Does science prove Noah's flood?
July 07, 2012
By Michael Haverluck
For decades, science books in America’s schools have taught that the earth is billions of years old, with the Big Bang bursting through the universe some 14.3 billion years ago. They teach children that bacteria has been around a billion years or so and that the “Precambrian Explosion” some 500 million years ago launched some of the earliest forms of life.
But what if the evidence doesn’t support that? What if scientific observation suggests that the Bible’s literal account of thousands of years is right.
That is the position of Walt Brown, director of the Center for Scientific Creation in Phoenix.
His own scientific credentials are impressive. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering, is a West Point graduate and a National Science Foundation fellow, served as a tenured associate professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy and was chief of Science and Technology Studies at the Air War College.
His blunt assessment is that some evolutionary explanations would be more relevant at a Star Wars convention than in a science classroom. Pangaea, plate tectonics and asteroids wiping out the dinosaurs might work in state-issued textbooks, but they do not pass the scrutiny of Brown’s scientific research.
In the Eighth edition of his book “In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,” Brown presents his hydroplate theory, which unfolds scientific evidence that the earth’s present geologic features and fossils were formed around 5,000 years ago — not untold millions or billions of years ago. He asserts that the global flood recorded in Genesis 7 is the mechanism that created the geologic, astronomical and biological phenomena witnesseed today.
A major motivation that has propelled Brown’s decades of research has been his quest to give Christian students answers that will withstand scrutiny when challenged by Darwinist theories within the classroom. He notes that he does not rely on faith, miracles or sped-up evolutionary processes to buttress his theory – only observable and calculable data.
More Water
According to Brown, the earth was an extremely different place before Noah’s flood. Oceans were much shallower and mountains much lower. He notes that it is no coincidence that more than 230 flood legends – with many common elements such as a sole surviving family in a boat – exist from every corner of the earth. In fact, the flood of Noah is the very device that sets Brown’s hydroplate theory in motion.
Many skeptics ponder how the entire earth could have been covered in water, especially with many mountain ranges extending miles into the sky. Brown argues that pre-flood oceans contained half their present volume of water and that the Earth’s massive mountain ranges were not yet pushed up.
Brown contends that “water depth would be 9,000 feet everywhere” if the earth’s surface was completely smooth, easily covering the low-lying mountains that existed at the time of the flood.
Tapping into the scientific validity of the Bible, Brown lets the book of Genesis uncork the source of the floodwaters that reshaped the earth to its present appearance.
“In the 600th year of Noah’s life, on the 17th day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened,” reads Genesis 7:11-12. “And rain fell on the Earth 40 days and 40 nights.”
For those wondering where such torrents of water would originate, Brown also has students examine the beginning of the Bible’s first book, which specifies that underground waters were set in place on the second day of Creation.
“And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water,’” states Genesis 1:6-7. “So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it.”
This expanse, says Brown, is the earth’s crust separating the shallow oceans and seas above from the water trapped underneath, before much of it jettisoned during the flood two millennia later.
“About half the water now in the oceans was once in interconnected chambers about 10 miles below the entire earth’s surface,” explains Brown. “The average thickness of the subterranean water was at least three-quarters of a mile. Above the subterranean water was a granite crust; beneath the water was earth’s mantle.”
Brown gives a visual of what he calculates the earth looked like before catastrophic forces pushed mountains tens of thousands of feet higher.
“Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas were … joined across what is now the Atlantic Ocean,” Brown asserts. “On the pre-flood crust were deep and shallow seas, and mountains – generally smaller than those of today, but some perhaps 5,000 feet high.”
Yet not all subterranean water escaped during the flood, asserts Brown. He argues that earthquakes provide evidence that oceans of water still exist underneath the crust, noting that only underground channels of water could rapidly transmit shockwaves thousands of miles from the epicenter.
See the “Incredible Creatures that Defy Evoluation III” and “Something Transhuman This Way Comes.”
Effects of this transmission are evidenced around lakes, where the crust is thinner. If the shockwaves were going through solid rock, instead of water, the earthquake’s effects would never extend great distances, as it did after an Alaskan earthquake, when transmitted shockwaves broke boat moorings in Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain ─ more than 4,000 miles away.
Dishing out the hydroplate theory
Because of tidal pumping forces increasing the water pressure beneath the miles of rock over the centuries, the crust stretched like an inflating balloon, says Brown. This pressure triggered a crack that ended up rupturing the earth’s crust – a process that Brown calculates took about two hours to wrap around the globe.
“As the crack raced around the earth, the 10-mile-thick crust opened like a rip in a tightly stretched cloth,” Brown explained. “Pressure in the subterranean chamber directly beneath the rupture suddenly dropped [and] caused supercritical water to explode with great violence out of the 10-mile-deep ‘slit’ that wrapped around the earth like the seam of a baseball.”
To relate the magnitude of this release, Brown equates it to the impact of 1,800 trillion hydrogen bombs, ripping a tear down the middle of the Atlantic, veering beneath Africa and Australia, running north a couple thousand miles off South America’s west coast, dipping under North America off Mexico’s west coast to Alaska, resurfacing in the Arctic Circle and continuing down through Iceland.
To see a video presentation of the theory, Click here.
“All along this globe-circling rupture, whose path approximates today’s Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a fountain of water jetted supersonically into and far above the atmosphere,” posits Brown. “Some of the water fragmented into an ‘ocean’ of droplets that fell as rain such as the earth has never experienced – before or after.”
According to Brown, this cataclysmic event had more than geologic effects.
“Other jetting water rose above the atmosphere, where it froze and then fell on various regions of earth as huge masses of extreme cold, muddy ‘hail,’” Brown stated. “That hail buried, suffocated and froze many animals, including some mammoths.”
Brown notes that this explains how mammoths froze in minutes while still chewing vegetation, which requires temperatures of -150 degrees Fahrenheit – colder than any natural temperatures ever recorded on earth.
The effects were of astronomical proportions, as well, says Brown.
“The most powerful jetting water and rock debris escaped earth’s gravity and became the solar system’s comets, asteroids and meteoroids,” Brown claims.
To buttress this assertion, Brown adds that numerous cosmic bodies in the solar system possess scientifically documented characteristics that support the earth’s supersonic expulsion – such as spin, density, composition, size, number, texture and orbital measurements. He credits this event with creating craters on the moon and terrestrial planets, many containing craters on their outer-facing sides with ice still inside of them.
The earth itself is also replete with many topological features formed during the flood. Ocean trenches are one of these phenomena.
“Deep folds, up to thousands of miles long and several miles deep, lie at the floor of the western Pacific Ocean in an area centered directly opposite of the Atlantic Ocean,” Brown explains. “As the flood increasingly altered the earth’s balanced, spherical shape, growing gravitational forces tended to squeeze the earth back toward a more spherical shape.”
Brown argues there are 15 reasons why the massive plates on the earth’s surface cannot dive into the earth and drag down the folds – one being his scientific explanation and diagram demonstrating why such pressure would crush the plate, not pull it down.
“Once a ‘tipping point’ was reached, the portion of the subterranean chamber floor – with the most overlying rock removed – rose at least eight miles to become today’s Atlantic floor,” Brown added. “This caused the Pacific floor ─ the region inside the Ring of Fire ─ to sink and buckle inward, producing folds called ocean trenches.”
In other words, the outburst and pressure release on the Atlantic side caused suction on the opposite side of the globe, pulling down the area where the world’s deepest ocean trenches (around the Pacific Rim) are concentrated today.
Brown points to the tens of thousands of volcanoes formed inside the “Ring of Fire” ─ where 90 percent of earthquakes originate ─ as modern evidence of the massive pressure release and drop of the Pacific Rim that formed this volcanic zone during the flood.
Let it roll
Even with the plummet of the Pacific floor, the most earth-changing event was yet to occur, as Brown contends that once the fountains of the great deep came to a halt after 40 days, other mechanisms were set into motion. He notes that these fountains that pushed up the crust on both sides to form the 46,000-mile Mid-Oceanic Ridge not only flooded the world; they produced massive amounts of sediment from the eroded rock that buried plants and animals to form the stratified fossil record.
“Then the hydroplates slid down and away from the inclining Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” Brown describes, illustrating how this separated the east coast of North and South America from Europe and Africa. “Once the gradually advancing plates reached speeds of about 45 miles per hour, they would collide, compress and buckle.”
Brown credits the process with fashioning today’s topography, comparing the event to a train falling down railroad tracks after being lifted in the middle. He notes that once the railway cars (hydroplates) run out of track (subterranean water), they lose momentum, crumple and jackknife. The 46,000-mile earth-encircling rupture quickly grew to an average width of 800 miles, says Brown, and when the subterranean water ceased escaping, the remaining water acted as a lubricant to propel the hydroplates.
“The plates that buckled downward became ocean trenches, and those that buckled upward became mountains,” Brown clarified. “This explains why large mountain ranges are in correlation to their oceanic ridges. Naturally, the long axis of each buckled mountain was generally perpendicular to its hydroplate’s motion or 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.”
Besides spurring the formation of mountain ranges, plateaus and the jigsaw fit of the continents, this compression event caused a catastrophic imbalance in the earth’s sphericity, caused by the upthrust of the Himalayan Plateau. The massive thickening of the crust containing the 10 highest peaks on earth produced a net centrifugal force that rolled the Himalayas 35 to 45 degrees toward today’s equator. Brown says this axis tilt explains why plants and animals from warm climates are buried in today’s Polar Regions.
Debunking the evolutionary model
Brown argues that the evolutionists’ account of a comet, asteroid or volcanic activity triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs is flawed. He contends that only a global flood could have generated a mass rapid burial and fossilization of animals, as all remains would have rotted away if they had died without being submerged in water to preserve them. Brown also explains that fossils’ similar density and mass discovered on the same levels of the geologic column prove that dinosaur remains were sorted and buried just thousands of years ago in a flood, not merely interred hundreds of millions of years ago in a series of mass extinctions.
Another chink in evolutionists’ armor, says Brown, is that the soft bone tissue and DNA found in dinosaur remains could not exist for more than thousands of years. On top of this, he points out that intentionally inflated and incorrect readings of fossils and rocks measured using various dating techniques further put evolutionists’ millions- and billions-of-years-old origins account into disrepute.
Evolutionary stories describing gradual erosion taking place over millions of years to form various natural wonders have also been shot down by Brown’s geological observations in and around the Grand Canyon, the Strait of Gibraltar and the channel under the Golden Gate Bridge. He presents evidence that these were carved by rapid erosion from nearby breaches of large bodies of water, which carved out these marvels of nature in a matter of weeks or months, not millions of years.
In addition to the aforementioned arguments for a young earth, Brown also turns to the Bible to dispel dozens of theistic evolution claims. One fundamental teaching from the Bible, that sin preceded death (Genesis 2:17, 3:1-24; Romans 5:12, 6:23), demonstrates that evolution is not compatible with Scripture, as naturalistic doctrine claims that animals and “primitive” humans died for untold millions of years before Adam and Eve’s original sin approximately 7,000 years ago, conversely stating that death preceded sin.
Brown examines other phenomena and topics that provide further evidence for the Bible’s accuracy and a young earth, including Noah’s Ark; symbiotic relationships; strange planets; the moon’s dust, origin and recession; planetary rings; a faint, young sun; the first and second laws of thermodynamics; the devolving of languages; biblical genealogies; mutations; mitochondrial Eve; and many more in his book.
As a former evolutionist and atheist, Brown is quite familiar with all the arguments from the other side. But does his flood account hold water to competing theories?
For decades, evolutionists and creationists alike have refused to debate Brown’s scientific findings. He has a few stipulations – that the debate is published in a major scientific journal, that his opponent supporting evolution hold a doctorate and that religion is not discussed in the debate, only scientific data.
Brown reports some 50 of the circumstances he would expect to see develop under his theory have been documented and concludes that it is the Bible’s description of origins that are, simply, scientific.