Creationism - National Center for Science Education

produces various different types of strata with different fossils in each (heavier, denser
ones settling first); differential mobility of organisms fleeing the rising Flood waters
(swifter and more active animals escaping to higher levels); and the layering of some
strata due to great currents sweeping back and forth during the Flood, depositing first one
type of sediment, then another from a different source. Oil and coal were formed from
plant remains buried by the Flood.
Whitcomb and Morris allow for some gaps in the biblical genealogies, so that a
precise dating of Creation and the Flood cannot be reckoned directly from the Bible, but
they assert that the Flood cannot have occurred more than five thousand years before
Abraham.
Chapter IV, “Uniformitarianism and the Flood: A Study of Attempted
Harmonizations,” is a discussion of many of the older creationist and Flood theories.
More so than in Morris’s other books (with the exception of his History), this chapter
reminds us that Flood Geology is not a new discovery, but a venerable (and discarded)
tradition. Whitcomb and Morris criticize, in detail, all “concordist” theories which tried
to reconcile scientific findings with biblical inerrancy. All such attempted compromises
betray the only correct interpretation of the Bible, which plainly teaches recent, literal
creation and a Flood which profoundly altered the earth. As Morris expressed it later
(1984:329b):
The Bible clearly teaches the special creation of all things in six literal days (e.g., Exodus 20:8-11) and a
worldwide cataclysmic destruction by the flood (e.g., II Peter 3:3-6), and it is only special pleading and
strained exegesis that can force any other meaning into the Biblical record. This teaching is so
transparently clear and definite in Scripture that it seems redundant even to have to discuss it. It ought to
be considered a “given,” like the deity of Christ, for all who profess to be Bible-believing Christians.
Whitcomb and Morris praise their predecessors who believed in a worldwide Flood as the
key event in geology and earth history: Burnet, Woodward, Whiston, and later Flood
champions such as Byron Nelson, and Rehwinkel (Price gets favorable mentions, but
only in passing). They castigate compromisers such as Cuvier (for introducing the notion
of other catastrophes in addition to Noah’s Flood), Buckland, Pye Smith and other
“tranquil” or “local” Flood advocates, and, of course, all uniformitarian evolutionists.
The Genesis Flood remains a rich source of references, theological and scientific (and
both), on attitudes and theories regarding the Flood through the centuries.
Many of the ideas in The Genesis Flood predate even Price’s twentieth-century
scientific version. John Williams, for instance, who surveyed and described British coal
strata, developed at length the theory that coal was formed by the Deluge. In The
Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom (1789), he argued that coal was formed from
antediluvian timber. Most of the earth was covered by a luxuriant growth of trees before
the Flood—enough to account for all present coal deposits. Vast amounts of timber
floated on the turbulent chaos of the Flood waters, turning mushy during the year of the
Flood. Then it was deposited on the ocean bottom, often in finely laminated strata
alternating with other deposits (such as Williams observed in his British coal seams).
These many fine strata resulted from the great tidal currents of the Flood, “several miles
in perpendicular depth,” which swept back and forth, at times exposing dry land in
between the currents. Williams emphasizes that the various strata are “promiscuously”
arranged with respect to gravitational sorting—that is, “hydrodynamic sorting” by itself
cannot account for the various alternating layers—and thus must be the result of