The claim that creationism is a science rests above all on the plausibility of the biblical flood
by Stephen Jay Gould
G.K.CHESTERTON once mused over Noah's dinnertime conversations during those long nights on a vast and tempestuous sea:
And Noah he often said to his wife
when he sat down to dine,
"I don't care where the water goes if
it doesn't get into the wine."
Noah's insouciance has not been matched by defenders of his famous flood. For centuries, fundamentalists have tried very hard to find a place for the subsiding torrents.
They have struggled even more valiantly to devise a source for all that water. Our modern oceans, extensive as they are, will not override Mt. Everest. One seventeenth-century searcher said: "I can as soon believe that a man would be drowned in his own spittle as that the world should be deluged by the water in it."
With the advent of creationism, a solution to this old dilemma has been put forward.
In The Genesis Flood (1961), the founding document of the creationist movement, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris seek guidance from Genesis 1:6-7, which states that God created the firmament and then slid it into place amidst the waters, thus dividing "the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so." The waters under the firmament include seas and interior fluid that may rise in volcanic eruptions. But what are the waters above the firmament? Whitcomb and Morris reason that Moses cannot refer here to transient rain clouds, because he also tells us (Genesis 2:5) that "the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth." The authors therefore imagine that the earth, in those palmy days, was surrounded by a gigantic canopy of water vapor (which, being invisible, did not obscure the light of Genesis 1:3).
"These upper waters," Whitcomb and Morris write, "were therefore placed in that position by divine creativity, not by the normal processes of the hydrological cycle of the present day." Upwelling from the depths together with the liquefaction, puncturing, and descent of the celestial canopy produced more than enough water for Noah's worldwide flood.
Fanciful solutions often generate a cascade of additional difficulties. In this case, Morris, a hydraulic engineer by training, and Whitcomb invoke a divine assist to gather the waters into their canopy, but then can't find a natural way to get them down. So they invoke a miracle: God put the water there in the first place; let him then release it.
The simple fact of the matter is that one cannot have any kind of a Genesis Flood without acknowledging the presence of supernatural elements....
It is obvious that the opening of the "windows of heaven" in order to allow "the waters which were above the firmament" to fall upon the earth, and the breaking up of "all the fountains of the great deep" were supernatural acts of God.
Since we usually define science, at least in part, as a system of explanation that relies upon invariant natural laws, this charmingly direct invocation of miracles (suspensions of natural law) would seem to negate the central claims of the modern creationist movement --
by Stephen Jay Gould
Science as a way of Knowing
"A fundamental difference between religious and scientific thought is that the received beliefs in religion are ultimately based on revelation or pronouncements, usually by some long-dead prophet or priest. These revelations or pronouncements become the dogma of faith. .
In contrast, the statements of science are derived ultimately from the data and experiment, and from the manipulation of these data according to logical and often mathematical procedures."
by john a. moore
I will post more later
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