The Flood changed everything

The weather has been absolutely gorgeous here the past few days. I was going for a walk the other day and just soaking in the 74-degree temperature, the gentle breeze, the cloudless blue sky and the brightly-colored leaves on the trees.

And I kept thinking about The Flood.

Because that's normal.

Thinking about THE Flood. Yep, I do mean The Big One. The flood that is the subject of myths and legends. Storybooks and fairy tales. The inspiration for children's toys and baby bedding. It's nice to think about in those terms, anyway. We all like to think of Noah and the animals marching two-by-two into the ark.

But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the flood and its implications. I mean, I've always thought about the flood from a Biblical perspective. And sure, I've even considered it as part of history. But I have to admit that never before in my life have I really stopped to ponder the scientific implications of the flood.

I've always been a creationist in my scientific thinking. And to me that meant a literal translation of the Bible in which God created the earth, the planets, the galaxy and everything else that exists in outer space. I'm a "strict" creationist, in that I don't believe in the evolutionary progression of species over billions of years. I believe in a young earth that is thousands — not billions — of years old. And that's about as far as I've ever gotten in my thinking about earth science.

I simply never gave it much thought.

This year, my fifth grader is taking a geology and astronomy class. The curriculum is written by Answers in Genesis. The first book is called, "Our Planet Earth," and I'm finding it fascinating that it bases pretty much everything that we see today in the formation of the earth on the scientific fact of a massive, worldwide flood that wiped out all living things on the planet thousands of years ago. Noah's flood.

Before the flood, the earth was a tropical paradise. No seasons. No rainy days. No cold winters. No leaves changing on the trees. The weather was perfect everywhere, all the time.

The flood changed everything.

That massive storm changed the weather, bringing on an ice age in parts of the world.

Glaciers formed. The earth shifted. Land masses broke apart, forming the continents we know today.

The surface of the earth quickly eroded, depositing layers of sediment over every part of the earth. Billions of living things were rapidly buried, leaving the fossils that we still find today across the globe. Fossils of fish and other creatures of the sea have been found on tops of mountains, in desserts and on Antarctica because the surface of the earth changed so dramatically when the water dried up.

In many areas of the world, we see strata, which are layers of rock stacked on top of each other. This can be accounted for by a massive flood that swept large amounts of sediment on top of layers of earth. According to "flood science," it was caused by a swift and massive erosion, not a slow, gradual process that took billions of years.

Even the fossil fuels that we rely on for coal, oil and natural gas were created when plants and animals were buried under the earth and then experienced great heat and pressure. While evolutionists believe this happened over billions of years, creationists say that the flood is a more reasonable explanation of how so many plants and animals were buried fast enough to cause their bodies to be converted into fossil fuels.

I realize that studying the flood as a scientific fact and a major factor in the development of the earth as we know it today is highly controversial. Even as a kid growing up in a family that believed in creation, I certainly was never exposed to that type of thinking. And I know that my kids are going to hear lots of other scientific theories in their lives about why the earth is the way it is.

So, I'm loving the fact that they also get to study the events of the Bible as actual fact and think about their implications from a scientific point of view. As they get older, they will have lots of opportunity to hear other ways of thinking. But this one will also be part of their thinking. I wish it had been part of mine.

And it has me wondering about what this earth would have been like without The Flood. Would we experience geological features as unusual as the Grand Canyon? Would our cars and homes be powered by fossil fuels? Would I have the opportunity to soak in the smell of fallen leaves on a warm autumn day?

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Here's are some photos from a little flood experiment we did last week.

Our candy pieces were enjoying their life on earth before the flood.

Here comes the rain! (aka, Jello.)

Our candy is turning into fossil fuel deep under the layers of earth that formed under all the sediment.