The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a
parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby
robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.
This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that
Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about
Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be
*young* dinosaurs, of course.... If we assume that one Biblical cubit
equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume
of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522
standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!
Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-
on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the
earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,
including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine
instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah's convenience. It seems
plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the beginning of
the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation
may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of
animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic
animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah's crew of eight.
Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge
patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a
radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and
Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that
before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows
before the Flood -- Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into
existence as a sign of God's covenant with Noah. If we assume that
normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in
pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that
rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was
replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).
The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the "fountains
of the great deep" and "the windows of heaven." Flood geologists
interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and
also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by
divine fiat, the Flood's waters once surrounded the entire planet in a
"vapor canopy." When the time came to destroy his Creation, God
caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire
planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in
Noah's time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah's seas
were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may
have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation
that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah's 969
years.
The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam's Fall. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics is strong evidence that the entire Universe
has been in decline since Adam's sin. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.
Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had
the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a
fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a
species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,
nor is the "tail" on an embryo an actual tail -- it only resembles one.
Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would
violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,
creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was
deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The
reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is
because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were
the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.
Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem
laughable, but *The Genesis Flood* is not a silly or comic work. It is
five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward
and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.
*The Genesis Flood* has sold over 200,000 copies and gone
through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry
M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world's most influential
creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,
California.
It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on
the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are
accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream
institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has
written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.'s monthly
newsletter, *Acts and Facts,* is distributed to over 100,000 people.
The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from
its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.
In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had
an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.
Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.
The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the
top and the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon yield incongruent
ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the
thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile-
deep canyon were in fact all deposited at the same time and that
conventional radiometric methods are, to say the least, gravely
flawed. A second I.C.R. effort should demonstrate that certain ice-
cores from Greenland, which purport to show 160 thousand years of
undisturbed annual snow layers, are in fact only two thousand years
old and have been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.
Mr. Hoesch expressed some amazement that his Institute's
efforts are poorly and privately funded, while mainstream geologists
and biologists often receive comparatively enormous federal funding.
In his opinion, if the Institute for Creation Research were to receive
equivalent funding with their rivals in uniformitarian and
evolutionary so-called science, then creation-scientists would soon be
making valuable contributions to the nation's research effort.
Other creation scientists have held that the search for oil, gas,
and mineral deposits has been confounded for years by mistaken
scientific orthodoxies. They have suggested that successful flood-
geology study would revolutionize our search for mineral resources
of all kinds.
Orthodox scientists are blinded by their naturalistic prejudices.
Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Hoesch described as a "great hypocrite," is a
case in point. Carl Sagan is helping to carry out a well-funded
search for extraterrestrial life in outer space, despite the fact that
there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for extraterrestrial
intelligence, and there is certainly no mention in the Bible of any
rival covenant with another intelligent species. Worse yet, Sagan
boasts that he could detect an ordered, intelligent signal from space
from the noise and static of mere cosmic debris. But here on earth
we have the massively ordered and intelligently designed "signal"
called DNA, and yet Sagan publicly pretends that DNA is the result of
random processes! If Sagan used the same criteria to distinguish