Bruce Sterling - Essays. FSF Columns

natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to

imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,

public, irrefutable violation of natural law.

Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of

evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight

Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly

had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were

henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found

ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would

violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,

the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a

few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would

simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We

thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through

slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the

fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our

species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an

instant all at once, and that was that.

This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to

the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained

through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike

the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see

scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --

despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at

hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer

"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there

naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere

illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always

had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once

had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.

The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a

parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby

robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.

This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that

Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about

Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be

*young* dinosaurs, of course.... If we assume that one Biblical cubit

equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume

of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522

standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!

Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-

on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the

earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,

including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine

instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah's convenience. It seems

plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the beginning of

the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation

may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of

animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic

animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah's crew of eight.

Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge

patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a

radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and

Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that

before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows

before the Flood -- Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into

existence as a sign of God's covenant with Noah. If we assume that

normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in

pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that

rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was

replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).

The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the "fountains

of the great deep" and "the windows of heaven." Flood geologists

interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and

also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by

divine fiat, the Flood's waters once surrounded the entire planet in a

"vapor canopy." When the time came to destroy his Creation, God

caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire

planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in

Noah's time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah's seas

were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may

have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation

that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah's 969

years.

The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second

Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam's Fall. The Second

Law of Thermodynamics is strong evidence that the entire Universe

has been in decline since Adam's sin. The Second Law of

Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.

Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had

the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a

fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a

species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,

nor is the "tail" on an embryo an actual tail -- it only resembles one.

Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would

violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,

creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was

deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The

reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is

because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were

the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.

Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem

laughable, but *The Genesis Flood* is not a silly or comic work. It is

five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward

and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.

*The Genesis Flood* has sold over 200,000 copies and gone

through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry

M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world's most influential

creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,

California.

It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on

the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are

accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream

institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has

written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.'s monthly

newsletter, *Acts and Facts,* is distributed to over 100,000 people.

The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from

its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.

In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had

an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.

Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.

The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the

top and the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon yield incongruent

ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the

thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile-