Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
als in a slurry of sediment-laden water. Individual corals grow at most about half an inch
per year, but reefs generally grow just millimeters a year because surf incessantly pounds
them. Even assuming an unreasonably generous centimeter per year growth rate, living
reefs more than 1,000 meters thick would require more than 100,000 years to grow.
Additional fatal flaws have been identified in Whitcomb and Morris's ideas. Problems
with their vapor canopy shrouding the early earth in a mild and uniform climate include
the awkward issue that suspending even just a third of the water in the modern oceans as
a vapor canopy would result in atmospheric pressure at the ground surface great enough
to flatten living things like pancakes. The associated greenhouse effect would have led to
runaway warming, producing a climate more like Hades than paradise.
Finally, although the Bible does not say a word about sedimentary rock or fossils, Whit-
comb and Morris's own logic refutes flood geologists' central claim that sedimentary rocks
did not exist before the Flood. A literal reading of the Bible requires that such rocks already
existed at the time of the Flood because bitumen, the pitch or tar Noah used to caulk the
ark (Genesis 6:14), comes from sedimentary rock.
Instead of grappling with these dilemmas, Whitcomb and Morris focused on challenging
uniformitarianism, which they saw as the foundation for the greater evil of evolution. But
they misunderstood Lyell's argument, thinking it claimed that things had always been just
as they are, rather than that the underlying physical laws were constant. In Lyell's view,
if you wanted to understand the types of deposits that a global flood would leave behind,
you'd start by studying the deposits left by big floods. He was trying to develop a sound
methodological basis for geology. Bizarrely, after ranting about how Lyell hypnotized gen-
erations of geologists, Whitcomb and Morris turned around and adopted his uniformitarian
approach in arguing that hydrodynamic forces acted on the debris churned up by the Flood
to sort it all out into fossil-bearing strata.
Christian reaction to
The Genesis Flood
was mixed. Some evangelical magazines praised
it for its defense of Genesis, but even Whitcomb admitted that most evangelicals he knew
accepted the reality of an old Earth. Yet, the topic proved wildly popular among the funda-
mentalist rank and file, revitalizing flood geology and spawning modern creationism.
Why did Whitcomb and Morris's young-Earth creationism resonate so loudly among
fundamentalists? One critic suggested that it was appealing because, unlike previous cre-
