Whose breaking all those plates?

As I study the Flood in Creation Science literature, I realize that we (meaning the church) have a diminished view of the Genesis Flood. I may write more about that later, but for now I want to present one theory that describes what the Flood may have been like.

The Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Theory was published about 18 years ago by a group of excellent creationists -- Steve Austin, Larry Vardiman, John Baumgardner, Russ Humphreys, Kurt Wise and Andrew Snelling. These are good men as well as qualified geologists and physicists. Other creationists who are also good men and qualified scientists disagree with this proposed mechanism for the Flood. True or not, it will give you a new perspective on a familiar story.

Genesis 7:11 describes all the fountains of the deep breaking up in one day. The Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Theory is one way of trying to understand this verse.

The earth is made up of three layers -- a crust, the mantle, and the core. The crust is just a few miles deep. That is the part of the earth we walk on. Under that is the mantle which extends about half way to the center of the earth. It is made of liquid rock which is very, very hot. The center part of the earth is the core.

The crust is made of plates. Under the ocean the crust is fairly thin, while under the continents it is thicker. Before the Flood, so the theory goes, there was just one continent (Pangaea) and one ocean (see Genesis 1:8). As the flood began, the crust at the boundary between the ocean and the continents began to sink into the mantle. (Currently, the crust floats on the liquid mantle, but just a slight change in the density of the crust or the viscosity of the mantle and the crust would sink.) As it sank, it caused frictional heat, making the mantle less viscous and accelerating the sinking.

This caused stress on both the mantle and the crust. The mantle began to flow as the crust sank into it. Meanwhile the crustal plates were being pulled toward the sinking crust. This split the one continent into pieces. The ocean rushed sideways into the new openings and the mantle rushed upwards. When the mantle met the ocean -- STEAM!! The ocean was vaporized, sending steam jets high into the atmosphere, providing the moisture for forty days of rain.

During the same time, (and I don't exactly understand this) the crust under the ocean floated higher, dumping the ocean across the continent.

Thus the beginning of the Flood was not a calm, gentle, gradual rain with slowly rising flood waters. The earth was moving, steam was shooting up into the atmosphere, water was crossing the continents in walls of water, rain was falling in torrents, and the waters rose to cover the mountains.

During the Flood, as the plates of the crust moved at speeds of miles per hour, earthquakes racked the earth, volcanoes formed as the mantle pushed up through weak spots in the crust, the waters would have rushed back and forth over the earth, eroding the land that had been there (destroying all evidence of man's civilization) and redepositing sediments into vast layers of sedimentary rock.

The Flood was a violent judgment of God on sin. Let us never diminish the awesomeness of God's holiness or justice.

PS I have explained this to the best of my ability and understanding. If any of you understand it better than I, please comment so I can improve this explanation. If something doesn't make sense, don't blame the good scientists who formulated this theory; blame your poor translator.

Hammer Head

One of my favorite examples of design is the woodpecker. I would like to thank Gary Parker for the original inspiration for this story.

Woodpeckers are famous for slamming their heads into trees. According to my sources, woodpeckers hit a tree with their head 10 times per second. For homework, you go slam your head into a tree 10 times in a second. On second thought - Don't! You're not designed for it. The woodpecker is.

What do you need to be able to slam your head into trees for a living? First of all you need a hard beak. If you don't have a hard beak you will fold up your beak like an accordion the first time you hit a tree. With a folded beak, you are facing a slow lingering death of starvation.

You also need a hard head. I know some of you do, but not like the woodpecker. The deceleration on the woodpecker's head is 1,000 g's or 250x the acceleration astronauts feel on take-off. You need a really hard head to withstand that kind of impact.

Okay, so you have a hard beak and a hard head. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? Not quite. You also need to protect your brain. Without protection, the impact on the head is enough to rip your brain loose. To protect it, there is a layer of fat that surrounds the brain. In addition, there are muscles that pull on the brain the moment the woodpecker hits the tree. That acts as a shock absorber for the brain.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, and your brain is protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? No, not yet. The woodpecker has feathers that cover his nose. Without those feathers, he'd breathe in wood chips and that wouldn't be healthy.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, and your brain and your nose are protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? Of course not! High speed photography has shown that a woodpecker closes his eyes every time he hits the tree. Their are two theories why. One theory is that it keeps wood chips out of his eyes. The other theory is that it keeps the eyeballs in the head.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, and your brain, your nose, and your eyes are protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? You guessed it. It is very important that you hit the tree with your beak perpendicular to the tangent of the trunk of tree. In other words, you want to hit the tree so all the force goes straight back through the head and not so the force spins your head sideways and snaps your neck.

Now you have a hard beak, a hard head, the right neck muscles, and your brain, your nose, and your eyes are protected. Are you ready to slam your head into trees? Just one more thing. The woodpecker feet and tail are specially designed to hold the woodpecker on the tree. Otherwise, the woodpecker would bounce off every time it hit the tree. While not life threatening, that would really reduce the woodpecker's efficiency.

So now, you are ready to slam your head into trees. But why would you do that? You're hungry of course. Would any self-respecting bug come answer the door when a woodpecker comes knocking? Of course not. So the woodpecker has a long, skinny, sticky, hairy tongue. The woodpecker's tongue is long and skinny enough to go down the bug's little tunnels. The hairs on the tongue send messages back to the woodpecker's brain -- "wood, wood, wood, wood, bug!" When the brain gets the message, "bug" , the woodpecker pull in his tongue -- with a bug stuck to the end.

But where do you put a long tongue in a short beak? A human tongue starts at the back of the mouth. A frog tongue starts at the front of the mouth. A woodpecker tongue starts in the nose, winds around the skull, and then goes out the mouth. That gives the woodpecker all the space he needs for his tongue.

The woodpecker is a good example of irreducible complexity. Unless all the pieces are there, the woodpecker is a failure. A step-by-step natural selection scenario doesn't work. The woodpecker point to a designer.

5-Minute Creationist

At ACSI I picked up a book called The Five Minute Church Historian. It has 100 readings stretching from the church of Acts to the 21st century. Each reading focuses on an important person or event of church history and should take about five minutes to read. Dr. Rick Cornish divided history into ten sections with about ten readings in each section. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it to any of you.

For Christmas, I received The Five Minute Theologian. Now I am anticipating getting The Five Minute Apologist. I can't recommend the Theologian completely since Dr. Cornish is a Five-Point Calvinist. ( I wonder why most of the intellectuals in Christianity are Calvinists?)

I like the idea. I'm thinking that I need to write The Five Minute Creationist. Of course I'll have to change the name since Dr. Cornish probably has the rights to that particular title. I'm hoping to write the 100 essays on this blog during this year. We'll see what happens.