What Did Noah Do With the Manure?
Hitt, Jack
WHAT DID NOAH DO WITH THE MANURE? And other burning questions of Creation Science by Jack Hitt R emember the scene in the movie, "Inherit the Wind," where the Darrow character wickedly...
...fresh water and adding "Instant Ocean" from the pet store...
...The Popular Science article explains that if you lay out pea gravel with pine bark over it in a watertight container and keep the gravel wet, the pine bark will suck the water up toward the plants through a capillary action...
...Nowadays they don't talk publicly about the Bible's account of clay and ribs, but proclaim the scientific theory of the "sudden appearance of highly developed forms of life?' In the face of such claims, mainstream scientists have locked arms and become dogmatic...
...Well, needles the lawyer, how did the snake get around before that...
...On his hind legs...
...How were these made...
...After that comes the Exodus quotation: "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is and rested on the seventh ." Although evolutionists have been known to be just as cocksure, it is peculiar for a scientific journal to publish its conclusions on the cover before anyone has a chance to examine the evidence...
...It is the development of theories, which are tested by experiments, result in data, are written up and published in journals...
...Yet, there still had to be more holes for God to ventilate enough water for "960 consecutive hours" (40 days and nights...
...What did they eat until then...
...There is one problem with this two-tiered canopy theory, the author notes: "It appears that a miracle is necessary for any canopy model, either to hold the water up or to get it down without destroying the earth" Creation Hyetology Everett H. Peterson, whose only mentioned credential is his address in San Jose, also grapples with the problem of there being no rain until Noah...
...His scientific proof of that assertion...
...The superb health of antediluvian man, he says, may also account for those 900-year life-spans they enjoyed...
...According to creation theory, fossils are the carnage left after the waters receded...
...Johnson has more proof...
...spring...
...The ice canopy remained...
...Bray is confounded by the food problem on the ark...
...It appears that a miracle is necessary for it to work...
...This incurred the wrath of God, who, as punishment, made the builders' speech mutually unintelligible...
...In order to get a fair hearing in the courts, creationists have had to learn to speak secular science...
...wonders John W. Klotz, who is also the director of graduate studies at Concordia Seminary, in the March 1980 issue...
...For their experiment, they created a saltwater environment by filling a 55-gallon aquarium with Creationists account for dinosaurs by claiming that they lived side by side with man during a kind of Flintstonian Epoch...
...Because, as the Popular Science article points out, despite the capillary action, the surface level of the soil in the pea-gravel bucket will dry out...
...Adam and Eve apparently did not need clothes (Genesis 2:25) for comfort, indicating a rather narrow temperature range" Moreover, it never rained until Noah, since rain is not mentioned in the Bible until then...
...Yes, says the unshaken believer...
...But clearly, says Bray, there must have been more than one window since Noah was growing food inside...
...It's not religion they want taught, they argue...
...This theory conquers one problem that seems to haunt him: how Noah and his companions could possibly have shoveled the tonnage of manure out of the ark every morning...
...The Quarterly certainly looks scientific, with its dignified covers and conservative format, but there is one oddity...
...The argument for this "balanced treatment" is now before the Supreme Court and the case should be decided sometime this...
...Gary L. Johnson sets forth a far more detailed explanation in his September 1986 "Global Heat Balance with a Liquid Water and Ice Canopy...
...In his article, "Is the Destruction of Plants Death in the Biblical Sense...
...At first the Earth was warm, with no fluctuations in temperature...
...Well, none really...
...Maybe, he hypothesizes, a miniature ecosystem existed inside the ark...
...This burst the Fountains of the Deep...
...According to Genesis 11:4-9, the tower was erected for the purpose of reaching heaven...
...Meanwhile the world repopulated until the collapse of the ice canopy...
...Since the Supreme Court may soon allow states to force children to learn this science, it is important to glimpse inside some recent issues of the Quarterly for a sampler of cutting edge theories and experiments the children may be tested on...
...Particularly bothersome, he says, are the meateaters...
...Creation Linguistics Lance B. Johnson, a retired optometrist who now directs Come & See Ministries, describes in "The `Tangled' Tongue" in the December 1982 issue how he had suspected that dyslexia was directly connected with the Tower of Babel...
...Bray boldly dismisses this statement by God as "an impossibility...
...That could explain why Noah is so often depicted with his face sticking out of the ark's lone window...
...Creation Oceanography The team of Dr...
...Above the volume and year are printed the words "Haec credimus," or "This we believe...
...E. Norbert Smith, director of the Grasslands Experiment Station of the Creation Research Society, and Stephen C. Hagberg, a graduate student at a Bible College, wondered how saltwater marine life survived 40 days and nights of a freshwater downpour during the Noachian Deluge...
...In its most] prestigious journal, the Creation Research Society Quarterly, one finds even the lesser trappings so loved by big-time scientists: pompous titles, sesquipedalianisms, Latin words, scientific jargon, even the metric system...
...Those who are programmed to read one way, but grow up in a culture that reads the other, wind up being dyslexic...
...Their findings: "At the slow rate of dilution of 0.031 0/00 salinity/hour the fish stopped swimming at 20.3 ± 1.10/00 salinity...
...These results raise "serious questions" about the Deluge, the authors conclude...
...Into the tank they placed Artemia nauplii (sometimes known as "sea monkeys," available on the back of comic books), sea slugs, and a hermit crab...
...They set forth their results and methods in a paper entitled "Survival of Freshwater and Saltwater Organisms in a Heterogeneous Flood Model Experiment" in the June 1984 issue...
...Creation science seems to have all of these...
...solves the Noachic food problem by proposing that all animals including man were vegetarians before the Flood...
...Praise the Lord,' I thought" More proof came later: "Then, to cap it off beautifully, she said her ancestry was Jewish...
...I nearly fell out of my chair...
...Creation Physiology If death came with original sin, as Paul says, then the scientific corollary is that nothing in the Garden of Eden could have died until Adam took a bite out of the apple...
...If "rain occurred before the Flood, the rainbow would have occurred also and would not have been useful as a sign" At the time of the Flood, Johnson argues, the water globules burst, yielding the 40 days and nights of rain...
...It is possible," he writes, that the "comets, asteroids, meterorites, and outer planetary moons (and planets...
...in Chicago, ponders one of the many problems associated with Noah's Flood, or the "Noachian Deluge," as creation scientists refer to it...
...According to comparatively recent accounts of sightings of the ark on Ararat, there was not just a single window?' Grant R. Lambert, in his June 1983 article, "Was the Pre-Flood Animal Kingdom Vegetarian...
...After the Tower's fall, Johnson argues, people were genetically programmed to read either left to right or right to left...
...Even if they could have, he says, that would have been a "major disaster" because removing the manure "would have broken the cycle of the system, and a large number of the species would have died of starvation and become extinct" Instead, the manure was spread around to fertilize the indoor miniature ecosystem...
...Hence, the mists are to keep the topsoil damp...
...The construction and operation of the valves is a mystery," he writes, "but they probably were operated by heat" With such a system in place, concludes Peterson, it would have been easy to inaugurate the Flood...
...Maybe, they write, small pockets of salt water remained unmixed and allowed the animals to survive...
...And other burning questions of Creation Science by Jack Hitt R emember the scene in the movie, "Inherit the Wind," where the Darrow character wickedly taunts the fundamentalist Bryan, asking him if he truly believes God condemned the snake to crawl forever on its belly...
...But he adds, "The deep seas give up their secrets reluctantly...
...This would have "buried the mammoths and permanently changed the climate of the polar regions," the source of what evolution scientists call the Ice Age...
...Another specimen "turned dark just prior to loss of locomotive ability...
...he asks in "How the Flood Altered the Earth" in the September 1981 issue...
...So: "He poked, as with an oversized ice pick, millions of holes through the three-mile-thick ocean floor...
...God simply "crushed" about a "1,000-foot wide, 25,000-mile long and a three-mile thick" area, what is now the Atlantic...
...Today, instead of shrinking, they might welcome such an observation and even dispatch some researchers to investigate the matter...
...An answer to this question is found in a recent article in Popular Science magazine which details a method of raising vegetables indoors," he says...
...Very little has changed in the peculiar American clash of religion and science since 1925, when a substitute biology teacher named John Scopes collaborated with a couple of Tennessee pranksters to scare up the first national media circus...
...How much proof does the author offer for his theory...
...It's no mystery what science is, at least in the popular conception...
...Evolution, they bellow, is not a theory but a fact...
...But is creationism really a science...
...Then they poured in a layer of fresh water and put in one Carassius auratus (gold fish), a freshwater snail, and some duckweed these researchers assure us was "collected locally...
...If they ate a plant, wouldn't they have to kill it...
...David W. Unfred, who is also director of external studies at Christian Heritage College, hypothesizes in a September 1984 article, "Asteroidal Impacts and the Flood Judgment;' that the postdeluvian detritus of this canopy could explain most of what is hurtling through space...
...Jack Kitt is a New York writer...
...In casual conversation she mentioned how odd it was that she had studied Hebrew and had excelled in it...
...The case involves a Louisiana law that requires public schools to teach creation science if a course in evolution is offered...
...But that may annoy only purists...
...He acknowledges the popular theory that the women on board nursed the carnivores with the milk of cows, but pooh-poohs it as the stuff of "those who make movies and write fictitious articles about the Deluge...
...Since the fossil record is seen as the cornerstone of evolution, the Flood debate looms large in creationist circles...
...This solves the problem of all those meateaters...
...The only significant difference is that creationists now insist more vehemently than ever that they are creation scientists...
...Kotz says this problem is solved in the Scripture when God blesses man and animals and instructs them to "be fruitful and multiply:' God didn't tell the plants to "be fruitful," so "the blessing added in the account of the creation of animals sets them apart from the plants" Klotz also adds that since the nucleus of a plant cell hugs the cell wall, while animal nuclei kind of bob around in the middle, eating plants "may not have involved `death' in the Biblical sense of that term" Creation Cosmography Some creation scientists argue that the Flood resulted from the collapse of a massive amount of water suspended high in the atmosphere, sometimes called the "vapor canopy...
...excluding the uniquely created Earth and Moon, are remnants, a reminder, of the pre-Flood `waters above...
...How did the plants and animals and the Earth get water...
...Simply by capping a few of the pipes with "nozzles ." And why would the Earth need mists...
...It's a science that deserves to be taught alongside evolution...
...It was then, he maintains, that he discovered his proof...
...he reports...
...Applying this interdisciplinary discovery, the author proposes that God had "pipes" running from the "Fountains of the Deep" (mentioned in Proverbs 8:28) up to earth to water the land...
...Like other scientists who keep one eye on their alembic and the other on their copy of The Foundation Directory these creationists close with the scientific conclusion most common in the 501(c)3 age: "Obviously, additional research is needed...
...The radical decline in the earth's average temperature that followed, Johnson writes, "would certainly have destroyed any remaining dinosaurs?' Since creationists believe Earth is only about 6,000 years old, they account for dinosaurs by claiming that they lived side by side with man during a kind of Flintstonian Epoch that ended after some cataclysm—possibly the collapse of the ice canopy described heredestroyed the large beasts...
...Also, the pipes must have had "shut-off valves," since you wouldn't want the water to run continuously...
...Therefore, the plants' roots are watered from below instead of from above...
...Creation Ecology In the June 1979 issue, Raymond Bray, who is also president of the Lord's Work, Inc...
...Creationists, playing to American notions of fairness and equality, respond calmly that they ask for nothing more than balance...
...According to his calculations, the canopy consisted of "large water globules at about 2 km altitude over equatorial regions and large ice fragment clouds at about 2200 km altitude over the polar regions ." This two-tiered canopy, he says, may explain the peculiar climate after the Creation...
...Genesis 6:21 explicitly says Noah carried on board all the food necessary for himself and all the animals...
...One day a patient came into Johnson's office to be fitted for glasses and to discuss her dyslexia...
...And creationism is nothing more than a Trojan horse brimming with Bible-thumpers...
...In the old days creationists cringed at being so mockingly bested by the opposition...
...There is only one problem with this theory, one creation scientist notes...
...But the Bible mentions "mists" as well, Peterson notes...
Vol. 19 • February 1987 • No. 1
