit hundreds of layers of magnesium, calcium, and carbonate bearing minerals. A final impact blasted rocks from this asteroid into space. In summary, impacts did it.

1. In the mid-1970s, the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft traveled out through the asteroid belt. NASA expected that the particle detection experiments on board would find 10 times more meteoroids in the belt than are present near Earth’s orbit.16 Surprisingly, the number of meteoroids diminished as the asteroid belt was approached.17 This showed that meteoroids are not coming from asteroids but from nearer Earth’s orbit.

2. A faint glow of light, called “zodiacal light,” extends from the orbit of Venus out to the asteroid belt. The light is reflected sunlight bouncing off dust-size particles. This lens-shaped swarm of particles orbits the Sun, near Earth’s orbital plane. (On dark, moonless nights, zodiacal light can be seen in the spring in the western sky after sunset and in the fall in the eastern sky before sunrise.) Debris chipped off asteroids would have a wide range of sizes and would not be so uniformly fine. Debris expelled by comets would have elongated and inclined orbits. However, such fine dust particles, so near the Earth's orbit and orbital plane, could be eroded debris launched from Earth by the fountains of the great deep.

3. Many meteorites have remanent magnetism, so they must have come from a larger magnetized body. Eros, the only asteroid on which a spacecraft has landed and taken magnetic measurements, has no net magnetic field. If this is true of other asteroids as well, meteorites probably did not come from asteroids.18 If asteroids are flying rock piles, as it now appears, any magnetic fields of the randomly oriented rocks would be largely self-cancelling, so the asteroid would have no net magnetic field. Therefore, instead of coming from asteroids, meteorites likely came from a magnetized body such as a planet. Because Earth’s magnetic field is a hundred times greater than all other rocky planets combined, meteorites probably came from Earth.

Remanent magnetism decays, so meteorites must have recently broken away from their parent magnetized body. Those who believe meteorites were chipped off asteroids, say this happened millions of years ago.

Figure 133: Shatter Cone. When a large, crater-forming meteorite strikes the Earth, a shock wave radiates outward from the impact point. The passing shock wave breaks the rock surrounding the crater into meteorite-size fragments having distinctive patterns called shatter cones. (Until shatter cones were associated with impact craters by Robert S. Dietz in 1969, impact craters were often difficult to identify.)

If large impacts on asteroids launched asteroid fragments toward Earth as meteorites, a few meteorites should have shatter cone patterns. None have ever been reported. Therefore, meteorites are probably not derived from asteroids. Likewise, impacts have not launched meteorites from Mars. [For other reasons, see page 248.]

Question 7: Does other evidence support this hypothesis that asteroids and meteoroids came from Earth?

Yes. Here are fourteen other observations that either support the proposed explanation or are inconsistent with current theories on the origin of asteroids and meteoroids:

1. Meteorites and meteoroids contain the same materials as the Earth’s crust.27 Some meteorites contain very dense elements, such as nickel and iron. Those heavy elements seem compatible only with the denser rocky planets: Mercury, Venus, and Earth—Earth being the densest.

A few asteroid densities have been calculated. They are generally low, ranging from 1.2 to 3.3 gm/cm3. The higher densities match those of the Earth’s crust. The lower densities imply the presence of empty space between loosely held rocks or something light such as water ice.28

2. Meteorites contain different varieties (isotopes) of the chemical element molybdenum, each isotope having a slightly different atomic weight. If, as evolutionists teach, a swirling gas and dust cloud mixed for millions of years and produced the Sun, its planets, and meteorites, then each meteorite should have about the same combination of these molybdenum isotopes. Because this is not the case,30 meteorites did not come from a swirling dust cloud or any source that mixed for millions of years.

3. Metamorphosed minerals in most meteorites31 and on some asteroids32 show that those bodies reached extremely high temperatures, despite a lifetime in the “deep freeze” of outer space. Radioactive decay within such relatively small bodies could not have produced the necessary heating, because too much heat would have escaped from their surfaces. Stranger still, liquid water altered some meteorites33 while they and their parent bodies were heated—sometimes heated multiple times.34

Impacts in space are sometimes proposed to explain this mysterious heating. However, an impact would only raise the temperature of a small portion of an asteroid near the point of impact. Before gravel-size fragments from an impact could become uniformly hot, they would radiate their heat into outer space.35

For centuries before the flood, heat was generated repeatedly within pillars in the subterranean water chamber. [To understand why, see the answer to Question 5 on page 242.] As the flood began, the powerful fountains of the great deep expelled fragments of these hot, crushed pillars from the Earth. Those rocks became meteoroids and asteroids.

4. Because asteroids came from Earth, they typically spin in the same direction as Earth (counterclockwise, as seen from the North). However, collisions have undoubtedly randomized the spins of many smaller asteroids in the last few thousand years.36

5. Some asteroids have captured one or more moons. [See Figure 129.] Sometimes the “moon” and asteroid are similar in size. Impacts would not create equal-size fragments that could capture each other.37 The only conceivable way for this to happen is if a potential moon enters an asteroid’s expanding sphere of influence while traveling about the same speed and direction as the asteroid. If even a thin gas surrounds the asteroid, the moon will be drawn closer to the asteroid, preventing the moon from being stripped away later. An “exploded planet” would disperse relatively little gas. The “failed planet explanation” meets none of the requirements. The hydroplate theory satisfies all requirements.

Figure 134: Chondrules. The central chondrule above is 2.2 millimeters in diameter, the size of this circle: o. This picture was taken in reflected light. Meteorites containing chondrules can be thinly sliced and polished, allowing light from below to pass through the thin slice and into the microscope. Such light becomes polarized as it passes through the minerals. The resulting colors identify minerals in and around the chondrules. [Meteorite from Hammada al Hamra Plateau, Libya.]

Chondrules [CON drools] are strange, spherical, BB-size objects found in 86% of all meteorites. To understand the origin of meteorites we must also understand how chondrules formed.

Their spherical shape and texture show they were once molten, but to melt chondrules requires temperatures exceeding 3,000°F. How could chondrules get that hot without melting the surrounding rock which usually has a lower melting temperature? Because chondrules contain volatile substances that would have bubbled out of melted rock, chondrules must have melted and cooled quite rapidly.19 By one estimate, melting occurred in about one-hundredth of a second.20

The standard explanation for chondrules is that small pieces of rock, moving in outer space billions of years ago, before the Sun and Earth formed, suddenly and mysteriously melted. These liquid droplets quickly cooled, solidified, and then were encased inside the rock that now surrounds them. Such vague conditions, hidden behind a veil of space and time, make it nearly impossible to test this explanation in a laboratory. Scientists recognize that no satisfactory explanation has been given for rapidly melting or cooling chondrules or for encasing them somewhat uniformly in rocks, which are sometimes radiometrically older than the chondrules.21 As one scientist wrote, “The heat source of chondrule melting remains uncertain. We know from the petrological data that we are looking for a very rapid heating source, but what?”22

Frequently, minerals grade (gradually change) across the boundaries between chondrules and surrounding material.23 This suggests that chondrules melted while encased in rock. If so, the heating sources must have been brief and localized near the center of what are now chondrules. But how could this have happened?

The most common mineral in chondrules is olivine.24 Deep rocks contain many BB-size pockets of olivine. Pillars within the subterranean water probably had similar pockets. Pillars were forced to carry more and more of the crust’s weight as the subterranean water escaped from under the crust. As olivine is compressed more and more, it will suddenly change into another mineral, called spinel [spin EL], and shrink in volume by about 10%.25 (Material surrounding each pocket would not suddenly shrink.)

Tiny, collapsing pockets of olivine transforming into spinel would generate great heat, for two reasons. First, the transformation is exothermic; that is, it releases heat chemically. Second, it releases heat mechanically, by friction. Here’s why. At the atomic level, each pocket would collapse in many stages—much like falling dominos or the section-by-section crushing of a giant scaffolding holding up an overloaded roof. Within each pocket, as each microscopic crystal slid over adjacent crystals at these extreme pressures, melting would occur along sliding surfaces. The remaining solid structures in the olivine pocket would then carry the entire compressive load—quickly collapsing and melting other parts of the “scaffolding.”

The fountains of the great deep expelled pieces of crushed pillars into outer space where they rapidly cooled. Their tumbling action, especially in the weightlessness of space, would have prevented volatiles from bubbling out of the encased liquid pockets within each rock. In summary, chondrules are a by product of the mechanism that produced meteorites—a rapid process that started under the Earth’s crust as the flood began.

Also, tidal effects, as described on pages 347–350, limit the lifetime of asteroid moons to about 100,000 years.38 This fact and the problems in capturing a moon caused evolutionist astronomers to scoff at early reports that some asteroids have moons.

Figure 135: Peanut Asteroids. The fountains of the great deep expelled dirt, rocks, and considerable water from Earth. About half of that water quickly evaporated into the vacuum of space. Each gas molecule became an orbiting body in the solar system. Asteroids then formed as explained on pages 240–244.

Gas molecules captured by asteroids or released by icy asteroids became atmospheres. Asteroids with thick atmospheres sometimes captured smaller asteroids as moons. If an atmosphere remained long enough, the moon would loose altitude and gently merge with the low-gravity asteroid, forming a peanut-shaped asteroid. (We see merging when a satellite or spacecraft reenters Earth’s atmosphere, slowly loses altitude, and eventually falls to Earth.) Without an atmosphere, merging becomes almost impossible.

Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft orbited asteroid Itokawa (shown above) for two months in 2005. Scientists studying Itokawa concluded that it consists of two smaller asteroids that merged. Donald Yeomans, a mission scientist and member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, admitted, “It’s a major mystery how two objects each the size of skyscrapers could collide without blowing each other to smithereens. This is especially puzzling in a region of the solar system where gravitational forces would normally involve collision speeds of 2 km/sec.43” The mystery is easily solved when one understands the role that water played in the origin of comets and asteroids.

Notice, a myriad of rounded boulders, some 150 feet in diameter, litter Itokawa’s surface. High velocity water produces rounded boulders; an exploded planet would produce angular rocks.

6. A few asteroids suddenly develop comet tails, so are considered both asteroid and comet. The hydroplate theory says that asteroids are weakly joined piles of rocks and ice. If such a pile cracked slightly, perhaps due to an impact by space debris, exposed internal ice would suddenly vent water vapor into the vacuum of space as with a comet—just as observed. The hydroplate theory explains why comets are so similar to asteroids.

7. A few comets are orbiting in the asteroid belt. Their tails lengthen as they approach perihelion and recede as they approach aphelion. However, it is virtually impossible for comets to have formed beyond the planet Pluto and end up in nearly circular orbits in the asteroid belt.39 Also, that near the Sun, the comets’ ice should have dissipated billions of years ago. Obviously, these comets did not form in the outer solar system. Only the hydroplate theory explains how comets could be in the asteroid belt.

8. If asteroids passing near Earth came from the asteroid belt, too many of them have diameters less than 50 meters,40 and too many have circular orbits.41 However, we would expect this if the rocks that formed asteroids were launched from Earth.

9. Computer simulations, both forward and backward in time, show that asteroids traveling near Earth have a maximum expected lifetime of only about a million years. They “quickly” collide with the Sun.42 This raises doubts that all asteroids began 4,600,000,000 years ago as evolutionists claim—4,600 times longer than the expected lifetime of near-Earth asteroids.

10. Asteroids 3753 Cruithne and 2000 AA29 are traveling companions of Earth.44 They delicately oscillate, in a horseshoe pattern, around two points that lie 60° (as viewed from the Sun) forward and 60° behind the Earth but on Earth’s nearly circular orbit. These points, predicted by Lagrange in 1764 and called Lagrange points, are stable places where an object would not move relative to the Earth and Sun if it could once occupy either point going at zero velocity relative to the Earth and Sun. But how could a slowly moving object ever reach, or get near, either point? Most likely, it barely escaped from Earth.

Furthermore, Asteroid 3753 could not have been in its present orbit for long, because it is so easy for a passing body to gravitationally perturb it out of its stable niche. Venus will pass near this asteroid 8,000 years from now and may dislodge it.45

11. Jupiter also has two Lagrange points on its nearly circular orbit. The first, called L4, lies 60° (as seen from the Sun) in the direction of Jupiter’s motion. The second, called L5, lies 60° behind Jupiter.

Visualize planets and asteroids as large and small marbles rolling in orbitlike paths around the Sun on a very large frictionless table. At each Lagrange point is a bowl shaped depression that moves along with each planet. Because there is no friction, small marbles (asteroids) that roll down into a bowl normally pick up enough speed to roll back out. However, if a chance gravitational encounter slowed one marble after it first entered a bowl, it might not exit the bowl. Marbles trapped in a bowl would normally stay 60° ahead of or behind their planet, gently rolling around near the bottom of their moving bowl.

One might think an asteroid is just as likely to get trapped in Jupiter’s leading bowl as its trailing bowl—a 50–50 chance, as with the flip of a coin. Surprisingly, 1068 asteroids are in Jupiter’s leading (L4) bowl, but only 681 are in the trailing bowl.57 If an asteroid is just as likely to get trapped at L4 as L5, this shouldn’t happen in a trillion trials! What concentrated asteroids near the L4 Lagrange point?

According to the hydroplate theory, asteroids formed near Earth’s orbit. Then, the radiometer effect spiraled them outward, toward the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Some spiraled out to Jupiter’s circular orbit. In overtaking Jupiter, they would have passed near both L4 and L5. Jupiter’s huge gravity would have slowed those asteroids that were moving away from Jupiter but toward L4. That braking action would have allowed some asteroids to settle into the L4 bowl. Conversely, asteroids that approached L5 were accelerated toward Jupiter, so even if they entered the L5 bowl, they would quickly be pulled out by Jupiter’s gravity. The surprising excess of asteroids near Jupiter’s leading Lagrange point is what we would expect based on the hydroplate theory.

12. As explained in “Shallow Meteorites” on page 35, meteorites are almost always found surprisingly near Earth’s surface. The one known exception is in southern Sweden, where 40 meteorites and thousands of grain-size fragments of one particular type of meteorite have been found at different depths in a few limestone quarries. The standard explanation is that all these meteorites somehow struck this same small area over a 1–2-million-year period about 480 million years ago.58

A more likely explanation is that some meteorites, not launched with enough velocity to escape Earth during the flood, fell back to Earth. One or more meteorites fragmented on reentering Earth’s atmosphere. The pieces landed in mushy, recently-deposited limestone layers in southern Sweden.

13. Light spectra (detailed color patterns, much like a long bar code) from certain asteroids in the outer asteroid belt imply the presence of organic compounds, especially kerogen, a coal-tar residue.59 No doubt the kerogen came from plant life. Life as we know it could not survive in such a cold region of space, but common organic matter launched from Earth could have been preserved.

14. Many asteroids are reddish and have light characteristics showing the presence of iron.60 On Earth, reddish rocks almost always imply iron oxidized (rusted) by oxygen gas. Today, oxygen is rare in outer space. If iron on asteroids is oxidized, what was the source of the oxygen? Answer: Water molecules, surrounding and impacting asteroids, dissociated (broke apart), releasing oxygen. That oxygen then combined chemically with iron on the asteroid’s surface, giving the reddish color.

Mars, often called the red planet, derives its red color from oxidized iron. Again, oxygen contained in water vapor launched from Earth during the flood, probably accounts for Mars’ red color.

Are Some Meteorites from Mars?

Widely publicized claims have been made that 24 meteorites from Mars have been found. A few scientists also proposed that one of these meteorites, named ALH84001, contained fossils of primitive life. Later study rejected that claim.

The wormy-looking shapes discovered in a meteorite from [supposedly] Mars turned out to be purely mineralogical and never were alive.74

The 24 meteorites are presumed to have come from the same place, because they contain similar ratios of three types of oxygen: oxygen weighing 16, 17, and 18 atomic mass units. (That presumption is not necessarily true, is it?) A chemical argument then indirectly links one of those meteorites to Mars, but the link is more tenuous than most realize.75 That single meteorite had tiny glass nodules containing dissolved gases. A few of these gases (basically the noble gases: argon, krypton, neon, and xenon) had the same relative abundances as those found in Mars’ atmosphere in 1976. (Actually, a later discovery shows that the mineralogy of these meteorites differs from that of almost all Martian rock.76) Besides, if two things are similar, it does not mean that one came from the other. Similarity in the relative abundances of the noble gases in Mars’ atmosphere and in one meteorite may be because those gases originated in Earth’s preflood subterranean chamber. Rocks and water from the subterranean chamber may have transported those gases to Mars.

Could those 24 meteorites have come from Mars? To escape the gravity of Mars requires a launch velocity of 3 miles per second. Additional velocity is then needed to transfer to an orbit intersecting Earth, 34–236 million miles away. Supposedly, one or more asteroids slammed into Mars and blasted off millions of meteoroids. Millions are needed, because less than one in a million77 would ever hit Earth, be large enough to survive reentry, be found, be turned over to scientists, and be analyzed in detail. Besides, if meteorites can come to Earth from Mars, many more should have come from the Moon—but haven’t.78

For an impact suddenly to accelerate any solid from rest to a radial velocity of 3 miles per second requires such extreme shock pressures that much of the material will melt, if not vaporize.79 All 24 meteorites should at least show shock effects. Some do not. Also, Mars should have at least six giant craters if such powerful blasts occurred, because six different launch dates are needed to explain the six age groupings the meteorites fall into (based on evolutionary dating methods). Such craters are hard to find, and large, recent impacts on Mars should have been rare.

Then there are energy questions. Almost all impact energy is lost as shock waves and ultimately as heat. Little energy remains to lift rocks off Mars. Even with enough energy, the fragments must be large enough to pass through Mars’ atmosphere. To see the difficulty, imagine throwing a ball high into the air. Then visualize how hard it would be to throw a handful of dust that high. Atmospheric drag, even in Mars’ thin atmosphere, absorbs too much of the smaller particles’ kinetic energy. Finally, for large particles to escape Mars, the expelling forces must be focused, as occurs in a gun barrel or rocket nozzle. For best results, this should be aimed straight up, to minimize the path length through the atmosphere.

A desire to believe in life on Mars produced a type of “Martian mythology” that continues today. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing grooves on Mars. The Italian word for groove is “canali”; therefore, many of us grew up hearing about “canals” on Mars—a mistranslation. Because canals are man-made structures, people started thinking about “little green men” on Mars.

In 1894, Percival Lowell, a wealthy, amateur astronomer with a vivid imagination, built Lowell Observatory primarily to study Mars. Lowell published a map showing and naming Martian canals, and wrote several books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). Even into the 1960s, textbooks displayed his map, described vegetative cycles on Mars, and explained how Martians may use canals to convey water from the polar ice caps to their parched cities. Few scientists publicly disagreed with the myth, even after 1949 when excellent pictures from the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar were available. Those of us in school before 1960 were directly influenced by such myths; virtually everyone has been indirectly influenced.

Artists, science fiction writers, and Hollywood helped fuel this “Martian mania.” In 1898, H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds telling of strange-looking Martians invading Earth. In 1938, Orson Welles, in a famous radio broadcast, panicked many Americans into thinking New Jersey was being invaded by Martians. In 1975, two Viking spacecraft were sent to Mars to look for life. Carl Sagan announced shortly before the spacecraft completed their tests that he was certain life would be discovered—a reasonable conclusion, if life evolved. The prediction failed. In 1996, United States President Clinton read to a global television audience, “More than 4 billion years ago this piece of rock [ALH84001] was formed as a part of the original crust of Mars. After billions of years, it broke from the surface and began a 16-million-year journey through space that would end here on Earth.” “... broke from the surface ...”? The myth is still alive.
Mars’ topsoil is richer in iron and magnesium than Martian rocks beneath the surface. The dusty surface of Mars also contains carbonates, such as limestone.61 Because meteorites and Earth’s subterranean water contained considerable iron, magnesium, and carbonates, it appears that Mars was heavily bombarded by meteorites and water launched from Earth’s subterranean chamber. [See “The Origin of Limestone” beginning on page 170.]

Figure 136: Salt of the Earth. On 22 March 1998, this 2 3/4 pound meteorite landed 40 feet from boys playing basketball in Monahans, Texas. While the rock was still warm, police were called. Hours later, NASA scientists cracked the meteorite open in a clean-room laboratory, eliminating any possibility of contamination. Inside were salt (NaCl) crystals 0.1 inch (3 mm) in diameter and liquid water!46 Some of these salt crystals are shown in the blue circle, highly magnified and in true color. Bubble (B) is inside a liquid, which itself is inside a salt crystal. Eleven quivering bubbles were found in about 40 fluid pockets. Shown in the green circle is another bubble (V) inside a liquid (L). The length of the horizontal black bar represents 0.005 mm, about 1/25th the diameter of a human hair.

NASA scientists who investigated this meteorite believe it came from an asteroid, but that is highly unlikely. Asteroids, having little gravity and being in the vacuum of space, cannot sustain liquid water which is required to form salt crystals. (Earth is the only planet, indeed the only body in the solar system, that can sustain liquid water on its surface.) Nor could surface water (gas, liquid, or solid) on asteroids withstand high-velocity impacts. Even more perplexing for the evolutionist: What is the salt’s origin? Also, what accounts for the meteorite’s other contents: potassium, magnesium, iron, and calcium—elements abundant on Earth, but as far as we know, not beyond Earth? 47

Figure 40 on page 99 illustrates the origin of meteoroids. Dust-sized meteoroids often come from comets. Most larger meteoroids are rock fragments that never merged into a comet or asteroid.

Considerable evidence supports Earth as the origin of meteorites.

* Minerals and isotopes in meteorites are remarkably similar to those on earth.27
* Some meteorites contain sugars,48 possible cellulose,49 and salt crystals containing liquid water.50
* Other meteorites contain limestone,51 which, on earth, forms only in liquid water. [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 170–175.]
* Three meteorites contain excess amounts of left-handed amino acids52—a sign of living matter. [See “Handedness: Left and Right” on page 15.]
* A few meteorites show that “salt-rich fluids analogous to terrestrial brines” flowed through their veins.53
* Some meteorites have about twice the heavy hydrogen concentration as Earth’s water today.54 As explained in the preceding chapter, this heavy hydrogen probably came from the subterranean chambers.
* About 86% of all meteorites contain chondrules which are best explained by the hydroplate theory. [See “Chondrules” on page 245.]
* Seventy-eight types of living bacteria have been found in two meteorites after extreme precautions were taken to avoid contamination.55 Bacteria need liquid water to live, grow, and reproduce. Obviously, liquid water does not exist inside meteoroids whose temperatures in outer space are near absolute zero (-460°F). Therefore, the bacteria must have been living in the presence of liquid water before being launched into space. Once in space, they quickly froze and became dormant. Had bacteria originated in outer space, what would they have eaten?

Meteorites containing chondrules, salt crystals, limestone, water, possible cellulose, left-handed amino acids, sugars, living bacteria, terrestrial-like brines, excess heavy hydrogen, and Earthlike patterns of minerals, isotopes, and other components56 implicate Earth as their source—and “the fountains of the great deep” as the powerful launcher.

Those who believe meteorites came from asteroids have wondered why meteorites do not have the red color of most asteroids.62 The answer is twofold: (a) meteorites did not come from asteroids, as explained on page 242, but both came from Earth, and (b) asteroids contain oxidized iron, as explained above, but meteorites are much less massive, so were unable to gravitationally attract chamber.

Water on Mars

Water recently and briefly flowed on a small fraction of Mars63 and is now sequestered at its poles.64 These former stream beds often “originate in steep-walled amphitheaters rather than in ever smaller tributaries” as on Earth.65 Rain formed other channels.66 On Mars, drainage channels and layered strata are found at almost 200 locations—but nowhere else.67 Some channels are at high latitudes or on sloping surfaces that receive little sunlight. One set of erosion gullies is on the central peak of an impact crater!68

Figure 137: Erosion Channels on Mars. These channels frequently originate in scooped-out regions, called amphitheaters, high on a crater wall. On Earth, where water falls as rain, erosion channels begin with narrow tributaries that merge with larger tributaries and finally, rivers. Could impacts of comets or icy asteroids have formed these craters, gouged out amphitheaters, and melted the ice—each within seconds? Mars, which is much colder than Antarctica in the winter, would need a heating source, such as impacts, to produce liquid water. Endnote 69 explains how this sequence of events may have happened

Today, Mars is extremely cold, averaging 117°F below freezing. Water on Mars should be ice, not liquid water. Mars’ low atmospheric pressures would hasten freezing even more.70

Did liquid water come from below Mars’ surface or above? Most believe that subsurface water migrated up to the surface. However, this would not carve wide flood channels or erosion gullies on a crater’s central peak. Besides, the water would freeze a mile or two below the surface.71 Even volcanic eruptions on Mars would not melt enough water fast enough to release the estimated 10–1,000 million cubic meters of water per second needed to cut each stream bed.72 (This exceeds the combined flow rate of all rivers on Earth that enter an ocean.)

Water probably came from above. Soon after the flood, the radiometer effect caused asteroids to spiral out to the asteroid belt, just beyond Mars. Asteroids spiraling outward through Mars’ orbit had frequent opportunities to collide with Mars. When crater forming impacts occurred, large amounts of debris were thrown into Mars’ atmosphere. Mars’ thin atmosphere and low gravity allowed the debris to settle back to the surface in vast layers of thin sheets—strata.

Part III: Frequently Asked Questions

Most questions concerning origins are answered in Parts I and II. Of the questions that remain, the following are some of the most frequently asked in my seminars and public presentations. They can be read in any order.

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How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific? p. 260
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Have New Scientific and Mathematical Tools Detected Adam and Eve? p. 261
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Because Galaxies Are Billions of Light-Years Away, Isn’t the Universe Billions of Years Old? p. 264
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Why Does the Universe Seem To Be Expanding? p. 269
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If the Sun and Stars Were Created on Day 4, What Was the Light of Day 1? p. 274
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How Old Do Evolutionists Say the Universe Is? p. 277
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What Was Archaeopteryx? p. 279
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How Accurate Is Radiocarbon Dating? p. 283
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How Could Saltwater and Freshwater Fish Survive the Flood? p. 286
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What about the Dinosaurs? p. 288
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Have Planets Been Discovered Outside the Solar System? p. 290
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Did the Flood Last 40 Days and 40 Nights? p. 292
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Is the Hydroplate Theory Consistent with the Bible? p. 293
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How Was the Earth Divided in Peleg’s Day? p. 295
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Did It Rain before the Flood? p. 298
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What Triggered the Flood? p. 300
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If God Made Everything, Who Made God? p. 305
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Did a Water Canopy Surround Earth and Contribute to the Flood? p. 306
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How Did Human “Races” Develop? p. 315
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According to the Bible, When Was Adam Created? p. 317
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Is There Life in Outer Space? p. 319
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Is There a Large Gap of Time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2? p. 320
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Is Evolution Compatible with the Bible? p. 323
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Does the New Testament Support Genesis 1–11? p. 329
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How Can Origins Be Taught in High School or College? p. 332
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What Are the Social Consequences of Belief in Evolution? p. 336
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How Can I Become Involved in This Issue? p. 339
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How Do Evolutionists Respond to What You Say? p. 341
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How Do You Respond to Common Claims of Evolutionists? p. 342
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Why Don’t Creationists Publish in Leading Science Journals? p. 344

Figure 138: Causes and Effects. Each arrow’s tail represents a cause, and each yellow circle represents an effect. The arrow itself is the cause-to-effect relationship. Yellow circles also represent scientific evidence that to most people suggests a creation and a global flood. All of us, including students, should be free to reach our own conclusions about origins after learning the evidence and all reasonable explanations. Withholding that information in schools or misrepresenting it in the media is inexcusable.

The first cause appears to be supernatural, or beyond the natural (blue area). Evolutionists often say the yellow circles and their scientific implications cannot be presented in science classrooms, because the first cause (red circle) is supernatural. Subjects outside the natural (including biblical descriptions of creation and the flood that are so consistent with the physical evidence) are inappropriate for publicly financed science education. However, excluding what is observable and verifiable in nature, along with possible causes, is bad science, misleading, and censorship. Creation science, then, is the study of this scientific evidence.

Let me define science.

science: A field of study seeking to better understand natural phenomena through the use of observations and experiments.

Broad, but increasingly precise and concise, relationships are sought between causes and effects. These relationships, called scientific laws, help predict future phenomena and explain past events.

Notice, this does not mean the first cause must be naturalistic. It is poor logic to say that because science deals with natural, cause-and-effect relationships, the first cause must be a natural event. Furthermore, if the first cause were a natural consequence of something else, it would not be the first cause. Scientific laws can provide great insight on ultimate origins even though the first cause cannot, by definition, be duplicated. Yes, there was a beginning. [See Items 53 and 55 beginning on page 27.]

Scientific conclusions, while never final, must be based on evidence.

scientific evidence: Something that has been observed with instruments or our senses, is verifiable, and helps support or refute possible explanations for phenomena.

All evidence in Part I of this book is based on observable, natural phenomena that others can check. To most people, this evidence implies a creation and a global flood. This does not mean the Creator (The First Cause) can be studied scientifically or that the Bible should be read in public-school science classes. (I have always opposed that.) Those who want evolution taught without the clear evidence opposing it, in effect, wish to censor a large body of scientific evidence from schools. That is wrong. Also, the consequences of a global flood have been misinterpreted as evidence for evolution, not as evidence for a flood. That misinterpretation, unfortunately, is taught as science. [See Part II.]

Explanations other than creation or a global flood may someday be proposed that are (1) consistent with all that evidence and (2) demonstrable by repeatable, cause-and-effect relationships. Until that happens, those who ignore existing evidence are being quite unscientific. Evolutionists’ refusal to debate this subject (see page 341) and their speculations on cause-and-effect phenomena that cannot be demonstrated is also poor science, especially when much evidence opposes those speculations.

Evolutionists raise several objections. Some say, “Even though evidence may imply a sudden creation, creation is supernatural, not natural, and cannot be entertained as a scientific explanation.” Of course, no one understands scientifically how the creation occurred—how space, time, matter, and the laws of physics began. [See Figure 155 on page 334 and the paragraph preceding that figure.] Others, not disputing that the flood best explains many features on earth, object to a global flood, because the Bible—a document they wish to discredit—speaks of the flood. Still others object to the starting point for the flood (given on page 110), but in science, all starting points are available. The key question must always be, “What best explains all the evidence?”

Also, the source of a scientific idea does not need to be scientifically derived. For example, Friedrich Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene in a dream in which a snake grabbed its tail. Kekulé’s discovery laid the basis for structural chemistry. Again, what is important is not the source of an idea, but whether all evidence supports it better than any other explanation. Science, after all, is a search for truth about how the physical universe behaves. Therefore, let’s teach all the science.

Figure 139: Language Divergence. Languages are related, as are genes. One of thousands of examples is the word for “from, of.” It exists in French (de), Italian (di), Spanish (de), Portuguese (de), and Romanian (de). So these languages, now spoken generally in southwestern Europe, are twigs on a tree branch called the Romance languages (Romance meaning Rome). This branch joins a larger branch that includes all languages derived primarily from Latin. They merge with other large branches, such as the Germanic branch that includes English, into a family called the Indo-European languages. When these and other languages are traced back in time, they appear to converge near Mount Ararat, a likely landing site of Noah’s Ark. [See pages 42–43.] Linguists admit they do not understand the origin of languages, only how languages spread.7

Virtually all cells of every living thing (plants, animals, and humans) contain tiny strands of coded information called DNA. DNA directs the cell, telling it what to produce and when. Therefore, much of your appearance and personality is determined by DNA you inherited from your parents.

In human cells, the nucleus contains 99.5% of the DNA. Half of it came from the individual’s mother and half from the father. Because both halves are shuffled together, it is difficult to identify which parent contributed any tiny segment. In other words, half of this DNA changes with each generation. However, outside the nucleus of each cell are thousands of little energy-producing components called mitochondria, each containing a circular strand of DNA. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comes only from the mother. Where did she get hers? From her mother—and so on. Normally, mtDNA does not change from generation to generation.

DNA is written with an alphabet of four letters: A, G, T, and C. One copy of a person’s MtDNA is 16,559 letters long. Sometimes a mutation changes one of the letters in the mtDNA that a mother passes on to her child. These rare and somewhat random changes allow geneticists to identify families. For example, if your grandmother experienced an early mutation in her mtDNA, her children and any daughters’ children would carry the same changed mtDNA. It would differ, in general, from that in the rest of the world’s population.1

In 1987, a team at the University of California at Berkeley published a study comparing the mtDNA of 147 people from five of the world’s geographic locations.2 They concluded that all 147 had the same female ancestor. She is now called “the mitochondrial Eve.”

Where did mitochondrial Eve live? Initial research concluded it was probably Africa. Later, after much debate, it was realized that Asia and Europe were also possible origins for the mitochondrial Eve.3

From a biblical perspective, do we know where Eve lived? Because the flood was so destructive, no one knows where the Garden of Eden was.4 However, Noah’s three daughters-in-law, who lived only a dozen or so generations after Eve, began raising their families near Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey—very near the common boundary of Asia, Africa, and Europe. (Each of us can claim one of Noah’s daughters-in-law as our ever-so-great grandmother.) So it is not surprising that Asia, Africa, and Europe are candidate homes for mitochondrial Eve.

Likewise, when similar words, sounds, and grammar of the world’s most widely spoken languages are traced back in time, they also seem to originate near Ararat.5 Another convergence near eastern Turkey is found when one traces agriculture back in time.6

When did mitochondrial Eve live? To answer this, one must know how frequently mutations occur in mtDNA. Initial estimates were based on the following faulty reasoning: “Humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. Because the mtDNA in humans and chimpanzees differ in 1,000 places, one mutation occurs about every 10,000 years.” Another erroneous approach began by assuming that Australia was first populated 40,000 years ago. The average number of mitochondrial mutations among Australian aborigines divided by 40,000 years provided another extremely slow mutation rate for mtDNA. These estimated rates, based on evolution, led to the mistaken belief that mitochondrial Eve lived 100,000–200,000 years ago.8 This surprised evolutionists who believe that our common ancestor was an apelike creature that lived 31/2 million years ago.9

A greater surprise, even disbelief, occurred in 1997, when it was announced that mutations in mtDNA occur 20 times more rapidly than had been estimated. Without assuming that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor 5 million years ago or that Australia was populated 40,000 years ago, mutation rates can now be determined directly by comparing the mtDNA of many mother-child pairs. Using the new, more accurate rate, mitochondrial Eve lived only about 6,500 years ago.10

Is there a “genetic Adam”? A man receives from his father a segment of DNA which lies on the Y chromosome; this makes him a male. Where did your father receive his segment? From his father. If we all descended from one man, all males should have the same Y chromosome segment—except for rare mutations.

A 1995 study of a worldwide sample of 38 men showed no changes in this segment of the Y chromosome that is always inherited from fathers. Had humans evolved and all men descended from one male who lived 500,000 years ago, each should carry about 19 mutations. Had he lived 150,000 years ago, 5.5 mutations would be expected.11 Because no changes were found, our common father probably lived only thousands of years ago. While Adam was father of all, our most recent common male ancestor was Noah.

For completeness, we must also consider another possibility. Even if we all descended from the same female, other women may have been living at the same time. Their chains of continuous female descendants may have ended; their mtDNA died out. This happens with family names. If Mary and John XYZ have no sons, their unusual last name dies out. Likewise, many other men may have lived at the same time as our “genetic Adam (or Noah).” They might have no male descendants living today. How likely is it that other men lived a few thousand years ago but left no continuous male descendants, and other women lived 6,000 years ago but left no continuous female descendants, and we end up today with a world population of 6 billion people? Extremely remote!12

Yes, new discoveries show that we carry traces of Adam and Eve in our cells. Furthermore, our common “parents” are probably removed from us by only 200–300 generations. All humans have a common and recent bond—a family bond. We are all cousins.

Figure 140: Atomic Clock. This atomic clock at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology is named NIST-7. If its time were compared with a similar clock 6 million years from now, they might differ by only one second! A newer development, called NIST F-1, achieves three times greater precision by cooling the vibrating atoms to nearly absolute zero. Despite the extreme precision of atomic clocks, we have no assurance that they are not all drifting relative to “true” time. In other words, we can marvel at the precision of atomic clocks, but we cannot be certain of their accuracy.

The logic behind this common question has several hidden assumptions, two of which are addressed by the following italicized questions:

a. Was space, along with light emitted by stars, rapidly stretched out soon after creation began? If so, energy would have been added to the universe and starlight during that stretching. Pages 269–273 show that the scientific evidence clearly favors this stretching explanation over the big bang theory which also claims that space expanded rapidly. (Yet, the big bang theory says all this expansion energy, plus all the matter in the universe, was, at the beginning of time, inside a volume much smaller than a pinhead.

b. Has starlight always traveled at its present speed—186,000 miles per second or, more precisely, 299,792.458 kilometers per second?

If either (a) space and its starlight were stretched out, or (b) the speed of light was much faster in the past, then distant stars should be visible in a young universe. Here we will address possibility (b) by examining the historic measurements of the speed of light.

Historical Measurements. During the past 300 years, at least 164 separate measurements of the speed of light have been published. Sixteen different measurement techniques were used. Astronomer Barry Setterfield of Australia has studied these measurements, especially their precision and experimental errors.1 His results show that the speed of light has apparently decreased so rapidly that experimental error cannot explain it! In the seven instances where the same scientists remeasured the speed of light with the same equipment years later, a decrease was always reported. The decreases were often several times greater than the reported experimental errors. I have conducted other analyses that weight (or give significance to) each measurement according to its accuracy. Even after considering the wide range of accuracies, it is hard to see how one can claim, with any statistical rigor, that the speed of light has remained constant.2

M. E. J. Gheury de Bray, writing in the official French astronomical journal in 1927, was probably the first to propose a decreasing speed of light.3 He based his conclusion on measurements spanning 75 years. Later, he became more convinced and twice published his results in Nature,4 possibly the most prestigious scientific journal in the world. He emphasized, “If the velocity of light is constant, how is it that, invariably, new determinations give values which are lower than the last one obtained ... There are twenty-two coincidences in favour of a decrease of the velocity of light, while there is not a single one against it.”5 [emphasis in original]

Although the measured speed of light has decreased only about 1% during the past three centuries, the decrease is statistically significant, because measurement techniques can detect changes thousands of times smaller. While the older measurements have greater errors, the trend of the data is startling. The farther back one looks in time, the more rapidly the speed of light seems to increase. Various mathematical curves fit these three centuries of data. When some of those curves are projected back in time, the speed of light becomes so fast that light from distant galaxies conceivably could have reached Earth in several thousand years.

No scientific law requires the speed of light to be constant.6 Many simply assume it is constant, and of course, changing old ways of thinking is sometimes difficult. Russian cosmologist, V. S. Troitskii, at the Radiophysical Research Institute in Gorky, is also questioning some old beliefs. He concluded, independently of Setterfield, that the speed of light was 10 billion times faster at time zero!7 Furthermore, he attributed the cosmic microwave background radiation and most redshifts to this rapidly decreasing speed of light. Setterfield reached the same conclusion concerning redshifts by a different method. If either Setterfield or Troitskii is correct, the big bang theory will fall (with a big bang).

Other cosmologists are proposing an enormous decay in the speed of light.8 Several of their theoretical problems with the big bang theory are solved if light once traveled millions of times faster.9

Atomic vs. Orbital Time. Why would the speed of light decrease? T. C. Van Flandern, working at the U.S. Naval Observatory, showed that atomic clocks are probably slowing relative to orbital clocks.10 Orbital clocks are based on orbiting astronomical bodies, especially Earth’s one-year period about the Sun. Before 1967, one second of time was defined by international agreement as 1/31,556,925.9747 of the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun. Atomic clocks are based on the vibrational period of the cesium-133 atom. In 1967, a second was redefined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium-133 atom. Van Flandern showed that if atomic clocks are “correct,” the orbital speeds of Mercury, Venus, and Mars are increasing. Consequently, the gravitational “constant” should be changing. However, he noted that if orbital clocks are “correct,” then the gravitational constant is truly constant, but atomic vibrations and the speed of light are decreasing. The drift between the two types of clocks was only several parts per billion per year. But again, the precision of the measurements is so good that the discrepancy is probably real.

There are four reasons orbital clocks seem to be correct and why atomic frequencies are probably slowing very slightly.

* If atomic clocks and Van Flandern’s study are correct, the gravitational “constant” should be changing. Other studies have not detected variations in the gravitational constant.
* If a planet’s orbital speed increased (and all other orbital parameters remained the same), its energy would increase. This would violate the law of conservation of mass-energy.
* If atomic time is slowing, then clocks based on the radioactive decay of atoms should also be slowing. Radiometric dating techniques would give ages that are too old. This would bring radiometric clocks more in line with most dating clocks. [See pages 34–37.] It would also explain why no primordial isotopes have half-lives of less than 50 million years. Such isotopes simply decayed away when radioactive decay rates were much greater.11
* If atomic frequencies are decreasing, then five “properties” of the atom, such as Planck’s constant, should also be changing. Statistical studies of past measurements show four of the five are changing—and in the right direction.12

So orbital clocks seem to be more accurate than the extremely precise atomic clocks.13

Many of us were skeptical of Setterfield’s initial claim, because the decrease in the speed-of-light measurements ceased in 1960. Large, one-time changes seldom occur in nature. The measurement techniques were precise enough to detect any decrease in the speed of light after 1960, if the trend of the prior three centuries had continued. Later, Setterfield realized that beginning in the 1960s, atomic clocks were used to measure the speed of light. If atomic frequencies are decreasing, then both the measured quantity (the speed of light) and the newly adopted measuring tool (atomic clocks) are changing at the same rate. Naturally, no relative change would be detected, and the speed of light would be constant in atomic time—but not orbital time.

Misconceptions. Does the decrease in the speed of light conflict with the statement frequently attributed to Albert Einstein that the speed of light is constant? Not really. Einstein said that the speed of light was not altered by the velocity of the light’s source. Setterfield says that the speed of light decreases over time.

Einstein’s statement that the speed of light is independent of the velocity of the light source, is called Einstein’s Second Postulate. (Many have misinterpreted it to mean that “Einstein said the speed of light is constant over time.”) Einstein’s Second Postulate is surprising, but probably true. Wouldn’t we expect a ball thrown from a fast train in the forward direction to travel faster than one thrown in the opposite direction, at least to an observer on the ground? While that is true for a thrown ball, some experimental evidence indicates it is not true for light.14 Light, launched from a fast-moving train, will travel at the same speed in all directions. This strange property of light led to the more extensive theory of relativity.15

Some people give another explanation for why we see distant stars in a young universe. They believe God created a beam of light between Earth and each star. Of course, a creation would immediately produce completed things. Instantly, they would look much older than they really were. This is called “creation with the appearance of age.” The concept is sound. However, for starlight, this presents two difficulties:

* Bright, exploding stars are called “supernovas.” If starlight, seemingly from a supernova, had been created en route to Earth and did not originate at the surface of an exploding star, then what exploded? Only a relatively short beam would have been created near Earth. If the image of an explosion was created on that short beam of light, then the star never existed and the explosion never happened. One finds this hard to accept.
* Every hot gas radiates a unique set of precise colors, called its emission spectrum. The gaseous envelope around each star also emits specific colors that identify the chemical composition of the gas. Because all starlight has emission spectra, this strongly suggests that a star’s light originated at the star—not in cold, empty space. Each beam of starlight also carries other information, such as the star’s spin rate, magnetic field, surface temperature, and the chemical composition of the cold gases between the star and Earth. Of course, God could have created this beam of light with all this information in it. However, the real question is not, “Could God have done it?” but, “Did He?”

Therefore, starlight seems to have originated at stellar surfaces, not in empty space.

Figure 141: Hubble Deep Field North. The Hubble Space Telescope, searching for evolving galaxies in December 1995, focused for 10 continuous days on a tiny patch of sky, so small when viewed from Earth that a grain of sand held at arm’s length would cover that area. This picture of that tiny patch of sky is called Hubble Deep Field North. Most objects in it are not isolated stars, but galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Of the 3,000 galaxies photographed that emitted enough light to measure their redshifts, which presumably measure distance, all seemed surprisingly mature. As stated in Scientific American, “the formation of ‘ordinary’ spiral and elliptical galaxies is apparently still out of reach of most redshift surveys.”16 Moreover, fully formed clusters of galaxies, not just galaxies, are seen at the greatest distances visible to the Hubble Space Telescope.17 In 1998 and 2004, similar pictures—with similar results—were taken.

Think about this. There is not enough time in the age of the universe (even as evolutionists imagine it, times a billion) for gravity to pull together all the particles comprising clusters of galaxies.18 (As explained under “Galaxies” on page 30, clusters of galaxies cannot form, even granting all this time.) Because the most current studies show fully-formed galaxies even farther away than those shown above,19 creation becomes the logical and obvious alternative. We may be seeing galaxies as they looked months after they were created. Vast amounts of time are no longer needed. [See page 277.]

Figure 142: Spiral Galaxies. The arms in these six representative spiral galaxies have about the same amount of twist. Their distances from Earth are shown in light-years. (One light-year, the distance light travels in one year, equals 5,879,000,000,000 miles.) For the light from all galaxies to arrive at Earth tonight, the more distant galaxies, which had to release their light long before the closer galaxies, did not have as much time to rotate and twist their arms. Therefore, farther galaxies should have less twist. Of course, if light traveled millions of times faster in the past, the farthest galaxies did not have to send their light long before the nearest galaxies. Spiral galaxies should have similar twists. This turns out to be the case.21 The galaxies are: A) M33, or NGC 598; B) M101, or NGC 5457; C) M51, or NGC 5194; D) NGC 4559; E) M88, or NGC 4501; and F) NGC 772. All distances are taken from R. Brent Tully, Nearby Galaxies Catalog (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Surprising Observations. Starlight from distant stars and galaxies is redshifted—meaning that their light is redder than one might expect. Although other interpretations are possible, most astronomers have interpreted redshifted light to be a wave effect, similar to that of the lower pitch of a train’s whistle when the train is going away from an observer. As the wave emitter (train or star) moves away from an observer, the waves are stretched, making them lower in pitch (for the train) or redder in color (for the star or galaxy). The greater a star’s or galaxy’s redshift, the faster it is supposedly moving away from us.

Since 1976, William Tifft, a University of Arizona astronomer, has found that the redshifts of distant stars and galaxies typically differ from each other by only a few fixed amounts.20 This is very strange if stars are actually moving away from us. It would be as if galaxies could travel only at specific speeds, jumping abruptly from one speed to another, without passing through intermediate speeds. If stars are not moving away from us at high speeds, the big bang theory is wrong, along with many other related beliefs in the field of cosmology. Other astronomers, not initially believing Tifft’s results, did similar work and reached the same conclusion.

All atoms give off tiny bundles of energy (called quanta) of fixed amounts—and nothing in between. So Setterfield believes that the “quantization of redshifts,” as many describe it, is an atomic effect, not a strange recessional-velocity effect. If space slowly absorbs energy from all emitted light, it would do so in fixed increments. This would redshift starlight, with the farthest star’s light being redshifted the most. Setterfield is working on a theory to tie this and the decay in the speed of light together. If he is correct, we should soon see the redshifts of a few distant galaxies suddenly decrease. This may explain why two distinct redshifts are seen in each of several well-studied galaxies.22 Those seemingly typical galaxies are not flying apart!

Another surprising observation is that most distant galaxies look remarkably similar to nearer galaxies. For example, galaxies are fully developed and show no signs of evolving. This puzzles astronomers.23 If the speed of light has decreased drastically, these distant, yet mature, galaxies no longer need explaining.

Also, the light from a distant galaxy would have reached Earth not too long after the light from nearby galaxies. This may be why spiral galaxies, both near and far, have similar twists. [See Figure 142.]

A Critical Test. If the speed of light has decreased a millionfold, we should observe events in outer space in extreme slow motion. Here is why.

Imagine a time in the distant past when the speed of light was a million times faster than it is today. On a hypothetical planet, billions of light-years from Earth, a light started flashing toward Earth every second. Each flash then began a very long trip to Earth. Because the speed of light was a million times greater than it is today, those initial flashes were spaced a million times farther apart than they would have been at today’s slower speed of light.

Now, thousands of years later, imagine that throughout the universe, the speed of light has slowed to today’s speed. The first of those light flashes—strung out like beads sliding down a long string—are approaching Earth. The large distances separating adjacent flashes have remained constant during those thousands of years, so the moving flashes slowed in unison. Because the first flashes to strike Earth are spaced so far apart, they will strike Earth every million seconds. In other words, we are seeing past events on that planet (the flashing of a light) in slow motion. If the speed of light has been decreasing since the creation, then the farther out in space we look, the more extreme this slow motion becomes.

About half the stars in our galaxy are binary. That is, they and a companion star are in a tight orbit around their common center of mass. If there is a “slow-motion effect,” the apparent orbital periods of binary stars should tend to increase with increasing distance from Earth. If the speed of light has been decreasing, the Hubble Space Telescope may eventually find that binary stars at great distances have very long orbital periods, showing that they are in slow motion.

Why Does the Universe Seem To Be Expanding?

At least eleven times, the Bible says that God “stretched out” or “stretches out” the heavens. [See Table 17.] For emphasis, important ideas are often repeated in the Bible. While we may have difficulty understanding all of this, we can be confident of its significance.

The Hebrew word for stretched is natah. It does not mean an explosion, a flinging out, or the type of stretching that encounters increasing resistance, as with a spring or rubber band. Natah is more like the effortless reaching out of one’s hand.

Expansion: Big Bang or Stretching?

The stretching explanation, proposed here, has similarities and differences with the big bang theory. Both the big bang and stretching explanations describe a very rapid expansion of the universe, beginning soon after time began, when not all laws of physics applied. As one big-bang authority states:

In its standard form, the big bang theory maintains that the universe was born about 15 billion years ago from a cosmological singularity—a state in which the temperature and density are infinitely high. Of course, one cannot really speak in physical terms about these quantities as being infinite. One usually assumes that the current laws of physics did not apply [during the big bang’s rapid expansion]. ... One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? What arose first: the universe or the laws determining its evolution? Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology.2 [emphasis added]

Contrary to the standard big bang theory, the expansion (or “stretching”) did not begin at a singularity, an infinitesimal point.3 Nor did energy expended in stretching out the heavens come from within the universe or during its first trillionth of a trillionth of a ten-billionth of a second (10-34 second) or less, as with the big bang theory. Energy flowed into the universe as the stretching progressed. According to the big bang theory, stars, galaxies, and black holes began forming after hundreds of millions of years. According to the stretching explanation, these bodies were formed (or began) near the beginning of time—during the creation week. Because matter and starlight occupy space, they were also stretched. You can decide which explanation the evidence supports.

The Evidence

Accelerating Expansion. The redshift of distant starlight suggests an expansion. However, a big bang—as in a big explosion—would produce only a decelerating expansion, not the accelerating expansion observed. [See “Dark Thoughts” on page 29.] Stretching during the creation week could have produced the accelerated expansion seen today at the edge of the visible universe.

Star Formation. Astronomers recognize that the densest concentrations of gas seen in the universe could not form stars by any known means, including gravitational collapse, unless that gas was thousands of times more compact than today.4 Apparently, stars were formed as, or before, the heavens were stretched out.

Black Holes. A supermassive black hole is in the center of at least every nearby galaxy. Black holes are so massive (a few billion times that of our Sun) that nothing can escape their gravity—even light. Astronomers admit that black holes must have existed very soon after the universe began,5 but the big bang theory says that all matter was spread out uniformly after 300,000 years, before stars formed. That uniformity would prevent gravity from forming galaxies and black holes even over the supposed age of the universe.6 However, stars and supermassive black holes could easily have formed—or been formed—soon after the creation of the universe and matter, but just before the heavens were stretched out.

Spiral Galaxies. If spiral galaxies formed billions of years ago, the arms of spiral galaxies should be wrapped more tightly around their respective galaxies than they are. Also, nearer galaxies should show considerably more “wrap” than more distant spiral galaxies. [See Figure 142 on page 266.] However, if space was stretched out recently, spiral galaxies could appear as they do.

Heavy Elements in Stars. According to the big bang theory, there are three generations of stars, each with increasing amounts of heavy elements. The first generation would have contained only hydrogen and helium. After hundreds of millions of years, second generation stars would begin forming with heavier elements made inside first generation stars. Although some first generation stars should still be visible, not one has ever been found. [See Endnote n on page 83.]

According to the stretching explanation, stars have always had some heavier chemical elements. Telescopes that can see the farthest back in time see stars, galaxies, and quasars containing these heavier chemical elements.

Stellar Velocities. Stars in dwarf galaxies and in the outer parts of spiral galaxies travel much faster than one would think based on physical laws. However, if only thousands of years ago those stars were nearer the centers of their galaxies before the heavens were stretched out, such high speeds would be expected.

Speeding Galaxies. A similar observation can be made about tight clusters of galaxies. Galaxies in clusters are traveling much faster than they should, based on their distances from their clusters’ centers of mass.

Dwarf Galaxies. Dwarf galaxies are sometimes imbedded in a smoothly rotating disk of hydrogen gas that is much larger than the galaxy itself. The mass (hidden or otherwise) of each dwarf galaxy and its surrounding gas is insufficient to pull the gas into its disk shape,7 but if this matter was once highly concentrated and then the space it occupied was recently stretched out, all observed characteristics would be explained.

Figure 143: Dwarf Galaxy. A vast hydrogen disk (blue) surrounds the dwarf galaxy, UGC 5288 (bright white). The isolated galaxy, 16 million light-years from earth, contains about 100,000 stars and is 20 times smaller in diameter than our Milky Way Galaxy, which has at least 100,000,000,000 stars. The dwarf’s mass is about 30 times too small to gravitationally hold onto the most distant hydrogen gas, so gravity could not have pulled the distant hydrogen gas into its disk. Because the gas is too evenly distributed and rotates so smoothly, it was not expelled from the galaxy or pulled out by a close encounter with another galaxy.

Hydrogen gas would have assumed this shape if space was once more compact. Gravitational forces would have been much more powerful and also would have produced this smooth rotational pattern. If so, space was later stretched out. This would have occurred recently, because the disk has not disbursed into the vacuum of space. (The galaxy is seen in visible light; the hydrogen disk is seen by a fleet of 27 radio telescopes.)

Strings of Galaxies. It is widely recognized that gravitational forces cannot pull matter into long, giant filaments composed of hundreds or thousands of galaxies—even if the universe were unbelievably old. Instead, gravity, acting over such enormous time and distances, would form more spherical globs of matter. Yet, long, massive filaments of galaxies have been discovered.8

These strings of galaxies can be understood if galaxies were formed when all matter in the universe was initially confined to a much smaller volume. (In that small volume, stars and galaxies formed either by the direct acts of a Creator or the powerful gravitational forces resulting from so much extremely confined mass.) Then, the heavens were rapidly stretched out. Just as one might pull taffy into long strings, the stretched out heavens might contain long, massive strings of thousands of galaxies. A surprising number appear connected or aligned with other galaxies or quasars, as prominent astronomers have noted. [See “Connected Galaxies” on page 37.]

Distant Galaxies. Massive galaxies and galaxy clusters are now found at such great distances that they must have formed soon after the universe began. The big bang theory cannot explain how such galaxy concentrations could have formed so quickly and so far away.9 The stretching explanation says that galaxies and galaxy clusters began before the heavens were stretched out, when all matter was relatively confined.

Colliding Galaxies. Some galaxies contain two distinct rotating systems, as if a galaxy rotating one way collided with another rotating the opposite way. Based on the speeds of galaxies we see and their separation distances today, such mergers would take billions of years. Does this show that the universe must be billions of years old?

No. Before the heavens were stretched out, galaxies would have been closer to each other, resulting in much greater speeds and frequent collisions. Today, galaxies are stretched so far apart that collisions rarely happen. Because galactic collisions appear surprisingly common, astronomers disregard their own calculations.10

If some galaxies merged over billions of years, why haven’t their respective rotations homogenized by now? Obviously, the mergings happened recently.11

Helium-2 Nebulas. Clouds of glowing, blue gas, called helium-2 nebulas, have been set aglow by something hot enough to strip two electrons from each helium atom. No known star —“young or old”—is hot enough to do so,12 but compressed conditions before the heavens were stretched out would do this.

Dark “Science.” The big bang theory must invoke unscientific concepts, such as “dark matter” and “dark energy,” to try to explain the “stretched out heavens.” (Dark matter, dark energy, and many other scientific problems with the big bang theory are explained, beginning on page 28.)

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is often given as evidence for the big bang theory. Actually, that radiation, when studied closely, is a strong argument against the big bang and evidence for the sudden creation of matter throughout an immense universe. [For details, see pages 274–276.]

If the Sun and Stars Were Created on Day 4, What Was the Light of Day 1?

Light from the Sun and other stars is not the only way to illuminate the earth and produce day-night cycles. The light of Day 1 may have been a consequence of the instantaneous creation of matter. To understand why, some basics must first be explained.

Before planets, plants, and people could be created, fundamental forces must be created including the gravitational force and the electrical force. All things on earth—rocks, the chair you are sitting in, and your body—are pulled toward the center of the earth by the gravitational force. Each object is also held together by forces associated with electrical charges.

Gravity. The Bible seems to mention the beginning of gravitational forces. In describing earth’s earliest state, Genesis 1:2 says, “And the earth was formless and void, ... .” The second half of that verse then states, “... the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” Could the earth be formless but soon afterwards have a surface? Yes, if gravitational forces suddenly began acting to make a “formless” earth spherical.

The earth’s particles, when created, would have been located at various distances from where they would finally rest after gravitational forces came into existence and pulled the particles together. Likewise, if atomic particles (electrons, protons, etc.) were not created in their equilibrium resting positions within atoms, the newly created electrical forces would have pulled electrons and protons—negatively and positively charged particles—toward each other to form atoms.

Electrons. Suppose electrons were created at various (even tiny) distances from what would become their first atoms. Negatively charged electrons would accelerate, or “fall,” by electrical attraction toward positively charged nuclei. In doing so, they would emit light. Genesis 1:3 may be describing this: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.”

Whenever electrical charges accelerate, electromagnetic radiation—which can include visible light—is given off. That is how an antenna works. Electrons surge up and down the antenna at a particular frequency, causing radio, television, or other electromagnetic waves to radiate out at that frequency.

If “a universe” of newly created electrons accelerated (or “fell”) toward atomic nuclei, light with various frequencies would be radiated. When light reflects enough times off surrounding matter so everything reaches a common temperature, the space between that matter becomes filled with blackbody radiation.1 If that space later expands, that radiation’s temperature will drop.

Two Perspectives

A Creation Perspective. The instant matter was created, a burst of light emanated from every particle in the universe. Light from one point on earth would reach other points in a tiny fraction of a second. The farther matter was from earth, the longer it would have taken for that light to reach earth. Just how long would depend on the velocity of light and how far matter extended from earth.

Visualize an observer sitting in a rowboat on a very large, glassy-smooth lake. At one instant, pebbles fall uniformly onto the entire lake. Assume that only one wave ripples out from each pebble’s splash. Waves that began nearest the rowboat strike the boat first. As time passes, waves that began farther and farther out strike the boat. For the observer in the boat, the waves hitting the boat at any instant appear to have begun from an imaginary ring centered on the boat, a ring that expands over time at “wave velocity.”

Now imagine a similar situation, but in three dimensions. An observer in the vacuum of outer space sees a constant stream of light coming from all directions—all emitted at the instant matter was created. It will appear to the observer that the light originated from an imaginary spherical shell with the observer at its center. The sphere’s radius increases at the speed of light, but the observer receives the same amount of radiation—from all directions and at all times. This is because the expanding sphere’s increasing area exactly balances the reduction in the radiation’s intensity due to the increasing distance the light has traveled.

If, before space was stretched out, matter was created with positive and negative charges accelerating toward each other, we would see almost identical blackbody radiation coming from all directions. Such radiation was discovered in 1965 and is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation. Its temperature today corresponds to a very cold 2.73 kelvins (-454.76°F). [Stretched out space is discussed on page 269: “Why Does the Universe Seem To Be Expanding?”]

What would this light have looked like before the Sun, Moon, and stars were made on Day 4 and before the heavens were stretched out? The initial burst of light from matter comprising the “formless” earth would disappear in less than a second. However, light would then reach earth from the surrounding sphere that expanded from earth at the velocity of light. Seconds or minutes later, light would arrive from the newly created matter from which the Sun would be made on Day 4. Hours later—and before the heavens were stretched out—light would begin arriving from matter that would form the bulk of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.

This bright, temporary source of light, from matter that would become our galaxy, would be concentrated in a particular portion of the sky. Earth, rotating since its creation on Day 1, would experience day-night cycles even before the Sun was created on Day 4. Today, thousands of years after that first day when matter was created throughout the entire universe, the CMB reaching earth is uniformly spread out over the entire sky. This is because blackbody radiation uniformly filled otherwise empty space on Days 1–3, before the heavens were stretched out. Since Day 4, the Sun has been earth’s dominant light source.

The Big Bang Perspective. The big bang theory, whose popularity is largely due to its explanation for the CMB, provides another explanation. Within a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was about the size of a basketball and was expanding trillions of billions of times faster than the speed of light today. Minutes later, matter and energy came together to form hydrogen nuclei.

Matter, during that time, was so compressed and temperatures were so hot that most nuclei would have merged to form heavier nuclei such as carbon, iron, and uranium. However, because hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in the universe today, something must have prevented this nuclear fusion. Intense background radiation would do the job, as Nobel prize winner Steven Weinberg explains:

[Before CMB was discovered, James Peebles, an early big bang researcher] noted that if there had not been an intense background of radiation present during the first few minutes of the universe, nuclear reactions would have proceeded so rapidly that a large fraction of the hydrogen present would have been “cooked” into heavier elements, in contradiction with the fact that about three-quarters of the present universe is hydrogen. This rapid nuclear cooking could have been prevented only if the universe was filled with radiation having an enormous equivalent temperature at very short wavelengths, which could blast nuclei apart as fast as they could be formed.2

Notice: CMB was needed to make the big bang theory work—as were “dark matter” and “dark energy.” [See “Dark Thoughts” on page 29.]

Smoothness of the CMB

The CMB is remarkably smooth, so smooth that for 25 years after its discovery, no variations could be detected. Increasingly precise instruments were designed and launched into space to look for variations in the CMB’s intensity, because the big bang theory said they had to be there. Without billions of large concentrations of matter (from which most CMB radiated), other matter could not gravitationally contract around those concentrations to form the untold billions of galaxies. If galaxies did not form, we would not be here!

Finally, after 25 years of searching, variations amounting to only one part in 100,000 were found. However, experts recognized that such weak concentrations, even after hundreds of billions of years, could not have pulled in enough matter to form galaxies.

But this uniformity [in the CMB] is difficult to reconcile with the obvious clumping of matter into galaxies, clusters of galaxies and even larger features extending across vast regions of the universe, such as “walls” and “bubbles.” 3

Why was [the CMB in] the early universe asymmetric by such a small amount? This is one of the outstanding puzzles of the Big Bang theory.4

The theorists know of no way such a monster [a massive accumulation of galaxies, called the Great Wall] could have condensed in the time available since the Big Bang, especially considering that the 2.7 K background radiation reveals a universe that was very homogeneous in the beginning.5

Gravity can’t, over the age of the universe, amplify these [tiny] irregularities enough [to form huge clusters of galaxies].6

Furthermore, the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the extreme edges of the visible universe. Most experts expected to see diffuse matter slowly gravitating together to form galaxies. This is what one would expect if the extremely smooth CMB was left over from the big bang. Instead, galaxies were already “bunched together”—having formed very early in the history of the universe.

... tremendously distant galaxies are just as clustered as today and are arranged in the same filamentary, bubbly structures that nearby galaxies are.7

In each of the five patches of sky surveyed by the team, the distant galaxies bunch together instead of being distributed randomly in space. “The work is ongoing, but what we’re able to say now is that galaxies we are seeing at great distances are as strongly clustered in the early universe as they are today,” says [Charles C.] Steidel, who is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.8

Conclusion

Is the CMB (1) left over from the big bang, (2) radiation emitted for a brief instant from all created matter, or (3) something else? Both (1) and (2) place the CMB at the beginning of time and attribute the radiation’s current low effective temperature (2.73 kelvins) to an expansion of space.

The big bang’s explanation for the CMB has several widely recognized problems.

* The CMB, when viewed over the entire sky, is thousands of times too smooth to be a consequence of the big bang. Without vastly larger irregularities, the big bang predicts that galaxies could not form in even hundreds of billions of years.
* The most distant galaxies seen are tightly clustered, much more than gravity could accomplish over the big bang’s age of the universe.
* According to the big bang theory, there is no reason why radiation from opposite sides of the universe should be identical, because radiating matter that far apart could not have reached thermal equilibrium. However, if the CMB is a natural consequence of the creation of matter within a very compact universe that was later stretched out, identical radiation would be expected.

All of this does not necessarily mean that the explanation proposed here for the light of Day 1 is correct. However, if one considers the many other problems with the big bang theory—a discussion that begins on page 28—the two choices described here are reduced to one. (Other possibilities, usually of a nonquantitative, nontestable nature and having nothing to do with the CMB, have been proposed for the “light of Day 1.”)

Yes, there is much we do not know about light and the beginning hours and days of the universe. However, faulty ideas should be exposed and superior ideas presented, even if they are not the final answer. Otherwise, incorrect ideas are accepted by default—reinforcing the reigning paradigm.

The subject is not unimportant. God asked Job (Job 38:19–20), “Where is the way to the dwelling of light? And darkness, where is its place, that you may take it to its territory, and that you may discern the paths to its home?” Just as Job could not answer those questions and others related to creation (Job 38), we also fall short—even though we better understand light and just how immense the universe is today.

One thing is clear: on Day 1, three days before the Sun and stars were created, a temporary light source illuminated the spinning earth and provided day-night cycles.

How Old Do Evolutionists Say the Universe Is?

In the late 1920s, evolutionists believed that the universe was 2 billion years (b.y.) old. Later, radiometric dating techniques gave much older ages for certain rocks on Earth.1 Obviously, a part of the universe cannot be older than the universe itself. This contradiction was soon removed by devising a rationale for increasing the age of the universe.

Similar problems are now widely acknowledged. [See “Big Bang?” on page 28.] If a big bang occurred, it happened 13.7 b.y. ago. If stars evolved, some stars are 16 b.y. old, such as the stars in the globular cluster below.2 Obviously, stars cannot be older than the universe. Also, the Hubble Space Telescope has found distant galaxies whose age, based on big-bang assumptions, exceeds the age of the universe.3

Figure 144: Globular Cluster. Globular clusters are tight, spherical concentrations of 10,000–1,000,000 stars. This globular cluster, called M13, is about 22,000 light-years away. To see why stars in globular clusters did not evolve but came into existence at about the same time, see “Star Births? Stellar Evolution?” on page 30.

Here is a similar, but less widely known, problem. Let’s suppose the universe is 13.7 b.y. old. That is not enough time for stars containing heavy chemical elements to form and then transmit their light to Earth. A big bang would have produced only hydrogen, helium, and lithium—the three lightest chemical elements. Light from the most distant stars and galaxies shows they contain much heavier chemical elements such as carbon, iron, and lead—elements that could not have been in the first generation of stars to form after the big bang. Evolutionists, therefore, believe that the hundred or so heavier chemical elements (97% of all chemical elements) were produced either deep inside stars or when some stars exploded as supernovas. Much later, a second generation of stars supposedly formed with the heavy elements from that exploded debris.

In other words, everyone realizes that a big bang would produce only the three lightest chemical elements. Therefore, big-bang advocates must explain the origin of the heavier chemical elements (carbon, oxygen, iron, lead etc.). To squeeze enough hydrogen nuclei together to form some heavier elements would require the high temperatures inside stars. Theoretically, to form elements heavier than iron requires something much hotter—a supernova.

So if a big bang happened, there would not be enough time afterward to:

a. Form the first generation of stars out of hydrogen, helium, and lithium.

b. Have many of those stars pass through their complete life cycles then finally explode as supernovas to produce the heavier chemical elements.

c. Recollect, somehow, enough of that exploded debris to form the second generation of stars. (Some were quasars thought to be powered by black holes, billions of times more massive than our Sun! See Endnote 5 on page 272.)

d. Transmit the light from these heavy elements to Earth, immense distances away.

New and sophisticated light-gathering instruments have enabled astronomers to discover heavy elements in many extremely distant galaxies4 and quasars.5 The current distance record is held by such a galaxy with a quasar at its center.6 If the speed of light has been constant, its light has taken 94% of the age of the universe to reach us. This means that only the first 6% of the age of the universe would have been available for events a–c above. (Only 0.8 b.y. would be available in a 13.7-b.y.-old universe.) Few astronomers believe that such slow processes as a–c above, if they happened at all, could happen in 0.8 b.y.7

Evolutionists can undoubtedly resolve these time contradictions—but at the cost of rejecting some cherished belief. Perhaps they will accept the possibility that light traveled much faster in the past. Measurements exist which support this revolutionary idea. [See page 264.] Maybe they will conclude that the big bang never occurred, or that heavy elements were somehow in the first and only generation of stars, or that stars degrade, but new stars don’t evolve. Much evidence supports each of these ideas, and all are consistent with a recent creation.

Few evolutionists are aware of these contradictions. However, as more powerful telescopes begin peering even farther into space, these problems will worsen and more attention will be focused on them. If scientists find, as one might expect, even more distant stars and galaxies with heavy elements, problems with the claimed age of the universe will no longer be the secret of a few evolutionists.8

Figure 145: Compsognathus. While most dinosaurs were large, this one, Compsognathus longipes, was small—about the size of a domestic cat. The German scientist who discovered Compsognathus, Andreas Wagner, “recognized from the description [of Archaeopteryx] what seemed to be his Compsognathus but with feathers! He was extremely suspicious ...”2 Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx have many similarities. Compsognathus fossils are also found at the same site in Germany where Archaeopteryx was found.

Figure 146: “Chewing Gum Blob.” These raised spots have the appearance of pieces of chewing gum. They have no corresponding indentation on the mating face of the fossil. Probably some small drops of wet cement fell on the surface and were never detected or cleaned off by the forger.

Figure 147: Furcula of Archaeopteryx? This V-shaped bone is claimed to be the wishbone, or furcula, of Archaeopteryx. It is shaped more like a boomerang than the familiar wishbone in a chicken. A furcula acts as a spring—storing and releasing energy with each flap of a wing. Notice the crack in the right arm of the furcula and the broken right tip—strange for a bird’s flexible bone buried in soft sediments. Perhaps it broke when a forger chipped it out of another fossil. One must ask why only this Berlin specimen shows a clear furcula. Notice how the counterslab, immediately below, does not have a correspondingly smooth depression into which the raised furcula will fit.

igure 148: Double Strike. A forger would have a delicate task positioning the counterslab on top of the slab with a cement paste between the two slabs. The two halves of the fossil must mate perfectly. A last-minute adjustment or slip would create a double strike.

If dinosaurs (or, as other evolutionists assert, reptiles) evolved into birds, thousands of types of animals should have been more birdlike than dinosaurs and yet more dinosaur-like than birds. Evolutionists claim that Archaeopteryx (ark ee OP ta riks) is a feathered dinosaur, a transition between dinosaurs (or reptiles) and birds. Of the relatively few claimed intermediate fossils, Archaeopteryx is the one most frequently cited by evolutionists and shown in most biology textbooks. Some say the six Archaeopteryx fossils are the most famous fossils in the world.

Archaeopteryx means ancient (archae) wing (pteryx). But the story behind this alleged half-dinosaur, half-bird is much more interesting than its fancy, scientific-sounding name or the details of its bones. If Archaeopteryx were shown to be a fraud, the result would be devastating for the evolution theory.

Since the early 1980s, several prominent scientists have charged that the two Archaeopteryx fossils with clearly visible feathers are forgeries.1 Allegedly, thin layers of cement were spread on two fossils of a chicken-size dinosaur, called Compsognathus (komp SOG nuh thus). Bird feathers were then imprinted into the wet cement.

If Archaeopteryx did not have a few perfectly formed, modern feathers, clearly visible on two of the six known specimens,3 Archaeopteryx would be considered Compsognathus.4 The skeletal features of Archaeopteryx are certainly not suitable for flight, because no specimen shows a sternum (breast bone) which all birds, and even bats, must have to anchor their large flight muscles. But why would Archaeopteryx have modern, aerodynamically perfect feathers if it could not fly?5 Finally, Archaeopteryx should not be classified as a bird.6

The two fossils with feathers were “found” and sold for high prices by Karl Häberlein (in 1861 for 700 pounds) and his son, Ernst (in 1877 for 20,000 gold marks), just as Darwin’s theory and book, The Origin of Species (1859), were gaining popularity. While some German experts thought the new (1861) fossil was a forgery, the British Museum (Natural History) bought it sight unseen. (In the preceding century, fossil forgeries from limestone quarries were common in that region of Germany.7)

Evidence of an Archaeopteryx forgery includes instances where the supposedly mating faces of the fossil (the main slab and counterslab) do not mate. The feather impressions are primarily on the main slab, while the counterslab in several places has raised areas with no corresponding indentation on the main slab. These raised areas, nicknamed “chewing gum blobs,” are made of the same fine-grained material that is found only under the feather impressions. The rest of the fossil is composed of a coarse-grained limestone. [See Figure 146.]

Some might claim that Archaeopteryx has a wishbone, or furcula—a unique feature of birds. It would be more accurate to say that only the British Museum specimen has a visible furcula. It is a strange furcula, “relatively the largest known in any bird.”8 Furthermore, it is upside down, a point acknowledged by two giants of the evolutionist movement—T. H. Huxley (Darwin’s so-called bulldog) and Gavin deBeer. As Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe stated,

It was somewhat unwise for the forgers to endow Compsognathus with a furcula, because a cavity had to be cut in the counterslab, with at least some semblance to providing a fit to the added bone. This would have to be done crudely with a chisel, which could not produce a degree of smoothness in cutting the rock similar to a true sedimentation cavity.9 [See Figure 147.]

Feather imprints show what have been called “double strike” impressions. Evidently, feather impressions were made twice in a slightly displaced position as the slab and counterslab were pressed together. [See Figure 148.]

Honest disagreement as to whether Archaeopteryx was or was not a forgery was possible until 1986, when a definitive test was performed. An x-ray resonance spectrograph of the British Museum fossil showed that the finer-grained material containing the feather impressions differed significantly from the rest of the coarser-grained fossil slab. The chemistry of this “amorphous paste” also differed from the crystalline rock in the famous fossil quarry in Bavaria, Germany, where Archaeopteryx supposedly was found.10 Few responses have been made to this latest, and probably conclusive, evidence.11

Fossilized feathers are almost unknown,12 and several complete, flat feathers that just happened to be at the slab/counterslab interface are even more remarkable. Had a feathered Archaeopteryx been buried in mud or a limestone paste, its feathers would have had a three-dimensional shape, typical of the curved feathers we have all held. Indeed, the only way to flatten a feather is to press it between two flat slabs. Flattened feathers, alone, raise suspicions.

Also, there has been no convincing explanation for how to fossilize (actually encase) a bird in the 80% pure, Solnhofen limestone. One difficulty, which will be appreciated after reading about liquefaction on pages 158–168, is the low density of bird carcasses. Another is that limestone is primarily precipitated from seawater, as explained on pages 170–175. Therefore, to be buried in limestone, the animal must lie on the seafloor—unusual for a dead bird. Other problems with evolving birds are described in Endnote i on page 62.

Significantly, two modern birds have been discovered in rock strata dated by evolutionists as much older than Archaeopteryx.13 In Argentina, many birdlike footprints have been found which evolutionists say preceded Archaeopteryx by at least 55 million years.14 Therefore, according to evolutionary dating methods, Archaeopteryx could not be ancestral to modern birds. True fossilized birds have been found that evolutionists believe lived shortly after Archaeopteryx.15 This has forced some to conclude that the distinctly different Archaeopteryx was not ancestral to modern birds.16

When the media popularize an evolutionist claim that is later shown to be false, retractions are seldom made. One refreshing exception is provided by National Geographic, which originally, and incorrectly, reported the discovery in China of “a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.” (Actually, the fossil was a composite of a bird’s body and a dinosaur’s tail, faked for financial gain.)17 Details were explained on a few back pages of National Geographic by an independent investigator at the request of National Geographic’s editor. The report was summarized as follows:

It’s a tale of misguided secrecy and misplaced confidence, of rampant egos clashing, self-aggrandizement, wishful thinking, naive assumptions, human error, stubbornness, manipulation, backbiting, lying, corruption, and, most of all, abysmal communication.18

Such fiascoes are common among those seeking rewards and prestige for finding fossils of missing links. The media that popularize these stories mislead the public.

Archaeopteryx’s fame seems assured, not as a transitional fossil between dinosaurs (or reptiles) and birds, but as a forgery. Unlike the Piltdown hoax, which fooled leading scientists for more than 40 years, the Archaeopteryx hoax has lasted for 125 years. [See “Ape-Men?” on page 12.] Because the apparent motive for the Archaeopteryx deception was money, Archaeopteryx should be labeled as a fraud. The British Museum (Natural History) gave life to both deceptions and must assume much of the blame. Those scientists who were too willing to fit Archaeopteryx into their evolutionary framework also helped spread the deception. Piltdown man may soon be replaced as the most famous hoax in all of science.

How Accurate Is Radiocarbon Dating?

Figure 150: Increasing Amounts of Carbon-14. Radiocarbon dating requires knowing the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere when the organic matter being dated was part of a living organism. The assumption (shown in red), which few realize is being made, is that this ratio has always been what it was before the industrial revolution9—about one carbon-14 atom for every trillion carbon-12 atoms. Willard Libby, who received a Nobel Prize for developing this technique, conducted tests in 1950 which showed more carbon-14 forming than decaying. Therefore, the amount of carbon-14 and the ratio must be increasing. He ignored his test results, because he believed the earth must be more than 20,000–30,000 years old, in which case the amount of carbon-14 must have had time to reach equilibrium and be constant.3 In 1977, Melvin Cook did similar, but more precise, tests which showed that the ratio was definitely increasing, even faster than Libby’s test indicated.

Today, carbon-14 forms in the upper atmosphere at the rate of 21 pounds a year, but in 5,730 years, half of it decays. Therefore, carbon-14 would normally increase from the time of the creation, as shown by the blue line. Before the flood, the blue line levels off as the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere approaches equilibrium—where the amount forming balances the amount decaying. Earth’s lush forests had so much carbon that the equilibrium level was much lower than today. Those forests, ripped up and buried during the flood, became our coal, oil, and methane deposits.

During the flood, carbon-12, released from the subterranean water chamber, diluted the carbon-14 in the atmosphere and oceans even more. (Carbon-14 could not have formed in this chamber, because it was shielded from the cosmic radiation that produces carbon-14.) If one thought the C-14/C-12 ratio had always been what it is today, he would erroneously conclude that small amounts of carbon-14 in fossils meant much time had passed. Instead, less carbon-14 was in those organisms when they died.

Radiocarbon ages less than 3,500 years old are probably accurate. However, before accepting any radiocarbon date, one should know how the technique works, its limitations, and its assumptions. One limitation is that the radiocarbon technique dates only material that was once part of an animal or plant, such as bones, flesh, or wood. It cannot date rocks directly. To understand the other capabilities and limitations of radiocarbon dating, we must understand how it works and consider the flood.

Most carbon atoms weigh 12 atomic mass units. However, roughly one in a trillion carbon atoms weighs 14 atomic units. This carbon is called carbon-14. It is also called radiocarbon because it is radioactive (but not dangerous). Half of it will decay in about 5,730 years to form nitrogen. Half of the remainder will decay in another 5,730 years, and so on.

Cosmic radiation striking the upper atmosphere converts about 21 pounds of nitrogen each year into radiocarbon (carbon-14). Most carbon-14 quickly combines with oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which then spreads throughout the atmosphere. Plants take in carbon dioxide, incorporating in their tissues both carbon-14 (unstable) and normal carbon-12 (stable) in the same proportion as they occur in the atmosphere. Carbon-14 then moves up the various food chains to enter animal tissue—again, in about the same ratio carbon-14 has with carbon-12 in the atmosphere.

When a living thing dies, its radiocarbon loss (decay) is no longer balanced by intake, so its radiocarbon steadily decreases with a half-life of 5,730 years. If we knew the amount of carbon-14 in an organism when it died, we could attempt to date the time of death. The key questions then are: “Has the atmospheric ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 changed in the past, and if so, why and how much?” The assumption usually made, but rarely acknowledged, is that the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution1 has always been the same—about one in a trillion. Actually, that ratio may have been quite different.

For example, a worldwide flood would uproot and bury preflood forests. Afterward, less carbon would be available to enter the atmosphere from decaying vegetation. With less carbon-12 to dilute the carbon-14 continually forming from nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere would increase. If the atmosphere’s ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 has doubled since the flood and we did not know it, radiocarbon ages of things that lived soon after the flood would appear to be one half-life (or 5,730 years) older than their true ages. If that ratio quadrupled, organic remains would appear 11,460 (2 x 5,730) years older, etc. Therefore, a “radiocarbon year” would not correspond to an actual year.2

As explained in Figure 150, recent measurements show that the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 has been building up in the atmosphere.3 However, for the last 3,500 years, the increase in the ratio has been extremely slight.

Radiocarbon dating of vertical sequences of organic-rich layers at 714 locations worldwide has consistently shown a surprising result.4 Radiocarbon ages do not increase steadily with depth, as one might expect. Instead, they increase at an accelerating rate. In other words, the concentration of carbon-14 is unexpectedly low in the lower organic layers. As one moves to higher and higher layers, this concentration increases, but at a decreasing rate.

Tree-ring dating allows us to infer how the atmospheric concentration of carbon-14 changed in the past. Some types of trees growing at high elevations with a steady supply of moisture will reliably add only one ring each year. In other environments, multiple rings can be added in a year.5 A tree ring’s thickness depends on the tree’s growing conditions, which vary from year to year. Some rings may show frost or fire damage. By comparing sequences of ring thicknesses in two different trees, a correspondence can sometimes be shown. Trees of the same species that simultaneously grew within a few hundred miles of each other may have similar patterns. Trees of different species or trees growing in different environments have less similar patterns.

Claims are frequently made that wood growing today can be matched up with some scattered pieces of dead wood so that tree-ring counts can be extended back more than 8,600 years. This may not be correct. These claimed “long chronologies” begin with either living trees or dead wood that can be accurately dated by historical methods.6 This carries the chronology back perhaps 3,500 years. Then the more questionable links are established based on the judgment of a tree-ring specialist. Sometimes “missing” rings are added.7 Each tree ring’s width varies greatly around the tree’s circumference. Also, parts of a ring may be dead wood. Standard statistical techniques could show how well the dozen supposedly overlapping tree-ring sequences fit. However, tree-ring specialists have refused to subject their judgments to these statistical tests and would not release their data, so others can do these statistical tests.8 Even less reliable techniques claim to be able to calibrate carbon-14 dating back 26,000 years or more.

Several laboratories in the world are now equipped to perform a much improved radiocarbon dating procedure. Using atomic accelerators, a specimen’s carbon-14 atoms can now be actually counted, giving a more precise radiocarbon date with even smaller samples. The standard, but less accurate, radiocarbon dating technique only counts the rare disintegrations of carbon-14 atoms, which are sometimes confused with other types of disintegrations.

This new atomic accelerator technique has consistently detected at least small amounts of carbon-14 in every organic specimen—even materials that evolutionists claim are millions of years old, such as coal. This small, consistent amount is found so often among various specimens that contamination can probably be ruled out. Ancient human skeletons, when dated by this new “accelerator mass spectrometer” technique, give surprisingly recent dates. In one study of eleven sets of ancient human bones, all were dated at about 5,000 radiocarbon years or less!10

Radiocarbon dating of supposedly very ancient bones should provide valuable information. Why is such testing rare? Researchers naturally do not waste money on a technique that destroys their specimen and provides no specific age. Therefore, most researchers do not radiocarbon date any organic specimen they think is older than 100,000 years, even if it still contains carbon. All carbon-14 that was once in anything older than 100,000 radiocarbon years would have decayed; its age could not be determined. However, if a bone an evolutionist thinks is a million years old contains any detectable carbon-14, the bone is probably less than 100,000 radiocarbon years. Figure 150, shows why those “radiocarbon years” correspond to a much younger true age.)

Very precise measurements now show that most fossils—regardless of presumed “geologic age”—have roughly the same ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12. (This includes fossil fuels: coal, oil, and methane.) Therefore, this former life must have been living at about the same time—less than 100,000 years ago. Because almost all fossils are preserved in water deposited sediments, all this former life was probably buried in a fairly recent, gigantic flood.12

Radiocarbon dating is becoming increasingly important in interpreting the past. However, one must understand how it works and especially how a flood affected radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon ages less than 3,500 years are probably accurate. Ages around 40,000 radiocarbon years, which are typical of coal, have much younger true dates—near the time of the flood, roughly 5,000 years ago.

How Could Saltwater and Freshwater Fish Survive the Flood?

Related Questions: Why didn’t the salty, subterranean water kill all freshwater fish during the flood? How did saltwater fish survive before the flood? Were preflood fish adapted to salt water or fresh water?

Chemistry of Body Fluids in Fish. Blood and other body fluids of almost all fish, freshwater and saltwater, have surprisingly similar chemistry. Their blood’s salinity, for example, is somewhere between that of fresh water and salt water. Actually, its concentration is about one-third that of normal seawater, not just for salt (NaCl) but for many other substances.1 For reasons that will soon be apparent, a typical preflood sea probably had a small salt content, as if you mixed two parts of fresh water with one part of seawater. However, just as oceans and seas today have variations in salt content, variations probably existed in and among preflood seas—perhaps large variations.

Living things have many marvelous, semipermeable membranes that allow some liquids or gases to pass through, but not others. For example, capillary walls are semipermeable membranes. Oxygen in our lungs can pass through capillary walls and mix with our blood, but blood does not normally pass through those walls. Substances that can pass through the membrane (such as oxygen) will, on balance, go from the higher concentration (in the lungs) to the lower concentration (in the blood). This is called osmosis.

Fish have a water problem. Freshwater fish have greater salinity in their blood (less concentration of water) than is in the water they swim in, so water seeps into their blood by osmosis. To correct this problem, freshwater fish seldom drink, and their kidneys secrete a watery urine. Conversely, saltwater fish have less salinity in their blood than is in their saline environment, so osmosis forces water from their bodies. Their kidneys pump out so little water that saltwater fish seldom urinate.

Mixing. During the flood, fish would have tried to stay in the most comfortable regions of the volume of water that was their preflood habitat. Salty, subterranean water, erupting onto the earth’s surface, would not have rapidly mixed with the less salty preflood seas. In fact, the larger a preflood sea, the slower it mixed and diffused, and the better it insulated its fish from muddy, hot, salty currents during the flood.2 Besides, preflood seas would have tended to “float” on the denser, muddier, saltier water.

In one 55-gallon experiment, a layer of freshwater floated on a typical layer of seawater. Several freshwater fish, saltwater fish, and other organisms placed in the tank lived in their respective environments for 30 days. The fish even made brief excursions into the more hostile environment.3 No doubt fresh water and salt water would mix at increasingly slower rates per unit volume if the experiment were scaled up to the size of a global flood.

Natural Selection. After 150 days (according to Genesis 8:3), flood waters began to drain into newly formed ocean basins. Fish trapped in continental basins were the potential ancestors of our freshwater fish. Rainfall over the next several decades diluted the salt concentration in most postflood lakes.4 Natural selection eliminated fish in each generation that could not tolerate the declining salinity. Those that could, had less competition for resources and could reproduce their tolerance for lower salinities. Because fish reproduce frequently and profusely, limited variations in each generation allowed rapid adaptation in their ability to control the water in their bodies. This is microevolution, not macroevolution. No new organs were needed.

Meanwhile, fish that ended up in the new oceans either had to tolerate slowly increasing salinity or face extinction. Survivors became our saltwater fish. Those unable to adapt are now extinct. (This largely explains why marine animals experienced the most extinctions.) Some fish, the best-known being salmon, are adapted to both fresh water and salt water. Wider salinity tolerances, such as those of salmon, may have existed before the flood.

Design. The ability over many generations to adapt to changing environments is a wonderful feature designed into all life. Without this capability, extinctions would be more common, and life would eventually cease—beginning, perhaps, near the bottom of the food chain. But adaptation has never produced macroevolution.

Figure 151: Probably Not a Plesiosaur. This 32-foot-long “monster,” caught by a Japanese fishing ship off the coast of New Zealand in 1977, was unfortunately thrown overboard shortly after this picture was taken. The animal made front-page news for weeks in Japan. Several Japanese scientists felt that it was a plesiosaur, and a Japanese postage stamp seemed to commemorate the discovery of the first modern plesiosaur. In the 1995 edition of this book, this animal was incorrectly labeled as a “possible plesiosaur.” Later, after reading English translations of opinions of other Japanese scientists and seeing similar pictures of decaying basking sharks, it seems more likely that this was a large basking shark.4 Decay patterns near the shark’s head give the appearance of a neck. My apologies for the error.

This frequent question, asked in just this way, implies many questions related to dinosaurs—a word meaning “terrible lizards.” When did they live? What killed the dinosaurs? What were they like? What does the Bible say about them? Could so many large animals have fit on the Ark? There were about 300 different types of dinosaurs. Most were large; some even gigantic. One adult dinosaur was as tall as a five-story building. However, some adults were small, about the size of a chicken. [See page 279.]

Many questions will be answered if we focus on one question, “When did they live?” Two quite different answers are usually given. Evolutionists say dinosaurs lived, died, and became extinct at least 60 million years before man evolved. Others believe God created all living things during the creation week, so man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. If we look at the evidence, sorting out these two very different answers should be easy.

Did dinosaurs become extinct at least 60 million years before man evolved? Almost all textbooks that address the subject say they did. Movies and television vividly portray this. One hears it even at Disney World and other amusement parks. Some will say that every educated person believes this. We frequently hear stories that begin with impressive-sounding phrases such as, “Two hundred million years ago, as dinosaurs ruled the earth, ...” But none of this is evidence; some of it is an appeal to authority. (Evidence must be observable and verifiable.)

Did man and dinosaurs live at the same time? Scientists in the former Soviet Union have reported a layer of rock containing more than 2,000 dinosaur footprints alongside tracks “resembling human footprints.”1 Obviously, both types of footprints were made in mud or sand that later hardened into rock. If some are human footprints, then man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Similar discoveries have been made in Arizona.2 Were it not for the theory of evolution, few would doubt that these were human footprints.

Soft dinosaur tissue has now been recovered from several dinosaurs: three tyrannosaurs (T rex) and one hadrosaur. It is ridiculous to believe that soft tissue can be preserved for more than 60,000,000 years, but it could be preserved for 5,000 years. [For details see “Old DNA, Bacteria, and Proteins?” on page 33.]

The Book of Job is one of the oldest books ever written. In it, God tells of His greatness as Creator and describes an animal, called Behemoth, as follows:

Behold now, Behemoth, which I made as well as you; He eats grass like an ox. Behold now, his strength in his loins, And his power in the muscles of his belly. He bends his tail like a cedar; The sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze; His limbs are like bars of iron. (Job 40:15–18)

Marginal notes in most Bibles speculate that Behemoth was probably an elephant or a hippopotamus, but those animals have tails like ropes. Behemoth had a “tail like a cedar.” Any animal with a tail as huge and strong as a cedar tree is probably a dinosaur. Also, Job 40:19–24 says this giant, difficult-to-capture animal was not alarmed by a raging river. If the writer of Job knew of a dinosaur, then the evolution position is wrong, and man saw dinosaurs.

The next chapter of Job describes another huge, fierce animal, a sea monster named Leviathan.3 It was not a whale or crocodile, because the Hebrew language had other words to describe such animals. Leviathan may be a plesiosaur (PLEE see uh sore), a large seagoing reptile that evolutionists say became extinct 60 million years before man evolved.

For the past three centuries, unconfirmed reports have come from the Congo in western Africa that dinosaurs exist in remote swamps. These stories are often from educated people, eyewitnesses, and others who can quickly describe dinosaurs. Although they did not personally see dinosaurs, two expeditions, led by biologist Dr. Roy Mackal of the University of Chicago, verified many of these accounts, some from scientists.5 If any of these accounts are correct, man and dinosaurs were contemporaries.

Consider the many dragon legends. Most ancient cultures have stories or artwork of dragons that strongly resemble dinosaurs.6 The World Book Encyclopedia states that:

The dragons of legend are strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are much like the great reptiles [dinosaurs] which inhabited the earth long before man is supposed to have appeared on earth. Dragons were generally evil and destructive. Every country had them in its mythology.7

The simplest and most obvious explanation for so many common descriptions of dragons from around the world is that man once knew the dinosaurs.

What caused the extinction of dinosaurs? Primarily, the flood. Because dinosaur bones are found among other fossils, dinosaurs must have been living when the flood began. Dozens of other dinosaur extinction theories exist, but all have recognized problems. [See pages 109–110.] Most of the food chain was buried in the flood. Therefore, many large dinosaurs that survived the flood probably had difficulty feeding themselves and became extinct.

Were dinosaurs on the Ark? Yes. God told Noah to put representatives of every kind of land animal on the Ark. (Some dinosaurs were semiaquatic and could have survived outside the Ark.) But why put adult dinosaurs on the Ark? Young dinosaurs would take up less room, eat less, and be easier to manage. The purpose for having animals on board was so they could reproduce after the flood and repopulate the earth. Young dinosaurs would have more potential for reproduction than old dinosaurs.

Certain bones in dinosaur bodies show annual growth rings, as trees do. Dinosaurs, early in life and late in life, grew at very slow rates. During mid-life, they went through huge growth spurts.8 Therefore, during the year dinosaurs were on the Ark, juveniles probably weighed less than 60 pounds. (A 2-year-old T rex weighed 66 pounds. The largest T rex known, lived to be 28 years.9 Notice, dinosaurs did not become large because they lived long lives.)

Have Planets Been Discovered Outside the Solar System?

Yes. However, this does not imply that planets evolve or that life exists on such planets. Quite the opposite.

The media and a few astronomers often fail to explain important aspects of these discoveries. From 1963–2000, false claims were made that planets had been found outside the solar system. Few details accompanied each report, so the general impression that planets evolve was reinforced and became textbook orthodoxy. Today, planets are being discovered, but a close examination shows that their existence contradicts current evolution theories, and almost all of their orbits create temperatures too extreme for life.1 Besides, hundreds of other requirements must be met, and life is too complex to evolve. [See pages 6–21 and “Is There Life in Outer Space?” on page 319.]

What were these false claims that planets had been discovered? In 1963, Peter Van de Kamp announced that Barnard’s star wobbled, as if a planet orbited the star. In 1973, other astronomers showed that the telescope wobbled, not the star. In 1984, major radio and television networks reported that astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory had discovered the first planet outside the solar system. Other astronomers, after months of searching, could not verify the claim. Two years later, the astronomers who made the “discovery” acknowledged that atmospheric turbulence probably fooled them, because even they could not find their “planet.” In 1991, British astronomers reported that a star, named Scutum, wobbled with a six-month cycle. They claimed, and the excited media announced, discovery of the first planet outside our solar system. Later, these astronomers admitted their error. It was Earth that wobbled slightly, not the star.

On 19 May 1998, NASA announced, amid much fanfare, that the Hubble Space Telescope had made the first direct observation of a planet outside the solar system. An editorial in Nature criticized NASA’s premature announcement. “One does not need to read between the lines to perceive a deep need within NASA for publicity.”2 Two years later, the astronomer making the “discovery” retracted her claim.3 What she thought was a planet was a star dimmed by interstellar dust. Other false alarms involved astronomers, eager for publicity, who joined with the media hungry for an audience. Misinformation resulted. Unfortunately, the media rarely retracts reports that are later disproven, and textbooks, which change very slowly, have yet to catch up.

Several stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust which a few astronomers thought might be merging to form planets. Some of these astronomers also believe that finding such disks confirms the theory that planets evolve from gas and dust orbiting a star. Now, it is known that on rare occasions the outer envelope of a sunlike star can be ejected into a disk shaped cloud within a few years.4

Since 1995, an indirect technique has identified 170+ possible planets outside our solar system. This technique measures a star’s wobble using extremely slight but periodic changes in the star’s color. The light from a few of these stars also dims periodically, as if a planet is passing between the star and Earth, blocking some of the star’s light. Someday, telescopes may allow us to actually see planets outside our solar system.

How do these extrasolar planets contradict evolution theories? One planet has been found in a tight cluster of tens of thousands of stars that would disrupt the evolution of any planet. That cluster is also devoid of the heavy chemical elements thought necessary to evolve a planet.5 At least 30 planets have two suns; one sun of each pair would tend to disrupt any slow evolution of a planet.6 A Jupiter-size planet has been found with three suns! Its orbit is too close (0.05 AU) to one star to keep from being pulled apart. Worse yet, two other stars orbit the first star at a distance of 12.3 AU. Their presence would also prevent the planet from evolving.7

Some relatively cool, planet-size bodies not associated with any star are being discovered wandering alone in deep space. Experts admit that, “The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form.” 8

To know if extrasolar planets have been found, we must first know what qualifies as a planet. The common characteristics of the solar system’s nine planets are our only guide. Therefore, we might define a planet as a spherical body that is not itself a star, but is in a nearly circular orbit around a star that spins in the same direction as the orbiting body. A planet should be at least as massive as Pluto, which in many ways is our most unusual planet. Pluto provides other limits such as distance from its star (the Sun): < 50 AU, eccentricity: < 0.25, and angle of inclination: < 18 degrees. Most claimed “planets” outside the solar system are not in nearly circular orbits, many are closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun, few can be shown to orbit in the plane of the star’s equator, and none can be shown to orbit in the direction of the star’s spin. Few, if any, resemble planets in the solar system.

Two aspects of these new, more valid discoveries have gone largely unnoticed. First, how is the plane of the orbiting body oriented? If the orbital plane is parallel to our line of sight to the star, then the orbiting body is small enough to be a planet and still cause the “wobble” we see. However, if the plane is nearly perpendicular to our line of sight, a much more massive body is needed to cause the observed wobble. Some bodies are probably so massive that they are brown dwarfs—small dim stars, some only 5–8 times larger than Jupiter. Most stars orbit other stars. A brown dwarf can also orbit another star, so brown dwarfs could cause some of the observed wobbles. The dividing line between brown dwarfs and planets is uncertain and involves more than just mass, because their sizes can overlap9—another reason for defining planets.

Second, if the unseen bodies are planets, then some are so near their star that they are losing mass too rapidly.10 Furthermore, their rocky cores would have melted before the planet’s evolution could begin.11 Others are too far from their star and the dust near the star needed to grow a planet. Also, their slow motion at those great distances would “scoop up” little dust. If planets evolved, friction from the gas and dust around a young star would have circularized each planet’s orbit. As stated above, most of the claimed planets do not have circular orbits.

Finally, some bodies orbiting stars may be a new class of object—neither planets nor brown dwarfs. Techniques are being developed which will shed more light on these bodies. What is clear is that for the nine planets we know best and for the extrasolar planets, evolutionary explanations are completely inadequate.12

Is the Hydroplate Theory Consistent with the Bible?

Without hearing from eyewitnesses, police can usually reconstruct the general outlines of an automobile accident by carefully studying skid marks and wreckage. So also, some details of the flood can be pieced together by studying its wreckage. However, good witnesses provide details consistent with the physical evidence as well as information we could never learn otherwise.

For example, the flood was initiated by God as a consequence of man’s sin. We may never understand exactly how God physically triggered the flood but, once triggered, other events must have occurred whose consequences, or “wreckage,” we can still see. Examples are: the death, rapid burial, and preservation of trillions of organisms as fossils in layered rocks, the crumpling of major mountains, fossils of sea creatures on every major mountain range, the jigsaw fit of the continents, the formation of strange features on the ocean floor, the gouging out of canyons, and hundreds of other events. One should be able to place many of these consequences in a cause-and-effect sequence that (1) conforms to scientific laws, (2) best explains details of these observations, and (3) provides a greater understanding of this global cataclysm. That is the purpose of the hydroplate theory.

Table 20 shows the close correspondence between the biblical description of the flood and the hydroplate theory.

The following verses speak of subterranean water. Taken collectively, they appear to provide support for the statements in bold below. Some passages may be metaphors referring to ancient demonstrations of God’s power.

1. Large quantities of subterranean water existed in the ancient past.

* Psalm 24:2. ... He has founded it [the earth] upon the seas ...
* Psalm 33:7. ... He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deeps in storehouses ... (A storehouse is a closed container that preserves something you may use later. God used that water when He brought it forth as a flood. Many storehouses, or interconnected chambers, held the subterranean water.)
* Psalm 104:3. He lays the beams of His upper chambers in the waters ...1 [Pillars were established.]
* Psalm 136:6. ... [He] spread out the earth above the waters ...
* II Peter 3:5. ... the earth was formed out of water and by water ...2

2. These subterranean waters burst forth bringing on the flood.

* Genesis 7:11–12. ... the fountains of the great deep burst open,3 and the floodgates4 of the sky were opened. And rain fell ...5
* Job 38:8–11. ... the sea ... bursting forth, it went out from the womb; when I made a cloud its garment ...
* Psalm 18:15. ... the channels of water appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare ...
* Proverbs 3:20. ... the deeps were broken up and the skies dripped dew ...

3. A massive hailstorm occurred.

* Exodus 9:18, 24. ... I will send a very heavy hail, such as has not been seen in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. ... So there was hail, and fire flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very severe, such as had not been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. [Both verses imply that an even larger hailstorm than the one God inflicted on Pharaoh occurred before Egypt became a nation. That earlier hailstorm was presumably during the flood.]6

4. After the 40-day avalanche of rain ended, the waters continued to rise until the 150th day.

* Genesis 7:12. And the [geshem (see Endnote 4)] rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.7
* Genesis 7:18–19, 24. ... the water prevailed8 and increased greatly ... so all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. ... and the waters prevailed for one hundred and fifty days.

5. Mountains dramatically formed, each in minutes, as the flood waters receded.

* Psalm 104:6b–9. ... the waters were standing above the mountains. At Thy rebuke they fled; at the sound of Thy thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose; the valleys sank down to the place which Thou didst establish for them. Thou didst set a boundary that they [the water] may not pass over; that they may not return to cover the earth.9
* A possible description of some events in the early history of the earth may be found in Proverbs 8:22–29.

6. Before the flood, a year may have had 360 days. [See Endnote 12 on page 151.]

* The 150th day of the flood was exactly 5 months after the fountains of the great deep broke loose. [See Genesis 7:11, 7:24, and 8:4.] Five 30-day months would be 150 days; twelve 30-day months would be 360 days.

How Was the Earth Divided in Peleg’s Day?

Genesis 10:25 states, and I Chronicles 1:19 repeats, “And two sons were born to Eber; the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided.” Peleg lived a few centuries after the flood. Little else is known about him.

In what way was the earth divided? Here are three possiblities. Bible commentators mention only the first two.

a. Languages multiplied at Babel and produced divisions among the people of the world. [See Genesis 11:1–9.]

b. The continents were divided by continental drift which began in Peleg’s day.

c. Greatly lowered sea levels soon after the flood (as explained by the hydroplate theory) connected all continents.1 Sea level rose in Peleg’s day, dividing the earth by water.

Languages Divided in Peleg’s Day? Scripture says, “the earth was divided.” The Hebrew word for earth, erets, can also be translated: countries, land, or ground. In other words, the land was divided, not people or languages. Besides, Peleg probably lived two generations after languages were multiplied at Babel.2

Continents Broke and Began Drifting in Peleg’s Day? If this happened, what broke them apart? Worse yet, what moved them? It takes earthshaking forces to break and move continents. Those who accept the plate tectonic theory believe continents have broken frequently—geologically speaking. To stretch and break a thick slab of rock requires, among other things,3 sliding it horizontally on its foundation against enormous frictional force. [See the Technical Note on page 355.] Simultaneously, an additional force must stretch the slab, like a rubber band, until it breaks. Plate tectonics can’t provide either gigantic force. Therefore, you can safely offer to move a continent (provide one force) if someone will break a continent (provide both forces).

Those who claim continents broke and moved have not fully considered the forces and energy required. To open up the entire Atlantic in a few thousand years by rock-on-rock sliding would produce indescribable global violence and volcanic activity that left no geological or historical record. (Among practically all cultures, ancient and modern, the only global catastrophe with a clear historical record is the flood.)

If the continents broke apart, they should fit together better than they do. (Figures 50–51, page 108, show this.) The public has been misled for decades into believing the continents fit against each other. Actually, four great map distortions were deliberately made, as Figure 49 explains. Continents bordering the Atlantic fit much better next to the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The hydroplate theory explains why.

Rising Water Divided Continents in Peleg’s Day? The Bible uses the Hebrew word peleg as a verb three times. Two usages, mentioned above, are translated simply as divided (Genesis 10:25 and I Chronicles 1:19). The third use is a division by water (Job 38:25). In the ten instances where peleg is a common noun, it always involves water. The New American Standard Bible translates it eight times as “streams,” once as “stream,” and once as “channels.” Therefore, peleg may imply a division by water.

In English, we have the words archipelago (a sea having, or dividing, many islands) and pelagic (relating to or living in the sea). Pelagic sediments or deposits are sediments on the ocean floor. Pelagic frequently refers to life forms found in the sea. Bathypelagic means relating to or living in the deep sea. Also, the prefix pelag means sea.

Dr. Bernard Northrup, a Hebrew professor, has shown that peleg originally meant division by water.4 That meaning is embedded in all three language families of Noah’s offspring. Consequently, its meaning probably preceded the multiplication of languages at Babel. Northrup states:

[Peleg, palag, or PLG] often contains within it a reference to water. It is used to refer to a stream of water in Hebrew, Coptic, Ethiopic and in Greek. The root is used to refer to irrigation canals which carried the water throughout the farming land of Mesopotamia. However, an examination of the Greek usage (of the family of Japeth [one of Noah’s three sons]) of the root letters PL and PLG clearly shows that in the majority of the instances this root was used of the ocean. ... It is used to mean: “to form a sea or lake,” “of places that are flooded and under water,” “of crossing the sea,” of “the broad sea” itself, of “being out at sea,” “on the open sea.” It is used of seamen and ships. The noun with the result suffix is used of “an inundation.” I continue: it is used of “a being at sea,” of “a creature of or on the sea,” of “one who walks on the sea,” of “running or sailing on the open sea,” of “a harbor that is formed in the open sea by means of sandbags,” and in many ways of “the open sea itself,” of “going to, into or toward the sea,” of “roving through the sea,” of “being sea-nourished,” of “turning something into the sea or into the sea or of flooding.” It is quite apparent that every Greek usage here involves the sea in someway.

Therefore, the earth was probably divided by water in Peleg’s day. The hydroplate theory explains how and why. Immediately after the flood, sea level was several miles lower than today,5 because the floor of the subterranean chambers was about 10 miles below the earth’s surface. As the crushed, thickened, buckled, and sediment-ladened continents sank into the mantle in the centuries after the flood, sea level had to rise in compensation. Eventually, sea level approached today’s level. [See pages 102–131 for details and evidence.]

With sea level much lower for a few centuries after the flood, imagine how many migration paths existed for animals and man to populate today’s continents and islands.6 God’s commands (Genesis 9:1, 11:4–9) for humans and animals to populate the “whole earth” after the flood must have been doable. If, after the flood, sea level was where it is today, repopulating the “whole earth” would have been difficult, if not impossible, for those first receiving God’s command. The wisdom and urgency of God’s command are apparent when we realize that sea level was steadily rising. The “window of opportunity” for global migration was disappearing in Peleg’s day.

From the genealogies listed on page 317, we see that Peleg lived from 100 to 339 years after the flood, five generations after Noah. Therefore, Peleg, or those who named him, may have been world travelers or explorers who discovered that the earth was being divided by rising water. Certainly, Noah’s early descendants knew how to construct ships, because Noah and his three sons built the Ark. They would have had an explorer’s curiosity when they realized how drastically the flood had changed the earth. Their long life spans allowed them to pursue that curiosity and accumulate knowledge.

This would explain why a remarkably accurate, authentic, and ancient map has been found showing islands now covered with water and the outlines of Antarctica—as it would look with no ice.7 The map’s cartographer must have explored, on a lowered sea, Antarctica’s coastline before it accumulated all its ice. Only in recent years has technology allowed us to “see” those ancient coastlines through the ice.

The Ice Age would have lowered sea level about 300 feet—not enough to join all continents. But at the height of the Ice Age, Antarctica would not have been free from ice. Therefore, an Ice Age cannot explain both the ancient map and interconnected continents. The flood accounts for both. (The hydroplate theory shows why the flood produced an Ice Age.)

Conclusion. Strong linguistic and scientific arguments oppose the two interpretations of Genesis 10:25 commonly taught: (1) a division of people by multiplication of languages, and (2) the beginning of continental drift. Instead, these studies point to an earth being divided by rising water in the days of Peleg. They also paint a picture of our ancestors migrating and exploring soon after the flood.

Did It Rain before the Flood?

Genesis 2:5–6 suggests it did not rain before the flood:

Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth; and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.1

But notice, these verses only state that shortly after the earth was created, it had not rained. How long did this condition last? Some believe this mist began the evaporation-rain cycle. If so, the period of no rain was brief, and it rained before the flood. Let’s look for other clues.

Rainbows. God promised never again to flood the entire earth (Genesis 9:12–17), a promise marked by a “bow in the cloud”—a rainbow. Rainbows form when raindrops refract sunlight. This suggests that rainbows began after the flood, which would mean there was no preflood rain.

Others disagree, saying rainbows may have been visible before the flood, but afterward God simply associated His promise with rainbows. This would be similar to the symbolism of a wedding ring. Rings existed before a wedding, but afterward the ring recalls a solemn vow. However, if rainbows suddenly began after the flood, the rainbow’s symbolic effect would have been more unforgettable and reassuring to the frightened survivors of the flood.

Some argue that rainbows would have formed before the flood every time water splashed and sunlight passed through the droplets. This argument overlooks that God’s promise concerned rainbows “in the cloud,” not a relatively few drops of water several feet above the ground.

A Terrarium. The Hebrew word translated “mist,” ed ($!), in Genesis 2:6 is used in only one other place in the Bible—Job 36:27. There it clearly means water vapor. So, did the preflood earth act as a humid terrarium in which water vapor evaporated, condensed without rainfall, and watered the earth? Could an earth-size terrarium produce enough water to supply major rivers, such as described in Genesis 2:10–14? Two preflood rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, were evidently the basis for naming the mighty postflood rivers that today bear the same names. [See Endnote 4 on page 262.]

The preflood earth was quite different from today’s earth. If the hydroplate theory is reasonably correct, earth’s preflood topography was smoother, so rivers flowed more slowly and required less water to keep them filled. No volcanoes, major mountains, glaciers, or polar ice existed before the flood. Approximately half the earth’s water was under the earth’s crust, so the earth’s surface had about half the water it has today. With 360-day years, days were slightly longer, so temperatures were slightly higher during the day and colder at night. [See pages 102–131 and Endnotes 12–14 on page 151.] The preflood earth had greater land area, because the flood produced today’s ocean basins. [See pages 136–155.] Preflood forests were vast and lush, enough to form today’s coal, oil, and methane deposits. This left little room for deserts. Could these preflood conditions have prevented rain, yet adequately watered a thirsty earth?

Condensation Nuclei. Water droplets almost always begin with water vapor condensing on a solid surface. A common example is early-morning dew that collects on grass. Raindrops, snowflakes, and fog particles begin growing on microscopic particles carried in the air. These particles, called condensation nuclei, are typically 0.001–0.0001 millimeters in diameter—less than one hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Each cubic inch of air we breathe contains at least 1,000 such particles. Water vapor molecules rarely collide and stick together; instead, a water droplet forms when trillions of water molecules collect on a microscopic particle.

Wind. Atmospheric temperature differences cause wind, which then mixes air that has different temperatures and moisture contents. The various “mixtures” give us weather: rain, snow, hail, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, fair weather, etc. Without major mountains, ice sheets, volcanoes, and as much ocean water as today,2 the preflood earth had more uniform temperatures. Also, abundant vegetation moderated temperatures by evaporative cooling during the day and condensation and heating at night. More uniform temperatures meant less wind3 and weather extremes.

If a water molecule were the size of a ping-pong ball, a condensation nucleus would be a house-size “rock” and a raindrop would be 100 miles in diameter. When a gaseous water molecule strikes that “rock,” much of the molecule’s energy is transferred to the “rock” as heat. If a somewhat “absorbent rock” is cold enough and the humidity is high enough, the molecule will stick; condensation will begin, and a raindrop will start to grow. The “rock,” slightly warmer because of the added energy from colliding water molecules, will warm the surrounding air, causing slight updrafts. Moist breezes plus updrafts would bring enough moisture to “the rock” for it to grow into a water droplet.

That “rock” and its attached water cannot “float” in calm air for long, just as a grain of sand cannot float in still water. Only wind can suspend condensation nuclei, just as only a swift stream can suspend a sand particle. With less preflood wind, condensation nuclei would receive less lift and stay closer to the ground. With more uniform temperatures globally, less air would rise over warmer areas—again, keeping nuclei and moisture closer to the ground. High clouds may not have existed.

Once water began collecting on nuclei near the ground, the heat of condensation warmed the adjacent air, causing it to rise. A microscopic droplet has a large cross-sectional area relative to its volume, so rising, moist air carried the tiny droplet upward. As it rapidly grew, its weight increased faster than its cross-sectional area, so it quickly settled to the earth and often collected other droplets in its path. We could describe this as fog rising from the earth and then settling back to water the ground before rain could form. (Sounds like Genesis 2:5–6, doesn’t it?) It would be similar to morning fog rising on a still lake, but with two differences.

First, without polar ice and snow-capped mountains before the flood, less solar radiation reflected back into space, so more of the sun’s rays heated the earth during the day. With more forests, fewer (if any) clouds, and slightly longer days, the earth absorbed even more solar energy. Consequently, more water evaporated each day. At night, fewer clouds and longer nights allowed more heat to escape into space, causing more water to condense. (Today, clouds reflect back into space 20–25% of the incoming radiation and hold in much of the earth’s outgoing radiation.) Therefore, the preflood earth was watered more abundantly and uniformly by daily condensation than by rain today.

Heavy condensation before each sunrise kept moisture closer to the ground and restricted high-cloud formation. Today, morning fog evaporates soon after sunrise, before it can settle to the ground. With fewer, if any, high clouds before the flood, temperatures dropped more rapidly at night. This, coupled with more moisture in the daytime air, allowed water droplets to grow larger, settle to the ground faster, and be absorbed by the soil before morning evaporation could begin.

The second difference caused preflood fog droplets to grow even faster and larger. Without today’s main sources of condensation nuclei (volcanic debris, sulfur compounds from volcanoes, man-made pollutants, lightning-produced fires, sea salt from ocean spray, or dust kicked up by high winds) there were fewer condensation nuclei. Condensing more moisture on fewer nuclei meant fog droplets grew larger and settled faster.

First Rain. If it did not rain before the flood, how did the first rain form at the very beginning of the flood? As explained on pages 102–131, the drops of water falling at the beginning of the flood were not formed by condensing water. Instead, they formed by fragmenting and atomizing the upward-jetting subterranean waters.

Any credible explanation of the flood should explain why it probably did not rain before the flood, how the fertile earth was watered, what supplied the rivers, how violent rain4 fell so rapidly at the beginning of the flood, and why the rain ended after 40 days, even though the flood waters rose until the 150th day when all the preflood mountains were covered. Also, if the flood’s 40 days of rain formed by condensation, why didn’t that rain stop after a few days, because falling rain would have removed the condensation nuclei? The hydroplate theory answers these questions.

What Triggered the Flood?

God initiated the flood because of man’s sin. At the end of the creation week, all that God created was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), so the flood was not inevitable at that time. In other words, the earth was not created with a “ticking time bomb.” Nor was the universe created with killer comets, asteroids, or meteoroids aimed at earth. Indeed, their presence at the end of the creation week would not have been “very good.” [Pages 208–255 explain why the flood produced comets, asteroids, and meteoroids.]

Later, because of the depth of man’s sin (Genesis 6:5–6), God flooded the entire earth. We may never know just how the physical chain of events for the flood began, but the Bible gives some intriguing clues.

The hydroplate theory, summarized on pages 102–131, shows how a global flood, corresponding in every detail to the Genesis flood, easily explains 24 otherwise mysterious features of the earth and solar system. This theory requires: (1) a large volume of water under the earth’s crust, and (2) pillars that partially supported the crust. Although the Bible speaks in several places of considerable subterranean water (see page 293), how did the pillars form?

Rock Movement. First, visualize an important feature of the newly created, preflood earth. Imagine the entire earth’s surface covered by a sandwich arrangement in which a horizontal layer of rock (which will become the earth’s crust) has a layer of water above and also below it. The rock layer is almost 10 miles thick; each water layer is about 3/4 of a mile thick. The water above this rock layer is surface water; the confined water below is subterranean water. If the rock layer were perfectly uniform in thickness and density, everything would be in balance. Equilibrium would exist.

No doubt variations existed in the rock’s thickness and density. The heavier parts would sag (bend) downward, like an overloaded floor, causing additional water on top to flow into each depression. That added weight would increase each sag. More surface water would flow into the growing depressions, driving each sag even deeper.1

Figure 152: Dry Land Appears. At the end of the first creation day, Day 1, water covered the entire earth. On Day 2, God made a “raqia” that sharply separated (“badal”) the liquid water (“mayim”) above from the liquid water below. On Day 3, land rose out of the surface water, in preparation for the creation of plants, animals, and humans. (Water thicknesses are exaggerated to illustrate events of Days 2 and 3. Dimensions are estimates.)

Recognizing that a large amount of water was under the preflood crust, as the Bible states, is essential to understanding the flood. Our failure to understand basic physical aspects of the flood opened the door to evolution and a belief, by some, in a multibillion-year-old earth.

Some sagging rock would also be squeezed downward through the subterranean water, forming protrusions—or “pillars”—pressed against the chamber floor. Here’s why. The pressure within the rock at the base of the rock layer’s thicker, denser portions would exceed the subterranean water’s pressure pushing upward. If that pressure difference exceeded the rock’s shear strength at any point, rock would “flow” downward, deforming like putty. (Compression tests on cylinders of rock subjected to high confining pressures, but larger axial loads, show that the rock cylinders deform like putty.)

Downward protrusions (pillars) would grow like the downward flow in a lava lamp, except the rock, being a solid instead of a liquid, had internal strength due to atomic bonding. The deeper the pillars went, the greater this pressure difference would become, so rock would “flow” even deeper until all pillars pressed against the chamber floor. Pillars carrying an excessive load would thicken and penetrate slightly into the chamber floor.

The same effects, but in the opposite direction, would have lifted thinner, less-dense portions of the rock layer up out of the water, forming continents. Keep in mind that the confined subterranean water had essentially a fixed volume. Therefore, as rock sagged downward and as pillars were squeezed downward, this fixed volume of subterranean water had to displace thinner parts of the rock layer, forcing them upward.

If, on Day 2 of the creation week, our “sandwich” encircled the earth like the outer three rings of an onion, water would cover the entire earth. In the following hours, the thinner portions of the crust would rise out of the surface water and become dry land. Water would drain into depressions. This seems to be what happened on Day 3 (Genesis 1:9–10). Water covered the entire earth, then “God said, ‘Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear’; and it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas;” [Pages 306–314 further support this interpretation of Day 2.]

Genesis 1:9 says the waters below the heavens were gathered into one place (i.e., one big ocean). Why, then, in the next verse did God call the collected waters “seas”—plural? Answer: Multiple seas were honeycombed below the crust. The Interpreter’s Bible explains:

“Seas” embraces more than the waters upon the face of the earth; it includes also the (supposed) subterranean waters upon which the earth was believed to rest ... and the circumfluent ocean, upon which the pillars of the firmament stood.2

Psalm 24:2a specifically states that God “founded it [the earth] upon the seas.

Interestingly, Day 2 was the only creation day in which the Bible does not expressly say God saw that day’s work was “good.” Certainly, nothing bad was done on the second day, because at the end of the creation week, God saw that all He had made was “very good.” Apparently, the second day’s activity was not completed until Day 3.

Now we can see why. On Day 2, after the crust was created with liquid water above and below it, the crust began to deform. Thicker portions sagged and squeezed down pillars, while thinner portions rose out of the water. Thus, Psalm 104:3, in describing Day 2,3 states (with my interpretations in brackets), “He lays the beams [pillars] of His upper chambers [the crust] in the [subterranean] waters.” By Day 3, surface water had drained into depressions, forming dry land—a “good” condition (Genesis 1:10) necessary for the life God would create next.

Peter also seems to describe these events in II Peter 3:3–6. He states that in the latter days mockers will not understand that, “the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.”

This is consistent with the following interpretation: On Day 2, a nearly horizontal crust, or “expanse,” was formed in the midst of the liquid water covering the earth (Genesis 1:2,6,7,9). On Day 3, thinner portions of the crust rose out of the water, causing water above the crust to flow into depressions (Genesis 1:10). In other words, the earth (its crust) was formed out of (rose out of) surface water and was formed by pressure from subterranean water. Some might incorrectly think “forming the earth out of water” implies alchemy—water (H2O) was changed into SiO2, (Mg,Fe)2SiO4, and a host of other minerals that comprise rock. (Even if alchemy occurred, one would not say rock formed by water.) Actually, “out of” is used in a spatial sense. The King James translation clearly conveys this idea of the land rising out of water: “... the earth standing out of the water ... .”

About 2,000 years later,4 the water below the crust burst forth as “the fountains of the great deep,” combined with the surface water, and, as Peter wrote, flooded and destroyed earth in a global cataclysm. The Greek word katakluzo, from which we get our word “cataclysm,” is translated as “flooded” in II Peter 3:6. In describing Noah’s flood, the Bible never uses the normal Greek or Hebrew words for flood. Noah’s flood was much more; it was an unparalleled, global cataclysm—earth’s defining geological event.

The complex Hebrew word raqia is usually translated in modern times as “expanse” or “firmament.” Pages 306–314 explain why raqia is sometimes identified with “heavens” but in other contexts refers to earth’s preflood crust.

Rock Pillars. Compressed subterranean water (water pressure) supported most of the crust’s weight; pillars supported the rest. Every 12 hours, tidal effects, caused primarily by the Moon’s gravity, lifted the subsurface water (and, therefore, the earth’s crust) a foot or so, just as tides lift ocean surfaces today. At low tides, the crust settled. The pressure each pillar exerted on the chamber floor increased and decreased twice daily. These loose, or flexible, contacts could be described as “sockets.” Smaller tides also occur in the solid earth. [See Endnote 5 on page 349.]

The Bible says the earth was founded on pillars. Psalm 75:3b says, “It is I [God] Who have firmly set its [the earth’s] pillars.” In Job 38, God demonstrates His authority by giving Job the most difficult science examination of all time. In verses 4–6, God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth! Tell Me, if you have understanding, ... On what were its bases sunk?” This word, “bases,” is translated in all 54 other places in the Bible as “pedestals” or “sockets” which held pillars.

Interestingly, two verses later, in Job 38:8–11, God seems to speak of liquid water—surrounded by a dark cloud of water vapor—that burst forth as the global flood.

Or who enclosed the sea with doors, when, bursting forth, it went out from the womb, when I made a cloud its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and I placed boundaries on it, and set a bolt and doors, and I said, “Thus far you shall come, but no farther; and here shall your proud waves stop.

Ancient extrabiblical writings, although not having the authority of biblical passages, also describe this pillar structure within the subterranean water. As one example, the British Museum’s The Book of the Cave of Treasures, dated at about A.D. 300–599, states:

And on the Third Day God commanded the waters that were below the firmament to be gathered together in one place, and the dry land to appear. And when the covering of water had been rolled up from the face of the earth, the earth showed itself to be in an unsettled and unstable state, that is to say, it was of a damp or moist and yielding nature. And the waters were gathered together into seas that were under the earth and within it, and upon it. And God made the earth from below, corridors and shafts, and channels for the passage of the waters; ... Now, as for the earth, the lower part of it is like unto a thick sponge, for it resteth on the waters.5 [emphasis added]

The Bible often speaks of “the foundation(s) of the earth.” On Day 3, the earth’s crust was literally established, or set (using pillars), on its foundation. Had this not happened, the crust would have continually tottered (or oscillated like the surface of an earth-size water bed). Perhaps this is why the psalmist wrote, “He established the earth upon its foundations, so that it will not totter forever and ever” (Psalm 104:5). Only by understanding some basic physics and the role of subterranean water, will these matters—and the global flood—be clear.

On the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open (Genesis 7:11). On one day, the crust ruptured and the flood began. Water from the fountains fell as rain. Subterranean water flowed with unimaginable force horizontally through the subterranean chambers and up through the globe-encircling rupture. Pillars were crushed into fragments by the increasing crustal loads they carried. Each pillar’s collapse generated huge waves in the surface water and pressure pulses in the subterranean water. Rock fragments, accelerated into space by astounding energy sources in the fountains of the great deep, became meteoroids.6 Thus the pillars, or foundations of the world, collapsed. This may be what Psalm 18:15 refers to when it says, “Then the channels of water appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare.”

Rupture Mechanism: Tidal Pumping. But why did the pressure in the subterranean water increase enough to rupture the crust? Tides. Each “tidal lift” transferred energy from the earth’s spin to the crust. As the massive crust settled between lifts, most of that enormous energy7 was converted by friction into heat. This cyclic compression—tidal pumping—twice a day for about 2,000 years, heated and expanded the subterranean water, increasing its pressure in the confined chamber. As temperatures rose throughout the chamber, the water became supercritical water (see page 112), existing pillars weakened, and more pillars flowed down from the hot ceiling, further increasing the subterranean water’s pressure. Failure of the first few pillars rapidly collapsed all pillars, much like a falling house of cards. Pressures within the chamber fluctuated wildly.

How hot might the high-pressure water have become? Question 5 on page 242 explains why some meteorites reached temperatures of at least 1,300°F. Other minerals within meteorites were also very hot,8 a fact that perplexes meteorite experts. This heating throughout meteorites must have occurred before they were launched into supercold outer space, where temperatures are almost absolute zero (-460°F). (Heating due to impacts, launch, or reentry would not be throughout meteorites.) Therefore, if meteorites came from pillars, as proposed on pages 240–256, then pillars and the subterranean water reached at least 1,300°F.

Sinking Continents. Because the thinner (and higher) portions of the crust were supported entirely by subterranean water, primarily the continents and preflood mountains sank as the supercritical water escaped. Therefore, the flooded earth resulted as much from sinking continents as from rising water.

Genesis 7:20 says that the flood waters covered all preflood mountains by 15 cubits (about 221/2 feet). Today, mountain heights vary by thousands of feet, so why did many, if not all, preflood mountains have about the same elevation? (Some commentators, inserting words not in the Bible, say that “at least” 15 cubits of water were above all the earth’s mountains. Others say that the text means the Ark, whose height was 30 cubits, must have been only half submerged and did not run into mountain peaks.) The explanation becomes clear if we recognize that the earth was founded on and spread out above liquid water (Psalms 24:2, 104:3, and 136:6). Here’s why:

On Day 3 of the creation week, the higher a continent rose out of the surface water, the more pressure it exerted on the subterranean water directly below. (To demonstrate this buoyancy effect, support a large rock under water with one hand. Notice how the pressure on your hand increases as you slowly lift the rock out of the water.) Therefore, as the land rose higher, it would have risen more slowly, giving preflood mountains similar heights.

About 2,000 years later, as the flood waters rose and continents sank, this same buoyancy effect caused preflood mountains not yet covered by water to exert greater pressure on the water still under the crust. This reduced their height and lifted lower mountains, further equalizing mountain heights above the rising water—just as Genesis 7:20 states.

As the first days and weeks of the flood passed, pillars were increasingly crushed, and more and more of the crust rested on the subterranean chamber floor, slowing the water’s escape. The vertical walls on each side of the rupture were almost 10-miles high. Because the rock’s pressure in the bottom half of each wall exceeded its crushing strength, the unsupported, unconfined walls continually crumbled—for 150 days (Genesis 7:24). During that time, the upward-jetting, supersonic fountains of the great deep removed that rubble, widening the rupture hundreds of miles.

Mass deep in the mantle shifted slightly toward these relatively unloaded portions of the chamber floor. Suddenly, the chamber floor buckled upward beneath the widened rupture, first forming the Mid-Atlantic portion of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. The crust slid on lubricating water, downhill and away from that Atlantic Ridge segment. Sliding continental plates—the hydroplates—crashed and compressed, in that “compression event.”

Weaker portions of the hydroplates crushed, thickened, and buckled. In doing so, the new, postflood continents rose out of the flood waters, allowing water to drain into newly opened—and temporarily very deep—ocean basins. Buckled mountains also formed, as shown in Figure 48 on page 106. For each cubic mile of land that rose out of the flood waters, one cubic mile of flood water could drain. (Note: Today, the volume of all land above sea level is only one-tenth of the volume of water on earth.) Other dramatic consequences in the Pacific, including formation of gigantic oceanic trenches, are discussed on pages 135–155.

Sliding rock-on-rock contacts quickly became molten rock-water mixtures. This is why magma contains a surprising amount of dissolved water, why a thin saltwater layer appears to be under all continents at the depth predicted by the hydroplate theory,9 and why a thick, water-laden layer appears to be under the Tibetan Plateau.10

Conclusions. Sometime after the Fall but before the flood, a chain of physical events began that produced a global flood.11 Although we cannot be sure exactly how it began, that cataclysm had many consequences: layered fossils; coal, oil, and methane deposits; major mountain ranges; ice ages; and dozens of other global features. Our challenge is to explain their details and show how all these features are related and consistent with the laws of physics and the biblical account. Recognizing that water was created under earth’s crust and understanding the second creation day clarify the flood considerably and explain many major issues that befuddle evolutionists.

For centuries, hundreds of sincere questions about the flood have been asked; they deserve thoughtful answers. Without clear explanations, a “vacuum” has existed into which evolutionists have placed faulty theories. Telling nonbelievers to simply believe the Bible accomplishes little and creates unnecessary resentment.

Day 2—a key to explaining the flood—has been poorly understood. As Peter wrote, people would not understand that earth’s crust was formed out of and by water which later flooded the earth. This proposed interpretation of Day 2 helps us appreciate the presence of so much subterranean water, the power of “the fountains of the great deep,” why they all erupted so quickly (on one day), and where the flood waters came from and where they went. Had the flood been better understood before Charles Darwin popularized evolution, that “idea vacuum” would never have formed, and many more people would have recognized evolutionary explanations as completely inadequate. Evolution would not have flourished. Our task, then, is to fill this “vacuum” by explaining to others what we now know about the flood.

If God Made Everything, Who Made God?

We live in, among other things, a time dimension where one event follows another. Time passes. Everything ages. Throughout our lives, we learn that effects always have causes. We would be confused if they didn’t. Therefore, it is hard to imagine the first cause, and even harder to imagine what, if anything, preceded “The First Cause.”

Just as God created the universe and everything in it, God also created time. There was a beginning of everything, including space and time. Consequently, God is outside of space and time. This means that God is unchanging (I Sam 15:29, Mal 3:6, Heb 6:17, James 1:17). He had no beginning and has no ending.

Also, and more pertinent to the question, from God’s perspective an effect does not follow a cause. He sees the beginning and the end (Rev 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). Asking who made God before time began reflects a lack of understanding—even though most of us at one time have pondered the question. No one “made” God; He is infinite, outside of time, and already existed when time began.

Thirty years ago, one of my children asked me this question as I tucked him into bed. While I can’t remember my answer, I am sure it was inadequate. Having years to think about his question has helped me somewhat resolve the logic of the preceding two paragraphs with what is hard to imagine.

Seeing things from God’s infinite perspective is probably as hard for us as it is for a dog or cat to understand what is on this printed page. If God is infinite and we are His finite creations, our limited understanding and perspective should not surprise us.

How else do we know that time began? The Bible is the most widely read book of all time. Within it, the most read page is probably the first page of Genesis. The first three words on that page

In the beginning ...

are probably the best-known group of three words of all time—the single, most widely proclaimed idea. By reading the fourth word, one sees that God was there at the beginning.

Another key insight comes from John 1:1.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Again, there was a beginning; we are also told Who was there when time began. Verses 1:2, 3, and 14 clarify these profound events even more.

For scientifically compelling reasons, there was a beginning. [See Items 52, 53, and 55, starting on page 27.] Alternatively, you can save time and effort by reading again the first four words of the Bible—and believing them.

In the beginning, God ...

Arguments for a Canopy—and Brief Responses

The Source of the Flood Water. “Today, earth’s atmosphere holds, on average, only one inch worth of liquid water. Therefore, the Genesis flood raises two common questions: Where did so much flood water come from, and where did it go? A canopy partially answers the first question.”

Response: No canopy theory claims to provide all the water for a global flood. Nor does any canopy theory explain where the water went after the flood. Somehow transporting this water back into outer space or suddenly forming deep ocean basins after the flood is hard to imagine or explain. However, the phrase “the fountains of the great deep” (Genesis 7:11) implies that the flood water came from subterranean sources. To learn where the water went after the flood, see pages 102–131.

Many have rejected the Genesis flood account because they could not imagine where the flood water, which covered all mountains, went. Canopy theories have contributed to this difficulty.

Drop in Longevity. “Radiation from outer space may cause people to age. If so, a preflood canopy might have shielded people from this aging process. Perhaps this is why life spans before the flood were about 900 years.”

Response: If radiation from space reduced life spans, we would expect an immediate drop in longevities after the flood. Life spans did drop, but for 12 generations after the flood, human longevity remained much higher than today. [See page 317.] Even Noah lived 349 years after the flood. Some argue that perhaps radiation damage accumulated genetically over many generations. Few, if any, canopy proponents have proposed specifically what type of harmful radiation it was, how it reduced longevity so much without causing massive deformities and genetic diseases, why longevity leveled off at about 70 years rather than continuing to deteriorate, or how to test the proposed mechanism.

Most proposals for this drop in longevity are testable, but seldom tested. One test, which might have shown that cosmic or solar radiation reduce longevity, failed. Mice were raised in deep caves, shielded from both types of radiation. Neither those mice nor their offspring lived longer than other mice.2 Furthermore, if radiation from outer space accelerated aging, then living at a lower elevation, where one is protected by a thicker blanket of atmosphere, should increase longevity. No such effect is known.3

Joseph Dillow’s book, The Waters Above, is probably the most complete, accurate, and up-to-date defense of any canopy theory. After explaining other problems with the “longevity claim,” Dillow concludes, “So it appears that canopy theorists have been in error when they appealed to the shielding effect of the canopy as a direct explanation for antediluvian longevity.”4 Dillow also states, “We readily admit that Genesis does not teach the existence of a pre-Flood vapor canopy.”5 [emphasis in original]

A Uniformly Warm Climate. “A canopy may have given the earth a uniformly warm climate. This might explain why fossils of temperate animals and plants (such as dinosaurs and large trees) are found in Antarctica and on islands inside the Arctic Circle.”

Response: After the flood, mountains were suddenly pushed up. This shifted the poles and brought temperate regions to today’s polar regions. [For details see page 118 and Endnote 53 on page 128.] Also, during the global flood, some plants and animals may have floated to today’s polar latitudes where they were later fossilized.

Even if a canopy produced a warm polar climate, it would not satisfy another requirement for lush vegetation— sunlight in the winter. Polar nights are six-months long, and when the Sun does shine, it is always low in the sky. How could large trees and dinosaurs (requiring long food chains) survive, let alone thrive, during the long polar night?

Despite much speculation, no one knows what temperatures would exist under a canopy. Today, even experts disagree on the extent to which carbon dioxide currently warms the earth. Think how much more difficult it is to determine the warming, thousands of years ago, under a canopy of unknown thickness, reflectivity, content, and height above the earth.

Venus. “We see canopies on other planets, such as Venus.”

Response: Some planets have atmospheres, but none has a canopy. An atmosphere has contact with its planet, but a canopy is a distinct shell above the planet’s atmosphere. Venus is shrouded by a thick, opaque atmosphere, consisting primarily of carbon dioxide (96.5%), nitrogen (3.5%), and traces of other gases. Venus does not have a layer of water, or any other relatively heavy substance, above its atmosphere.

Genesis 7:11–12. “Genesis 1:6–8a seems to speak of a water canopy that contributed to the flood. After all, Genesis 7:11–12 states that ‘... the floodgates of the sky were opened. And the rain fell ...’ A lot of rain fell from somewhere.”

Response: If this were true, similar biblical interpretations should predate Vail’s in 1874. Where are they? Quite often it is hard to see alternatives once we have learned “the accepted explanation.”

Actually, Genesis 7:11–12 says that “all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. And the rain fell ...” Later, Genesis 8:2 states “the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained.” These events were perhaps in cause-and-effect order.6 That is, the fountains of the great deep caused extreme, torrential rain. Once the fountains stopped, this violent rain ended. Then milder, more normal, rain fell. In other words, “the rain from the sky was restrained.”

The transliteration of the Hebrew word usually used for normal rain is matar. Violent rain is geshem (used only in Genesis 7:11 and 8:2). It is sometimes accompanied by high winds and huge hailstones that can destroy mortared walls (Ezekiel 13:11–13). The hydroplate theory (pages 102–131) explains this sequence in more detailed, physical terms. We have failed to appreciate the explosiveness, magnitude, and power of “the fountains of the great deep.”

where 5.1 x 1021 grams is the mass of the atmosphere, and 0.242 and 1.0 are the calories needed to raise one gram of air and one gram of liquid water (respectively) 1°C. Unbearable temperatures remain even after we expand this analysis to include every scientifically conceivable way to remove this heat.11 Also, 40 feet of rain would not produce a global flood.

A Liquid or Ice Canopy. For liquid or ice particles to remain in space above the earth’s atmosphere, they must be in orbit. For anything to orbit the earth, its velocity must exceed 17,000 miles per hour (760,000 cm/sec). (As stated earlier, a layer of water only 40 feet thick contains 6.22 x 1021 grams of water.) Just as a spacecraft generates great heat as it reenters the atmosphere, orbiting liquid or ice particles release vast amounts of heat as they fall from orbit. That heat energy equals the kinetic energy of the particles in orbit, which is where 2.39 x 10-8 converts the units to calories. This heat would raise the atmosphere’s temperature.

Even if a canopy began with the coldest ice possible (absolute zero) or if some heat were transferred elsewhere, insufferable heat would remain.12

A similar problem exists if this ice were part of a spinning shell surrounding the earth. A rapidly-spinning shell, providing enough centrifugal force to balance the gravitational force as much as possible, would still have too much kinetic energy. Once the shell collapsed, that energy would become scalding heat, enough to “roast” all life on earth.

The Light Problem. A canopy having only 40 feet of water—in any form—would reflect, refract, absorb, or scatter most light trying to pass through it.

Starlight. People living under a 40-foot-thick canopy could see stars only if they were directly overhead, so their light would have the shortest path through a canopy. Before the flood, people presumably could see stars, because stars were created for a purpose: “for signs, and for seasons, for days and years ” (Genesis 1:14). Stars would achieve their purpose only if enough stars could be seen to identify seasonal variations. Therefore, one needs to see large star patterns, such as constellations—not just a few stars directly overhead. By looking through a “keyhole” into the night sky, it is questionable whether one could have seen, recalled, and distinguished seasonally shifting star patterns through the filter of a 40-foot-thick canopy, even on a moonless night.

Sunlight. A canopy would also reflect and absorb considerable sunlight. How then could many tropical plants, which require much sunlight today, have survived for centuries under a preflood canopy?

The Nucleation Problem. To form raindrops, microscopic particles, called “condensation nuclei,” must be present to initiate condensation. However, falling rain sweeps away these nuclei and cleans the atmosphere. This reduces further condensation. Rain from a vapor canopy would actually “choke off” rain production.

Some claim volcanic eruptions, beginning suddenly at the time of the flood, continuously ejected condensation nuclei into the upper atmosphere. Never explained is why volcanic eruptions suddenly began globally, then quickly and continuously distributed nuclei throughout the atmosphere for up to 40 days. Volcanic eruptions, rather than contributing to the flood, require special conditions that seem to be a consequence of the flood. [For an explanation, see pages 106 and 117.]

The nucleation and heat problems limit the rain formed by condensation to that of a local flood. It seems more likely that “geshem rain” was produced by the powerful jetting of the “fountains of the great deep” which caused torrential rain for “40 days and 40 nights.”13

The Greenhouse Problem. While sunlight can pass through glass into a greenhouse, heat in a greenhouse has more difficulty radiating back out through the glass. This greenhouse effect traps heat inside the greenhouse, raising its temperature. All canopy theories have a greenhouse problem.

Also, as temperatures under a canopy rose, more water would evaporate from the earth’s surface, especially its oceans. More water vapor in the air means a greater greenhouse effect, a warmer atmosphere, and even more evaporation. This cycle would feed on itself, producing what is called “a runaway greenhouse effect.” For example, Venus’ atmosphere has experienced a runaway greenhouse effect. Venus is about 700°F hotter than one would expect based on its distance from the Sun. The greenhouse effect increases Earth’s temperature by about 60°F.

During the last thirty years, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has been the best-known advocate of a vapor canopy. In 1998, ICR wrote that a strong greenhouse effect would exist under a vapor canopy, raising “surface temperatures as high as 400°F.” However, if many variables were chosen in the most favorable manner for a vapor canopy, “the water content of a canopy could be as much as [no more than] three feet of liquid water without the surface temperature reaching temperatures which would destroy life on the earth.”14 So if many variables are favorably selected, the greenhouse effect, alone, limits a canopy to a thickness of only 3 feet.

The Support Problem. What supported the canopy?

A Vapor or Liquid Canopy. A vapor canopy would rapidly mix with the atmosphere, just as steam above a kitchen stove quickly mixes with air. Once the vapor contacted the earth’s surface, it would condense. A liquid canopy would quickly evaporate and then diffuse through the atmosphere. Neither type of canopy could have survived for the many centuries before the flood.

An Ice Canopy. A pure ice canopy would vaporize into the vacuum of space, just as dry ice vaporizes at atmospheric temperature and pressure. Furthermore, ice is structurally weak. An ice shell could not withstand tidal stresses or meteoritic, cometary, or asteroidal impacts. A spinning ice shell could not withstand the powerful centrifugal forces at its equator and the crushing gravitational forces along its spin axis.

The Ultraviolet Problem. Ozone in the earth’s upper atmosphere blocks the Sun’s destructive ultraviolet light, but a canopy surrounding the atmosphere would be exposed to ultraviolet light. Therefore, water in the canopy would dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen, effectively destroying that canopy.

Final Thoughts. Could there have been a canopy? Perhaps, in one of two ways. First, one could minimize most of these scientific problems by assuming the canopy was thin, maybe inches thick. The thinner the canopy, the less severe most problems become. (Notice, the support and ultraviolet problems remain.) But what function would the canopy perform, and what hard, scientific evidence—not speculation—is there for claiming that a thin canopy could perform that function? Certainly, a thin canopy would not contribute to a global flood—the reason most people accepted the canopy in the first place.

Second, one could also dismiss each of these scientific problems by saying that God performed a miracle. That may be true. Certainly, He can; He has; and He sometimes does. However, miracles should not be proposed to “prop up” a scientific theory. (Some evolutionists mistakenly believe this is how creation science works.) As one sees more and more “miracles” required by canopy theories, their plausibility decreases, and the need for an alternate explanation increases.

A Study of Some Key Hebrew Words

To understand Genesis 1:6–8a better, we will study the key words in bold below.

Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate waters from waters.” And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. And God called the expanse heaven.

Waters (mayim). This word means a liquid water, not a vapor or solid.16 Had the water in Genesis 1:6-8 been a vapor, cloud, mist, or ice, other Hebrew words would have been more appropriate. For example, ancient Hebrew had six words for “cloud.”

II Peter 3:5–6 also implies that this is liquid water. Peter used the same Greek word (canopy5.jpg Image) to describe both the liquid water that flooded the earth and the water out of which the earth formed, an obvious reference to Genesis 1:6-7. Liquid water was both above and below the expanse, which contradicts the vapor or ice canopy ideas but is consistent with the “expanse = crust” interpretation.

Separate (badal). This word implies a sharp division. Furthermore, the generally untranslated preposition “ben,” associated with “badal,” means “between.” It suggests an ordering (water, expanse, water) with no overlapping or gaps. Interfaces are also implied on each side of the expanse.17 These meanings oppose a vapor, liquid, or ice particle canopy lying above the atmosphere, because atmospheric gases would mix with the canopy.

In the Midst of (tavek). This word means between, within, among, inside, etc. Sometimes it means “to bisect” or “in the center of.” Regarding Genesis 1:6–7, the respected Jewish commentator Cassuto stated, “It is true that in the Pentateuch, too, reference is made to the division of the primeval world-ocean into two halves, situated one above the other, ...”18 [See also Genesis 15:10.] Rabbi Solomon Yitzchaki, in his famous eleventh century Rashi Commentary, stated that the expanse was “in the exact center of the waters.”19 As we have seen, canopy theories place less than one-half of 1% of the earth’s water above the expanse and the rest below. (This is necessary to reduce the problems associated with heat, light, and pressure mentioned earlier.) Would it not seem strange to say that your scalp is “in the midst of” your body? According to the hydroplate theory, the crust of the preflood earth divided more equally the earth’s liquid waters.

Heaven (shamayim). “Heaven” had a variety of meanings in ancient Hebrew, as it does in modern languages. Moses used shamayim to describe outer space (Genesis 26:4), the atmosphere (Genesis 27:28), where God dwells (Deuteronomy 26:15), where angels dwell (Genesis 28:12), and the source of blessings (Genesis 49:25). Other examples could be given. The context in which shamayim is used is important to understanding its specific meaning.

Expanse or Firmament (raqia). The key Hebrew word in Genesis 1:6–8a is raqia raqia.jpg Image. It is translated “firmament” in the King James translation and “expanse” in most Hebrew dictionaries and modern translations. While its original meaning is uncertain, its root, raqa raqa.jpg Image, means to spread out, beat out, or hammer as one would a malleable metal. It can also mean “plate.” This may explain why the Greek Septuagint translated raqia 16 out of 17 times with the Greek word stereoma canopy4.jpg Image, which means “a firm or solid structure.” The Latin Vulgate (A.D. 382) used the Latin term “firmamentum,” which also denotes solidness and firmness. So the King James translators in A.D. 1611 coined the word “firmament.” Today, “firmament” is usually used poetically to mean sky, atmosphere, or heavens. In modern Hebrew, raqia means sky or heavens. However, originally it probably meant something solid or firm that was spread out.

Finally, if raqia were related to a canopy, it seems strange that other Hebrew words, often translated as “canopy,” were not used in Genesis: sukkah (Ps 18:11 and II Sam 22:12), chuppah (Is 4:5), and shaphrur (Jer 43:10).

Questions Raised by Genesis 1: 8a

Why then, does Genesis 1:8a state, “And God called the expanse heaven”? Perhaps “heaven” (thought of today as atmosphere or outer space) is always the proper translation for raqia, and the Septuagint and Vulgate translators incorrectly associated solidness with it. However, the similarities of raqia raqia.jpg Image with baqia baqia.jpg Image and raqa raqa.jpg Image argue against this. [See page 312.] If raqia always means “heaven,” five questions, or apparent textual contradictions, arise.

Question 1: Why was it necessary to follow the word raqia with the phrase “of the heavens” in Genesis 1:14, 15, 17, and 20? That would be redundant.

Question 2: If raqia implies a canopy, why wasn’t one of the three Hebrew words that clearly means “canopy” used?

Question 3: Genesis 1:8a defines heaven after the word “heavens” was first used in Genesis 1:1. Normally a word’s meaning is understood from the context of its first usage. Furthermore, Genesis 1:1 says the heavens were created on the first day.20 However, if raqia always means “heaven,” then Genesis 1:8a says heaven was created on the second day.

Question 4: Genesis 1:9 states, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.” Obviously, these are earth’s surface waters. If “heaven” and “raqia” are identical, as canopy theorists believe, why did Genesis 1:9 not read, “Let the waters below be gathered into one place”? That would have been sufficient, clear, and consistent with the phrasing of Genesis 1:7. It would also make clear that the raqia is above—not below—the surface waters. Instead, the text reads, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place.” The words “the heavens” had to be added to specify that surface waters were gathered into one place. To refer to “the waters below” (without “of the heavens” added) would point to subterranean waters.

Question 5: If raqia means “heaven,” was liquid water placed above “heaven,” as Genesis 1:7 states? Because the Sun, Moon, and stars were placed in the raqia (of the heavens) and liquid water was placed above the raqia, were all heavenly bodies inside the canopy?21

Genesis 1:8a, as typically translated and understood, seems inconsistent with many verses. Either we do not understand the true meaning of raqia and shamayim, or something is mistranslated or inserted.

For centuries, Bible scholars have noted some of these contradictions and have proposed other translations or meanings. Four will be briefly described; two involve textual details, one is theological, and one is historical.

Robert Hooke (1635–1703), one of the greatest scientists of all time,22 gave a lecture before the famous Royal Society of London. There he proposed that Genesis 1:8a should read: “Also, God called the heaven the firmament” rather than the normal “And God called the firmament heaven.” Hooke said there were two firmaments. The first, described in Genesis 1:6, was a solid expanse in the midst of the liquid waters that covered the earth. It was a spherical shell that divided equally, above and below, the earth’s liquid waters. The second firmament was the heavens (sky, atmosphere, or outer space). According to Hooke, whenever raqia was followed by “of the heavens,” as in the next four uses of raqia (Genesis 1:14, 15, 17, and 20), the second firmament is implied.23

What Does “Raqia” Mean?

The Hebrew word raqia is usually translated “expanse” or “firmament.” When it is immediately followed by “of the heavens” it means atmosphere, sky, outer space, or heaven. However, what does raqia standing alone mean? The Hebrew words most similar to raqia raqialightyellow.jpg Image are raqa raqayellow.jpg Image (its root), baqia baqiayellow.jpg Image, and baqa baqayellow.jpg Image. Each describes a deformed solid.

In 1890, James Strong catalogued all usages of every word in the Old and New Testaments. He counted the frequency of each Hebrew and Greek word’s specific English translation. For example, the Hebrew word baqa, the 1234th word in Strong’s Hebrew dictionary, is translated in the New American Standard Bible as “breached” three times, “split” seven times, etc. By studying all usages and contexts of a word and similar words, a difficult-to-translate word can be better understood.

The King James translators translated raqia as firmament, because they thought it involved something firm. However, its specific meaning when Genesis was written is unknown. Raqia is obviously important, because the second creation day centered around it, just as the third day dealt with plants, and the fourth day with heavenly bodies. What was the raqia? Certainly, raqia is one of the most mysterious and important words in the Bible.

By carefully studying English meanings of raqa, baqa, and baqia in Table 21, one can see that atmosphere, sky, outer space, and heaven do not relate to what we might guess raqia means. Instead, we get a picture of a breakable solid being pressed out. How can a solid be breakable but malleable or moldable? Answer: extreme compression.

Few realize that all rock 5 miles or more below the earth’s surface is “pressed out.” Imagine a perfectly vertical column of a typical rock 5 miles high. If the rock were “somewhat confined,” as explained in the next paragraph, the pressure at the column’s base would be so great that it would slowly flow—like tar. Stacking more rock on top would cause even more flow at the bottom. If the column were 10 miles high, all the rock in the bottom half would try to flow. The rock at the bottom would be squeezed like a tall stick of butter trying to support a 10-ton truck.

If our column were pressed in from all sides by similar columns, the flow in the central column could go nowhere. The central column would have lateral support. Furthermore, if all columns were given lateral support by other columns, we would have the situation that actually exists in the top 10 miles of the earth’s crust. At depths of 5 miles or greater, the rock wants to flow but can’t, because the forces on all particles are balanced in all directions. So below 5 miles, the rock is sealed like highly compressed putty. Cracks could not normally open up immediately above the subterranean water chamber, which I estimate was almost 10 miles below the earth’s surface. [See pages 102–131.]

This 10-mile-thick crust above the subterranean chamber would be a potentially breakable, pressed out solid—a raqia. How could it break? A crack could not begin in the sealed, extremely compressed lower half. However, if a vertical crack formed at the earth’s surface, steadily increasing pressure in the subterranean water would cause the crack to grow downward. Once the crack penetrated halfway down, it would then become unstable and, in a few seconds, rip catastrophically to the bottom of the crust. What would follow is the subject of Part II of this book, pages 100–254.

Hooke’s proposal would answer questions 1–5 and harmoniously unite all related Bible verses and key Hebrew words. However, the most natural rendering of the Hebrew in Genesis 1:8a, as presently understood, does not support Hooke’s proposal. Because the oldest manuscript containing Genesis 1:8a dates back only about 1075 years (Aleppo Codex, copied by Aaron ben Asher in A.D. 930), finding an even older manuscript might clarify this matter.

As a second possibility, the word in Genesis 1:8a normally translated “heaven” (shamayim) may not have originally meant heaven. Prior to about A.D. 700, the written Hebrew language contained only consonants. Vowel points were then inserted in written Hebrew to standardize its pronunciation. For example, the meaning of

n th bgnng Gd crtd th hvns nd th rth

may be clear, but the phrase is difficult to pronounce (and, therefore, to remember). If other vowels had been inserted long ago in “hvn,” the original word might have a different meaning today.

Rabbi Yitzchaki (mentioned above) explained in his eleventh century Rashi Commentary that with different vowel points the original Hebrew word we now think of as meaning “heaven” in Genesis 1:8a, would mean “there are waters,” “fire and water,” or “it carries waters.” Each meaning could relate to the earth’s preflood crust.

While in Jerusalem on 28 June 1990, I tried to resolve this confusion in a two-hour meeting with Michael Kline, Dean of Hebrew Union University. My question was, “What did raqia and shamayim mean when Moses wrote Genesis?” To my surprise, he suggested Rabbi Yitzchaki’s three alternate translations, which I had previously studied. After all, shamayim in Genesis 1:8a is a compound of sha + mayim, and while a distinct original meaning for sha is uncertain, mayim does mean liquid water. After I briefly explained the hydroplate theory, Dean Kline said that raqia (as opposed to “raqia of the heavens”) might well have been the earth’s crust, below which was liquid water.

A third possibility was proposed to me in independent letters by two pastors.24 Before Adam’s fall, the earth was a paradise; in a sense, it was “heaven on earth.” Therefore, God “called” the firmament (earth’s crust) heaven. Each pastor provided different biblical reasons for his view, but both maintain that our difficulty in understanding Genesis 1:8a results largely from our inability to imagine the original paradise. If man had not fallen, no one would have difficulty with the fact that God called the earth, “heaven.”

Douglas E. Cox provides a fourth, but radical, explanation for Genesis 1:8a.25 In a detailed historical study, Cox claims that the raqia was the earth’s crust. When the Septuagint was written, Greeks ruled the Middle East, including Israel. Hebrew beliefs clashed with Greek religion and cosmology. In Greek thought, their chief god, Zeus, was the solid dome that held up all stars. By equating “raqia” with “heaven” in Genesis 1:8a, Hebrew religion and cosmology fell more in line with Greek beliefs. The tyrannical Greek ruler, Antiochus IV (referred to by Christ in Mt 24:15), claimed to be Zeus, desecrated the temple in Jerusalem, appointed two high priests, killed anyone possessing Hebrew Scriptures, and destroyed Scriptures he did find.26 Genesis 1:8a, in later copies of the Masoretic, conformed with the Septuagint. Cox believes the prophecy of Daniel 8 was fulfilled by the Greeks altering Genesis 1:8. While Cox may be wrong about raqia, he correctly demonstrates that the ancient Hebrews were falsely blamed for the pagan Greek idea that a solid dome (canopy) surrounded the earth.

Let’s say the strongest possible case was made against each of these four proposals. In that worst case situation, two problematic interpretations, shown in Table 22, would remain.

How Did Human “Races” Develop?

Figure 153: Faces. A few members of the human race from the following places: top row, left to right: Japan, Tibet, Borneo, Holland; second row: Ireland, China, Rwanda, Korea; third row: New Zealand, Bali, Okinawa, Israel; fourth row: United States of America, Australia, India, Egypt; bottom row: Molucca Islands, Canada, Greece, Guatemala. Visualize all without variations in dress, hair style, age, and skin color. How different are we? People continents apart laugh alike and cry alike. Our differences are small; our similarities are great.

There is only one race, the human race. Today, the word “race” has come to mean groups of people with distinguishing physical characteristics such as skin color, shape of eyes, and type of hair. This new meaning arose with the growing acceptance of evolutionism in the late 1800s. The word “race,” referring to physical characteristics, hardly ever occurs in the Bible.1 Instead, the word “nation” is used more than 200 times.

Race is a social idea, not a scientific concept. It is recognized that genetic and molecular variations among the so-called “races” are trivial, although a few traits may vary widely. Human variations are relatively minor when compared with many other kinds of life. For example, consider the many traits in the dog family. [See Figure 3 on page 5.] Most varieties of domestic dogs have been produced during the past 300 years. Dogs may be white, black, red, yellow, spotted, tiny, huge, hairy, almost hairless, cute, or not-so-cute. Temperaments and abilities also vary widely. Because domestic dogs can interbreed with the wolf, coyote, dingo, and jackal, all are part of the dog kind. The vast number of genes in every kind of life permits these variations, allowing successive generations to adjust to environmental changes. Without this design feature, extinctions would be much more common. Besides, wouldn’t life be much less interesting without variations within each kind?

The following three mechanisms2 probably account for most “racial” characteristics, all of which developed since the flood, approximately 5,000 years ago.

1. Natural Selection. This well-established phenomenon is not a mechanism for macroevolution, as a century of experimentation has shown, although it is an important mechanism for microevolution. Natural selection filters out certain parental genes in successive generations, producing offspring with slightly different characteristics but less genetic variability. For example, fair-skinned people living near the equator are more susceptible to several health risks, such as skin cancer. Consequently, they have slightly less chance of living to reproductive age and passing on genes for light skin color to their children. Likewise, darker-skinned people absorb less sunlight, depriving them of vitamin D3 which forms in skin exposed to sunlight. In polar latitudes, this could cause rickets. Therefore, over many generations, dark-skinned people tend to live near the equator and light-skinned people tend to live at higher latitudes.

There are exceptions. Eskimos (Inuits) have dark skin, yet live in Arctic latitudes. However, their traditional diet, which includes fish-liver oils containing large amounts of vitamin D3, prevents rickets.

3. Small, Isolated Populations. A population of people, or any other form of life, has a large set of genetic characteristics. If a few members of this population move to an isolated region, such as an island, the new group will have a different and smaller set of genetic characteristics (or a smaller range of genetic potential) than the entire population. As a result, subsequent generations on that island will have traits that differ from the original population.

This can be illustrated by a barrel filled with marbles—half white and half black. Let’s say that each marble represents a person, and the marble’s color represents a gene for that person’s skin color. If pairs of marbles, representing a husband and wife, are drawn at random and placed on separate islands, about half the islands will have marbles of just one color—white or black. This would be somewhat analogous to the dispersion and isolation of peoples after the flood and after Babel. Each person carries several genes for skin color. If a husband and wife had the same genes for skin color (dark or light), then their descendants would tend to have the same skin color. The color of the marbles could just as well represent other genetic characteristics.

Actually, the genetics of this process are more complicated than this simple illustration. For example, at least three genes determine skin color, not one. Also, there are thousands of traits, each of which might cluster in an isolated geographic region if small groups broke off from the larger population. So specific characteristics can easily arise, as they did when the eight survivors of the flood and their descendants eventually obeyed God’s command to spread out and repopulate the earth. From the listing of Noah’s descendants given in Genesis 10–11, we can see how early migration patterns began. Shem’s immediate descendants stayed generally near Ararat (what is now eastern Turkey) or migrated eastward. Ham’s descendants migrated southward, while Japheth’s descendants migrated northward. Undoubtedly, many other small groups colonized isolated regions, allowing their unique genetic characteristics to be expressed in subsequent generations.

Understanding these three mechanisms—natural selection, cultural preferences, and isolated populations—we can now ask some interesting questions. What did Adam and Eve look like? Obviously, their genes carried all traits humans have today—and probably other traits that have since disappeared. Many of their genes, of course, were not visible (or expressed) because other genes dominated. We usually imagine Adam and Eve as looking like ourselves. However, for genetic reasons, Adam and Eve were not “white” or “black” but something in between. The Hebrew word for Adam suggests redness, because an almost identical Hebrew word means “red” or “to show blood.” Adam’s skin coloring may have been similar to that of Native Americans.

For the past 140 years, evolution has painted a very different picture. Man supposedly ascended from some apelike ancestor. According to the theory, because some early humans branched off sooner than others, they had different physical, mental, and behavioral characteristics. This is racism, a highly prejudicial school of thought that dehumanizes fellow human beings. One cannot say that evolutionists today are racists, although Charles Darwin and many of his followers were. Racism is unpopular today, at least openly, so public acknowledgment of it is rare. However, the theory of evolution provides a rationale to justify racism.3

Genesis provides quite a different historical perspective. We are all descended from Adam and Eve and from Noah and his wife. Consequently, we are all cousins. Think what the world would be like if everyone realized that and acted accordingly!

d. Luke 3:36 lists Cainan as the son of Arpachshad and the father of Shelah. In Genesis, Cainan’s name occurs only in recent copies of the Septuagint—not the oldest. Nor is Cainan in the oldest known copy of Luke. Therefore, a copyist probably added Cainan’s name inadvertently, perhaps taking it from Luke 3:37.

e. Most students of the subject place the death of Joseph (Jacob’s son) between 1606 B.C. and 1690 B.C. An error in this date will add a corresponding error to the year of Adam’s creation.

Theistic evolutionists often raise two objections to the chronological information in Genesis.

a. Some say, pointing to Cainan, that the genealogies contain gaps. However, the possibility of gaps is irrelevant to the year of Adam’s creation. Let us assume that many generations existed between two consecutive patriarchs on this chart. The time between their births is fixed by Genesis, no matter how many generations might be missing. (For example, Enosh was born 105 years after Seth’s birth.) The writer or compiler of this information had a careful, systematic, and mathematical way of linking the chronology into one continuous family record—in contrast to other genealogies in the Bible.

b. Some have said that the long ages of the preflood patriarchs resulted from lunar months being incorrectly counted as years. If so, Mahalaleel and Enoch were 5 years old when they had children.

This chart contains other interesting details.

a. Noah was almost a contemporary of Abraham. Noah’s son Shem, born before the flood, nearly outlived Abraham. Surprisingly, many people think of Noah and Shem as relatively ancient (or imaginary) but accept Abraham as historically recent.

b. Notice the continuous chain of overlapping life spans of Adam, Methuselah, Shem, and Abraham or Isaac.

c. Enoch’s time on earth was cut short, but not by death. [See Hebrews 11:5.]

d. Notice the systematic change in life spans after the flood, as shown in the inset on page 317.

Genesis 5 says that each of the first 9 patriarchs had “other sons and daughters” besides the son in the patriarchal line. In other words, each family had at least 5 children: 3 sons and 2 daughters. Statistically, all 9 families would probably have at least 3 sons and 2 daughters if each family had 10 or more children. (Conversely, all 9 families would probably not have had 3 sons and 2 daughters if each family had 9 children or less.) If 10 or more children per family were typical before the flood, and plagues, famines, and wars were no more common than in the last several thousand years, then the world’s population at the time of the flood would have exceeded today’s population of 6 billion people.

If during the 351 years between the flood and Abraham’s birth, people reached sexual maturity at 30 years and couples averaged only 8 children (who also averaged 8 children), the world’s population would have exceeded 100 million people.

Is There Life in Outer Space?

Those who believe life exists on distant planets usually base that belief on the following reasoning:

Life evolved on Earth. Because the universe is so immense and contains so many heavenly bodies, life probably evolved on other planets as well.

This reasoning is flawed. First, it assumes life evolved on Earth. Overwhelming evidence shows life is so complex it could not have evolved—anywhere! [See pages 6–21.] Over the last 140 years, our culture has been so saturated with evolution that many have uncritically believed it. As a result, they concluded that life must also have evolved on at least a few of the many extraterrestrial bodies.

Yes, there are many stars, and a very small fraction have planets. [See page 290.] However, the probability of just one living cell forming by natural processes is so infinitesimal, even considering the vast number of stars, that the likelihood of life spontaneously occurring anywhere in the visible universe is virtually zero!

Despite popular and influential science fiction books and films, such as: Star Wars, E.T., Star Trek, 2001, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there really is no scientific evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Hundreds of millions of tax dollars have been spent trying to find life in outer space. Conditions outside Earth are more destructive than almost anyone suspected before space exploration began: deadly radiation, poisonous gases, extreme gravitational forces, gigantic explosions, and the absence of the proper atmospheres and chemical elements. Just the temperature extremes in outer space would make almost any form of life either so hot it would vaporize or so cold it would be completely rigid, brittle, and dead. Unfortunately, these physical realities do not excite the public as much as science fiction and evolutionary stories.

“Bioastronomy” and “exobiology” refer to the search for and study of life in outer space. (These are the only fields of science without evidence or subject matter.) People in these fields are searching for signals from outer space that would imply an intelligent source. Radio telescopes, linked with computers, simultaneously search millions of radio frequencies for a nonrandom, nonnatural, extraterrestrial signal—any short sequence of information. Yet the long sequence of information in the DNA of every living thing is a signal from an intelligence—a vast intelligence—a Creator. But if those searching for extraterrestrial life ever accepted the evidence for a Creator, the evolutionary basis for their search would disappear.

If life evolved in outer space as easily as some people believe, many extraterrestrial “civilizations” should exist, especially on planets around stars that evolutionists say are older than our Sun. Some civilizations should even be technologically superior to ours and have tried to reach us with verifiable evidence. Any superior civilization within our galaxy would probably have already explored and colonized our solar system, at least with robots. Because this has not happened, extraterrestrial life probably does not exist, certainly within our Milky Way Galaxy.

Almost all stories of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have since been traced to natural or manmade causes. Even if technically advanced flying objects exist, they may have a terrestrial, not extraterrestrial, origin. The United States, for example, developed and flew the superfast SR-71 aircraft and its prototype several years before most senior military officers in the United States knew such technology was possible. Evidence that UFOs are from extraterrestrial civilizations, although not disproved, has not been verified and usually relies on the truthfulness, rationality, or accuracy of a few alleged witnesses.

Could God have created life elsewhere? Certainly, but the Bible is largely silent on this subject. However, the Bible does say, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” (Exodus 20:11a). So if life were created in outer space, it would have happened during the six creation days. Also, because Genesis 1:14–19 says heavenly bodies were made on the fourth day, one can narrow the possible time for creating extraterrestrial life to the 4th, 5th, or 6th creation days.

Three other Bible verses suggest that conscious, rational life is unique to earth.

* Romans 8:22 states, “the whole creation groans and suffers” because of Adam’s sin. This would be a strange statement if humanlike beings existed in outer space, because it would mean that those not descended from Adam suffer because of Adam’s sin.
* Romans 5:12 tells us, “through one man [Adam] sin entered the world.” The Greek word we translate as “world” is kosmos, which generally means the entire universe. Again, if intelligent beings exist beyond Earth, they would be suffering—unjustly, it would seem—for Adam’s sin.
* Genesis 1:14 states that the heavenly bodies were made “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.” It does not say that they were created as habitats for other creatures.

Is there life in outer space? Except as noted on page 249, probably not. Many people enjoy speculating on this subject, and some want to believe life is in outer space, usually life that is superior to ours. They may be right. However, little rational basis exists for this belief—either scientific or biblical.

Is There a Large Gap of Time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2?

The idea that a vast period of time elapsed between the first two verses of Genesis is known as the gap theory. Most variations of this theory interpret Genesis 1:1 as the first creation, which included the creation of the heavens, the earth, plants and animals, and even a race of humans preceding Adam! Perhaps billions of years then elapsed, during which time Satan and his angels fell and corrupted earth’s inhabitants. God then judged and destroyed the earth and all its inhabitants. Thus, the earth became “formless and void” (Genesis 1:2) and remained that way for eons. Genesis 1:3, according to the gap theory, describes the beginning of the second creation with the first day of the (re)creation week—the familiar six-day creation. This series of events is also called the “ruin-reconstruction theory” or “the pre-Adamic cataclysm theory.”

The modern gap theory was popularized in 1814 by Thomas Chalmers, a leading Scottish theologian. Some geologists of his day argued that the earth was much older than Genesis implied. Chalmers, therefore, proposed the gap theory to harmonize Genesis with those demands. No clear record shows anyone prior to 1814 interpreting Genesis 1:1–2 in this way.1 This is especially significant, because Hebrew scholars 2,000 years ago certainly understood Hebrew writing better than we do today. The gap theory simply accommodated the growing demand for long periods of time.2 Unfortunately, the adherents to the theory are usually unaware of all the scientific evidence supporting a young earth.

What are the problems with the gap theory? Gap theorists generally believe that the fossil record was formed, not in a global flood, but when God destroyed the earth in “the gap” between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. Gappists have not understood how the flood rapidly formed fossils and deposited sedimentary layers with a total average thickness of one mile. For that reason, they believe Noah’s flood was less destructive than the judgment they claim preceded the creation week. No clear biblical passage supports the worldwide destruction they imagine, and they ignore references to Noah’s flood by many biblical writers and Christ Himself (Mt 24:37–39, Lk 17:26–27). The gap theory resulted, to a large extent, from a failure to comprehend the flood. [See pages 102–131.]

Gap theorists also ignore this clear biblical statement that no great time gap preceding the completed creation:

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them ... (Exodus 20:11)

The gap theory states that the heavens were created long before the six creation days—perhaps billions of years earlier. Exodus 20:11 says the heavens (and everything else) were made in six days. If the gap theory is correct, the Sun must have shone on earth to support the life that existed before the “gap.” But Genesis 1:14–18 says the Sun was made on the fourth day of the creation week.

Gap theorists miss the importance of Christ’s words in Mark 10:6, “But from the beginning of creation, God made them [Adam and Eve] male and female.” Christ knew that Adam and Eve were created at the beginning, not after a vast gap of time.

According to most versions of the gap theory, the death and destruction shown by the fossil record, including the death of supposedly pre-Adamic man, preceded Adam’s creation. But the Bible clearly states that death came because of (therefore, after) Adam.

If Satan fell before the creation week, as most gap theorists maintain, it is strange that at the end of the creation week, God pronounced that all He had made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Also, the fossil record gives evidence of death and violent burial on a global scale. How could such destruction be described as “very good” if it preceded God’s pronouncement?

Why then do some believe in the gap theory? As mentioned earlier, they have accepted, perhaps unknowingly, claims that the earth is billions of years old. Therefore, they try to find where a vast period of time might fit into the Bible. They know that long periods of time cannot be inserted after Adam’s creation because the various genealogies are tightly linked.3 Consequently, the only place billions of years can be inserted is before Adam. Because time flowed smoothly and continuously during the creation week, a week that for various reasons is composed of normal 24-hour days, the time gap must be inserted before the first creation day. Rather than start the creation week at Genesis 1:1 as most Bible scholars do, gappists start that week at Genesis 1:3. Therefore, they believe that before Genesis 1:3, a vast length of time existed—as they state, “whatever geologists demand.”

To justify this, they propose nontraditional translations of several verses. They believe that Genesis 1:2a should be translated “the earth became formless and void,” instead of the more widely accepted translation “the earth was formless and void.” Prior to 1800, no one ever translated this verse as gap theorists do. While it is true that the Hebrew word “hayah” can be translated “became,” it is usually translated “was.” In fact, in the 4,900 times “hayah” occurs in the Old Testament, almost 98% are translated as “was.” Hebrew grammarians and linguists have almost uniformly rejected the translation “became” or “had become.”

Gap theorists rely heavily on Isaiah 45:18, which states:

For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited),

They correctly state that God did not create the earth a waste place. Genesis 1:2, using the same Hebrew word as in Isaiah 45:18 for “waste place,” describes the earth as “formless and void.” Gap theorists unfortunately conclude that after the earth’s first creation, it must have become a waste place that was “formless and void.” A more straightforward and internally consistent interpretation is that the earth was temporarily “formless and void” during the first day of its creation. At the end of the sixth creation day, the earth was completed, inhabited, and “very good”—not “formless and void.” In other words, God “did not create it [to be] a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited.”

Another verse used to support the gap theory is Genesis 1:28, which in the King James translation states “... Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it ...” Today, the word “replenish” is a recognized mistranslation of the Hebrew. All modern translations translate this word “fill.”

Most people who accept the gap theory have great confidence in the Bible and oppose evolution. However, they accept many evolutionary interpretations of such things as dinosaurs, ice ages, and coal-producing peat bogs. They avoid controversy by placing dinosaurs, ice ages, and coal formation in the “gap,” and thus fail to see their connection with the flood. So gappists generally take a position of noninvolvement in the origins issue other than saying they accept creation and oppose evolution. This attitude helped the evolutionary viewpoint go largely unopposed in our schools and media for decades.

The gap theory has declined in popularity in recent years.4 It was one of many attempts to reinterpret Scripture to conform to a belief that was becoming popular among some scientists in the 1800s—a belief in an old earth. Unfortunately, the gap theory is inconsistent with the Bible in many ways.

Is Evolution Compatible with the Bible?

Many people, although they may not know the term, are theistic evolutionists; that is, they believe God used evolution to create the universe and everything in it. For some, this is an acceptable compromise—belief in at least some aspects of evolution and belief in God. The first provides scientific respectability, while the second satisfies an inward conviction that there must be a Creator. For these people, evolution is compatible with the Bible.

But is it? Since Darwin’s time (mid-late 1800s), many who knew what the Bible said have tried to reinterpret Scripture to make it compatible with the theory of evolution. The fact that there are about twenty theistic evolution theories indicates the general dissatisfaction with each. It also suggests that reconciling evolution with the Bible is not as easy as some claim. You will soon see why.

Better-known efforts to reinterpret the early chapters of Genesis include the day-age theory,1 the gap theory (pages 320–321), the framework theory,2 the revelation theory,3 and progressive creation.4 Each theory uncritically accepts some aspects of evolution and then reinterprets Genesis to force it to accommodate those aspects. These reinterpretations contradict obvious meanings in Scripture, interpretations of the text made by ancient and modern Hebrew scholars,5 clear statements of many Old Testament writers, all New Testament writers, and Jesus Christ Himself.

Many who accept these theories sincerely reject evolution. Unfortunately, they fail to realize the evolutionary assumptions on which these theories, and their personal beliefs, are built. Those assumptions may appear “scientific,” unless the evidence is closely examined.

No single theistic evolution theory incorporates all 74 beliefs listed below.6 However, each is compatible with one or more of the primary theistic evolution theories. Actually, no compelling scientific evidence supports any of these evolutionary positions, and much scientific evidence refutes them. [See “The Scientific Case for Creation,” pages 6–98.]

Notice how many ideas in the left-hand column below are uncritically accepted by mainstream society. Notice also how these ideas have subtly alienated many from the Bible—which both contradicts theistic evolution and lays the foundation for some of our most basic beliefs and institutions. Undermining this foundation has obviously contributed to many societal problems. [See “What Are the Social Consequences of Belief in Evolution?” on page 336.]

Table 23. Theistic Evolution vs. The Biblical Account

In the following there will be two statements following a set of the same numbers. The first number is for Theistic Evolution and the second one is the Creation version given in the Bible.

I.e.

1. Creation required few, if any, miracles. Science can now explain how everything evolved. (Theistic Evolution)

1. Creation was a miracle. Evolution, if true, would require many miracles. [See pages 6–98.] A miracle is a departure from physical laws. (The Biblical Account)

2. Genesis 1–11 is either allegory, poetry, or myth. It is not literally true.


2. Genesis 1–11 is accurate history involving real people and major events. Jesus Christ and every New Testament writer cited these foundational events that shaped human culture. [See the 68 references beginning on page 329.]

3. Genesis contains two conflicting creation accounts, Genesis 1:1–2:3 and Genesis 2:4–2:25. Obviously, both cannot be correct—or taken literally.


3. Genesis contains two descriptions of creation. The first is chronological, while the second is from man’s perspective. A close study of the Hebrew words shows no conflict. Christ, who in a single sentence mentioned both descriptions, knew they referred to the same creation event. (Mt 19:4–5) [Endnote 1 on page 299 contains additional information.]

4. Natural processes (or “Mother Nature”) can explain the formation of the heavenly bodies, earth, and life. Matter preceded mind.


4. The Creator, with supernatural power, brought forth the heavenly bodies, earth, and life. Mind preceded matter. (Gen 1–2, Ps 33:6)

5. Space, time, and matter are eternal. Time existed before things were created.


5. God who is eternal, created space, time, and matter. The creation came out of nothing. There was a beginning.7 Time began at the creation. (Gen 1:1, Mt 24:21, Mk 13:19, Jn 1:1, Col 1:16, Heb 11:3)

6. The universe began as a burst of light with the big bang. Ten billion years later, the earth slowly formed in the presence of sunlight.


6. On the first day, the earth was formed in darkness. (Gen 1:2) Soon afterward, but before the Sun and stars were made, light was created. (Gen 1:3) [See page 274.]

7. The big bang was the basic creation event. It occurred during a fraction of a second.


7. A series of creative acts occurred during the creation week. (Gen 1)

8. Hydrogen, helium, and some lithium formed millions of years before all the other 100+ chemical elements.


8. All chemical elements came into existence during the creation week. (Gen 2:2, Ex 20:11)

9. Since the big bang, the average temperature of the universe has continually decreased. Eventually, the Sun will exhaust its fuel and the earth will lose its heat and freeze solid.


9. The earth began in a relatively cool state (see #12 below). Eventually, intense heat will destroy the heavens and the earth. (II Peter 3:7,10,12)

10. The Sun and most stars formed billions of years before Earth. Stars are still forming.


10. Earth was created three days before the Sun and stars. Today, stars are dying, not being created. (Gen 1:2, 1:16; Ex 20:11) [See page 31.]

11. During the fourth creation period (not the fourth day), the Sun, Moon, and stars were “made to appear”8 on a previously cloud-covered earth.


11. On the fourth creation day, the Sun, Moon, and stars were made.
(Gen 1:14–19) If the word “day” in Genesis 1:14 means a long period, what do the words “year” or “night” mean in that verse?

12. The earth initially had a hot, molten surface. Millions of years later, water—chemically locked in the earth’s interior—oozed out.


12. On the first day, the earth had a liquid water surface.9 Therefore, the earth was relatively cool at the beginning. (Gen 1:2)

13. The earth slowly coalesced from meteoritic impacts that melted the earth’s surface and vaporized all surface water.


13. The earth formed quickly. After the second day, its surface was spread out above the liquid subterranean waters. (Ps 24:2, 104:3, 136:6)

14. Land formed before oceans.


14. A global ocean existed before land. Dry land appeared when the surface waters were gathered into one place. (Gen 1:2, 1:9)

15. Evolution took place over billions of years, not in six literal days. The word “day” in the Bible can, in rare cases, mean an indefinite period of time. The six creation “days” may have been six ages, so each creation age had millions of evenings and mornings. Another possibility is that God created in six literal days, but each day was separated by millions of years.


15. Creation took place in six literal, consecutive days. (Gen 1, Ex 20:11) The Hebrew word for day, yom, always means literal, consecutive days when modified by a plural number. Yom was defined as a literal day when it was first used. (Gen 1:4,5) Each creation day had only one “evening and morning.”

To survive, plants need the Sun and animals—especially insects. All were created within three literal days of each other. (Gen 1:11–23) Had it taken much longer, plants could not have survived.10 (Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31)

16. In the Bible, a day can be a long time. For example, Psalm 90:4 and II Peter 3:8 say that “a day is like a thousand years.”


16. Those verses do not refer specifically to the six creation days. Instead, they say that God is outside of time; He can see the intimate details and the big picture. Besides, no evolutionist believes creation took 6,000 years.

17. Since the earth began, natural disasters have occurred: earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, lightning strikes, tsunamis, droughts, and impacts by meteorites, asteroids, and comets.


17. The earth was created “very good,” so natural disasters did not occur initially. (Gen 1:31) Part II of this book explains why each type of natural disaster was a different consequence of the global flood. [See pages 100–256.]

18. The present is the key to the past; that is, presently observable natural processes explain all past events. (This principle, called uniformitarianism, underlies much of geology.)


18. The present is not always the key to the past. God sometimes works suddenly, as He did during the creation, the fall, and the flood. (Gen 1–3, 6–8) No natural process on earth approaches the flood in its power, destructiveness, or extent. (II Peter 3:3–6) [See pages 100–255.]

19. Once the atmosphere began to evolve, rains occurred on the earth.


19. Before the flood, man apparently had not seen a rainbow in the sky. (Gen 9:11–17) The hydrodynamic cycle must have been quite different. It probably did not rain before the flood. [See pages 298–299.]

20. There have been no worldwide floods—only brief, local floods. “Noah’s flood,” if it happened, was only a local, or regional, flood. God’s promise, in Genesis 9:11, not to again flood the earth cannot be taken literally.


20. A catastrophic, worldwide flood covered all11 the earth’s preflood mountains after 150 days. (Gen 7:19–20, 7:24; Ps 104:6–9) This year-long flood (Gen 7:11, 8:14) destroyed almost all humans and air-breathing land animals. (Gen 6:13, 6:17, 7:4, 7:21–23, 8:21, 9:11; Lk 17:27; I Pet 3:20; II Pet 2:5, 3:6)

21. The first animals were microscopic, single-celled creatures.


21. The first animals included great sea monsters, such as whales, and other complex creatures. (Gen 1:20 – 21)

22. The first sea life was a small blob of complex chemicals. It took a billion years for other sea life to form.


22. On the fifth day, sea life was created, and the waters swarmed with all the various kinds of sea creatures. (Gen 1:20 – 22)

23. The original atmosphere consisted of methane, ammonia, and other poisonous gases. Over billions of years, the atmosphere became what it is today.


23. The atmosphere was created quickly and has since supported all living things. (Gen 1:6–8)

24. Plant life helped produce our atmosphere.


24. The atmosphere was created before plant life. (Gen 1:6–12)

25. Plants evolved over a long period of time. Flowering plants evolved 220 million years after all other plants.


25. All major categories of plants, including their seeds and fruit, were created on the third day. (Gen 1:11–12)

26. The Sun evolved several billion years before plant life.


26. The Sun was made one day after plant life. (Gen 1:12–16)

27. Various forms of plant life and animal life evolved during each of four sequential, geological eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. These eras were of unequal length.


27. Life was created during only three of the six creation days—3rd day: plant life, 5th day: sea life and birds, and the 6th day: other land animals and man. (Gen 1)

28. Since the earth began, new forms of life have continued to arise within each of the major categories: plants, sea creatures, birds, and land animals.


28. All plants were created first, then all sea creatures and birds, then all land animals. Finally, man was created. (Gen 1)

29. There is continuity among all forms of life. All organisms have a common ancestor. Therefore, there were continuous transitions among all plants and among all animals. The millions of species are not fixed and not distinct.


29. There are permanent discontinuities between the many different “kinds” of life. In fact, the Bible states 10 times that each “kind” will reproduce after itself. (Gen 1) The kinds are fixed and distinct. (I Cor 15:39)

30. Sea life preceded land life by hundreds of millions of years.


30. Sea life did not precede land life. (Gen 1:11–13, 1:20 – 23)

31. Adam could not have named all the animals in one day, because there were too many. Besides, most animals and plants became extinct before man evolved.


31. The Bible does not say Adam named all the animals. On Day 6, he named “all the cattle,” “the birds of the sky,” and “every beast of the field” (domesticated animal). Adam did not name, for example, sea creatures, creeping things (insects), and the beasts of the earth (wild animals). (Gen 2:20) All animal kinds have lived contemporaneously with man. (Gen 1:20 – 30)

32. Insects evolved millions of years before birds and flowering plants.


32. All birds and plants were created before “creeping things.” (Gen 1:20 – 24)

33. Either reptiles or dinosaurs evolved into birds. More than a 100 million years later, 60 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct, man evolved.


33. Birds were created before dinosaurs, reptiles, and other beasts of the earth. (Gen 1:20 – 25) Man saw and wrote about dinosaurs and giant seagoing reptiles. (Job 40:15–41:34)

34. Fish evolved hundreds of millions of years before birds and fruit trees. The first fish and birds came from eggs.


34. Fruit trees were created before fish. Fish and birds were created on the same day. Fish were created swimming, and birds were created flying.
(Gen 1:11, 21–22)

35. It is uncertain which came first, the chicken or the egg.


35. Eggs were within the first chickens, so both came together. All animals were created fully formed and functional.12

36. The first animals were simple sea creatures. Much later, fish evolved, then amphibians, and finally mammals. The last mammals to evolve included whales.


36. The first animals created included highly developed mammals such as the great whales. The next day, many so-called “lower forms” were created. (Gen 1:21, 1:24)

37. For hundreds of millions of years before man evolved, many animals were carnivores (meat eaters).


37. Early animals were herbivores (plant eaters). After either the fall or the flood, some became carnivores. (Gen 1:30)

38. Females evolved before males.


38. Males and females within a “kind” were created on the same day. (Gen 1:20 – 25) The first human male came before the first human female. (Gen 2:22)

39. Macroevolution continues today, so creation is a long process.


39. Creation was a distinct event. (Ps 148:5) God finished “all His work” in six days. (Gen 2:1–3; Ex 20:11, 31:17; Heb 4:1–11)

40. Everything in nature, from protons to people, evolved by slow, continuous processes.


40. Everything in nature was created in one or more rapid, discrete steps. (Ps 33:6–9) Five times Genesis states that “God said ... and it was so.” (Gen 1:6–7, 1:9, 1:11, 1:14–15, 1:24) All the Bible’s miracles occurred quickly, including the biggest and first miracle—creation itself.

41. Evolution works, in part, through a process called “survival of the fittest.” Violence, pain, and death were necessary for animals to become more complex. Suffering, cruelty, and death are natural results of the evolutionary process. In this sense, death produced man.


41. God is all-powerful and does not need to use violence, pain, or death to create. God did not author evil, suffering, disease, or calamity. Several attributes of our Creator are love, peace, and joy. Right after the creation, everything was “very good.” (Gen 1:31) Suffering and cruelty entered the world when Adam sinned. (Gen 3) In this sense, man produced death. (Gen 2:17, Rom 5:12, I Cor 15:21)

42. Man is a product of nature. Man is controlled and shaped by his environment. In fact, the environment largely determined how man evolved.


42. Man was given dominion over nature. God told man to control his environment—to subdue the earth and rule over every living thing that moves on the earth. (Gen 1:26, 1:28–30)

43. Man is an animal that has evolved a little higher than the apes.


43. Man, who was given dominion over all animals, was created in the image of God. (Gen 1:26–27, 1:30, 5:1) Man was made “a little lower than the angels.” (Ps 8:5)

44. Man evolved from a lower animal.


44. Adam was formed from the dust. (Gen 2:7)

45. Man has existed during only the past 1,000th of the earth’s history—10,000,000,000 years after the universe began and 4,000,000,000 years after the earth formed.


45. Man has existed since the creation. (Mt 19:4; Mk 10:6, 13:19; Lk 11:50–51a; Jn 8:44; Rom 1:20)

46. There really was no one individual we can call “Adam”; the term refers to “mankind” or a race of primitive men. Adam and Eve may be mythical characters in a saga explaining how evil originated—or characters in a timeless myth representing the sinful choices we all make.


46. Inspired writers of both Testaments spoke of Adam as an individual, not as a race of people. (Gen 5:3; I Chron 1:1; Lk 3:38; Acts 17:26; Rom 5:12; I Cor 15:21–22, 15:45–47) Eve was also a unique person. (I Cor 11:8–9, I Tim 2:13–14) We are all descended from Adam and Eve. (Gen 3:20)

47. Almost all fossils formed before man appeared on earth.


47. Man was created before any fossils formed.

48. Man’s genealogy includes many apelike animals. It spans more than a hundred thousand generations. Adam had millions of years’ worth of ancestors.


48. Man’s genealogy begins with Adam and Eve. It involves only a few hundred generations. The Bible gives the line of descent from Adam to Noah and even up to historical times. (Gen 5, I Chron 1, Lk 3:23–38) Christ never mentioned any ancestors of Adam; Adam had none. (Mt 19:4)

49. Although apes, man’s closest relatives, have no difficulty or pain in giving birth, human childbirth is painful and dangerous for mother and child. Natural selection should have eliminated women with narrow birth canals.13


49. Humans are a special creation; they did not descend from apes or any ancestor of apes. Pain in human birth was multiplied as a result of the fall. (Gen 3:16)

50. God breathed a spirit into an apelike creature. This became man.


50. God breathed the breath of life into a lifeless human body. This became man. (Gen 2:7)

51. The earliest people were meat eaters. The first animals that could be considered human were hunters. Hundreds of thousands of years later, man began farming.


51. The earliest people were vegetarians. (Gen 1:29) The first man, Adam, was a gardener. (Gen 2:15) Later, Adam became a farmer; his son Abel was a herdsman. (Gen 4:2) Less than 10 generations later, man began hunting. (Gen 9:3)

52. Because man evolved from the animals, there is very little difference in the psychological makeup and behavior of animals and man. (This premise underlies much of modern psychology.)


52. Man was created distinct from the animals and in the image of God. (Gen 1:26–27, 5:1) Adam did not find any animal that was physically and emotionally compatible with him. Only another human, Eve, could be his counterpart. (Gen 2:20)

53. The first man came from a woman. Woman, like man, evolved from animals. The story of Eve being formed by “divine surgery” from Adam’s side is nonsense. Eve had a mother.


53. The first woman came from a man. (Acts 17:26, I Cor 11:8) Eve was specially created—taken from the side of Adam. (Gen 2:21–23) Eve had no mother.

54. Marriage, a cultural convention, evolved from human experience. Marriage therefore changes as culture evolves.


54. Marriage is a permanent bond instituted by God. (Gen 2:24)

55. Man slowly developed our basic units of time: a day, a week, a month, and a year.


55. Genesis 1, which was not composed by man, defines our basic units of time.

56. No one established the seven-day week. It was culturally derived. Surprisingly, practically all known cultures throughout history have had a seven-day week.


56. God established the seven-day week for man’s benefit. (Mk 2:27) It reminds us of His activity and rest during the creation week. (Gen 1, Ex 20:8–11)

57. The Garden of Eden is a myth.


57. Eden was a literal place. (Is 51:3; Ezek 28:13, 36:35; Joel 2:3)

58. People have rarely lived beyond 100 years, especially in the primitive past.


58. Before the flood, conditions were such that at least the people listed in chapter 5 of Genesis lived to be about 900 years old. [See page 317.]

59. Lunar months may have been mistakenly called “years” by the early Hebrews. Thus, the patriarchal ages (typically 900 “years”) in Genesis 5 could be much younger in true years.


59. Two patriarchs were 65 years old when their sons were born. (Gen 5:15, 5:21) If those “years” were lunar months, then they had children when they were 5 years old!

60. Early man was quite primitive and technologically immature.


60. Within only a few hundred years after the creation, man built musical instruments and refined alloys. (Gen 4:21–22) Early man also had the technology to build Noah’s Ark (Gen 6:14–16) and the Tower of Babel. (Gen 11:3–6)

61. The genealogies listed from Adam to Joseph contain many gaps. Each gap may span centuries.


61. The genealogies from Adam to Joseph are tightly linked, because each patriarch’s age is given when the next named patriarch was born. [See pages 317–318.] Therefore, more time cannot be inserted between patriarchs.

62. Cain, Adam and Eve’s first son, was banished to a distant land and would not have had a wife, unless he married a subhuman primate or another evolved human.


62. Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters. (Gen 5:4) Cain probably married a sister, or perhaps a niece.14

63. Language evolved slowly; it began with grunts and signs of emotion. (Most linguists admit they do not know how languages multiplied. Today, languages are rapidly becoming extinct.)


63. Adam, who was created with a large vocabulary, conducted intelligent conversations from the beginning. He named many, but not all, land animals on the day he was created. (Gen 2:18–24) Languages multiplied suddenly at Babel. (Gen 11:1–9) [See “Language” and “Speech” beginning on page 9.]

64. For a billion years, millions of species have slowly improved and become more complex. This is still happening. New forms of life are always evolving.


64. Right after the creation, God saw all that He had made, and it was “very good.” (Gen 1:31) Since then, things have deteriorated (Gen 3:16–19, Rom 8:18–22) and diversified. We have never seen a new kind of life evolve. (Ex 20:11)

65. Death entered the world just after the simplest form of life evolved—a billion years before man evolved.


65. Death entered the world after Adam was created and sinned. (Rom 5:12)

66. Death preceded the activities that some people call sin.15


66. Sin preceded death. (Gen 2:17, 3:1–24; Rom 5:12, 6:23, I Cor 15:21)

67. The fall of Adam had only spiritual consequences.


67. The fall of Adam had both spiritual and physical consequences. (Gen 2:17, 3:14–24; Rom 8:18–22; I Cor 15:21–22)

68. Ever since plants evolved, some have been poisonous. This enhanced their survivability.


68. Before the fall, every green plant was edible. (Gen 1:29–30)

69. Thorns and thistles evolved along with plants.


69. Adam’s sin caused thorns and thistles. (Gen 3:17–18)

70. Man’s wickedness is a result of his animal nature.


70. Man’s wickedness is a result of his fallen nature.

71. God gave Adam a spirit, so Adam was the first primate who could be called human. He died physically as did his primate ancestors, but not as a penalty for disobedience. Adam’s penalty for disobedience was only spiritual death—separation from God.


71. The first Adam brought physical and spiritual death into the world for humans. The last Adam (Jesus Christ) brings physical resurrection from the dead and spiritual life. If Adam’s body evolved from an animal, this profound theological correspondence is broken, along with the “plan of redemption.”16 Both “Adams” had miraculously created bodies, but both could die as a penalty for human disobedience. (Rom 5:14–15, I Cor 15:45)

72. Struggle and death preceded man’s arrival on earth. This struggle has continued ever since.


72. The completed creation, which included man, was “very good.” (Gen 1:31) There was no struggle and death. Subsequently, man (by his willful disobedience) fell from this universal paradise, causing struggle and death to enter the world. Someday, this paradise will be restored as a “new heaven and a new earth.” (Is 11:6–9, Rev 22:2–3)

73. Ever since the earth evolved with God’s guidance, natural disasters—such as floods, earthquakes, storms, lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions, and impacts by asteroids, meteors, and comets—have brought death to earth.


73. These deadly calamities were not part of God’s “very good ” creation. Later, man’s sin destroyed that tranquility. Man’s wickedness became so bad that God chose to destroy almost all men and air breathing animals in a global flood. These calamities are a consequence of the flood. (Gen 1:31, 6:5–7) [See pages 100–255, 298.]

74. Man is continually improving—physically, mentally, socially, morally, and spiritually.


74. Since early times, man has advanced technologically. (Gen 4:21–22) This was largely inevitable. (Gen 11:6) However, man has regressed physically and spiritually. (Gen 3, 5, 11)

75. Because man culminates billions of years of upward progress, his well-being and continued improvement must be our greatest concern.17


75. Because God created man (and everything else), God should be our greatest concern. Man, who was made in the image of God, was given dominion over all other creatures. (Gen 1:26) Man must exercise great care and concern for the creation, especially for his fellow man. However, men are special creatures who have sinned and, therefore, need a Savior. (Jn 3:16)

How Can Origins Be Taught in High School or College?

Teaching scientific evidence for creation has always been legal in public schools.1 Nevertheless, many teachers wonder how to do this. Schools should be places of inquiry, where students are taught to analyze all sides of an issue. Few academic subjects have greater inherent interest for high school or college students than the origins question. The fact that it is controversial is, therefore, not a liability but an asset.2 The origins question, then, is an ideal vehicle for developing analytical skills.3 An excellent way to develop these skills is “The Origins Research Project.”

The Origins Research Project

Introduction. The Origins Research Project may be one of the most interesting and exciting projects students ever experience—one they will remember the rest of their lives. It will demonstrate how scientific inquiry works while building upon one of the most basic and natural questions a person ever asks: “How did everything begin?” Each student is (1) to decide which theory of origins best fits the scientific evidence, and (2) to write a paper explaining why. Religious beliefs, while possibly important to the student’s overall conclusion, are not to be a part of this paper. There is no right or wrong answer. Instead, the student’s work should be evaluated on its breadth of research, critical thinking, sound logic, and detailed comparisons of the data with the various theories.

The following description of the Origins Research Project is written in a generalized form, so it can be used at the high school or college level in either secular or religious schools. Teachers can tailor this project to the time available, the student’s needs, and the teacher’s objectives.

Purpose. This project will (1) help each student develop analytical skills in science, (2) integrate many seemingly diverse topics and fields of science into a meaningful, maturing, and exciting investigation, and (3) permit academic study in an important area of science without infringing on diverse religious views that are the prerogative of the individual and the home. Because strongly held views will be presented on both sides of this question of origins, the student will develop, probably for the first time, strong, reasoned, and confident disagreement with some scientific authorities and textbook authors. This experience, which even most scientists and engineers do not have until they are well into their first major research effort, is one of the most maturing that an education can provide. Unfortunately, the typical classroom experience, especially in the sciences, involves learning or absorbing information, not evaluating the evidence and deciding which of several scientific explanations is most plausible.

The Project. Each student is to write a paper stating which theory of origins he or she feels is best supported by the scientific evidence and why. The first sentence of the paper will be, “I believe the scientific evidence best supports ______________________.” The blank space, for example, might contain one of the following:

* the theory of evolution
* the theory of creation
* a modified theory of evolution
* a modified theory of creation

(Possible definitions of “evolution” and “creation” are on page 334.) Any student who feels the evidence supports a theory other than evolution or creation should define that theory. Students should understand that their conclusions, based upon an examination of only some scientific evidence, may differ from their religious views (theism, atheism, or their many variants).

The scope of this project is not to resolve such differences but to learn to examine scientific evidence. Limitations and uncertainties in science, especially when dealing with ancient, unrepeatable events having no observers, will become apparent before the project is completed.

The Role of the Teacher. The teacher’s role is (1) to develop each student’s analytical skills in science, (2) to prevent religious aspects from entering any classroom discussions, (3) to prevent censorship of any scientific evidence,(4) to facilitate discussion, and (5) to challenge and stimulate the student’s thinking. Teachers should frequently ask thought-provoking questions such as:

* What assumptions are being made?
* Can those assumptions be tested?
* Why do other scientists disagree?
* What are other explanations?
* What evidence is there for other conclusions?

The teacher’s role is not to compel belief in any theory of origins; nor is it to teach the material. The subject matter is so broad that it would be unreasonable to expect teachers to master it quickly enough to teach it. Furthermore, most teachers probably have presuppositions that could easily bias the student’s decision-making process. Students will frequently ask, sometimes subtly, what the teacher believes. A suggested response is:

Don’t be concerned with what I believe. What matters in this class is how thoroughly you examine the scientific evidence on both sides of this issue. I am not interested in your specific conclusion; I am interested in only the thoroughness and logic you use to reach your conclusion. You are on your own.

Resource Materials

Many resources are available to help students form conclusions. Teachers and school officials are encouraged to examine the following list of resources and select those they feel are appropriate for their learning situations. Regardless of which specific resources or activities the teacher selects, every effort should be made to provide a balance between at least the two basic scientific models of origins—evolution and creation.

Video Tape

The Great Debate: Evolution vs. Creation (50 minutes). This excellent video features a debate between Professor Evolution and Dr. Creation, each played by Terrence R. Mondy, who was selected as the outstanding high school biology teacher for Illinois, 1999–2000. Entertaining, informative, interesting, and accurate. Appropriate for high school through college audiences. Available from Creative Media, 6305 Ojibwa Lane, McHenry, IL 60050 for $15.00, which includes mailing and handling.

Books for Student Reference:

From the evolution perspective:4

* Charles Darwin, The Illustrated Origins of Species by Charles Darwin, abridged and introduced by Richard E. Leakey, Hill & Wang, 1979.
* Robert Jastrow, Until the Sun Dies, Warner Books, 1977.

From the creation perspective:

* Any portion of this book may be copied.
* Duane T. Gish, Challenge of the Fossil Record, Master Books, 1985.
* Henry M. Morris and Gary E. Parker, What is Creation Science? Master Books, 1982.

Contrasting the creation and evolution perspectives:

* Richard Bliss and Gary E. Parker, Origin of Life, Evolution/Creation, Master Books, 1979.
* Richard Bliss, Gary E. Parker, and Duane T. Gish, Fossils: Key to the Present, Evolution/Creation, Master Books, 1980.
* Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, Ticknor & Fields: New Haven and New York, 1982.
* Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Burnett Books Limited (London), 1985.
* William R. Fix, The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984.
* Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, Simon and Schuster, 1981.
* Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, Harper and Row, 1983.

Outside Speakers

Invite outside experts to answer students’ questions. These experts would usually be an evolutionist and a creation scientist. Teachers should not assume this role and defend one point of view. Teachers are encouraged to create an atmosphere of inquiry by stimulating and motivating students to arrive at their own conclusions independently. Having expert witnesses just before the students begin writing their papers will help the students concentrate on unresolved questions. It might be instructive, especially at the high school level, to formulate questions beforehand in class. Students who favor evolution should question the creationist witness, and students who favor creation should question the evolutionist witness. This will increase the level of interest and the desire to prepare adequately.

Student Debates

Brief student debates are an excellent way to increase student interest and involvement in this project. Student could be given five minutes to state their cases regarding some evidence, followed by two-minute rebuttals. A sign up sheet could be posted for students to seek an opponent to debate selected topics. One such debate each week, lasting possibly 15–20 minutes, could provide an important stimulus for all students. Care must be taken at the high school level to keep debates orderly. At all levels, videotaping during nonclassroom time can be effectively used. This would let teachers select only the best debates for classroom viewing.

Bulletin Board Displays

Students should be encouraged to bring to class any magazine, newspaper, or journal articles on the subject of origins. After they have been posted on a bulletin board for several days, discussions concerning the quality of the articles, the evidence cited, and the identification of hidden assumptions can be very informative. Letters to the editor by students could provide additional interest. Teachers may wish to offer incentives for any student whose letter is published, such as excusing the student from another writing exercise.

What Are the Social Consequences of Belief in Evolution?

Opinions about origins have profound social consequences and even affect the way we think. Consider the following italicized perspectives and some responses. Notice that all these perspectives presume evolution occurred, despite the scientific evidence.

1. Animal-like Behavior. If humans descended from animals, why shouldn’t humans behave like animals?

2. Meaninglessness. If evolution happened, why believe life has any purpose other than to reproduce and pass on your genes? 1

Response: Evolution did not happen. Your life has purpose and hope. God does not make mistakes. You are not an accident.

3. Good vs. Evil. If nature is all there is, why believe there is good and evil? 2

Response: Distinguishing good and evil requires broad, even absolute, standards—and Someone competent to set those standards. Humans instinctively know there is good and evil, right and wrong. Someone implanted that understanding in us; the laws of physics can’t.

4. Survival of the Fittest. If we evolved by “survival of the fittest,” then getting rid of the unfit is desirable. To conquer and exploit weaker people, businesses, or countries is just the law of the jungle from which we evolved. Mercy killings, forced sterilization, and selective breeding of humans, while unpopular with some, would be beneficial, in the long run, and very logical—if we evolved.

5. Communism. Friederich Engels, one of the founders of communism, wrote Karl Marx, another founder, and strongly recommended Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species. In response, Marx wrote Engels that Darwin’s book “contains the basis in natural history for our view [communism].”3 Marx offered to dedicate his book, Das Capital, to Darwin, but Darwin declined.

Joseph Stalin, ruthless dictator of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, read Darwin’s book as a student at a church-based school. Stalin urged others to also read it. During that time, he became an atheist.

6. Personal Responsibility. If everything came into existence by chance and natural processes, then we have no responsibility to some supernatural being. Religions would be a crutch for the weak-minded and superstitious. Churches would be monuments to human ignorance.

Furthermore, if evolution happened, then we and our actions are consequences of billions of years’ worth of natural events—over which we had no control. Our responsibility for our situation is relatively small. If bad things happen to us, we are primarily victims.

Response: We were created for a purpose, so we have great responsibility, and our Creator will hold us accountable. More will be expected from those who have been given more.

7. Relativism. There are no absolutes, moral or otherwise (except the fact that there are absolutely no absolutes). Your belief is just as good as mine; your truth is just as good as my truth.

Response: Obviously, the One who created the universe, life, and humans has the authority and ability to establish timeless, moral absolutes. And, He has.

8. Social Darwinism. If life evolved, then the human mind evolved. So did products of the human mind and all social institutions: law, education, science, religion, language, economics, industry—civilization itself.

Response: Technology progresses, information accumulates, and civilization often improves, but humans remain humans—with all our frailties and shortcomings.

9. Secular Humanism. If the “molecules-to-monkeys-to-man” idea is correct, then man is the highest form of being. Man should be the object of greatest concern, not some fictitious Creator that man actually created.

Response: This philosophy is called secular humanism (a humane sounding term that means atheism with a vague, intellectual flavor). Secular humanism will decline as people increasingly learn the scientific flaws of evolution.

10. New Age Movement. If people slowly evolved up from bacteria, then aren’t we evolving toward God? Aren’t we evolving a new consciousness? Aren’t we evolving into a glorious New Age?

Response: This belief, built on evolution, is growing like a cancer, even in many churches in the world. It’s called the new age movement. It also will decline as the scientific errors of evolution become known.

11. Marriage. If marriage is a cultural development, begun by ignorant tribes thousands of years ago, then why not change that custom, as we do other out-of-date customs? Animals don’t marry; why should people? After all, we’re just animals. If people are a product of natural processes, then why not do what comes naturally? What’s wrong with sexual activity outside of marriage as long as no one is hurt?

Response: God instituted marriage when He created a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, and said they should become one.

12. Racism. If humans evolved up from some apelike creature, then some people must have advanced higher on the evolutionary ladder than others. Some classes of people should be inherently superior to others.

Response: But that’s racism. That’s the twisted logic Hitler used to try to establish his super, Aryan race and to justify killing six million Jews in the Holocaust. This does not mean evolutionists are racists, although Charles Darwin and many of his followers of a century ago were extreme racists. However, evolution has provided the main rationale for racism. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “Biological arguments for racism ... increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” [See Endnote 3 on page 316.] People with darker skin have suffered greatly from evolutionary racism. Evolution has also caused others to suffer even more. They are victims of a greater holocaust going on all around us—abortion.

13. Abortion. We dispose of unwanted animals such as cats and dogs. If humans are evolved animals, why not terminate an unwanted pregnancy? Isn’t it the mother’s right? Shouldn’t she have a “choice” in such a personal matter? After all, a fetus has no name or personality. During its first three months, it’s just a tiny glob of tissue—no more important than a little pig or rabbit. Why shouldn’t a fetus, having less value than an adult, be “terminated” if adults or society would benefit? This will help solve our population problem. We must guide our destiny.

Response: Abortion is the premeditated killing of an innocent, defenseless, developing (but completely human) baby. Calling an unborn child a “fetus” is dehumanizing. Nor should we speak of “terminating a pregnancy.” That is simply a euphemism for killing a very young human.

Nine years after Darwin published his theory of evolution, Professor Ernst Haeckel announced that animal embryos, including unborn humans, repeat their evolutionary steps. Human embryos begin as microscopic spheres, because, Haeckel said, humans evolved from bacteria which are sometimes microscopic spheres. Later unborn babies look like fish, because humans evolved from fish. Still later, human embryos look like chimpanzees, because humans evolved from some apelike ancestor. So human embryos are not yet human. Can you see the errors in this logic? Similarity does not imply a genetic relationship.

Haeckel faked his drawings to fit his theory. In the following 130 years, hundreds of textbook writers copied these drawings, popularizing the theory. It has since been taught as fact throughout the world, even in medical schools. Today the theory is completely discredited, although it is still taught. [See “Embryology” on page 11 and page 58.]

Unborn children are human. Each adult’s body has about 100 trillion cells. When you were just one cell inside your mother, all the marvelous, complex information that physically defines you and every organ in your body was there. Although you were tiny and immature, you were completely human at one cell. Since then, mutations may have slightly decreased the amount of complex information that physically defines you.

Before birth, your mother acted as your support system, just as medical support systems are needed by some sick or elderly people. Needing a support system does not remove one from the human race or justify killing that person.

Although these matters have nothing to do with whether evolution is true or false, they have much to do with the importance of the issue and the adverse consequences of teaching that evolution is a fact. These social problems did not originate with evolution, but they follow logically from evolution. No doubt most evolutionists are as opposed as creationists to many of these social problems, but from an evolution perspective these behaviors are easily justified, rationalized, or tolerated. Evolution, while not the cause of evil, can usually defend or justify such behavior—with seeming scientific credibility.4

Obviously, the creator of a complex machine can best provide its operating instructions. Likewise, only our Creator has the authority and ability to establish timeless, moral absolutes. By what logic could anyone oppose these thirteen italicized viewpoints if there were no moral absolutes? Without moral absolutes, “right” and “wrong” will be decided by whoever is in control, but that will change from time to time. A false understanding of origins has subtle and far-reaching consequences.

How Do You Respond to Common Claims of Evolutionists?

1. “The evidence against evolution is bad science.”

Response: Have you studied the evidence? [See Parts I and II of this book.] Both sides of this issue tend to think the other is defending “bad science,” but “good” evidence may exist on both sides. Why not teach all the major scientific evidence? Evolutionists avoid a thorough, publishable, head-to-head comparison of the evidence for and against evolution. [See pages 344–346.] In fact, evolutionist leaders advise others never to participate in even an oral scientific debate on the evidence for and against evolution. In what other major science controversy has one side refused to allow all the evidence on the table?

2. “If you are going to teach an alternate view to evolution, why not teach chemistry AND alchemy, heliocentrism AND geocentrism, gynecology AND the stork ‘theory,’ or astronomy AND astrology?”

Response: If anyone has scientific evidence for these fringe beliefs, I would be happy to lay out the counterevidence. (Remember, evidence must be observable and verifiable.) Millions of people know evidence that opposes evolution. Even polls conducted by evolutionist organizations have shown that about 80% of the American public want such evidence taught in the schools their taxes finance.

3. “National standards call for the exclusive teaching of evolution.”

Response: There are no “national science standards.” Three private, nongovernmental, national organizations have a long record of promoting evolution. Each group has proposed a different science curriculum, all with a common theme—evolution.

The organizations with different, so-called “national standards” are The National Science Teachers Association, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The National Research Council. Some may think the National Research Council is part of the federal government. No. The National Research Council is a private organization set up to advise elements of the federal government when invited on matters of science and technology. None of these self-appointed groups has any charter for establishing national standards in any academic discipline. There are no “national science standards.”

4. “Almost all scientists accept evolution.”

Response: No, they don’t. The only related survey of scientists I am aware of was of chemists. A slight majority rejected evolution. [See the last paragraph of Endnote 2 on page 340.] Most professors in the basic sciences favor evolution, in part, because that is what they were taught and those who openly reject evolution are not hired or are fired. In the applied sciences (medicine, engineering, etc.) and among scientists in industry, those accepting and rejecting evolution may be nearly balanced. Gallup polls have shown that more Americans reject evolution than accept it. [See page 340.]

Of course, scientific conclusions are based on evidence, not a vote. The founders of modern science (Kepler, Bacon, Pascal, Boyle, Galileo, Hooke, and Newton—who, by the way, were creationists and opposed the evolutionary views of their day) based decisions on evidence. In contrast, the science of previous ages was based on philosophical deductions or authoritative opinions. Those who try to establish scientific truth by “counting noses” regress into dark-age thinking. By that criterion, you would believe in a flat earth, because once most scientists believed in a flat earth.

5. “People who oppose evolution do so for religious reasons.”

Response: In some cases. In other cases, some people who want to suppress the evidence against evolution do so for their religious reasons. Let’s just agree to stick to the scientific evidence on both sides of the origins issue.

In the first half of my life, throughout all my formal academic work, I was an evolutionist. My basic religious views have not changed, but after learning some convincing evidence, I had to reject evolution. Of course, the origins issue has religious implications for everyone—even those who claim to hold no religious views. But the issue can be addressed from a purely scientific standpoint. An earlier edition of this book (the special edition) demonstrated that. In it, religious matters were excluded, as I believe they should be in public schools.

6. “Speaking of a creator or a global flood is religious, because those ideas are drawn directly from the Bible.”

Response: Speaking of Noah’s flood would be religious, but explaining geological features caused by a global flood would not be. [See pages 100–255.] Speaking of Adam or Eve would be religious, but describing the evidence related to the mitochondrial Eve or the genetic Adam, from whom scientists have concluded all humans recently descended, is not. [See pages 261–263.] Referring to the God of the Bible or Allah of the Koran as the Creator would be religious, but speaking of a creator is not. As Supreme Court Justice Scalia wrote: “to posit a past creator is not to posit the eternal and personal God who is the object of religious veneration.” Scalia also wrote, “We will not presume that a law’s purpose is to advance religion merely because it happens to coincide or harmonize with the tenets of some or all religions.” 1

For example, scientists (even some evolutionists) who understand the amazing complexity inside a living cell know it could never have evolved; it had to be created. [See “The Elephant in the Living Room” on page 16.] But science cannot say who the creator was. It might have been several creators or even “little green men” from Mars. Nevertheless, when one understands the evidence, it is clear that this amazing complexity could not have evolved. It is hard to imagine an unbiased person who understands the evidence reaching any other conclusion. Unfortunately, few educators and scientists have heard this evidence. (Unintended ignorance is excusable. Unwillingness to learn is not. Preventing students from learning is reprehensible.)

Because much scientific evidence is being censored from our schools, a small but growing industry has developed. Many, such as myself, spend our time teaching others this evidence. People, including scientists, are excited about what they are learning. Demand for speakers and information exceeds what we can give. If the schools did their job, this rapidly-growing industry would shrink. But today, parental dissatisfaction with public schools in general, and science education in particular, has never been higher—in large part because of the one-sided way origins has been taught.

7. “The courts have stated that teaching evidence for creation would violate the separation of church and state.”

Response: Wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court said just the opposite. A few evolutionist organizations, the ACLU, and many media outlets have propagated that myth. The Supreme Court actually said that the scientific evidence for any theory of origins, including creation, has always been legal in the classroom. “Moreover, requiring the teaching of creation science with evolution does not give schoolteachers a flexibility that they did not already possess to supplant the present science curriculum with the presentation of theories, besides evolution, about the origin of life.” 2

Of course, our issue is whether the evidence against evolution will be taught along with that for evolution. Besides, the U.S. Constitution only states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Our founding fathers, who acknowledged the Creator in many places, including the Declaration of Independence, did not want a national religion such as the Church of England. (The phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution. Nor is the word “separation” or the word “church.”)

Why Don’t Creationists Publish in Leading Science Journals?

Scientists should want their conclusions critiqued, or refereed, by their peers (called “peer review”). Researchers, whose work is sound and important, should then have it published. However, leading science journals will not accept papers published elsewhere. (That stipulation alone eliminates any portion of this book from consideration.) Seldom would a science journal publish a paper more than 6 pages in length. (That also prevents the hydroplate theory, pages 102–254, from being published in a journal.)

I certainly want my ideas tested and have frequently initiated and appreciated cordial, factual exchanges with scientists who are not creationists. But in a journal, who does the testing, and does a writer have a right to challenge the reviewer’s conclusions if the writer disagrees? In other words, is there an unbiased judge? Unfortunately, leading science journals have a solid history of hostility toward creationists. Evolutionists are both judge and jury. Who would want to make his case in a court run by an opponent? Why would that opponent publish your case? The playing field is not level.

To level the playing field, I have had “on the table,” since 1980, a written-debate offer for any qualified evolutionist or team of evolutionists who disagree with what I have written. A neutral editor, acting as judge, would ensure the debate rules were followed; the jury would be all readers. Both sides would have the right to publish the complete debate if a large publisher chose not to.

Leading evolutionists have known of this offer for many years. It was published in the well-known anticreation journal, Creation-Evolution , in 1990. The offer was even placed on the worldwide web in 1995. So far, no evolutionist has been willing to participate. (A few initially accepted but quickly dropped out, usually because they were unwilling to limit the exchange to science. Instead they wanted to include their religious views.) This debate offer is explained below. Can you find a taker?

How Long Would It Take the Moon to Recede from Earth to Its Present Position?

Evolutionists believe (1) the Earth and Moon are 4.5 billion years old, and (2) with enough time bacteria will change into people. We have all heard some evolutionists say, “Given enough time, anything can happen.” This simplistic attitude overlooks two things. First, most conceivable events will not happen, because they would violate well-established laws of science.1 Second, if 4.5 billion years have elapsed, many things should have occurred that obviously have not. Rather than “time being the hero of the plot,” as one prominent evolutionist stated,2 immense amounts of time cause problems for evolution, as you will now see.

Most dating techniques, including the majority that indicate young ages, make the three basic assumptions given on page 31. The following dating technique has few, if any, major assumptions. It relies basically on only the law of gravity and one undisputed and frequently repeated measurement. We will look at the forces causing the Moon to spiral farther and farther away from Earth. Then we will see that this spiraling action could not have been happening for the length of time evolutionists say the Earth and Moon have been around.

It will be shown that if the Moon began orbiting very near the Earth, it would move to its present position in only 1.2 billion years. Stated another way, if we could run the clock backwards, in 1.2 billion years the Moon would be so close to Earth that ocean tides would sweep over all mountains. Astronomers who are aware of this problem call it “the lunar crisis.”3 Notice that this conclusion does not say that the Earth-Moon system is 1.2 billion years old; it only says that the Earth-Moon system must be less than 1.2 billion years old. Had the Moon begun orbiting Earth slightly inside the Moon’s present orbit, its age would be much less. Obviously, something is wrong with either the law of gravity or evolutionists’ belief that the Earth-Moon system is 4.5 billion years old. Most astute people would place their confidence in the law of gravity, which has been verified by tens of thousands of experiments.

What causes tides? If the Moon’s gravity attracted equally every particle in and on Earth, there would be no tides. Tides are caused by slight differences in the Moon’s gravitational forces throughout Earth.4 As shown in Figure 156, the Moon pulls more on ocean particle A, directly under the Moon, than it does the center of Earth, C, because A is closer to the Moon. Therefore, A, pulled with slightly more force, moves proportionally farther toward the Moon than C, creating a tidal bulge. Likewise, water particle B, on the far side of Earth, is pulled with slightly less force than C. This difference pulls Earth away from B, creating the far tidal bulge.

How does the height of ocean tides relate to the Earth-Moon separation distance (R)? According to Newton’s law of gravitation, the Moon’s gravitational force pulls on Earth’s center of mass (C) with a force proportional to 1/R2. Water particle A directly under the Moon is one Earth radius (r) closer, so it is pulled by a force proportional to 1/(R-r)2.

Because r is much less than R, the numerator on the right is almost 2rR and its denominator is almost R4.

Because Earth’s radius (r) is constant, we can conclude that the height of the tides is proportional to 1/R3. For example, if the Earth-Moon distance suddenly doubled, the tides caused by the Moon would be only 1/8th as high.5

How do tides affect the Moon’s orbit and the Earth’s spin rate? Surprisingly, the tidal bulges do not line up directly under the Moon as shown in Figure 156. This is because the spinning Earth carries the bulges out of alignment as shown in Figure 157. If Earth spun faster in the past, as we will see, the misalignment would have been even greater.

Let’s think of Earth as composed of two parts: a spherical portion (gray in Figure 157) and the tidal bulges—both water and solid tides.6 Gs is the gravitational force the Moon feels from the spherical portion of Earth. Because Gs is aligned with the centers of Earth and Moon, it does not alter the Moon’s orbit. However, the near tidal bulge, because it is offset, pulls the Moon in a direction shown by Gn, with a tangential component, Fn, in the direction of the Moon’s orbital motion. Fn accelerates the Moon in the direction it is moving, flinging it into an increasingly larger orbit. The far tidal bulge has an opposite but slightly weaker effect—weaker because it is farther from the Moon. The far bulge produces a gravitational force, Gf, and a retarding force on the Moon, Ff. The net strength of this accelerating force is (Fn - Ff). It can also be thought of as a thrust pushing the Moon tangential to its orbit, moving the Moon farther from Earth. This accelerating force allows us to calculate an upper limit on the age of the Moon. Today’s recession rate has been precisely measured at 3.82 cm/yr,7 but as you will see, it was faster in the past.

Conversely, the Moon’s net gravitational pull applies an equal and opposite force on Earth’s tidal bulges, slowing Earth’s spin. In other words, the Earth spun slightly faster in the past.

Discussion

The lunar surface is composed of a powdery soil, an inch or so thick, below which are 4–10 meters of regolith.6 The Moon’s regolith consists of a range of particle sizes from fine dust up to blocks several meters wide. Meteoritic impacts overturn and mix this soil-regolith, each time coating the outer surfaces with very thin layers of condensed meteoritic material.

The expected thickness of the soil-regolith, as shown in Table 27 where we assumed 4.5 billion years of bombardment at only today’s rate, exceeds by about 50 times its actual thickness. Most of this calculated thickness comes from Region D—meteorites larger than 106 grams but smaller than meteorites that can form craters 100 km in diameter. Why are the contributions from Regions A, B, and C so much smaller?

We made two faulty assumptions. First, we assumed that the influx of meteoritic material, for Regions A, B, and C, has always been what it is today. Obviously, as time has passed, the influx has decreased enormously because moons and planets sweep meteoritic material up or expel it beyond the Earth-Moon neighborhood. Only Point E, which strongly influenced Region D, did not have that assumption. Point E is based on rocks that we know struck the Moon sometime in the past. Removing this assumption increases the expected thickness even more in all regions7 and would partly explain why Region D contributes so much to our total expected thickness.

Second, Table 27 assumes that the impactors fell steadily from outer space as they do today. However, the caption to Heat flow measurements on the Moon are also consistent with a recent cratering event. [See “Hot Moon” on page page 36 and the corresponding endnote on page 95.]What if all lunar impactors were of two types: primary and secondary? The primary impactors were large, extremely high-velocity rocks fired from Earth by the fountains of the great deep. Those impacts formed the giant multiringed basins that dominate the Moon’s near side. The resulting debris and other space debris were secondary impactors. Consequently, primary impactors account for Point E, and secondary impactors account for much smaller and slower impactors. Therefore, Region D requires less impactor mass than our interpolation assumed.

1. The Law of Biogenesis

a


. And yet, leading evolutionists are forced to accept some form of spontaneous generation. For example, a former Harvard University professor and Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine acknowledged the dilemma.


The reasonable view [during the two centuries before Louis Pasteur] was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, Vol. 190, August 1954, p. 46.


With no rationale given, Wald goes on to accept the impossible odds of spontaneous generation rather than creation.


One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. Ibid.

b


. “The beginning of the evolutionary process raises a question which is as yet unanswerable. What was the origin of life on this planet? Until fairly recent times there was a pretty general belief in the occurrence of ‘spontaneous generation.’ It was supposed that lowly forms of life developed spontaneously from, for example, putrefying meat. But careful experiments, notably those of Pasteur, showed that this conclusion was due to imperfect observation, and it became an accepted doctrine [the law of biogenesis] that life never arises except from life. So far as actual evidence goes, this is still the only possible conclusion. But since it is a conclusion that seems to lead back to some supernatural creative act, it is a conclusion that scientific men find very difficult of acceptance. It carries with it what are felt to be, in the present mental climate, undesirable philosophic implications, and it is opposed to the scientific desire for continuity. It introduces an unaccountable break in the chain of causation, and therefore cannot be admitted as part of science unless it is quite impossible to reject it. For that reason most scientific men prefer to believe that life arose, in some way not yet understood, from inorganic matter in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry.” J. W. N. Sullivan, The Limitations of Science (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1933), p. 94.

2. Acquired Characteristics

a


. The false belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited, called Lamarckism, would mean that the environment can directly and beneficially change egg and sperm cells. Only a few biologists try to justify Lamarckism. The minor acquired characteristics they cite have no real significance for any present theory of organic evolution. For example, see “Lamarck, Dr. Steel and Plagiarism,” Nature, Vol. 337, 12 January 1989, pp. 101–102.

b


. “This hypothesis [called “pangenesis” which Darwin proposed] maintained the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics.” A. M. Winchester, Genetics, 5th edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), p. 24.

c


“... it is a perplexing evolutionary question how a population might move to a different local optimum without an intervening period of reduced fitness (adaptive valley).” Christine Queitsch et al., “Hsp90 as a Capacitor of Phenotypic Variation,” Nature, Vol. 417, 6 June 2002, p. 623.

d


. “... genes that were switched on in the parent to generate the defensive response are also switched on in the offspring.” Erkki Haukioja, “Bite the Mother, Fight the Daughter,” Nature, Vol. 401, 2 September 1999, p. 23.
u

“... non-lethal exposure of an animal to carnivores, and a plant to a herbivore, not only induces a defence, but causes the attacked organisms to produce offspring that are better defended than offspring from unthreatened parents.” Anurag A. Agrawal et al., “Transgenerational Induction of Defences in Animals and Plants,” Nature, Vol. 401, 2 September 1999, p. 60.
u

“... hidden genetic diversity exists within species and can erupt when [environmental] conditions change.” John Travis, “Evolutionary Shocker?: Stressful Conditions May Trigger Plants and Animals to Unleash New Forms Quickly,” Science News, Vol. 161, 22 June 2002, p. 394.
u

“Environmental stress can reveal genetic variants, presumably because it compromises buffering systems. If selected for, these uncovered phenotypes can lead to heritable changes in plants and animals (assimilation).” Queitsch et al., p. 618.

e


. Marina Chicurel, “Can Organisms Speed Their Own Evolution?” Science, Vol. 292, 8 June 2001, pp. 1824–1827.

3. Mendel’s Laws

a


. Monroe W. Strickberger, Genetics, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 812.
u

Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently proposed the theory of organic evolution slightly before Charles Darwin, was opposed to Mendel’s laws of genetics. Wallace knew Mendel’s experiments showed that the general characteristics of an organism remained within distinct boundaries. In a letter to Dr. Archdall Reid on 28 December 1909, Wallace wrote:


But on the general relation of Mendelism to Evolution I have come to a very definite conclusion. This is, that it has no relation whatever to the evolution of species or higher groups, but is really antagonistic to such evolution! The essential basis of evolution, involving as it does the most minute and all-pervading adaptation to the whole environment, is extreme and ever-present plasticity, as a condition of survival and adaptation. But the essence of Mendelian characters is their rigidity. They are transmitted without variation, and therefore, except by the rarest of accidents, can never become adapted to ever varying conditions. James Marchant, Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), p. 340.

b


. “Every series of breeding experiments that has ever taken place has established a finite limit to breeding possibilities.” Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor and Fields, 1982), p. 55.
u

“All competent biologists acknowledge the limited nature of the variation breeders can produce, although they do not like to discuss it much when grinding the evolutionary ax.” William R. Fix, The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984), pp. 184–185.
u

“A rule that all breeders recognize, is that there are fixed limits to the amount of change that can be produced.” Lane P. Lester and Raymond G. Bohlin, The Natural Limits to Biological Change (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), p. 96.
u

Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (Ipswich, Massachusetts: Gambit, 1971), p. 36.
u

William J. Tinkle, Heredity (Houston: St. Thomas Press, 1967), pp. 55–56.

c


. “... the distinctions of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1927), p. 322.
u

“Indeed, the isolation and distinctness of different types of organisms and the existence of clear discontinuities in nature have been self-evident for centuries, even to non-biologists.” Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, 1985), p. 105.

5. Natural Selection

a


. In 1835 and again in 1837, Edward Blyth, a creationist, published an explanation of natural selection. Later, Charles Darwin adopted it as the foundation for his theory, evolution by natural selection. Darwin failed to credit Blyth for his important insight. [See evolutionist Loren C. Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), pp. 45–80.]


Darwin also largely ignored Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently proposed the theory that is usually credited solely to Darwin. In 1855, Wallace published the theory of evolution in a brief note in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, a note that Darwin read. Again, on 9 March 1858, Wallace explained the theory in a letter to Darwin, 20 months before Darwin finally published his more detailed theory of evolution.


Edward Blyth also showed why natural selection would limit an organism’s characteristics to only slight deviations from those of all its ancestors. Twenty-four years later, Darwin tried to refute Blyth’s explanation in a chapter in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (24 November 1859).


Darwin felt that, with enough time, gradual changes could accumulate. Charles Lyell’s writings (1830) had persuaded Darwin that the earth was at least hundreds of thousands of years old. James Hutton’s writings (1788) had convinced Lyell that the earth was extremely old. Hutton felt that certain geological formations supported an old earth. Those geological formations are explained, not by time, but by a global flood. [See pages 100–255.]
u

“Darwin was confronted by a genuinely unusual problem. The mechanism, natural selection, by which he hoped to prove the reality of evolution, had been written about most intelligently by a nonevolutionist [Edward Blyth]. Geology, the time world which it was necessary to attach to natural selection in order to produce [hopefully] the mechanism of organic change, had been beautifully written upon by a man [Charles Lyell] who had publicly repudiated the evolutionary position.” Eiseley, p. 76.
u

Charles Darwin also plagiarized in other instances. [See Jerry Bergman, “Did Darwin Plagiarize His Evolution Theory?” Technical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002, pp. 58–63.]

b


. “[Natural selection] may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It is not a creative force as many people have suggested.” Daniel Brooks, as quoted by Roger Lewin, “A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity,” Science, Vol. 217, 24 September 1982, p. 1240.
u

“The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that natural selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well.” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, Vol. 86, June–July 1977, p. 28.

c


. G. Z. Opadia-Kadima, “How the Slot Machine Led Biologists Astray,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 124, 1987, pp. 127–135.

d


. Eric Penrose, “Bacterial Resistance to Antibiotics—A Case of Un-Natural Selection,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 35, September 1998, pp. 76–83.

e


. Well-preserved bodies of members of the Franklin expedition, frozen in the Canadian Arctic in 1845, contain bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Because the first antibiotics were developed in the early 1940s, these resistant bacteria could not have evolved in response to antibiotics. Contamination has been eliminated as a possibility. [See Rick McGuire, “Eerie: Human Arctic Fossils Yield Resistant Bacteria,” Medical Tribune, 29 December 1988, p. 1.]
u

“The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds.” Francisco J. Ayala, “The Mechanisms of Evolution,” Scientific American, Vol. 239, September 1978, p. 65.

f


. “Darwin complained his critics did not understand him, but he did not seem to realize that almost everybody, friends, supporters and critics, agreed on one point, his natural selection cannot account for the origin of the variations, only for their possible survival. And the reasons for rejecting Darwin’s proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous.” Søren Løvtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 274–275.
u

“It was a shock to the people of the 19th century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.” Michael J. Behe, “Molecular Machines,” Cosmic Pursuit, Spring 1998, p. 35.

g


. In 1980, the “Macroevolution Conference” was held in Chicago. Roger Lewin, writing for Science, described it as a “turning point in the history of evolutionary theory.” He went on to say:


The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No. Roger Lewin, “Evolution Theory under Fire,” Science, Vol. 210, 21 November 1980, p. 883.


“In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis [neo-Darwinism] in the United States, said ‘We would not have predicted stasis [the stability of species over time] from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.’ ” Ibid., p. 884.


As stated earlier, micro + time ≠ macro.
u

“One could argue at this point that such ‘minor’ changes [microevolution], extrapolated over millions of years, could result in macroevolutionary change. But the observational evidence will not support this argument ... [examples given] Thus, the changes observed in the laboratory are not analogous to the sort of changes needed for macroevolution. Those who argue from microevolution to macroevolution may be guilty, then, of employing a false analogy—especially when one considers that microevolution may be a force of stasis [stability], not transformation. ... For those who must describe the history of life as a purely natural phenomenon, the winnowing action of natural selection is truly a difficult problem to overcome. For scientists who are content to describe accurately those processes and phenomena which occur in nature (in particular, stasis), natural selection acts to prevent major evolutionary change.” Michael Thomas, “Stasis Considered,” Origins Research, Vol. 12, Fall/Winter 1989, p. 11.

6. Mutations

a


. “Ultimately, all variation is, of course, due to mutation.” Ernst Mayr, “Evolutionary Challenges to the Mathematical Interpretation of Evolution,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, proceedings of a symposium held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 25–26 April, 1966 (Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute Press, 1967), p. 50.
u

“Although mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation, it is a relatively rare event, ...” Ayala, p. 63.

b


. “The process of mutation is the only known source of the raw materials of genetic variability, and hence of evolution. ... the mutants which arise are, with rare exceptions, deleterious to their carriers, at least in the environments which the species normally encounters.” Theodosius Dobzhansky, “On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology,” American Scientist, December 1957, p. 385.
u

“In molecular biology, various kinds of mutations introduce the equivalent of noise pollution of the original instructive message. Communication theory goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent noise pollution of signals of all kinds. Given this longstanding struggle against noise contamination of meaningful algorithmic messages, it seems curious that the central paradigm of biology today attributes genomic messages themselves solely to noise.” David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information,” Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, p. 10. (Also available at www.tbiomed.com/content/2/1/29.)
u

“Accordingly, mutations are more than just sudden changes in heredity; they also affect viability, and, to the best of our knowledge, invariably affect it adversely.” C. P. Martin, “A Non-Geneticist Looks at Evolution,” American Scientist, January 1953, p. 102.


“Mutation does produce hereditary changes, but the mass of evidence shows that all, or almost all, known mutations are unmistakably pathological and the few remaining ones are highly suspect.” Ibid., p. 103.


“[Although mutations have produced some desirable breeds of animals and plants,] all mutations seem to be in the nature of injuries that, to some extent, impair the fertility and viability of the affected organisms. I doubt if among the many thousands of known mutant types one can be found which is superior to the wild type in its normal environment, only very few can be named which are superior to the wild type in a strange environment.” Ibid., p. 100.
u

“If we say that it is only by chance that they [mutations] are useful, we are still speaking too leniently. In general, they are useless, detrimental, or lethal.” W. R. Thompson, “Introduction to The Origin of Species,” Everyman Library No. 811 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Sons, 1956; reprint, Sussex, England: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1967), p. 10.
u

Visible mutations are easily detectable genetic changes such as albinism, dwarfism, and hemophilia. Winchester quantifies the relative frequency of several types of mutations.


Lethal mutations outnumber visibles by about 20 to 1. Mutations that have small harmful effects, the detrimental mutations, are even more frequent than the lethal ones. Winchester, p. 356.
u

John W. Klotz, Genes, Genesis, and Evolution, 2nd edition, revised (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), pp. 262–265.
u

“... I took a little trouble to find whether a single amino acid change in a hemoglobin mutation is known that doesn’t affect seriously the function of that hemoglobin. One is hard put to find such an instance.” George Wald, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, pp. 18–19.


However, evolutionists have taught for years that hemoglobin alpha changed through mutations into hemoglobin beta. This would require, at a minimum, 120 point mutations. In other words, the improbability Wald refers to above must be raised to the 120th power to produce just this one protein!
u

“Even if we didn’t have a great deal of data on this point, we could still be quite sure on theoretical grounds that mutants would usually be detrimental. For a mutation is a random change of a highly organized, reasonably smoothly functioning living body. A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is almost certain to impair it—just as a random interchange of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture.” James F. Crow (Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconsin), “Genetic Effects of Radiation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, January 1958, pp. 19–20.
u

“The one systematic effect of mutation seems to be a tendency towards degeneration ...” [emphasis in original] Sewall Wright, “The Statistical Consequences of Mendelian Heredity in Relation to Speciation,” The New Systematics, editor Julian Huxley (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 174.


Wright then concludes that other factors must also have been involved, because he believes evolution happened.
u

In discussing the many mutations needed to produce a new organ, Koestler says:


Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all interdependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1968), p. 129.

c


. “There is no single instance where it can be maintained that any of the mutants studied has a higher vitality than the mother species.” N. Heribert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag CWK Gleerup, 1953), p. 1157.


“It is, therefore, absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations.” [emphasis in original] Ibid., p. 1186.
u

“No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.” Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms (New York: Academic Press, 1977), p. 88.
u

“I have seen no evidence whatsoever that these [evolutionary] changes can occur through the accumulation of gradual mutations.” Lynn Margulis, as quoted by Charles Mann, “Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,” Science, Vol. 252, 19 April 1991, p. 379.
u

“It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macromutation. It is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micromutations.” Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist, Vol. 40, January 1952, p. 94.
u

“If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations.” Frank B. Salisbury, “Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene,” Nature, Vol. 224, 25 October 1969, p. 342.
u

“Do we, therefore, ever see mutations going about the business of producing new structures for selection to work on? No nascent organ has ever been observed emerging, though their origin in pre-functional form is basic to evolutionary theory. Some should be visible today, occurring in organisms at various stages up to integration of a functional new system, but we don’t see them: there is no sign at all of this kind of radical novelty. Neither observation nor controlled experiment has shown natural selection manipulating mutations so as to produce a new gene, hormone, enzyme system or organ.” Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (London: Rider, 1984), pp. 67–68.

7. Fruit Flies

a


. “Most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors. The classical mutants obtained in Drosophila [the fruit fly] usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs. Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, and in the body reduce the wings, eyes, bristles, legs. Many mutants are, in fact, lethal to their possessors. Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority, and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization in the normal environments are unknown.” Theodosius Dobzhansky, Evolution, Genetics, and Man (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1955), p. 105.
u

“A review of known facts about their [mutated fruit flies’] ability to survive has led to no other conclusion than that they are always constitutionally weaker than their parent form or species, and in a population with free competition they are eliminated. Therefore they are never found in nature (e.g., not a single one of the several hundreds of Drosophila mutations), and therefore they are able to appear only in the favourable environment of the experimental field or laboratory ...” Nilsson, p. 1186.
u

“In the best-known organisms, like Drosophila, innumerable mutants are known. If we were able to combine a thousand or more of such mutants in a single individual, this still would have no resemblance whatsoever to any type known as a [new] species in nature.” Goldschmidt, p. 94.
u

“It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world—flies which produce a new generation every eleven days—they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.” Gordon Rattray Taylor (former Chief Science Advisor, BBC Television), The Great Evolution Mystery (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 48.
u

“Fruit flies refuse to become anything but fruit flies under any circumstances yet devised.” Hitching, p. 61.
u

“The fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster), the favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical, biotopical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out, seems not to have changed since the remotest times.” Grassé, p. 130.

8. Complex Molecules and Organs

a


. “There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems.” Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 179.
u

“Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature—in prestigious journals, speciality journals, or book—that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that—like the contention that the Eagles will win the Super Bowl this year—the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.” Behe, p. 186.

b


. “While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of [1985] Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.” John K. Stevens, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” Byte, April 1985, p. 287.
u

“Was the eye contrived without skill in opticks [optics], and the ear without knowledge of sounds?” Isaac Newton, Opticks (England: 1704; reprint, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), pp. 369–370.
u

“Certainly there are those who argue that the universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system of the human eye?” Wernher von Braun (probably the rocket scientist most responsible for the United States’ success in placing men on the Moon) from a letter written by Dr. Wernher von Braun and read to the California State Board of Education by Dr. John Ford on 14 September 1972.
u

“What random process could possibly explain the simultaneous evolution of the eye’s optical system, the nervous conductors of the optical signals from the eye to the brain, and the optical nerve center in the brain itself where the incoming light impulses are converted to an image the conscious mind can comprehend?” Wernher von Braun, foreword to From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo by Harold Hill (Plainfield, New Jersey: Logos International, 1976), p. xi.
u

“The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Dürer’s ‘Melancholia’ is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye; besides, these errors had no relationship whatsoever with the function that the eye would have to perform or was starting to perform. There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it.” [emphasis in original] Grassé, p. 104.
u

“It must be admitted, however, that it is a considerable strain on one’s credulity to assume that finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of vertebrates, or the bird’s feather) could be improved by random mutations. This is even more true for some of the ecological chain relationships (the famous yucca moth case, and so forth). However, the objectors to random mutations have so far been unable to advance any alternative explanation that was supported by substantial evidence.” Ernst Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species (New York: Dover Publications, 1942), p. 296.
u

Although Robert Jastrow generally accepts Darwinian evolution, he acknowledges that:


It is hard to accept the evolution of the human eye as a product of chance; it is even harder to accept the evolution of human intelligence as the product of random disruptions in the brain cells of our ancestors. Robert Jastrow, “Evolution: Selection for Perfection,” Science Digest, December 1981, p. 87.
u

Many leading scientists have commented on the staggering complexity of the human eye. What some do not appreciate is how many diverse types of eyes there are, each of which adds to the problem for evolution.
        v

One of the strangest is a multiple-lensed, compound eye found in fossilized worms! [See Donald G. Mikulic et al., “A Silurian Soft-Bodied Biota,” Science, Vol. 228, 10 May 1985, pp. 715–717.]
        v

Another type of eye belonged to some trilobites, a thumb-size, extinct, sea-bottom creature. Evolutionists claim they were very early forms of life. Trilobite eyes had compound lenses, sophisticated designs for eliminating image distortion (spherical aberration). Only the best cameras and telescopes contain compound lenses. Some trilobite eyes contained 280 lenses, allowing vision in all directions, day and night. [See Richard Fortey and Brian Chatterton, “A Devonian Trilobite with an Eyeshade,” Science, Vol. 301, 19 September 2003, p. 1689.] Trilobite eyes “represent an all-time feat of function optimization.” [Riccardo Levi-Setti, Trilobites, 2nd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 29–74.] Shawver described trilobite eyes as having “the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature.” [Lisa J. Shawver, “Trilobite Eyes: An Impressive Feat of Early Evolution,” Science News, Vol. 105, 2 February 1974, p. 72.] Gould admitted that “The eyes of early trilobites, for example, have never been exceeded for complexity or acuity by later arthropods. ... I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.” [Stephen Jay Gould, “The Ediacaran Experiment,” Natural History, February 1984, pp. 22–23.]
        v

The brittlestar, an animal similar to a 5-arm starfish, has, as part of its skeleton, thousands of eyes, each smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Each eye consists of a calcium carbonate crystal that acts as a compound lens and precisely focuses light on a bundle of nerves. If an arm is lost, a new arm regenerates along with its array of eyes mounted on the upper-back side of the arm. While evolutionists had considered these animals primitive, Sambles admits that “Once again we find that nature foreshadowed our technical developments.” Roy Sambles, “Armed for Light Sensing,” Nature, Vol. 412, 23 August 2001, p. 783. The capabilities of these light-focusing lenses exceed today’s technology.

c


. “To my mind the human brain is the most marvelous and mysterious object in the whole universe and no geologic period seems too long to allow for its natural evolution.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, an influential evolutionist speaking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1929, as told by Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1987), p. 57. [Even greater capabilities of the brain have been discovered since 1929. Undoubtedly, more remain. W.B.]
u

“And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.” Isaac Asimov, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even,” Smithsonian, August 1970, p. 10.


Asimov forgot that the brain, and presumably most of its details, is coded by only a fraction of an individual’s DNA. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that DNA is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter known in the universe.
u

The human brain is frequently likened to a supercomputer. In most respects the brain greatly exceeds any computer’s capabilities. Speed is one area where the computer beats the brain—at least in some ways. For example, few of us can quickly multiply 0.0239 times 854.95. This task is called a floating point operation, because the decimal point “floats” until we (or a computer) decide where to place it. The number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) is a measure of a computer’s speed. As of this writing, an IBM computer can achieve 70 trillion FLOPS (70 teraFLOPS). Within the next few years, petaFLOPS machines (peta: 1015) will be commonplace. One challenge is to prevent these superfast computers from melting. Too much electrically generated heat is dissipated in too small a volume.


Overall, the human brain seems to operate at petaFLOPS speeds—without overheating. One knowledgeable observer on these ultrafast computers commented:


The human brain itself serves, in some sense, as a proof of concept [that cool petaFLOPS machines are possible]. Its dense network of neurons apparently operates at a petaFLOPS or higher level. Yet the whole device fits in a 1 liter box and uses only about 10 watts of power. That’s a hard act to follow. Ivars Peterson, “PetaCrunchers: Setting a Course toward Ultrafast Supercomputing,” Science News, Vol. 147, 15 April 1995, p. 235.


How, then, could the brain have evolved?

d


. “The human brain consists of about ten thousand million nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out somewhere in the region of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand connecting fibres by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. ... a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth.” Denton, pp. 330–331.
u

“... the human brain probably contains more than 1014 synapses ...” Deborah M. Barnes, “Brain Architecture: Beyond Genes,” Science, Vol. 233, 11 July 1986, p. 155.

e


. Marlyn E. Clark, Our Amazing Circulatory System, Technical Monograph No. 5 (San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers, 1976).

9. Fully-Developed Organs

a


. William Paley, Natural Theology (England: 1802; reprint, Houston, Texas: St. Thomas Press, 1972).


This work by Paley, which contains many powerful arguments for a Creator, is a classic in scientific literature. Some might feel that because it was written in 1802, it is out of date. Not so. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe compared Darwin’s ideas with those of Paley as follows:


The speculations of The Origin of Species turned out to be wrong, as we have seen in this chapter. It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner. Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), pp. 96–97.

b


. Asa Gray, a famous Harvard botany professor, who was to become a leading theistic evolutionist, wrote to Darwin expressing doubt that natural processes could explain the formation of complex organs such as the eye. Darwin expressed a similar concern in his return letter of February 1860.


The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations [possible if millions of years of evolution were available], my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2, editor Francis Darwin (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899), pp. 66–67.


And yet, Darwin admitted that:


To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 175.


Darwin then proceeded to speculate on how the eye might nevertheless have evolved. However, no evidence was given. Later, he explained how his theory could be falsified.


If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 179.
u

“It’s one of the oldest riddles in evolutionary biology: How does natural selection gradually create an eye, or any complex organ for that matter? The puzzle troubled Charles Darwin, who nevertheless gamely nailed together a ladder of how it might have happened—from photoreceptor cells to highly refined orbits—by drawing examples from living organisms such as mollusks and arthropods. But holes in this progression have persistently bothered evolutionary biologists and left openings that creationists have been only too happy to exploit.” Virginia Morell, “Placentas May Nourish Complexity Studies,” Science, Vol. 298, 1 November 2002, p. 945.


David Reznick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California (Riverside), explained to Virginia Morell:


Darwin had to use organisms from different classes, because there isn’t a living group of related organisms that have all the steps for making an eye. Ibid.


To solve this dilemma, Reznick points to different species of a guppylike fish, some of which have no placenta and others that have “tissues that might become placentas.” However, when pressed, “Reznick admits that the [guppylike fish’s] placenta might not be as sophisticated as the mammalian placenta” [or the eye of any organism]. Ibid.
u

“The eye, as one of the most complex organs, has been the symbol and archetype of his [Darwin’s] dilemma. Since the eye is obviously of no use at all except in its final, complete form, how could natural selection have functioned in those initial stages of its evolution when the variations had no possible survival value? No single variation, indeed no single part, being of any use without every other, and natural selection presuming no knowledge of the ultimate end or purpose of the organ, the criterion of utility, or survival, would seem to be irrelevant. And there are other equally provoking examples of organs and processes which seem to defy natural selection. Biochemistry provides the case of chemical synthesis built up in several stages, of which the intermediate substance formed at any one stage is of no value at all, and only the end product, the final elaborate and delicate machinery, is useful—and not only useful but vital to life. How can selection, knowing nothing of the end or final purpose of this process, function when the only test is precisely that end or final purpose?” Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 320–321.

c


. “Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” p. 23.

11. Altruism

a


. “... the existence of altruism between different species—which is not uncommon—remains an obstinate enigma.” Taylor, p. 225.
u

Some inherited behavior is lethal to the animal but beneficial to unrelated species. For example, dolphins sometimes protect humans from deadly sharks. Many animals (goats, lambs, rabbits, horses, frogs, toads) scream when a predator discovers them. This increases their exposure but warns other species.

b


. From an evolutionist’s point of view, a very costly form of altruism occurs when an animal forgoes reproduction while caring for another individual’s young. This occurs in some human societies where a man has multiple wives who share in raising the children of one wife. More well-known examples include celibate individuals (such as nuns and many missionaries) who devote themselves to helping others. Such traits should never have evolved, or if they accidentally arose, they should quickly die out.


Adoption is another example.


From a Darwinian standpoint, going childless by choice is hard enough to explain, but adoption, as the arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins notes, is a double whammy. Not only do you reduce, or at least fail to increase, your own reproductive success, but you improve someone else’s. Since the birth parent is your rival in the great genetic steeplechase, a gene that encourages adoption should be knocked out of the running in fairly short order. Cleo Sullivan, “The Adoption Paradox,” Discover, January 2001, p. 80.


Adoption is known even among mice, rats, skunks, llamas, deer, caribou, kangaroos, wallabies, seals, sea lions, dogs, pigs, goats, sheep, bears, and many primates. Altruism is also shown by some people who have pets—a form of adoption—especially individuals who have pets in lieu of having children.
u

Humans, vertebrates, and invertebrates frequently help raise the unrelated young of others.


... it is not clear that the degree of relatedness is consistently higher in cooperative breeders than in other species that live in stable groups but do not breed cooperatively. In many societies of vertebrates as well as invertebrates, differences in contributions to rearing young do not appear to vary with the relatedness of helpers, and several studies of cooperative birds and mammals have shown that helpers can be unrelated to the young they are raising and that the unrelated helpers invest as heavily as close relatives. Tim Clutton-Brock, “Breeding Together: Kin Selection and Mutualism in Cooperative Vertebrates,” Science, Vol. 296, 5 April 2002, p. 69.


Six different studies were cited in support of the conclusions above.

c


. “Ultimately, moral guidelines determine an essential part of economic life. How could such forms of social behavior evolve? This is a central question for Darwinian theory. The prevalence of altruistic acts—providing benefits to a recipient at a cost to the donor—can seem hard to reconcile with the idea of the selfish gene, the notion that evolution at its base acts solely to promote genes that are most adept at engineering their own proliferation. Benefits and costs are measured in terms of the ultimate biological currency—reproductive success. Genes that reduce this success are unlikely to spread in a population.” Karl Sigmund et al., “The Economics of Fair Play,” Scientific American, Vol. 286, January 2002, p. 87.

d


. Some evolutionists propose the following explanation for this long-standing and widely recognized problem for evolution: “Altruistic behavior may prevent the altruistic individual from passing on his or her genes, but it benefits the individual’s clan that carries a few of those genes.” This hypothesis has five problems—the last two are fatal.
        v

Observations do not support it. [See Clutton-Brock, pp. 69–72.]
        v

“... altruistic behavior toward relatives may at some later time led to increased competition between relatives, reducing or even completely removing the net selective advantage of altruism.” Stuart A. West et al., “Cooperation and Competition between Relatives,” Science, Vol. 296, 5 April 2002, p. 73.
        v

If individual X’s altruistic trait was inherited, that trait should be carried recessively in only half the individual’s brothers and sisters, one-eighth of the first cousins, etc. The key question then is: Does this “fractional altruism” benefit these relatives enough that they sire enough children with the altruistic trait? On average, one or more in the next generation must have the trait, and no generation can ever lose the trait. Otherwise, the trait will become extinct.
        v

If X did not inherit the altruistic trait but got it from a rare mutation, then probably no brothers, sisters, or cousins have the trait. No matter how much the individual’s clan benefits, the trait will become extinct. From an evolutionist’s perspective, all altruistic traits had to originate this way. Therefore, altruistic traits cannot survive the first generation.
        v

The hypothesis fails to explain altruism between different species. Without discussing examples that require a knowledge of the life patterns of such species, consider the simple example above of humans who forgo having children in order to care for animals.

12. Extraterrestrial Life?

a


. The widely publicized claims, made by NASA in 1996, to have found fossilized life in a meteorite from Mars are now largely dismissed. [See Richard A. Kerr, “Requiem for Life on Mars? Support for Microbes Fades,” Science, Vol. 282, 20 November 1998, pp. 1398–1400.]

13. Language

a


. G. F. Marcus et al., “Rule Learning by Seven-Month-Old Infants,” Science, Vol. 283, 1 January 1999, pp. 77–80.

b


. Arthur Custance, Genesis and Early Man (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1975), pp. 250–271.
u

“Nobody knows how [language] began. There doesn’t seem to be anything like syntax in non-human animals and it is hard to imagine evolutionary forerunners of it.” Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), p. 294.

c


. “Projects devoted to teaching chimpanzees and gorillas to use language have shown that these apes can learn vocabularies of visual symbols. There is no evidence, however, that apes can combine such symbols in order to create new meanings. The function of the symbols of an ape’s vocabulary appears to be not so much to identify things or to convey information as it is to satisfy a demand that it use that symbol in order to obtain some reward.” H. S. Terrance et al., “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science, Vol. 206, 23 November 1979, p. 900.
u

“... human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.” Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (Chicago: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), p. 59.

d


. “No languageless community has ever been found.” Jean Aitchison, The Atlas of Languages (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1996), p. 10.
u

“There is no reason to suppose that the ‘gaps’ [in language development between apes and man] are bridgeable.” Chomsky, p. 60.

e


. “... [concerning imitation, not language] only humans can lose one modality (e.g., hearing) and make up for this deficit by communicating with complete competence in a different modality (i.e., signing).” Marc D. Hauser et al., “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science, Vol. 298, 22 November 2002, p. 1575.

f


. David C. C. Watson, The Great Brain Robbery (Chicago: Moody Press, 1976), pp. 83–89.
u

George Gaylord Simpson acknowledged the vast gulf that separates animal communication and human languages. Although he recognized the apparent pattern of language development from complex to simple, he could not digest it. He simply wrote, “Yet it is incredible that the first language could have been the most complex.” He then shifted to a new subject. George Gaylord Simpson, Biology and Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), p. 116.
u

“Many other attempts have been made to determine the evolutionary origin of language, and all have failed. ... Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers. ... The oldest language that can reasonably be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view.” George Gaylord Simpson, “The Biological Nature of Man,” Science, Vol. 152, 22 April 1966, p. 477.
u

“The evolution of language, at least within the historical period, is a story of progressive simplification.” Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 2nd edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1957), p. 10.
u

“The so-called primitive languages can throw no light on language origins, since most of them are actually more complicated in grammar than the tongues spoken by civilized peoples.” Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 9.

g


. “It was Charles Darwin who first linked the evolution of languages to biology. In The Descent of Man (1871), he wrote, ‘the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.’ But linguists cringe at the idea that evolution might transform simple languages into complex ones. Today it is believed that no language is, in any basic way, ‘prior’ to any other, living or dead. Language alters even as we speak it, but it neither improves nor degenerates.” Philip E. Ross, “Hard Words,” Scientific American, Vol. 264, April 1991, p. 144.
u

“Noam Chomsky ... has firmly established his point that grammar, and in particular syntax, is innate. Interested linguistics people ... are busily speculating on how the language function could have evolved ... Derek Bickerton (Univ. Hawaii) insists that this faculty must have come into being all at once.” John Maddox, “The Price of Language?” Nature, Vol. 388, 31 July 1997, p. 424.

15. Codes, Programs, and Information

a


. The genetic code is remarkably insensitive to translation errors. If the code were generated by random processes, as evolutionists believe, life would have needed about a million different starts before a code could have been stumbled on that was as resilient as the code used by all life today. [See Stephen J. Freeland and Laurence D. Hurst, “Evolution Encoded,” Scientific American, Vol. 290, April 2004, pp. 84–91.]
u

“This analysis gives us a reason to believe that the A–T and G–C choice forms the best pairs that are the most different from each other, so that their ubiquitous use in living things represents an efficient and successful choice rather than an accident of evolution.” [emphasis added] Larry Liebovitch as quoted by David Bradley, “The Genome Chose Its Alphabet with Care,” Science, Vol. 297, 13 September 2002, p. 1790.

b


. “No matter how many ‘bits’ of possible combinations it has, there is no reason to call it ‘information’ if it doesn’t at least have the potential of producing something useful. What kind of information produces function? In computer science, we call it a ‘program.’ Another name for computer software is an ‘algorithm.’ No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organisms with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?” Abel and Trevors, p. 8.
u

“No known hypothetical mechanism has even been suggested for the generation of nucleic acid algorithms.” Jack T. Trevors and David L. Abel, “Chance and Necessity Do Not Explain the Origin of Life,” Cell Biology International, Vol. 28, 2004, p. 730.

c


. For example, a computer file might contain information for printing a story, reproducing a picture at a given resolution, or producing a widget to specified tolerances. That information can usually be compressed to some degree, just as the English language could be compressed by eliminating every “u” that directly follows a “q”. After compression, the number of bits (0s or 1s) would be a measure of the information needed to produce the story, picture, or component.


Each living system can be described by its age and the information stored in its DNA. Each basic unit of DNA, called a nucleotide, can be one of four types. Therefore, each nucleotide represents two (log24 = 2) bits of information. Conceptual systems, such as ideas, a filing system, or a system for betting on race horses, can be explained in books. Several bits of information can define each symbol in these books. The number of bits of information, after compression, needed to duplicate and achieve the purpose of a system will be defined as its information content. That number is also a measure of the system’s complexity.


Objects and organisms are not information. Each is a complex combination of matter and energy that the right information could theoretically produce. Matter and energy alone cannot produce complex objects or living organisms.


While we may not know the precise amount of information in different organisms, we do know those numbers are enormous and quite different. Simply changing (mutating) a few bits to begin the gigantic leap toward evolving a new organ or organism would likely kill the host.
u

Werner Gitt (Professor of Information Systems) describes man as the most complex information processing system on earth. Gitt estimated that about 3 x 1024 bits of information are processed daily in an average human body. That is thousands of times more than all the information in all the world’s libraries. [See Werner Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information, 2nd edition (Bielefeld, Germany: CLV, 2000), p. 88.]

d


. “There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.” Ibid., p. 107.

e


. Because macroevolution requires increasing complexity through natural processes, the organism’s information content must spontaneously increase many times. However, natural processes cannot significantly increase the information content of an isolated system, such as a reproductive cell. Therefore, macroevolution cannot occur.
u

“The basic flaw of all evolutionary views is the origin of the information in living beings. It has never been shown that a coding system and semantic information could originate by itself in a material medium, and the information theorems predict that this will never be possible. A purely material origin of life is thus precluded.” Gitt, p. 124.

f


. Based on modern advances in the field of information theory, the only known way to decrease the entropy of an isolated system is by having intelligence in that system. [See, for example, Charles H. Bennett, “Demons, Engines and the Second Law,” Scientific American, Vol. 257, November 1987, pp. 108–116.] Because the universe is far from its maximum entropy level, a vast intelligence is the only known means by which the universe could have been brought into being. [See also “Second Law of Thermodynamics” on page 27.]

g


. If the “big bang” occurred, all the matter in the universe was at one time a hot gas. A gas is one of the most random systems known to science. Random, chaotic movements of gas molecules contain virtually no useful information. Because an isolated system, such as the universe, cannot generate nontrivial information, the “big bang” could not produce the complex, living universe we have today, which contains astronomical amounts of useful information.

17. Convergent Evolution or Intelligent Design?

a


. “... the definitive mammalian middle ear evolved independently in living monotremes and therians (marsupials and placentals).” Thomas H. Rich et al., “Independent Origins of Middle Ear Bones in Monotremes and Therians,” Science, Vol. 307, 11 February 2005, p. 910.
u

“Because of the complexity of the bone arrangement, some scientists have argued that the innovation arose just once—in a common ancestor of the three mammalian groups. Now, analyses of a jawbone from a specimen of Teinolophos trusleri, a shrew-size creature that lived in Australia about 115 million years ago, have dealt a blow to that notion.” Sid Perkins, “Groovy Bones,” Science News, Vol. 167, 12 February 2005, p. 100.

b


. Also, for mammals to hear also requires the organ of Corti and complex “wiring” in the brain. No known reptile (the supposed ancestor of mammals), living or fossil, has anything resembling this amazing organ.

c


. “By this we have also proved that a morphological similarity between organisms cannot be used as proof of a phylogenetic [evolutionary] relationship ... it is unscientific to maintain that the morphology may be used to prove relationships and evolution of the higher categories of units, ...” Nilsson, p. 1143.
u

“But biologists have known for a hundred years that homologous structures are often not produced by similar developmental pathways. And they have known for thirty years that they are often not produced by similar genes, either. So there is no empirically demonstrated mechanism to establish that homologies are due to common ancestry rather than common design.” Johathan Wells, “Survival of the Fakest,” The American Spectator, December 2000/January 2001, p. 22.

d


. Fix, pp. 189–191.
u

Denton, pp. 142–155.
u

“Therefore, homologous [similar] structures need not be controlled by identical genes, and homology of phenotypes does not imply similarity of genotypes. It is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced; for such inheritance cannot be ascribed to identity of genes. ... But if it is true that through the genetic code, genes code for enzymes that synthesize proteins which are responsible (in a manner still unknown in embryology) for the differentiation of the various parts in their normal manner, what mechanism can it be that results in the production of homologous organs, the same ‘patterns’, in spite of their not being controlled by the same genes? I asked this question in 1938, and it has not been answered.” [Nor has it been answered today. W.B.; emphasis in original] Gavin R. deBeer, formerly Professor of Embryology at the University of London and Director of the British Museum (Natural History), Homology, An Unsolved Problem (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 16.

e


. “Structures as obviously homologous as the alimentary canal in all vertebrates can be formed from the roof of the embryonic gut cavity (sharks), floor (lampreys, newts), roof and floor (frogs), or from the lower layer of the embryonic disc, the blastoderm, that floats on the top of heavily yolked eggs (reptiles, birds). It does not seem to matter where in the egg or the embryo the living substance out of which homologous organs are formed comes from. Therefore, correspondence between homologous structures cannot be pressed back to similarity of position of the cells of the embryo or the parts of the egg out of which these structures are ultimately differentiated.” [emphasis in original] Ibid., p. 13.

I had planned on starting a thread introducing Walt, Brown's Book which he gracously posted online believing the material is to important not to share. I advise anyone who witnesses to have a copy of this book. I've been using it as a witness tool since 1995 but I just found out that it has been made available of free. God bless Walt Brown for being generous enough that he may lose sales of the book because he has given away the material to strenghten the Church universal.

Anyways while I was looking for the right place to post it, I found that you are way ahead of me and have already done so. Well done!

I love the picture of the human footprints fossils with shoes that had heels and crushed a trilobite which was supposed to be extint for 240 million years. Theres another great photo of a tree growing against a canyon that has been fossiled and has hundreds of strata layers which sceintists say is millions of years yet it never decayed. Those two photos have helped me wake up a bunch of brainwashed people. Once they see those pictures they seem to respond to reason and that book helps explain so many things. People feel like they have gone 10 rounds with Ali when I start debating with that book on the table.

I use this book for those who are stuck on science, and then I hit them with the fact one of my eyes doesn't see. I looks fine, Does everything an eye should do except see. I expain that according to Darwin someday it might evolve and turn on, so I'm just waiting for that to happen. Then I ask them the question of what if both of my eyes were like the blind eye. I explain that the eye is a basiclly an organic camera and all the componets must work together perfectly for the camera to operate. One of my organic cameras has a bad wiring connection somewhere in the organic computer we can the brain. We copied ourselves when we built computers. We dream and arrange our files when we sleep just as a computer has a hard drive so do we. My organic camera called "my eye" is not wired perectly so the eye does not work.

I explain how far my eye must has evolved and yet it still does not function. My eye didn't evolve, it couldn't have. Without a designer that knew how to completely wire my brain so that a bunch of tissue actually become an organic camera, it would never happen. Think people, how many generations would it take without a designer for a eye to form and then function? One generation forms a bunch of jellylike tissue, the next generation adds eyelashes, next generation a lens, next gerneation ... Yet the eye doesn't work until everything is perfect.

I am walking living proof that Darwin was an idiot. I use my blind eye as a witnessing tool. I believe I was equiped to be ME! And I see my blind eye as a blessing.
My BLIND EYE helped me to SEE through Darwin lie and to SEE the truth, That I was wonderfully made, with a purpose, and those things some would see as a curse I know are my blessings!

Psalms 139:14 "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well"

Thought I'd share that with you,.

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Theology => Bible Study => Topic started by: Soldier4Christ on April 06, 2006, 04:29:31 PM