CPT Q. 032: Is God’s supernatural intervention needed to cool the Flood’s newly forming ocean floor?

Q. 32. Your 1986 paper for the first ICC you wrote that the requirement for cooling the newly forming ocean floor in the short time span during and after the Flood seemed to require God’s supernatural intervention to remove the heat. Since then, has anything changed that assessment? Do you have any additional insight as to how that might have happened?

Response: In my assessment nothing has changed since 1986 when I emphasized the problem of cooling the ocean lithosphere from near a molten state to its present state within the time constraints of Bible history. Subsequent to 1986, the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) team undertook an eight-year research program to attempt to understand why radioisotope methods commonly yield dates of hundreds of millions to billions of years for the earth’s rocks, when the Bible indicates that God created the earth only a few thousand years ago. Multiple independent lines of radioisotope evidence led this team (of which I was a member) to conclude that the basic answer to this extremely important question was, quite simply, that nuclear decay rates were much higher during two episodes in the past than they are today. We identified the first of the episodes as occurring during the formation of the earth but before plant life was created on Day 3. The second episode occurred during the Genesis Flood. The first episode involved a total of approximately four billion years’ worth of nuclear transmutation at today’s rates, while the second involved some 500-600 million years’ worth. We judged these conclusions to be extremely firm.

Moreover, we concluded that there is likely no natural explanation that can account for such dramatic changes in the rates of nuclear decay. Even how God might have done it was not at all obvious to us, although we speculated that His intervention may have involved a temporary change in the strong nuclear force. Since Scripture indicates in at least seventeen places that God, among His mighty deeds, “stretches out the heavens,” Russ Humphreys has conjectured that God’s intervention may have involved this aspect of His governance of the cosmos. If so, such an intervention may well have also removed some of the heat in the rocks during the Flood. But, again, these possibilities at this point are in the realm of conjecture and speculation.

Nevertheless, because we of the RATE team have taken the bold step of rejecting the materialist dogma of no interventions by God in the realm of nature with regard to nuclear decay during the Flood, it makes it a bit easier for me to do the same with regard to the cooling of the ocean lithosphere. For those among us who might be uncomfortable with such dramatic interventions by God in the natural realm, I would remind them of the words of the apostle Peter in 2 Peter 3:3-6. Here Peter warns of a major deception of the last days which we today refer to as uniformitarianism. In refuting this error, Peter points to intervention by God in the natural order both during creation and also during the Flood. The implication to me is that Scripture is likely telling us that it is impossible to account for the physical aspects of the Flood exclusively in terms of the principles of physics and process rates we observe operating today. In my view wisdom dictates that we can make this appeal only when our case is exceedingly strong. My colleagues and I are persuaded that the scientific case is sufficiently secure to appeal to God’s intervention in regard to the issue of accelerated nuclear decay. I am also now convinced the case is strong enough in regard to the cooling of the ocean lithosphere.