Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
1. Was the flood inevitable—“programmed” from the beginning? No. If sin had not entered the world, I believe that the earth would still have its preflood subterranean water and pillars.
One admittedly speculative idea is that if mankind had not sinned and had learned to extract and use the abundant geothermal energy generated by tidal pumping, that energy could have been used for people’s benefit, not their destruction. After all, humans needed an energy source to fully exercise dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28). Today’s primary energy source, fossil fuels, did not exist before the flood.
2. The rock layer—the earth’s crust—would have had some stiffness, because it was almost 10 miles thick. However, the crust’s large area would have given it great flexibility. If the crust’s thickness, density, or strength varied horizontally (as a sine wave, for example) with a wavelength of 110 miles, the crust would have sagged downward to the chamber floor at more than 18,000 locations.
The effects of the rock sagging downward through water at one location on earth would spread laterally, but only at the speed of sound in water. Outside that expanding “ring of influence,” other sags could occur simultaneously.
3. This thickness for the subterranean water assumes that no water in the fountains of the great deep escaped earth’s gravity. However, an unknown amount of water did escape into outer space, so the average thickness would have been somewhat greater than 3/4 of a mile.
4. Walter Russell Bowie, “The Book of Genesis,” The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (New York: Abingdon Press, 1952), p. 473.
6. This writing and translation was brought to my attention by Ari Haviv on 13 September 2010. See also Pirkę De Rabbi Eliezer, translation by Gerald Friedlander (New York: The Bloch Publishing Company, 1916), pp. 27–28.
The original Hebrew can be found in chapter 5 at www.daat.ac.il/daat/vl/pirkeyeliezer/pirkeyeliezer02.pdf.
7. According to the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, this time period was 1,656 years. [See page 465.] According to the Septuagint text, it was 2,242 years. According to the Samaritan text, it was 1307 years.
8. The Book of the Cave of Treasures, translated from the Syriac Text of the British Museum (MS. Add. 25875) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1927).
9. Before the flood, the energy added to the pillars every 12 hours by the gravitational pull of the Moon, and to a lesser extent the Sun, was huge. That energy was proportional to the crust’s massive weight times the average lift distance. [For details see "Tidal Pumping: Two Types" on pages 532–533.]
10. Sin has physical consequences (Genesis 3). What might they be when every intent of all humans (except Noah) was evil continually (Genesis 6:5, 7:1)? Could sinful man’s activities have caused physical changes that further weakened the crust or a few pillars? After all, “the earth [at that time] was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:11) A sufficiently large man-made explosion could have disrupted the weakened crust and pillar system, and initiated the rupture—which then triggered the flood.
As a second possibility, God could simply have commanded the earth’s crust to crack or a pillar to collapse. God spoke the universe into existence, so commanding such a small thing at the right place, which is all it would take, is not difficult to imagine.
Would this second possibility depart from science by injecting a miracle into the physical world? The hydroplate theory does not assume that a miracle happened. The theory has only three starting assumptions, as listed on page 118. (Starting assumptions, often unstated, are part of every scientific theory that tries to explain the past.)
The role of creation science is to explain what we see in the universe with the fewest assumptions and without appeals to miracles not specifically mentioned in the Bible. (It was this practice of invoking miracles to solve scientific problems that irritated so many and led to the rigid insistence on uniformitarianism.) Creation science avoids the narrow-minded assumption that “the physical universe is all there is and all there ever will be”—beliefs called materialism and scientism. These views (uniformitarianism, materialism, and scientism), entrenched in most schools and much of society, produce scientific contradictions. Creation science, on the other hand, (a) does not invoke self-serving miracles, (b) is more consistent with the evidence and the laws of physics, and (c) recognizes the obvious: there is a Creator (Romans 1:20). [See “How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific?” on page 401.]
11. The surface of the earth, warmed slightly by the rising steam, would also have radiated its heat each night into outer space.
12. As page 532 explains, it took about 90 years for the subterranean water to become supercritical, and perhaps decades more before steady state was reached and the earth’s watering system was operating at full capacity. No doubt, the world’s populations (human, animal, and plant) grew at a slower rate. Before steady state was reached, Adam and Eve lived comfortable in the well-watered Garden of Eden, out of which flowed four mighty rivers.
13. For details and supporting evidence, see pages 286–348.
14. Besides iron meteorites, which were once at least 1,300°F, chondrules were once about 3,000°F. [See Figure 172 on page 326 and “Chondrules” on page 376.] Also, the matrix material encasing chondrules shows thermal metamorphism requiring temperatures of at least 750°F. [See O. Richard Norton, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 92.] While the heat-generating mechanisms for each are different, all three result from the release of gravitational potential energy.
15. “Magnetotelluric measurements show the lower continental crust to be electrically conductive globally ... The most probable candidates for the conduction mechanisms are small amounts of interconnected saline pore fluids and interconnected thin films of graphite. ... We favor the supercritical saline fluid model ...” R. D. Hyndman et al., “The Origin of Electrically Conductive Lower Continental Crust: Saline Water or Graphite?” Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Vol. 81, 1993, pp. 325, 341.
While these authors favor the supercritical saltwater explanation for this electrical conductivity, they assume that the saltwater is in innumerable microscopic pockets that are electrically and horizontally connected. The authors are puzzled, because so much horizontal connectivity should be accompanied by vertical connectivity. Over long geological ages, this water should have leaked up to the earth’s surface.
The hydroplate theory solves the problem. The preflood subterranean water layer had worldwide (horizontal) connectivity only. Within a century, tidal pumping made that water supercritical, so it began dissolving certain minerals, such as quartz and salt, and expanded vertically into the growing spongelike pockets in subterranean chamber’s floor and ceiling. As water escaped during the flood, the subterranean layer simply became thinner.
u “Nevertheless, the simplest explanation of increased conductivity in the deep crust is the presence of a continuous, lithostatically pressured, water-rich fluid.” Bruce W. D. Yardley and John W. Valley, “How Wet Is the Earth’s Crust?” Nature, Vol. 371, 15 September 1994, p. 206.
After presenting a strong case for the presence of water trapped deep under the earth’s surface, Yardley and Valley point out a problem. Over hundreds of millions of years, that water would leak up to the earth’s surface. It apparently never occurred to these authors that the earth is not hundreds of millions of years old, and most of the subterranean water did escape upward—during the global flood.
16. See the quote by Wenbo Wei et al. in Endnote 70 on page 142.
Note: The hydroplate theory makes 50 explicit predictions. Prediction 1, published in 1980, says that large volumes of pooled saltwater are beneath major mountains. The above study by Wei et al. explains why saltwater appears to be about 10 miles below the Tibetan Plateau (the world’s highest and largest plateau), which is bounded on the south by the most massive mountain range on earth.