World in Ruins - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 61

tial rain from the comet's atmosphere opened the floodgates of heaven. The gravitational
attraction of this near miss created enormous stresses as the rocky crust stretched and con-
tracted under the influence of subterranean tides. As the crust cracked, the combination of
torrential rain and water liberated from below scoured the world's surface. Then the flood-
waters neatly drained back down into the abyss, leaving the churned-up mess to settle back
into place much as Woodward had described.
Not everybody was impressed with such theories. Oxford astronomy professor John Keill
published a critique of Burnet's and Whiston's arguments that condemned both men as
“makers of imaginary worlds and loosers of imaginary floods.” 11 Keill derisively labeled
Burnet's topic a “ Philosophical Romance ” because an originally smooth world bathed in
perpetual sunlight would be uninhabitable. 12
Rivers would not run on Burnet's perfectly smooth Earth. With no slope to drive the cur-
rent, rivers could not flow. They would “stagnate and stink,” making for “uncomfortable
living.” 13 With no rain and no flowing surface water, Keill thought that the land between
the foul rivers would have been more like Hades than Paradise.
And Burnet's rocky crust could never float like clay flakes on an ocean of water. It would
sink as soon as it consolidated. Besides, Keill noted, Genesis revealed that antediluvian so-
ciety had iron tools, and thus Earth's original crust must have contained iron. Yet if Bur-
net was right, dense iron particles would have settled rapidly down through the abyss and
would never have become incorporated into the crust in the first place. Keill dismissed Bur-
net as a victim of excessive imagination who used clever rhetoric to charm logic to sleep.
Still, that wasn't the biggest flaw in Burnet's theory. Had the warmth of the Sun been
able to penetrate Earth's surface and heat the inner sea enough to crack the crust, it would
have baked the planet's surface, raising insurmountable questions about Noah's Flood.
Certainly there could be no necessity for a Deluge in that case, except it were to cool the Earth again after such an
excessive heat, which must have destroyed all the Animals, Plants, and Trees which were upon the earth, and have
turned them into Glass. 14
Keill likewise demolished Whiston's theory by showing that there would not be enough
pressure in a comet's tail to generate torrential rains. Keill further calculated that the grav-