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Part 2'

The How, Why, and When of Creation, Part 2

But verse 5 says, “When they maintain this, when they say that everything continues the same, it escapes their notice that by the Word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water.” And he's referring to creation here, through which, he says, “The world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But the present heavens and earth by His Word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.”

So these people who say everything has always continued as it was from the very beginning have forgotten that there was a time when the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, and another time when it was destroyed by being flooded. In other words, Peter is pointing to the fact that everything has not continued through a uniformitarian process since the beginning, but rather there have been two cataclysmic events...one, creation, and the other the universal global flood. There have been immense alterations in the earth as we know it. Creation itself was cataclysmic. Originally the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water...and we'll comment more on that when we go back to Genesis. And there was a time when the entire globe was destroyed, being flooded with water, which had immense cataclysmic impact on the surface of the earth.

This earth has not gone on in a uniform kind of existence; rather two immense cataclysms have effected its current condition, one being creation itself, and the other being the Flood. Uniformitarians claim that the strata in rocks, the strata sediment, the fossils and the companion chemistry of geologic dating based on uniformity demand an earth that is billions of years old. During the early nineteenth century, the central presupposition of uniformitarianism was that the present is the key to the past. That is that everything went always the way it's going now, popularized by James Hutton and Charles Lyle, who in turn influenced Darwin.

Uniformitarianism is the belief that the origin and development of all things can be explained exclusively in terms of the same natural laws and processes seen operating today. Uniformitarianism has been the backbone of modern historical geology and is responsible for the current widespread assumption that the earth is billions of years old. The uniformitarians insist that all geologic features and formations once attributed to geologic cataclysms can now be satisfactorily explained by ordinary processes functioning over immensely long periods of time. That's basically their view. Scott Hulse, writing in The Collapse of Evolution , gave us that definition.

Creationists, however, have argued against that, saying that geological evidences support not uniformity but cataclysm, and in particular, the surface of the earth demonstrates massive universal hydraulic cataclysm; that is to say, cataclysm related to water. And at creation there was literally a water-engulfed earth that was reshaped cataclysmically, and at the time of the Flood there was a Flood that covered the earth, again having an immense effect on its formation. Two very outstanding theologians and scientists, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, marshalled evidence from known natural processes, including the hydro-dynamic drag of flood water, to demonstrate the necessity of a universal flood to explain the present geological structures of the earth, which cannot be explained from present slow processes. Frankly, folks, science, true science is not at all on the side of evolutionists. Widespread geologic phenomenon such as a heavy preponderance of sedimentary rocks and structures all across earth's surface, including seashells on the tops of the highest mountains, rapid, almost sudden deposits of fossils, and extremely large and deep fossil graveyards, as well as the pressurized formation of coal and gas, all point to a watery catastrophe, not some slow natural process. And more and more recent studies are confirming this.

Scott Hulse summarizes some of this evidence – just give it to you briefly. “Creationists maintain the uniformitarian principles simply cannot account for most of the major geological features and formations. For instance, there's the vast Tibetan plateau which consists of sedimentary deposits which are thousands of feet thick, located presently at an elevation of three miles above sea level. The Karoo formation of Africa contains an estimated 800 billion vertebrate animals. The herring fossil bed of California contains approximately one billion fish within a four-square-mile area. The uniformitarian concept is equally incapable of explaining the Columbia plateau in northwestern United States, which is an incredible lava plateau several thousand feet thick covering an area of 200 thousand square miles. Uniformitarianism also fails to offer a reasonable explanation for important geological concepts such as mountain building,” and it goes on and on, and I won't bore you with it.

All of these things require sudden and dramatic change, rapid burial, and lithification, as it's called, are essential to the formation and preservation of fossils. The only possible way you can have seashells on the top of mountains thousands of miles from the sea is if there was once water there.

Douglas Kelly, writing in his book Creation and Change , says, “The uniformitarian assumption that millions of years of geological work extrapolating from present, slow, natural processes would be required to explain structure such as the American Grand Canyon, for instance, is called into serious question by the explosion of Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington on the 18th of May, 1980. Massive energy equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT destroyed 400 square kilometers of forest in 6 minutes, changing the face of the mountain and digging out depths of earth and rock, leaving formations not unlike parts of the larger Grand Canyon. Recent studies of the Mount St. Helens phenomenon indicate that if attempts were made to date these structures, which were formed in 1980, on the basis of uniformitarian theory, millions of years of formation time would be necessarily postulated. Ironically, one of the centerpieces used to demonstrate uniformitarian chronology, the geologic column, on closer inspection actually witnesses to catastrophism.” And so it goes.

Part 3''