Flood geology

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Flood geology (also creation geology or diluvial geology) is a prominent subset of beliefs under the umbrella of creationism that assumes the literal truth of a global flood as described in the Genesis account of Noah's Ark. For adherents, the global flood and its aftermath are believed to be the origin of most of the Earth's geological features, including sedimentary strata, fossilization, fossil fuels, submarine canyons, and salt domes. Young Earth creationists regard Genesis as providing a historically and scientifically accurate record for the geological history of the Earth and believe that there exists evidence that can back up the historicity of the flood.

However, creationist presentations of what they believe is evidence have routinely been evaluated, refuted and dismissed unequivocally by the scientific community, which considers such flood geology to be pseudoscience. Flood geology directly contradicts the current consensus (and much of the evidence underlying it) in scientific disciplines such as geology, evolutionary biology and paleontology.

Flood geology should not be confused with episodic catastrophism as observed by geologists and earth scientists at many locations throughout the Earth's ~4.55 billion year natural history. Such confusion surrounded the observations of the geologist J. Harlen Bretz who discovered the Missoula Floods in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.^[1][2][3] His observations and theories were rejected out of hand for many years by geologists and scientists on the basis that catastrophism was not science, but rather religion. Today, it is recognized by geologists that while periodic catastrophes may occur, there are uniformitarian principles at work in geologic history as well.

Contents 1 History of flood geology 1.1 The great flood in the history of geology 1.2 Emergence of flood geology 2 Theological basis 3 Evidence cited to support a global flood 3.1 Fossils 3.2 Liquefaction 3.3 Submarine canyon formation 3.4 Widespread flood stories 4 Proposed mechanisms of the flood 4.1 Hydroplates 4.2 Vapor canopy 4.3 Runaway subduction 5 Additional evidence against a global flood 5.1 Historical records 5.2 Erosion 5.3 Geochronology 5.4 Paleontology 5.5 Geochemistry 6 Philosophical objections 7 Notes and references 8 Further reading 9 See also 10 External links 10.1 Flood geology sites 10.2 Sites critical of Flood Geology

[edit] History of flood geology

[edit] The great flood in the history of geology

The modern science of geology was founded in Europe in the 18th century.^[4] Its practitioners sought to understand the history and shaping of the Earth through the physical evidence laid down in rocks and minerals. As many early geologists were clergymen, they naturally sought to link the geological history of the world with that set out in the Bible. The ancient theory that fossils were the result of "plastic forces" within the Earth's crust had by this time been abandoned, with the recognition that they represented the remains of once-living creatures. This, though, raised a major problem: how did fossils of sea creatures end up on land, or on the tops of mountains?

As early as the 2nd century AD, Christian thinkers had proposed that fossils represented organisms that were killed and buried during the brief duration of the Flood.^{[citation needed]} This idea became commonly held, aided by the geological peculiarity that much of northern Europe is covered by layers of loam and gravel as well as erratic boulders deposited hundreds of miles from their original sources. This was interpreted as being the result of massive flooding, though it is now known that they are the product of ice age glaciations (an unknown phenomenon at that time). Prevailing notions of the time held that the global flood was associated with massive geographical upheavals, with old continents sinking and new ones rising, thus transforming ancient seabeds into mountain tops.

During the Age of Enlightenment, there were significant attempts made to provide natural causes for the miracles recounted in the Bible. Natural philosophy explanations for a global flood can be found in such works as An Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) by John Woodward and New Theory of the Earth (1696) by Woodward’s student William Whiston.^[5]

By the early 19th century, however, this view had fallen into disrepute. It was already thought that the Earth's lifespan was far longer than that suggested by literal readings of the Bible (an age of 75,000 years had been suggested as early as 1779, as against the 6,000 years proposed by Archbishop James Ussher's famous chronology). Charles Lyell's promotion of James Hutton's ideas of uniformitarianism advocated the principle that geological changes that occurred in the past may be understood by studying present-day phenomena. In common with Newton, Hutton assumed that the world-system had been in a steady state since the day of creation, but unlike Newton he included in this vision not only the motion of celestial bodies and processes like chemical change on earth, but also processes of geological change. Christopher Kaiser writes:

In other words, in comparison with Newton's, Hutton's was a higher order concept of the system of nature which included not only the present structure of the world, but the process (or natural history) by which the present structure had come into existence and was maintained. As with Newton, and in contrast to materialists like Buffon and neomechanists like Laplace, the origins of the system were beyond the scope of science for Hutton: in nature itself he found 'no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end'. But Hutton came about as close to being a neomechanist as one possibly could without changing the Newtonian framework of God and nature. Only the Newtonian stipulation that God had personally designed the present system of nature stood between natural theology and the retirement of God from science altogether... Like Derham and Cotes, Hutton believed that God had implanted active principles in nature at creation sufficient to account for all its natural functions.^[6]

The idea that all geological strata were produced by a single flood was rejected in 1837 by the Reverend William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford University, who wrote:

Some have attempted to ascribe the formation of all the stratified rocks to the effects of the Mosaic Deluge; an opinion which is irreconcilable with the enormous thickness and almost infinite subdivisions of these strata, and with the numerous and regular successions which they contain of the remains of animals and vegetables, differing more and more widely from existing species, as the strata in which we find them are placed at greater depths. The fact that a large proportion of these remains belong to extinct genera, and almost all of them to extinct species, that lived and multiplied and died on or near the spots where they are now found, shows that the strata in which they occur were deposited slowly and gradually, during long periods of time, and at widely distant intervals.^[7]

Although Buckland continued for a while to insist that some geological layers related to the Great Flood, he was forced to abandon this idea as the evidence increasingly indicated multiple inundations which occurred well before humans existed. He was convinced by the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz that much of the evidence on which he relied was in fact the product of ancient ice ages, and became one of the foremost champions of Agassiz's theory of glaciations. Mainstream science gave up on the idea of flood geology, which required major deviations from known physical processes.

[edit] Emergence of flood geology

Flood geology was developed as a creationist endeavor in the 20th century by George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist and amateur geologist who wrote a book in 1923 to provide an explicitly Christian fundamentalist perspective on geology.^[8][9] In the 1950’s Price's work came under severe criticism and in particular by Bernard Ramm in his book “The Christian View of Science and Scripture”. Together with J. Laurence Kulp^[10], a geologist and member of the Plymouth Brethren, and other scientists^[11], Ramm influenced Christian organisations such as the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in not supporting flood geology. Price's work was subsequently adapted and updated by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr. in their book The Genesis Flood in 1961. Morris and Whitcomb argued that the Earth was geologically recent, that the Fall of Man had triggered the second law of thermodynamics, and that the Great Flood had laid down most of the geological strata in the space of a single year.^[12] Given this history, they argued, "the last refuge of the case for evolution immediately vanishes away, and the record of the rocks becomes a tremendous witness . . . to the holiness and justice and power of the living God of Creation!"^[13]

This became the foundation of a new generation of Young Earth creationist thinkers, many of whom organized themselves around Morris' Institute for Creation Research. Subsequent research by the Creation Research Society has observed and analyzed, and interpreted geological formations, within a flood geology framework, including the La Brea Tar Pits,^[14] the Tavrick Formation (Tauric Formation, Russian: "Tavricheskaya formatsiya") in the Crimean Peninsula^[15] and Stone Mountain, Georgia.^[16] In each case, the creationists claimed that the flood geology interpretation had superior explanatory power than the uniformitarian explanation. The Creation Research Society argues that "uniformitarianism is wishful thinking".^[17]

The impact on creationism and fundamentalist Christianity of these ideas is considerable. Morris' theories of flood geology are widely promoted throughout the United States and overseas, with his books being translated into many other languages. Flood geology is still a major theme of modern creationism, though it is rejected by earth scientists.

[edit] Theological basis

Flood geology starts from the viewpoint that the Biblical Book of Genesis is an accurate and impartial description of actual historical events. Young Earth creationists – a position held by the majority of proponents of flood geology – believe that God created the universe between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, in the space of six days.

Genesis states that God deliberately caused the flood, indicating that the cause of the flood was supernatural in origin. The account describes two events which resulted in the flood, the "fountains of the great deep were broken up" and the "windows of heaven were opened". The waters of the flood rose so high that "all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered", drowning all land animals on Earth except the occupants of Noah's Ark. The Flood story is considered by most modern scholars to consist of two slightly different interwoven accounts [1], hence the apparent uncertainty regarding the duration of the flood (40 or 150 days) and the number of animals taken on board Noah's Ark (2 of each kind, or 7 pairs of some kinds). Eventually the waters subsided and the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (not necessarily Mount Ararat, but the mountains in that region).

The idea that Genesis is literally accurate is not universally held within Christianity, being associated principally with conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant denominations in the United States. The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, both regard Genesis as being a non-literal description of the Earth's creation. Indeed, the literalness of Genesis had been rejected in Jewish thought as early as the 1st century by Philo of Alexandria, and in Christian thought in the 3rd century by Origen. Although Origen was followed by the Alexandrian school and such Church Fathers as Augustine of Hippo, the Antiochian school, which preferred a more literal interpretation of Scripture, was always numerically superior.^[18]

Opponents of flood geology within the church such as Landon Gilkey argue that it and creation science, as well as philosophical naturalism err in reducing all truth to scientific truth. Gilkey’s key claim is that these endeavors confuse religion’s language of ultimate origins with scientific theories about proximate origins and as a result give the impression that independent domains of knowledge are competing exhaustive explanations of reality.^[19][20] Others regard flood geology as both unscientific and an impediment to evangelism.^[21]

[edit] Evidence cited to support a global flood

[edit] Fossils

Generally, the geologic column and the fossil record are used as major pieces of evidence in the modern scientific explanation of the development and evolution of life on Earth as well as a means to establish the age of the Earth. Some creationists deny the existence of these pieces of evidence. This is the approach taken by Morris and Whitcomb in their 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, and it is continued today by leading creationists such as Michael Oard and John Woodmorappe.^[22]

Other creationists accept the existence of the geological column and believe that it indicates a sequence of events that might have occurred during the global flood. This is the approach taken by Institute for Creation Research creationists such as Andrew Snelling, Steven A. Austin and Kurt Wise, as well as Creation Ministries International.^[23][24] They claim that fossils are produced not by a process lasting millions of years, but by rapid burial of the remains of many of the Earth's lifeforms by sediments in the short period of the flood. Sometimes, creationists will claim that fossilization can only take place when the matter is buried quickly so that the matter does not decompose.^[25]

The ordering of fossil layers is often used as evidence for the scientific explanation of geological features. Certain creationists believe that the separation between dinosaur fossils and hominid fossils is not due to the organisms living in different geological eras. Instead an unspecified and unmodeled "hydraulic sorting action" is claimed to be able to sort out fossils according to their shape, density, size, and the gases released from the body after death.^{[citation needed]}

Some creationists believe that oil deposits are the result of the flood's accumulation and subsequent subsurface compression of dead plant matter.^{[citation needed]}

Creationists continue to search for evidence in the natural world that they consider to be consistent with the above description, such as evidence of rapid formation. For example, there have been claims of raindrop marks and water ripples at layer boundaries, sometimes associated with the claimed fossilized footprints of men and dinosaurs walking together. Most of this evidence has been debunked by scientists^[26] and some have been shown to be fakes.^[27]

[edit] Liquefaction

Liquefaction is a process by which sediments saturated with water can, under certain conditions, acquire properties that are more like those of a heavy liquid than those of a loose solid. Some proponents of flood geology contend that this process can explain a number of observations in a way that is consistent with a global flood. In particular, they propose that the observed sorting of fossils into globally ordered layers can be explained by the influence of the size, density, and hydrodynamic properties of the creatures on their movement within the liquid-like state. They further argue that the liquefaction predicted by the flood can explain phenomena such as relatively uniform strata over wide areas, transported blocks, sand plumes, coal and limestone deposits, and aquifers.^{[citation needed]}

However, archaeologists state that if this sorting actually took place, heavy, dense objects (such as human artifacts) would be expected to sink to the bottom. In actuality, man-made artifacts are very close to the top of the sedimentary layers. And if creatures were differentiated by body size and density, then massive dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus should be found near the top sediments, rather than in sediments containing all the other Jurassic dinosaurs.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Submarine canyon formation

A submarine canyon is a steep-sided valley on the sea floor of the continental slope. Many submarine canyons are found as extensions to large rivers; however there are many that have no such association. Proponents of Flood Geology argue that they were formed as the floodwaters receded from the continents,^{[citation needed]} claiming that the steep, often vertical sides show little erosion and are thus more consistent with rapid formation.

The major mechanism of canyon erosion is now thought in the scientific consensus to be turbidity currents and underwater landslides.

[edit] Widespread flood stories

While it is not geological evidence, believers in Flood Geology also point out that flood stories can be found in many cultures, places and religions, not just in the Bible; this, they suggest, is evidence of an actual event in the historic past because local floods would not explain the similarities in the flood stories.^[28]

Anthropologists generally reject this view and highlight the fact that much of the human population lives near water sources such as rivers and coasts, where unusually severe floods can be expected to occur occasionally and will be recorded in tribal mythology.^[29] Geologists William Ryan and Walter C. Pitman, III have suggested that a massive local flood in the Black Sea area, or possibly even the huge rise in sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age, may be responsible for the preponderance of the flood myths in the Near East and across the world.^[30]

[edit] Proposed mechanisms of the flood

Although most proponents of a global flood believe that it was at some level the result of divine intervention, some have also attempted to find a mechanism by which a flood could have occurred within the framework of natural laws. The main difficulty is where the enormous amount of water required to cover "all the high mountains" came from or where it went to. Some flood geology supporters propose that the mountains were much smaller before the flood, so that not thousands of meters but only tens of meters of water were required. Whether this interpretation is consistent with the Biblical account is questionable, but even tens of meters of water is on the order of a thousand times larger than the several centimeters of water normally suspended in the atmosphere.^{[citation needed]} At various times, subterranean sources ("hydroplates"), atmospheric sources (a "vapor canopy"), and extraterrestrial sources (a comet strike or orbiting ice) have been proposed as the source of the flood waters. The source currently most often discussed is that the ocean basins were closed by some form of rapid tectonics, spreading the water over the whole Earth. Most flood geology proponents envision the ocean basins opening up after the flood, whether for the first time or reopening, providing a place for the flood waters to drain to. This would require tectonic motion millions of times faster than that observed today.

[edit] Hydroplates

One of the proposed mechanisms relying on a subterranean source of water is the hydroplate hypothesis, put forward by Walt Brown. In this picture, the Earth was originally created with a great deal of subterranean water, and the Flood was brought on when the crust of the Earth was cracked, allowing this water to escape violently to the surface.^[31] The pieces of the surface, referred to as "hydroplates", are supposed to have rapidly divided during and after the flood. Brown states that the water later drained into the basins that had been formed by the division of the plates becoming the oceans. Many creationist organizations such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research consider the hydroplate notion to be unworkable.^{[citation needed]}

The Hydroplates hypothesis has been criticised as being faulty for a number of reasons:^[32][33]

• that the rock that makes up the earth's crust does not float, so that the water would have been forced to the surface long before the Genesis flood.
• that even two miles deep (far above the hypothesised depth), the earth is boiling hot (260 to 270 degrees C at 5.656 miles in one borehole; Bram et al. 1995), resulting in a superheated reservoir of water and temperatures that would not have been survivable.
• that the waters would have eroded the sides of the fissures through which they were escaping, producing poorly sorted basaltic erosional deposits. These would be concentrated mainly near the fissures, but some would be shot thousands of miles along with the water. Such deposits would be quite noticeable but have never been seen.

[edit] Vapor canopy

The "vapor canopy" is the idea that the waters for the flood came from a "canopy" of water vapor surrounding the Earth. Related proposals have been made with the water in the form of a liquid or ice. The earliest water canopy proposal was that of Isaac Vail in 1874, but the idea came to prominence in 1961 with the publication of the book The Genesis Flood by Henry M. Morris and John Whitcomb. The concept of the water canopy seems to come from Genesis 1:7 with the phrase "the waters above the firmament." Other biblical statements that point to this possible interpretation include:

• "the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth... but there went up a mist from the earth" (Genesis 2:5-6) - interpreted to mean that there was no rain prior to the great Flood, but only a vapor mist which watered the earth
• "the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" - interpreted to mean that sunset being the breezy part of every day
• "I do set my bow in the cloud" (Genesis 9:13) - interpreted to mean that there were no rainbows prior to the great Flood
• "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day" - the great luminary on the 4th day that becomes the sun after the Flood.
• "the windows of heaven were opened" (Genesis 7:11) - understood to describe the collapse of the vapor canopy during the Flood.
• “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22) - understood to mean that prior to the flood there were no seasons as the vapor canopy created a uniform climate.
• Additionally, many creationist advocates of the vapor canopy model believe that the vapor canopy shielded human beings from cosmic rays, thus accounting for the long lifespans recorded prior to the flood.

One major proponent of the vapor canopy is Kent Hovind, who has made the model popular among the general population of creationists, but most creation scientists now reject the idea.^{[citation needed]} For instance, Walt Brown's Center for Scientific Creation opposes it, and it has also fallen into disfavour at Answers in Genesis.^[34]

The scientific criticism of the vapor canopy focus on the required pressure and temperature of the atmosphere. For water vapor equivalent to one kilometer of liquid water, the pressure at the surface of the Earth would be 100 times greater than it is now. The critical pressure of water is only 217 atm, so it is difficult to distinguish between liquid and vapor under these conditions, but either the temperature would be high (hundreds or thousands of degrees) or the density of the vapor would be more like that of liquid water than our present atmosphere. Finally, to get this vapor to condense into rain, an enormous amount of heat would have to be extracted and disposed of.

A canopy of liquid water or ice faces other difficulties. A stationary layer of water would, of course, not be stable and would immediately fall. An orbiting ring or shell of water or ice, even if it could be made stable for long periods and then suddenly fall, would be heated by conversion of gravitational energy during the fall, resulting in steam rather than rain. There have also been versions of the vapor canopy idea that interpret the frozen remains of woolly mammoths with grass in their mouths as evidence of a sudden freezing out of the water vapor as ice at the poles. Modern science does not see the frozen mammoths as something difficult to explain,^{[citation needed]} and the difficulty of getting rid of the excess heat would be even more severe in this scenario than it already is just to produce rain.

[edit] Runaway subduction

In the last decade, most proposed flood mechanisms involve "runaway subduction" (the rapid movement of tectonic plates) in one form or another, at least in order to open up the ocean basins to allow the drainage of the water after the flood, but possibly also to close them before the flood in order to force the oceans onto the land.

One specific form of runaway subduction is called Catastrophic plate tectonics, proposed by geophysicist John Baumgardner and supported by the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis.^[35] This holds the rapid plunge of former oceanic plates into the mantle caused by an unknown trigger mechanism which increased local mantle pressures to the point that it's viscosity dropped several magnitudes according to known properties of mantle silicates. Once initiated, sinking plates caused the spread of low viscosity throughout the mantle resulting in runaway mantle convection and catastrophic tectonic motion as continents were dragged across the surface of the earth. Once the former ocean plates, which are known to be more dense than the mantle, reached the bottom of the mantle an equilibrium was reached. Pressures dropped, viscosity increased, runaway mantle convection stopped, leaving the surface of the earth rearranged. Proponents point to subducted slabs in the mantle which are still relatively cool, which they regard as evidence that they have not been there for millions of years of temperature equilibration.^[36]

The hypothesis of catastrophic plate tectonics is considered pseudoscience and is rejected by the vast majority of geologists in favour of the conventional geological theory of plate tectonics. It has been argued that the tremendous release of energy necessitated by such an event would boil off the Earth's oceans, making a global flood impossible.^[37] Further, this hypothesis is contradicted by a considerable body of geological evidence:^[38]

• some volcanic island chains, such as the Hawaiian islands, present evidence that the ocean floor moved slowly over erupting "hot spots." Radiometric dating and erosion levels indicate that the older islands are very much older, not close to the same age as catastrophic tectonics would require.
• Catastrophic plate tectonics requires that all ocean floor should be approximately the same age, but both radiometric dating and amounts of sedimentation indicate that the age changes gradually, from brand new to tens of millions of years old.
• As sea-floor basalt cools, it becomes denser and sinks. The elevation of sea floors is consistent with cooling appropriate for its age according to conventional geology, assuming gradual spreading.
• Guyots are flat-topped underwater mountains, whose tops were eroded flat over a long time at the ocean surface, and they sank with the sea floor. Catastrophic tectonics does not allow enough time for the sea mountain to form, erode, and sink.
• This hypothesis does not account for continent-continent collisions, such as between India and the Eurasian plate.

Catastrophic plate tectonics lacks a plausible mechanism. Particularly, the greatly lowered viscosity of the mantle, the rapid magnetic reversals, and the sudden cooling of the ocean floor afterwards cannot be explained under conventional physics.^[38]

Conventional plate tectonics accounts for the geological evidence already, including innumerable details that catastrophic plate tectonics cannot, such as why there is gold in California, silver in Nevada, salt flats in Utah, and coal in Pennsylvania, without requiring any extraordinary mechanisms to do so.^[38][39]

[edit] Additional evidence against a global flood

Modern geology, and its sub-disciplines of earth science, geochemistry, geophysics, glaciology, paleoclimatology, paleontology and other scientific disciplines utilize the scientific method to analyze the geology of the earth. The key tenets of flood geology are refuted by scientific analysis and do not have any standing in the scientific community. Modern geology relies on a number of established principles, one of the most important of which is Charles Lyell's principle of uniformitarianism. In relation to geological forces it states that the shaping of the Earth has occurred by means of mostly slow-acting forces that can be seen in operation today. By applying this principle, geologists have determined that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. They study the lithosphere of the Earth to gain information on the history of the planet. Geologists divide Earth's history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and faunal stages characterized by well-defined breaks in the fossil record (see Geologic time scale).^[40][41] In general, there is a lack of any evidence for any of the above effects proposed by flood geologists and their claims of fossil layering are not taken seriously by scientists.^[42]

[edit] Historical records

The dates of a number of ancient cultures (such as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia) have been established by the analysis of historical documents supported by carbon dating to be older than the alleged date of the Flood.

[edit] Erosion

The flood, had it occurred, should also have produced large-scale effects spread throughout the entire world. Erosion should be evenly distributed, yet the levels of erosion in, for example, the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains differ significantly.^[42]

[edit] Geochronology

Geochronology is the science of determining the absolute age of rocks, fossils, and sediments by a variety of techniques. These methods indicate that the Earth as a whole is at least 4.5 billion years old, and that the strata that, according to flood geology, were laid down during the Flood 6000 years ago, were actually deposited gradually over many millions of years. These methods are robust because they only rely on the assumption that the physical laws governing radioactive decay have not been violated since the sample was formed, and because a wide variety of different methods give consistent results^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Paleontology

Paleontologists note that if all the fossilized animals were killed in the flood, and the flood is responsible for fossilization, then the average density of vertebrates was an abnormally high number, close to 2100 creatures per acre, judging from fossil sites found worldwide.^[43] In addition, carbonate hardgrounds and the fossils associated with them show that the so-called flood sediments include evidence of long hiatuses in deposition not consistent with flood dynamics or timing.^[44]

[edit] Geochemistry

Proponents of Flood Geology also have a difficult time explaining the alternation between calcite seas and aragonite seas through the Phanerozoic. The cyclical pattern of carbonate hardgrounds, calcitic and aragonitic ooids, and calcite-shelled fauna has apparently been controlled by seafloor spreading rates and the flushing of seawater through hydrothermal vents which changes its Mg/Ca ratio.^[46]

[edit] Philosophical objections

See also: Occam's Razor

The scientific community contends that Flood Geology, in contrast to conventional geology, is not able to plausibly explain the available observations. However, even if both hypotheses did an equally good job, many scientists would nevertheless reject Flood Geology on philosophical grounds, specifically Occam's Razor. Occam's razor is the principle of rejecting any unnecessary assumptions from scientific theories: "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less." Applied to geology, if one explanation requires only natural processes and the other requires a God in addition, then the explanation that only requires natural processes is to be preferred.

Furthermore, Flood Geology supporters are accused of not approaching the subject with the objective, open mind which is the scientific ideal. Their purpose is to find evidence for a particular explanation, rather than to find the explanation that best fits the evidence. The history of geology supports this view by the recounting that geologists had looked at the evidence for a worldwide flood in the century before Darwin and found it lacking, dismissing it in favor of uniformitarian models.^[42]

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] Further reading

• Brown, W (2001). In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood. Center for Scientific Creation. ISBN 1-878026-08-9. 
• Dubrovo, N. A. et al., “Upper Quaternary Deposits and Paleogeography of the Region Inhabited by the Young Kirgilyakh Mammoth,” International Geology Review, Vol. 24, No. 6, June 1982, p. 630.
• Hapgood, Charles H. The Path of the Pole (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1970), p. 267.
• Howorth, Henry H. The Mammoth and the Flood (London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1887), pp. 2–4, 74–75.
• M. Huc, Recollections of a Journey through Tartary, Thibet [Tibet], and China, During the Years 1844, 1845, and 1846. Vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1852), pp. 130–131.
• H. Neuville, “On the Extinction of the Mammoth,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1919.
• Numbers, RL (1991). The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520083936. 
• E. W. Pfizenmayer, Siberian Man and Mammoth, translated from German by Muriel D. Simpson (London: Black & Son Limited, 1939).
• Ukraintseva, Valentina V. Vegetation Cover and Environment of the “Mammoth Epoch” in Siberia (Hot Springs, South Dakota: The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, 1993), pp. 12–13.

[edit] See also

• Baraminology
• Creation biology
• Creation science
• Frank Lewis Marsh
• Pre-Adamite
• Pseudoscience
• Polystrate fossil
• Young Earth creationism

[edit] External links

[edit] Flood geology sites

• Unveiling the Mechanism Behind the Genesis Flood
• Startling Evidence That Noah's Flood Really Happened
• Answers in Genesis' Geology Questions and Answers Page
• Tas Walker's Biblical Geology
• Christian Geology
• Global Flood Geology from "Creation Science Prophecy"
• Hydroplate Theory
• Biblical Evidence for the Universality of the Genesis Flood - Richard M. Davidson - John Nevin Andrews Professor of Old Testament Interpretation - Old Testament Department - Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan
• Revolution against Evolution geology page
• Recolonisation Theory
• Shock Dynamics geology theory - Evidence of a catastrophic meteorite impact causing continental drift in 26 hours instead of 200 million years

[edit] Sites critical of Flood Geology

• Answers In Creation and Age of the Earth. Old earth creationist websites explaining the problems of young earth flood geology.
• talk.origins Flood Geology archive
• Fossils, Flood Geology and Creation Science
• Creationist "Flood Geology" Versus Common Sense
• Problems with a Global Flood
• Mount St. Helens: Explosive Evidence for Catastrophe
• History of the Collapse of "Flood Geology" and a Young Earth, adapted from the book The Biblical Flood by Davis A. Young, ISBN 0-8028-0719-4
• Why a Global Flood is impossible
• A Series of Articles written by a former YEC attacking Flood Geology
• A Collection of Essays Criticizing Creation Science, including Flood Geology
• Critique of a YEC article defending Flood Geology
• Problems with Flood Geology
• An extended course syllabus from The College of Wooster
• Noah's Flood - What does the Evidence Say?