How Noah’s Flood Covered the “Whole World.”

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled”  (Luke 2:1)

                Hundreds of widely-scattered cultures across our world have made reference to a gigantic flood in their distant past (see a list compiled by Mark Isaak at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html).  The fact that these stories, apart from their central point of the flood, disagree with each other in many other details, does not weaken the case for granting as true the main unifying kernel of truth behind these accounts.  There are good reasons for believing that there was indeed a catastrophic flood that covered the “whole world” of Noah’s time.  Yet these good reasons are not grounded on popular interpretations of the flood, but on an understanding of both the Hebrew text and the context of the Book of Genesis.  Please do not be put off by this reality.  The challenge of interpreting Genesis correctly has far less to do with our possession of more scientific facts than could have been known in Moses’ time, than it does that we live in two widely-different cultures, with widely-different modes of verbal expression, and viewed through widely-different perspectives.    

I have several pieces of fossil-bearing shale (sedimentary) rock from high in the southern Alberta Rocky Mountains.  Indeed fossils have been found all across the world at high elevations, including the Himalayan Mountains all the way to the summit of Mount Everest (http://mathisencorollary.blogspot. com/ 2012/03/crinoids-on-mount-everest.html).  At the same time, it must be noted that there are also vast regions of land across our planet that lack both fossils and the sedimentary rock which fossils by definition require (Hugh Ross. “Global or Worldwide Flood: The Scientific Evidence.” Navigating Genesis. (Reasons to Believe, 2014), p.157.  ** See also an extended discussion of these matters at http://www. reasons.org/theflood).  Unless these fossil-less regions were geologically formed at a later time after the Genesis flood, their existence counts utterly against the notion of a flood on a global scale.

Other factors standing in the way of a truly global flood include the impossibility of accounting for the enormous amount of water required to cover the entire world, even if the highest mountains were only 500 feet above recent sea levels (Ross, p.152).  Furthermore, the movement of the earth’s crust (plate tectonics) required for the uplifting of the current mountainous landforms would have been so cataclysmic that even Noah and his family could not have survived the waves that would have been thereby produced.  The Genesis account gives not even a hint of such an upheaval of land and waves.

To be continued…

Why the Meteor Hit the Moon Part II

What science had yet to discover in Galileo’s time, was that the depressions he observed through his scope were in fact craters that were caused by the impact of explosions from meteors hitting the Moon’s surface, utterly un-impeded by an atmosphere (the Moon has none).  Earth’s far stronger gravity attracts many more times the number of meteors than does the Moon.  That doesn’t mean that the Moon never gets hit at all.  But the atmosphere on Earth burns up the vast majority of them before they could ever reach its surface.  Consequently Earth has few such depressions (“Meteor Crater” in Arizona is one example) to show for its entire bombardment history. 

So the real question of how the meteors aimed at the Moon make it all the way to its surface, has a simple and obvious answer: it has no atmosphere in place that will cause them to burn up and disinte-grate.  Nevertheless, from our vantage point as Earthlings this answer ought to amaze and fill us with gratitude for our own living arrangements.  The entire range of benefits that result from the possession of an atmosphere of the kind that we happen to enjoy on Earth, is too lengthy to describe in this essay.  But this exhaustive list of benefits must surely include the protective aspect of our atmosphere which prevents such harmful objects from otherwise making their way to the surface, thereby bringing damage to such a degree that life here on Earth would be impossible.       

Why the Meteor Hit the Moon

“Come, behold the works of the LORD” (Psalm 46:8)

On September 11, 2013, an approximately 1 meter meteor hit the Moon at close to 40,000 mph, creating a crater 50 meters wide.  The glow from its impact explosion lasted 8 seconds and was the brightest flash of light ever recorded on the Moon.  Humans looking in that direction could have seen it with the naked eye.  The event was caught on camera, and can be seen at http://www.slate.com/blogs/ bad_ astronomy/ 2014/02/24/lunar_impact_video_of_an_asteroid_hitting_the_Moon.html.

The Earth is much larger than the Moon, and so its gravitational pull is much stronger.  For that reason we get hit by several meter-sized meteors several times a year even while no one ever notices a thing.  The major explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia the same year, from which a thousand people were injured, was, by contrast, caused by a meteor estimated to be 19 meters across (and therefore nearly 20 times the diameter of the “Moon-bomb”).  So to the question why the Moon got hit on September 11 (ironically), the short answer is as simple as the answer to why a chicken might not in the end succeed in crossing the road.  That meteor hit the Moon because the Moon was right in the way of its journey to the other side of the solar system!

The longer answer to the question, however, is much more interesting.  To get there, I want to share a recent discovery of mine as the result of a reading assignment for the class, “Historical Perspectives in Science and Religion,” for my Science and Religion MA degree program.  It was my delight to read Galileo’s account of the first time he ever looked at the Moon through a telescope (which, of course, was the very first time ever that anyone in history had seen the Moon magnified at all!).   Portions of his 1610 pamphlet, “The Starry Messenger,” can be read in the article, “Neither Known Nor Observed by Anyone Before,” from Dennis Danielson, ed., The Book of the Cosmos­, (Perseus, 2000), p.145f.  The magnitude (no pun intended) of his discoveries are better understood by first clarifying the hindering role that Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) cosmology played in the apprehension of the heavens many centuries later in Galileo’s time (1564-1642 AD).  Aristotle believed, and the Western world for 2,000 years largely accepted, that the heavenly bodies above, including the Moon, belong to a realm altogether separate from the natural laws and conditions on Earth.  These bodies were characterized as unchanging, perfectly smooth, and perfectly round spheres (corresponding to the Greek notion of ideal shapes and forms).

Galileo, by contrast, wrote after his lunar observations, “[I do not] perceive the surface of the Moon to be perfectly smooth, free from inequalities and exactly spherical (as a large school of philosophers believes concerning the Moon and other heavenly bodies), but to the contrary to be full of inequalities, uneven, full of hollows and protuberances.  It is like the surface of the Earth itself, which is everywhere varied with lofty mountains and deep valleys…The grandeur, however, of such prominences and depress-ions in the Moon seems to surpass both in magnitude and extent the ruggedness of the Earth’s surface” (p.147,8, boldface mine).

to be continued...