knuckles644

I was searching around in a few of the Witness publications and I found a quote that I thought would be of interest.

"It was apparently the tremendous weight of the Flood waters that pushed mountain peaks to their high levels and produced more than six-mile-deep valleys in the ocean floor."

Is this even plausible? If this a widely accepted view by Creationists? What are some specific arguments and scientific data that disagree with this statement?



BTW, I would appreciate it if you listed some sources, because I'll be using this in a letter to the Society

Roland

I'm not a geologist, but I do live in earthquake country. It seems to me that if such incredible deformation of the land really took place, there would be so many aftershocks that people wouln't have been able to construct a single dwelling for centuries to come. The surface disclocation caused by an 8.0 earthquake could probably be measured in a few feet. Imagine the Richter Scale reading if the earth's surface were being literally torn asunder as envisioned by the nonsensical scenario described above. Any city Noah's descendants would have built would have been destroyed five minutes after they finished it.

mrmoderate

Overly imaginative fundy creationist thinking.

The formation of mountains and valleys is pretty well understood and a global deluge doesn't weigh in.

Toto

All questions involving the Flood belong to the kind folks in Evolution-Creationism, so I'm sending this to them.

Coragyps

I've seen similar statements quite a bit. When I do bother to reply, it's usually along the lines of asking whether water or the rock of the mountains has the greater density......
My considered opinion is that rock is nearly always more dense than water, and a mile's depth of rock will push down harder on its supporting rock than a mile of ocean will. (Maybe pre-Noachic rocks floated on water, but I have yet to see that possibility brought up.) The statement is really just another of the bazillions of pieces of "armchair science" used by fundies who have never troubled themselves to waste ten seconds thinking about what they're proposing.

espritch

If one assumes that Mountains and deep sea valleys didn't exist pre-flood, then the world was pretty much flat. This would imply that the flood depth was pretty similar everywhere. So why would it push up mountains in some places and valleys in others?

Plate tectonics gives us a pretty good understanding of how Mountains and valleys form. The process is on-going today. The Rocky Mountains are growing at a rate of about 2 inches a year IIRC. This can be entirely explained by the tremendous pressure as the continental plates shift and collide. I doubt the weight of water, even from a world wide flood, would be a significant factor compared to the weight of continents.

SEF

You've managed to avoid the nonsensical posts and pay-per-view website of ReverseTheory (RTRT) then. Rocks are supposed to accrete from water into sand into pebbles and then something like sandstone pumice before achieving limestone or greater density. That's allegedly why the pyramids were so easy to build before becoming all clogged up and heavy. It doesn't appear to bother RT that his fantasy doesn't match the evidence (wrong ingredients in water, no accretion shells on pebbles, dating of rocks etc).

Kulindrichnus

Oh, it is occasionally brought up, ideas of a global layer of water at some unknown depth. I don't know if there is any sort of well-formulated expression of it. It usually comes up in debates about the volume of water required for Noahs flood, where it is invoked as the 'fountain of the deep' to make up the balance defecit between required and available water.

To the OP, this idea is complete nonsense, of course. As far as the mountains go, I have often seen Creationist say they were 'thrown up by the ravages of the flood' but they seldom say how. If a worldwide flood exerted sufficient downforce to depress the oceanic crust by 6Km, then it would also exert sufficient downforce to resist the upthrusting of continental crust by similar amounts. Even using the flawed initial presumptions of this argument (to depress the ocean crust by 6Km obviously requires much more force than would be available simply from the weight of overlying water in a global flood) it is immediately contradictory with respect to invoking the same mechanism for massive isostatic movement in opposite directions. This alone marks it out as an ad-hoc apologetic, without pointing out that it fails to explain the numerous ancilliary evidence for plate tectonics, not massive isostatic movements, associated with both mountain ranges and ocean trenches.

K

Coragyps

Like Walt Brown and his mile-thick water layer ten miles down, which launched the asteroid belt when it popped loose......
Walt never seems to worry that water at 16 km subsurface would be at 400° Celsius and would sort of warm up Noah's oceans a little. :banghead:

http://www.creationscience.com/ for any of you who don't know the guy.

And Hi, new geologist! Glad to have you here!

kaelcarp

IIRC, the Witnesses also believe that there was no rain on earth until the flood, that water would just seep up from the ground. I think we can say that the use of science in their belief structure is a little scant.