Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
Is the Hydroplate Theory Consistent with the Bible?
Without hearing from eyewitnesses, police can usually reconstruct the general outlines of an automobile accident by carefully studying the evidence, such as skid marks and wreckage. Likewise, some details of the flood can be pieced together just by studying its wreckage. Part II of this book is such a study. However, witnesses provide details consistent with the physical evidence as well as information we might never learn elsewhere. Here, you will see that the hydroplate theory is also consistent with the Bible, which records eyewitness accounts of the flood. Table 32 shows the close correspondence between the biblical descriptions of the flood and the hydroplate theory.
| Biblical Chronology (Eyewitness Accounts) |
Hydroplate Theory (Scientific Evidence) |
|---|---|
| Day 2 of Creation Week: Water covered the earth. (Gen 1:2) Then “a raqia” separated liquid water above from liquid water below. (Gen 1:6–7) |
During Creation Week: A layer of water was below earth’s crust (a raqia, or pressed-out solid). [See “What Does ‘Raqia’ Mean?” on page 541 for further details.] Earth’s surface waters were above the crust. Because the crust was initially so flat, those surface waters covered the entire earth. |
| Day 3 of Creation Week: The waters below the heavens were gathered into one place, and the dry land appeared. (Gen 1:9)
|
The raqia—earth’s 200,000,000-square-mile rock crust—rested on a layer of trapped subterranean water. The heaviest (densest, thickest) portions of the crust rapidly sank into the subterranean water, forming depressions at earth’s surface. Because a fixed volume of water was trapped under the crust, the displaced subterranean water lifted the lightest portions of the crust out of the surface water. The dry land appeared. (Gen 1:9) The water above the crust then drained into the depressions, forming seas. [See "What Triggered the Flood?" on pages 477–483.] |
| It did not rain before the flood. Instead, “a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.” (Gen 2:5–6) Note: For water to become a mist, heat must be added to the water. For this to happen uniformly and regularly over the whole earth, requires huge amounts of continuously generated heat from inside the earth. |
Before the Flood: The subterranean water, heated by tidal pumping, quickly1 became supercritical.2 Certain minerals in the granite crust, such as quartz, readily dissolved in the supercritical water, making the lower crust porous. [See “Recorded Ancient History” on page 479.] Heat from tidal pumping could then rise continuously by convection through the lower crust and evaporate ground water (not connected to the subterranean water) near earth’s surface. With such a humid atmosphere, heavy dew settled to the ground each night as temperatures fell below the dew point, providing a marvelous and simple system for daily distributing pure water for all life—not too much and not too little. This also cleaned the atmosphere, and produced cooling during the day and heating during the night. |
| At the end of the creation week, “God saw that all He had made was very good.” (Gen 1:31) Because earth’s radioactivity is harmful to life, radioactivity must not have been on the early earth. |
Radioactivity did not exist on earth prior to the flood. The flood produced earth’s radioactivity. [See "The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity" on pages 387–441.] |
| Human violence and great sin had spread throughout the earth. (Gen 6:5–12)
About 2,000 years after creation, all the fountains of the great deep3 burst open on one day and the flood began with “geshem4 rain”—as if “flood gates” in the sky had opened up. (Gen 7:11) |
Rupture Phase: Because the lower crust was porous, it was weaker than solid granite. The elevated pressure in the subterranean chamber (from tidal pumping) and in the water filling the voids in the lower crust stretched the crust, much like a stretched rubber band. Some event, perhaps resulting from human violence, added additional stress to the crust, pushing it to its failure point. A tension crack then propagated around the earth in about 2 hours, releasing subterranean water. Fountains of muddy water and rocks jetted high above the earth and became extremely cold in seconds—almost absolute zero (-460°F).5 Muddy hail falling from the supercold fountains buried and froze mammoths. Comets, asteroids, and meteoroids formed from some of the high velocity water and rocks that escaped earth. [See pages 269–382.] |
| The 40 days and 40 nights of “geshem rain” ended. (Gen 7:4,12) |
Flood Phase: The fountains of the great deep were suppressed. [See "The Water Prevailed" on page 505.] Sediments from the muddy water buried (and eventually fossilized) plants and animals. |
| Flood waters rose until the 150th day, when they covered all preflood mountains. (Gen 7:19–24) |
High-pressure water continued to gush up into the flood waters. Liquefaction sorted sediments and dead plants and animals. Salt domes, coal, oil, and methane began forming. |
|
150th Day: A wind passed over the earth. Waters slowly began to subside.6 The Ark landed on the mountains of Ararat. (Gen 8:1–4) |
Continental-Drift Phase: The Mid-Atlantic Ridge buckled up, and the Atlantic floor rose. The Pacific plate subsided, so the hydroplates accelerated downhill, sliding on a layer of lubricating water. |
| Hours later, the massive hydroplates decelerated and crashed; they were crushed, thickened, buckled, and heated in a powerful compression event.7 Overthrusting occurred in some places. Continents took on their present shapes. As mountains buckled upward—all within an hour—air was displaced, causing a great wind. The earth began a slow 34°–57° roll, so the poles shifted. [See pages 130–133, and 499–500.] |
|
| 150th – 371st Day: Passengers stayed on Ark. |
Recovery Phase: Hostile environment began: earthquakes, melting in the inner earth, Ice Age, continental shifting, and Ring of Fire (flood basalts and volcanoes); ocean trenches and methane hydrates formed; water drained; vegetation reestablished. Lower sea level facilitated land migration and formed tablemounts and submarine canyons. Plateaus were lifted hydraulically. Breaching of natural dams carved large continental canyons, such as the Grand Canyon. |
| 371st Day: Ark was off-loaded. (Gen 8:15–19) |
|
| 371st Day to the present. Earth divided in Peleg’s day. [See page 533 and Endnote 15 on page 513.] |
The flood was initiated by God because of man’s sin. We may never know the precise event that God used (or allowed) to physically trigger the flood.8 However, once it started, other events must have occurred whose consequences, or “wreckage,” we can still see. Examples include the jigsaw fit of the continents; rapid burial and preservation of trillions upon trillions of fossils in layered rocks; marine fossils on every major mountain range; crumpled mountains; coal, oil, and methane deposits; frozen mammoths; strange features on the ocean floor; earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; the Ring of Fire and earth’s core; gouged out canyons; chondrules, comets, asteroids, and meteorites; earth’s radioactivity; and hundreds of other consequences. One can place these events in a cause-and-effect sequence that (1) conforms to scientific laws, (2) explains details of these observations, and (3) provides a greater understanding of this global cataclysm. That is the purpose of the hydroplate theory.
The following verses speak of events similar to those described in the hydroplate theory. Taken collectively, they provide support for the statements above them in bold. Some passages may be metaphors referring to ancient demonstrations of God’s power.
1. Large quantities of subterranean water existed in the ancient past.
- Psalm 24:2. ... He has founded it [the earth] upon the seas ...
- Psalm 33:7. ... He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deeps in storehouses ... (A storehouse is a closed container that preserves something you may use later. God used that water when it was brought forth as a flood. Many storehouses, or interconnected chambers, held the subterranean water.)
- Psalm 136:6. ... [He] spread out the earth above the waters ...
- II Peter 3:5. ... the earth was formed out of water and by water ...8
2. These subterranean waters, under extreme pressure, burst forth, bringing on the flood.10
- Genesis 7:11–12. ... the fountains of the great deep burst open,11 and the floodgates4 of the sky were opened. And rain fell ...12
- Job 38:8–11. ... who enclosed the sea with doors, when bursting forth, it went out from the womb; when I made a cloud its garment ...
- Psalm 18:15. ... the channels of water appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare ...
- Proverbs 3:20. ... the deeps were broken up and the skies dripped dew ...
3. Some supercritical subterranean water is still jetting up from beneath the ocean floor. [See Figure 57 on page 128.][See page 124.]
4. The deepest recesses on the ocean floor are trenches. [See Figure 83 on page 154.][See page 124.]
5. A massive hailstorm occurred.
- Exodus 9:18, 24. ... I will send a very heavy hail, such as has not been seen in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. ... So there was hail, and fire flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very severe, such as had not been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. [This could mean that an even larger hail and lightning storm than the one God inflicted on Pharaoh occurred before Egypt became a nation. If so, that more powerful hail and lightning storm was presumably during the flood.]
6. After 40 days and 40 nights, the avalanche of rain (geshem4 rain) stopped, because the layer of water rising on the earth reached a tipping point and suddenly poured into and suppressed the high jetting of the fountains of the great deep. [See "The Water Prevailed" on page 505.] However, high-pressure, subterranean waters continued to gush out and add to the rising flood water. On the 150th day, flood waters covered all preflood mountains. Then, the floodgates were closed by the hydroplates slowly settling onto the chamber floor, pinching shut the outward flowing water.
- Genesis 7:12. And the [geshem4] rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.
- Genesis 7:18–19, 24. ... the water prevailed and increased greatly ... so all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. ... and the waters prevailed for one hundred and fifty days.
- Genesis 8:2. Also, the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained.
7. During the compression event, the continents crushed, buckled, and thickened and mountains dramatically rose—in less than an hour.7 Then the flood waters receded.
- Psalm 104:6b–9. ... the waters were standing above the mountains. At Thy rebuke they fled; at the sound of Thy thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose; the valleys sank down to the place which Thou didst establish for them. Thou didst set a boundary that they [the waters] may not pass over; that they may not return to cover the earth.13
- Proverbs 8:22–29 contains a possible description of some very early events in earth’s history.
8. Before the flood, the Earth probably had a 360-day year and a 30-day lunar month. As Genesis 1:14–16a states, the Sun and Moon were created as “very good” time keepers. The 150th day of the flood was exactly 5 months after the fountains of the great deep broke loose. [See Genesis 7:11, 7:24, and 8:4.] Five 30-day months would be 150 days; twelve 30-day months would be 360 days. The flood may have altered a 30-day lunar orbit. [See Endnote 35 on page 186, Figure 169 on page 305, and "Does Subduction Really Occur?" on page 610.]
9. The flood was a catastrophic event that involved far more than falling rain. The earth shook violently and was accompanied by continuous thunder; the erupting fountains of the great deep darkened the sky; some launched rocks fell back to earth as glowing hailstones; powerful electrical activity (generated by the fluttering crust and the piezoelectric effect) was unleashed, and torrents of water emerged from below.
- Psalm 18:7–15. Then the earth shook and quaked; and the foundations of the mountains were trembling and were shaken, ... He made darkness His hiding place, His canopy around Him, darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies ... The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered His voice, hailstones and coals of fire ... lightning flashes in abundance ... . Then the channels of water appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare ...
10. The Book of Jasher.14 Although not inspired scripture, The Book of Jasher (which means “The Book of the Upright”) is mentioned in Joshua 10:13 and II Samuel 1:18. Jasher 6:11 vividly describes the beginning of the flood.
And on that day, the Lord caused the whole earth to shake, and the sun darkened, and the foundations of the world raged, and the whole earth was moved violently, and the lightning flashed, and the thunder roared, and all the fountains in the earth were broken up, such as was not known to the inhabitants before; and God did this mighty act, in order to terrify the sons of men that, there might be no more evil upon earth.
No original manuscript of The Book of Jasher has been located. At least three different books claim to be The Book of Jasher. All but one can be dismissed as bogus, based on linguistic and other problems. However, details in The Book of Jasher, which contains 91 chapters and was translated from Hebrew in 1625, show that Jasher is probably a copy of the book mentioned in Joshua and II Samuel.15
Jasher conforms historically to the Bible at many points, provides interesting details, and was obviously well known when Joshua and Samuel were written. One also sees a fascinating flow of over 3,000 years of Hebrew and Egyptian history—from creation to the Israelites entry into the Promised Land. Some parts are exaggerations that may have been inserted since the original Jasher was written. Wayne Simpson,14 who provides an extensive analysis of the book, believes it is a detailed record of Abraham’s family compiled by his descendants over many generations, with large sections contributed by Joseph when he was Vizier of Egypt—second only to Pharaoh. Certainly, Jasher is very ancient, at least 2,300 years old.
If you have read “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” on pages 387–441, “the lightning flashed” in Jasher 6:11, Exodus 9:24, and Psalm 18:14 will carry special meaning, as will the fluttering crust and pounding pillars with the words “caused the whole earth to shake,” and “the foundations of the world raged.”
11. Isaiah (Is 24:18–20) uses terminology that likens a future global catastrophe to the destructiveness of the flood.
For the windows above are opened, and the foundations of the earth shake. The earth is broken asunder, The earth is split through, The earth is shaken violently. The earth reels to and fro like a drunkard ...
We know there will not be another global flood (Genesis 9:11), so Isaiah is not saying the future destruction will be by flood waters. But there are other similarities, which numerous commentators have described as an echo of the flood. Keil and Delitzsch, in their highly respected Bible commentary, attribute the flood terminology to Isaiah’s purpose in describing this judgment as a direct act of God that totally destroys the earth. They also point out that the “foundations of the earth” are “the internal supports upon which the visible crust of the earth rests.”16 The hydroplate theory calls those supports pillars—the thousands of points where the crust, because of its varying density and thickness, sagged to the floor of the subterranean water chamber. Notice the similarity of Is 24:18–20 with Jasher 6:11 above.
12. The Bible has two well-known predictions that the hydroplate theory helps explain.
Before the flood, water was heating up immediately below the crust. This resulted in a global catastrophe that was predicted in Genesis 6:13 and 6:17. Since the flood, liquid rock (magma) has been heating up in the earth’s core. This will result in a global catastrophe that is remarkably consistent with the predictions in Mt 24:7, Mk 13:8, Lk 21:11, and II Peter 3:7. [See page 180 and181]
Final Thoughts. If we accept the Bible’s eyewitness accounts of the flood, we should also answer some questions the biblical account raises: Where did enough water come from to cover all the mountains on earth? Where did all that water go afterwards? After the flood, how could animals cross oceans and migrate to every continent on earth? How could such violent rain fall so rapidly at the beginning of the flood but end after 40 days, even though the flood waters rose and covered all the mountains on the 150th day of the flood? If the flood’s 40 days of rain formed by condensation, that rain should have stopped after a few days, because rain would have removed the condensation nuclei, necessary to form today’s rain. The hydroplate theory answers these questions and others.
Today, some do not believe there was a catastrophic, global flood. They think it was a relatively mild, local event, or avoid discussing it because they believe too many unanswerable questions would be raised that might subject them to ridicule. The problem for most of us is grasping the flood’s almost unimaginable magnitude and power, which is difficult without a close study of the biblical texts and the scientific evidence from many disciplines.
The Water Prevailed
Figure 241: The Tipping Point. (A similar figure and related information are on pages 598–599.) Shown, but not to scale, is a cross section of the earth’s crust and the jetting supercritical water (SCW) hours to weeks after the rupture. The left and right dashed lines are the vertical center lines of a hydroplate and the rupture, respectively. A mirror image of this figure (not shown) would lie to the left and right of each center line. Because of this symmetry, the dashed lines can be thought of as barriers beyond which matter will not flow.
The two red arrows represent opposing forces. The left red arrow represents the force of the flood waters that tended to pour into the 60-mile-deep chasm and quench (shut off) the fountains. The right arrow represents the high pressure, expanding fountains that pushed the flood water to the left. Which force prevailed over the other? For about the first 40 days of the flood, the expanding fountains prevailed. Then, gravity and the downward fluttering overcame the weakening fountains. As the flood waters filled the chasm, the fountains were quickly shut off.
Genesis 7:18–20 and 7:24 state:
And the water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the surface of the water. And the water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered. ... And the water prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days. [emphasis added]
English translations of the flood account in Genesis 6-9 have lost some powerful, insightful meanings of a few key Hebrew words. Standard Hebrew-English dictionaries have also “missed the boat.” The failure lies primarily in using English words that describe our common experiences, but the flood was the most uncommon event since the creation. This also has contributed to the centuries of confusion and doubt concerning the flood. I am indebted to G. Russell Akridge for explaining this in his 1981 article “The Hebrew Flood Even More Devastating than the English Translation Depicts.”17 Akridge gained his insights into meanings of the ancient Hebrew from the Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon (HCL) by Wihelm Gesenius.18
One of these Hebrew words, gabar, is translated “prevailed” in most English translations of the above verses. According to HCL, gabar carries the idea of one powerful force overcoming another powerful force. Therefore, we must ask what powerful forces opposed each other as the flood waters rose to cover all preflood mountains.
Figure 241 shows that the rising flood waters would have immediately drained into the 60-mile-deep chasm formed by the widening rupture had it not been for the dynamic pressure of the fountains themselves.
At the base of the fountains, the static pressure of the supercritical water (SCW) was a gigantic 62,000 psi. (A large, but unknown, amount of addition pressure was provided by the nuclear effects explained in "Vast Energy Generated / Vast Energy Removed" on page 407.) As each bundle of SCW rose in the fountain, two effects tended to decrease each bundle’s pressure: (1) increasing elevation and (2) increasing velocity. However, for every incremental drop in pressure, two other effects would have instantly restored the pressure: (1) evaporation from the hot, microscopic droplets within the SCW, and (2) the release of electrical energy.19 High pressures would have existed until only electrically-neutral superheated steam remained far above earth’s surface. [To understand SCW water, see "Three Common Questions" on pages 124–125.]
The crust fluttered in the early weeks of the flood at a frequency of about one cycle every 30 minutes. [See pages 199 and 623.] A downward flutter at the sagging20 edge of the rupture tended to send the flood waters into the 60-mile-deep chasm, weakening the fountains even more. For about the first 40 days of the flood, these powerful inertial and gravitational forces were overcome by the more powerful “prevailing” force of the expanding fountains.
Once the rupture had widened enough and the height of the subterranean chamber had decreased enough, the fountains weakened sufficiently to reach a tipping point. Then, flood waters on the earth’s surface poured into the chasm, weakening the fountains even more. This sudden collapse produced the tallest (60-miles-high), widest (46,000-miles-wide) waterfalls in earth’s history—one on each side of the rupture. The inpouring would have occurred as the edge of the fluttering plate was in the downward quarter of its 30-minute cycle. Therefore, at each point along the 46,000-mile-long rupture, the fountains were turned off within minutes—although not simultaneously—all on about the 40th day of the flood. Even after the fountains were shut off, vast amounts of water still under the crust continued to escape from the chambers, so the flood waters steadily rose until the continental-drift phase began on the 150th day of the flood.