Flood geology is an oddly named branch of YEC pseudoscience. I
call it "oddly named" because it has no support
whatsoever among real geologists. A more proper name would be
"flood stupidity", but most scientists are too polite to
use insults even though their foes call them liars, fools, and
soulless pawns of Satan every day. There's an irony here about
the fact that it's the scientists who are "turning the
other cheek" while the religious zealots launch attack after
attack, but I suspect most YECs aren't introspective enough to
notice that. As for me, I don't believe in turning the other
cheek, and I intend to call it as I see it.
Evolution started
with the philosophy of "uniformitarianism," which says
that all changes happened very, very slowly. No such thing as a
worldwide catastrophe; can't be.
When will YECs finally admit that evolution and geology
aren't the same field? The fact that their conclusions
are compatible with one another is an interesting coincidence that
merely reinforces the validity of both. Evolution didn't start
with geological uniformitarianism. For the historically ignorant
among you, Charles Darwin was trained in the divinities
rather than the sciences. His interest in science was strictly
personal but was cultivated through acquaintances and supercharged
by his 5 year journey as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle. He made
many interesting observations about geology during this trip which
he published, but he also made many observations about flora and
fauna which he initially kept to himself.
It bothered him that nature was so brutal, so cruel and
unyielding and unmerciful to its victims, particularly since his
religious upbringing led him to assume that this savagery was the
design of a benevolent Creator. He also saw patterns in the
physical structure of isolated island species, their environments,
and their location relative to one another. But he lacked a
mechanism to explain these patterns, so he refrained from
publication for want of a mechanism and more evidence (it would be
nice of YECs would also wait for mechanisms and evidence
before publishing theories, because then we wouldn't have to
hear from them any more). It eventually occurred to him that the
savagery he deplored was actually the perfect explanation for the
patterns he saw. In short, the savagery had a "purpose",
and so the principle of natural selection was born. The principle
of uniformitarianism had nothing to do with it. Darwin was
undoubtedly aware of it, as were all scientists for the last
two thousand years, but it was irrelevant to his theory.
Besides, our ignorant YEC friend hasn't been attacking
evolution at all. He's been attacking geology and astrophysics,
with this ridiculous "young Earth" nonsense that actually
has nothing to do with evolution apart from his desperate desire to
create conditions under which there wouldn't be enough time for
evolution to occur. Like most creationists, he blatantly lumps
numerous disciplines of science under the meaningless term
"evolutionism" as if they're all the same discipline.
Perhaps that's his method of dealing with the fact that
multiple disciplines of science came to the same conclusions about
the age of the Earth; he pretends they aren't multiple
divergent disciplines of science, and that they really
aren't distinguished from one another.
Except they have
since needed to explain why the dinosaurs went extinct so suddenly.
So now we have a worldwide nuclear winter caused by an asteroid
hitting the earth. Worldwide changes in geography, topography,
climate -- the works.
So why not a flood, which would do all the same things?
Well, a flood is "unscientific" -- but a giant asteroid
isn't! Huh?
Notice the abject ignorance of science which he displays here.
The scientific method starts with an observation and then attempts
to propose, explain, and support theories to explain that
observation. Meteor impact theory started in precisely this manner,
with Eugene Shoemaker's observations of similar meteor impact
craters on Earth and the Moon in 1952. The similarity between
craters on a living planet and a geologically dead moon conflicts
with gradualist theories of crater formation, and it requires an
explanation, hence Shoemaker's meteor impact theory (note that
it had nothing whatsoever to do with dinosaurs, despite our YEC
friend's ignorant assumption). Flood theory, on the other hand,
started as a theory rather than an observation. Its proponents then
went on to list observations which they thought to be consistent
with it. Do you see the difference? It's not subtle;
there's a huge difference between "this observation
leads to the following theory" and "I have a theory and I
can list some observations that are consistent with it". One
is the scientific method and the other is not.
Charles Darwin and Eugene Shoemaker both started with an
observation, and devised a theory to explain it. YECs start with a
theory which is assumed to be correct, and then they selectively
quote evidence to support it. They don't understand why the
former is scientific, while the latter is not, even though the
latter bears no resemblance whatsoever to the scientific
method!
Another difference between meteor impact theory and flood
stupidity is that meteor impact theory was adopted wholeheartedly
by the scientific community in spite of the fact that it violated
the principle of gradualism that YECs deride as "dogma".
Why? Because unlike flood geology, it works. When YECs
assume that all catastrophist theories are dismissed by the
scientific community out of hand, they seem to delete the
contradictory example of meteor impact theory from their minds in
order to preserve their misconception that geology is dogmatic.
Meteor impact theory is a real scientific theory, unlike
"flood geology". Meteors of the appropriate size and
speed have been observed hurtling through our solar system. Simple
Newtonian calculations of their kinetic energy indicate that they
carry sufficient energy to cause the destruction that they have
been theorized to cause. Fused material at meteor impact sites
indicates a violent, high-temperature formation process.
Experimentation on high-velocity impacts proves that a sufficiently
energetic impact will pulverize and/or vapourize the impactor, thus
leaving only the crater. The theoretical mechanism behind the
global holocaust scenario has been verified in the global cooling
effect that follows large volcanic eruptions.
So why did meteor impact theory survive the firestorm of peer
review while flood geology did not? Because it satisfies any
sensible requirements for acceptance. It has an underlying
mechanism. It is consistent with fundamental laws of physics. Many
of its effects can be experimentally reproduced on a small scale.
It has predictive capabilities, and its predictions match
observation. How does this compare to the YEC joke known as
"flood geology?" Let's see ...
Does flood geology have a mechanism? Absolutely not.
While meteor impact theory completely describes the physical
mechanisms by which the impactor creates a crater, fuses material
at the impact site, sends out shockwaves and thermal radiation, and
hurls a plume of sub-micron particles into the atmosphere, flood
geology explains none of its mechanisms. It merely asks you
to believe that a flood would occur (and create the world's
geological features) without explaining how. This is
hideously unscientific; it's not enough to point at the sky and
mumble that the water could have been hiding invisibly, somewhere
above the clouds. It's not enough to point at the ground and
say that the water could have been hidden in enormous underground
deposits. It's not enough to point at the Grand Canyon and say
"yup- could have been caused by a flood". You must answer
the question "how?", and YECs cannot do that.
For example, flood geology requires a source of sufficient water
to cover all of the Earth's land masses, up to the highest
point (many "vapour canopy" advocates speak of a mere
forty feet of water, but anyone who thinks that will cover
the continents is on drugs). Let's say it's a 2 km thick
global deluge (which still wouldn't be enough to cover
the mountains); you would need to come up with more than 1E21 kg of
water (that's a million trillion tons, in case you don't
like scientific notation). Where is all of this water supposed to
come from? No feasible source exists, and pathetic creationist
attempts to provide one are uniformly ridiculous:
The ionospheric "vapour canopy" theory is completely
absurd; how would it get up there, and what would keep it up
there? Did vapour canopy proponents sleep through grade-school
science class when they talked about the mechanism behind clouds
and rain? Why didn't this enormous blanket of water vapour
block out the Sun? We're talking about globe-spanning clouds,
hundreds of kilometres thick! Why didn't the added mass
increase the atmospheric pressure and alter the chemistry of the
air?
The "hydroplate" theory is equally absurd (it
describes water buried at 10 mile depths); rock is much denser than
water, so how could it possibly have formed a "skin" on
top of a huge globe-spanning layer of water? Why didn't the
water seep to the surface before the Flood? Since the
temperatures at many miles depth are easily hot enough to boil
water, it would have emerged as steam, and as more than one critic
has noted, Noah would have been poached. And what happened to the
crust when it no longer had the water underneath it? Did it
collapse? Why do we find no geological evidence of such a
catastrophic rearrangement?
The comet theory is so incredibly, mind-bogglingly stupid that
one wonders how anyone could publish it and not hang his head in
shame. It proposes that a huge comet made of water hit the
Earth's atmosphere and became rain. However, the physics of a
huge comet impact are no secret; it would strike the Earth with an
enormous impact of many hundreds of millions of megatons, plunging
the planet into freezing darkness. A flood would be the
least of Noah's problems. As an aside, real scientists
have proposed that comets contributed some of our planet's
water in the distant past, but they would have done so in the
primeval period before life began, since their cataclysmic
impacts would have likely killed any pre-existing life.
The violent plate shift theory is not quite as blatantly stupid
as the comet theory, but it's close. It attempts to escape the
problem of water sources with the idea that the Earth's surface
simply became much flatter during the flood, so that the land
masses could be flooded without an infusion of new water.
The release of energy during this catalysmic tectonic shift boiled
off part of the oceans which eventually fell back to Earth as rain
(over a forty day period, of course), and afterwards, in another
series of cataclysms, the ocean basins fell, the continents rose,
and the mountains were violently shoved up towards the sky. But
even the authors of this theory have no explanation of what could
possibly cause such spontaneous and violent rearrangement of
these huge land masses, so they resort to miracles, which are
essentially an admission that their theory has zero scientific
validity. They also can't explain how such enormous masses of
water and land could have moved up and down by many kilometres
within a few months without killing Noah. Try to imagine shoving an
entire continent down by several miles, letting the waters rush
over it, and then shoving it back up a couple of miles within a few
months. Do you think the oceans would remain calm enough during
this procedure for Noah's little boat to survive, or do you
think you'd see the mother of all tsunamis?
Flood geology also requires a mechanism through which a flood
would create all of the world's geological features, such as
the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. Every creationist simply says
"yes, it could cause those things" without even
attempting to explain how, and after more than a century of
evasions, the game has grown quite tiresome. The phrase "put
up or shut up" comes to mind. Geologists can explain their
mechanisms but the YECs can't. Is it any mystery that the
former are accepted while the latter are not?
Is flood geology consistent with fundamental laws of
physics? Once again, absolutely not. Not only do its proposals
for a water source violate the concepts of buoyancy, gravity, and
opacity, but they also ignore the laws of thermodynamics. While
meteor theory depends on the laws of thermodynamics (the
kinetic energy of the meteor must be converted into work and heat
in order to generate the global holocaust scenario), flood geology
ignores those laws by neglecting the energy involved in the
storage and/or movement of all the water:
Consider the "vapour canopy" theory. We all know that
an object picks up speed and kinetic energy as it falls, but what
about a million trillion tons of water falling from fifty
kilometres? The energy released in this case would be equivalent to
more than a hundred billion megatons! This staggering amount
of energy would have manifested itself in the form of extreme
temperatures, vapourizing the oceans, superheating the atmosphere,
and creating a vast globe-spanning cloud of steam that would have
sterilized the entire surface of the planet. The victims of
that sterilization would, of course, includes Noah and his
ridiculous little wooden boat. Boats, after all, do not float in
clouds of superheated steam.
Now, consider the "hydroplate" theory. It's
better, right? Well, not really. It proposes that buried water shot
up as steam into the upper atmosphere, and then fell back to Earth
as rain. However, this merely exacerbates the problems of
the vapour canopy! Now, not only does the water have to fall from
the upper atmosphere and hit the Earth like a hundred billion
megaton bomb, but it must be shot out of fissures in the
Earth's crust beforehand.
And finally, consider the "flat continents" theory.
The deformation of any material requires energy; that's why it
takes effort to bend a piece of metal, and that's why it will
be slightly warmer after you've bent it. The heating effect of
deformation is not often obvious in everyday situations, but if
you've ever seen a steel rolling mill, you'll be convinced.
Metal strips can become red hot after passing through just a few
rolling mills, and that's because the work performed on the
metal has to go somewhere. The same is true of rock, yet the YECs
claim that millions upon trillions of tons of rock moved
effortlessly up and down by 5 miles or more! Don't they realize
that hundreds of billions of megatons of work would be required, so
the land masses would become red hot and the oceans would boil off?
Apparently not. You can't just arbitrarily speed up a process
like continental drift to many hundreds of millions of times its
normal rate, because that will also accelerate the rate of energy
release by the same factor, with lethal consequences.
Can its effects be reproduced experimentally on a small
scale? Yet again, absolutely not. Any experiment involving the
dumping of enormous quantities of water onto loose debris will show
that the effect is highly entropic, and will tend to disrupt
sorting patterns rather than creating them. If a creationist could
produce an experiment to show that a chaotic deposition of water
could actually create fine-grained, thinly layered strata of
carefully sorted sedimentary rock, we would most certainly have
heard about it by now. If a creationist could produce an experiment
to show that receding waters on a flat plain could preferentially
cut the ground into deep grooves in certain spots such as the Grand
Canyon, or create plate discontinuities such as Niagara Falls, or
erode one set of obstructions much more than another (eg. the
Appalachians vs the Rockies), we would most certainly have heard
about it buy now. But we hear nothing of the sort, do we? Instead,
we just hear the same insistences, repeated decade after decade
that it "would" happen even though they lack theoretical
mechanisms, consistency with thermodynamics, or experimental
evidence.
They've done none of the work required to
substantiate their theory, they've done nothing to
address serious questions raised by peer review (even those
questions that were raised more than a century ago), yet they act
as though we should all be shocked that their unsupported,
thermodynamically impossible, half-baked, half-assed theory
hasn't gained scientific acceptance yet! It must be that damned
global conspiracy again, eh?
Does it have predictive abilities? Actually, it does,
although YECs are mysteriously quiet about those predictions.
That's not an oversight; they are quiet because they know that
its predictions aren't even remotely compatible with
observation. Some of the consequences of a year-long global flood
would be:
All of the fresh water fish would have become extinct, as the
lakes mingled with the salt water of the oceans. This has obviously
not happened, since the world's lake are full of specialized
organisms which cannot survive in the salt water of the
oceans.
Most of the sedimentary rock on the Earth should be in the
oceans, since the loose material would have been largely pushed
off-shore as the flood waters receded. However, most of the
sedimentary rock on Earth is on high ground!. In fact, even
the mountains are largely composed of sedimentary rock!
The level of erosion should be constant all over the world,
since all of the world's erosion was supposedly caused by a
single global event. However, some mountains are much more
eroded than others (eg. the Appalachians as opposed to the
Rockies).
Animal species which are dependent upon non-European localized
ecosystems would have become extinct, since they would never
survive the migration back home after debarking from the Ark. For
example, the South American trapdoor tarantulas would have had to
somehow journey all the way from Europe to the Amazon jungle, over
an ocean and through environments which are much too cold to
support it. The polar bear would have had to journey back to its
arctic home, through thousands of kilometres of temperate zone. The
giant panda would have had to journey from Europe to the bamboo
forests of China, despite its poor mobility and extremely specific
dietary requirements. What did it eat until it reached the distant
bamboo forests? Species like this should have become extinct, but
they didn't.
The distribution of recent fossils should follow a radial
pattern from the point where Noah unloaded his Ark, irrespective of
species. Consider the fact that all of the Earth's creatures
had to migrate outward from a single point. This would leave
obvious fossil patterns, which we have failed to observe. Instead,
the fossil patterns seem to be consistent with a pattern of
long-term migrations and evolutionary adaptations.
All the plants in the world would have died, because plants
require UV radiation and cannot survive deep submersion for
prolonged periods (that's why all underwater plants are close
to the surface). However, the ancient Bristlecone Pine trees of
California show an unbroken line passing right through the Flood
and dating back more than 10,000 years. In fact, one particular
specimen (nicknamed "Methuselah") is still living, even
though it dates back nearly 4800 years, or 500 years before the
Flood. How did the YECs deal with this? You'll love this ...
when they heard about it, they started writing "research
papers" denying the validity of tree-ring dating.
Fossils of flightless animals should be depth-sorted based on
their size and hydrodynamic characteristics rather than their
position in the evolutionary progression. However, this is not the
case. Species of virtually identical hydrodynamic characteristics
are separated by eons, while even the largest dinosaurs are found
at the same level as the smallest dinosaurs (which are all, in
turn, found far below much smaller and more recent primates). No
pattern of depth-sorting based on size and hydrodynamic
characteristics is identifiable in the fossil record.
Fossils of species with superior mobility should always be
found at the shallowest levels in the sedimentary rock rather than
being grouped with their evolutionary contemporaries, since they
would presumably have reached high ground and taken the longest
time to die. Flying animals in particular would be at the very top.
However, this is not the case. For example, flying dinosaur species
are buried at the same depth as other dinosaur species, well below
much more recent species with inferior mobility. No pattern of
depth-sorting based on mobility is identifiable in the fossil
record.
The fossil record should be composed almost entirely of land
creatures, since flood geology claims that all sedimentary rock was
formed during the Flood and ocean-dwellers wouldn't die in a
Flood (remember that any ocean disruption violent enough to kill
the sea life would have easily capsized Noah's boat). However,
much of the fossil record is sea life.
Metallic man-made Bronze Age artifacts would be found at the
very bottom of the fossil record, since such objects fall quicker
than any organism, and will obviously not run to high ground or
struggle to tread water. However, this is not the case; the vast
majority of the fossil record lies beneath the earliest
human metallic artifacts.
Geologists would have no problem accepting a theory once
somebody shows that it actually works, even if it contradicts
gradualism. The example of meteor impact theory leaps to mind,
which is a bit ironic since he mentions it himself, yet fails to
see that it disproves his implicit claims about geologist dogma.
Here's a miscellaneous grab bag of other problems with flood
geology (it's not comprehensive, but it's a start):
How did Noah build the Ark? A simple examination of
shipbuilding techniques and manpower requirements reveals that a
wooden boat of that size will not be seaworthy because of excessive
leakage, and that one man couldn't possibly build it. The act
of procuring the necessary wood alone would have easily overwhelmed
him.
Exactly how did the mountains form? Why would a flood
make mountains? Did they form by magic? That's not
science.
Why do the sedimentary rocks in the mountains contain fossils
of ocean-dwelling creatures?
How did the ice caps form? They would have been broken up and
melted during the flood, and there hasn't been enough time for
them to form since then. Moreover, Greenland ice cores show a
progression of yearly patterns since well before the Flood, even
though the entire mass should have been broken up.
Why aren't the fossils of modern land-locked animals
routinely found deep in the sea bed, even though a catastrophic
flood should have easily pushed huge amounts of coastal life into
the ocean?
Why aren't environmentally specialized fossils found away
from their native environments? A flood would easily disperse
fossils over very wide areas irrespective of their original
environmental suitability, yet we see no evidence of this
dispersion.
Why do we often find sedimentary rocks which demonstrate severe
erosion long after their formation? The Red Deer River
valley, for example, is composed of a single region of sedimentary
rock through which a fissure was eroded by a river. Exposed, eroded
sedimentary rock makes up the walls of the valley. Are we to
imagine that the same Flood which deposited and then rapidly
compacted this rock then preferentially arranged itself so as to
cut a groove through the middle as it receded?
Why are different components of the same organism (ie. the
pollen and trunk of a plant) invariably sorted at the same layer?
Did the flood somehow sort the pollen and trunk and leaves of
plants so that they would always end up in consistent layers?
Why are exposed-surface features such as footprints found in
deep rock, often layered on top of one another? How does a
footprint form, remain intact, and fossilize in the midst of the
chaotic sedimentation process described by flood geology?
Why are fossils layered with complete forest ecosystems to
match, so that soil layers and plants and animals from one epoch
are always grouped together? Did the flood somehow sort this too?
That's one clever flood!
How did all of this sedimentary rock form without releasing the
requisite amount of heat, which would have boiled the oceans?
Sedimentary rock forms because the resulting rock has a lower
energy state than the loose matter from which it was formed, and
the energy decrease in the rock must be balanced by an equal energy
release into its environment. You can't accelerate the process
of rock sedimentation without also accelerating the
consequent rate of energy release.
How do they explain where all of the animals would have lived,
or have they ever noticed that the sheer animal population
indicated by fossil deposits is enough to fill the Earth to the
point of being dangerously overcrowded? Not a problem if those
animals lived over many hundreds of millions of years, but if they
were all crammed into a 6,000 year history ...
On the same note, how can they explain the sheer volume of
organic material in the Earth's coal deposits and sedimentary
rock layers? It's been pointed out many times that even a
globe-spanning forest wouldn't provide anywhere near enough
organic material to account for all of that mass ... unless, of
course, it was deposited over a very long period of time rather
than just one year.
How did Noah or any of the other animals survive in the barren,
devastated global ecosystem that would have been left after the
flood? Since all of the plants would have died from prolonged deep
submersion, the effect would be similar to any other global
holocaust scenario; there would be no food except for the other
animals coming off the Ark. Even if we assume that fertile topsoil
magically appeared amidst the devastation and new plants began
growing immediately, they wouldn't grow quickly enough to keep
all of Noah's animals from starving to death.
How did the forests and jungles regrow so quickly? Why are some
of the most ancient trees and densest jungles in the world found in
the Americas, so far from Noah's Ark? Did he travel to North
and South America via magic carpet and reseed the jungles?
How did all of the human-specific diseases survive? Did the
residents of the Ark simultaneously carry every disease in
existence? That must have been one sick ship, particularly when you
consider the fact that every other species on the bo at must
have also been carrying all of the diseases that are specialized
for it.
How did species with short lifespans (eg. mayflies) survive the
long trip?
How did Noah feed all of those species, particularly those who
must eat other species to survive?
How did Noah provide environments suitable for all those
species, since some of them can't survive in heat and some of
them can't survive in cold? Did he have heated bays and
refridgerated bays in his boat? Was there a Fridgidaire logo on the
side of the Ark?
How did unique species find themselves on isolated
islands?
Why isn't there any inbreeding-related damage in the
Earth's species? Such damage should be severe if every species
was repopulated from just two specimens, but then again, your
average Southern Baptist YEC probably thinks inbreeding is a
good thing.
Why didn't the ancient Egyptians make any record of a
catastrophic flood even though they were known to have an advanced
civilization at the time (between 2000BC and 2500BC)? Are the YECs
going to dispute the historical and archaeological estimates of the
Pyramids' age as well? Maybe the Egyptians were part of the
vast "evolutionist" conspiracy :)
How did Noah and his family repopulate the Earth so quickly?
Some of the Egyptian pyramids were built in the centuries
immediately following the imaginary global Flood; were they built
by a few dozen people?
Why are all the flood myths across the world so different? They
love to point out that flood myths are common to many religions,
but they don't like to point out how much different they are
from their own flood story. That's quite odd if all
those stories originate, as they claim, from a single consistent
event rather than common cultural phobias such as the dissimilar
armageddon stories which are also found in many
religions.
Why doesn't their own Bible mention any of these other
crazy errata which they attribute to the flood, such as the global
catastrophism that supposedly created all of the valleys and
mountains in defiance of the laws of physics, or the enormous steam
geysers shooting into the sky to provide the rain water, or the
devastated lifeless planet afterwards?
How did life on Earth survive if all of the meteor impact
craters were formed within the last 6000 years, as required by YEC?
This also begs the question of why none of the world's cultures
recorded the devastation of all these meteor impacts. There are
numerous huge impact craters which betray evidence of impacts
powerful enough to devastate the planet (such as the infamous
"dino-killer" asteroid), and in primeval periods, some
that were so powerful that they would have vapourized the
oceans. The huge craters are right there for all to see, and
yet we're still alive, aren't we?
Why should the story of Genesis and the Flood be taken
literally when flat-Earth and Earth-centred solar system models
(also derived from the Bible) have both been discarded in favour of
scientific observations and theories?
The really sad thing is that I'm just getting started. The
stellar Talk.Origins
website has a far more detailed description of serious problems
with flood geology, but I hope my brief list is informative enough
to provide YECs with food for thought (if they're capable of
opening their minds just a crack, to let the light in) and their
opponents with ammunition for debate. The Great Flood isn't
just unlikely; it's impossible, by virtue of casually
violating the laws of thermodynamics (the real laws of
thermodynamics, not the butchered misrepresentations being
publicized by YECs) and many other scientific principles.
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