Since, in Setterfield’s view, the human and higher land animal survivors confined themselves to the Ararat-Zagros mountainous areas for at least a century, some of the secondary global catastrophes could have hit with relatively small impact on human memory. Animal populations with a reduced threat of predation would have grown and spread at extraordinary rates by today’s standards. (Even today, the coyote has spread from the Great Southwest to infest Cape Cod with no help from man—except for his garbage—in less than 20 years.)
In Setterfield’s model, the biblical Deluge left little direct fossil evidence, except of soft-bodied ocean floor creatures, which make up 95% of all fossil material. This initial cataclysm began with a mechanism similar to the mantle radiation heating envisioned by Baumgardner, but with different results. The Setterfield scenario has slower runaway subduction that begins some 200 or so years after the Deluge, in a second catastrophe, followed by three more extinction level events that involve asteroid impacts with further rapid subduction episodes interspersed by short ice ages.
The 5% of land-based life fossils formed mostly during secondary catastrophes within a relatively short period of no more than one or two thousand years. In this view, the Paleozoic land-life fossils formed through frequent super-tsunami action over an immediate post-Deluge lowland ecosystem dominated by amphibians and spore-bearing “primitive” plants. Since amphibians, insects, and spore-bearing plants would have been able to survive relatively easily outside the ark, and reproduce prolifically with little threat from predators, they would have had the survival advantage in coastal plains during the immediate post-Flood decades.
Subsequent impact events would have produced intense global dust storms that wiped out the dominant amphibians, giving survival advantage to reptiles, small mammals, and birds. Further impacts and rapid subduction episodes would have wiped out the dinosaurs, with ice age conditions giving the mammals, and eventually humanity, dominance—around the time it became feasible for human populations to spread rapidly again.
Another example of the “land-based fossils are post-Flood” theories is that of Steven J. Robinson. He places the Flood—Post-Flood boundary in the Carboniferous strata, in the Paleozoic, or lower subdivisions of the fossil record. In his symposium paper, Can Flood Geology Explain the Fossil Record? published in Creation Ex Nihilo (renamed Technical Journal, and then Creation), Volume 10, in 1996, Robinson made a good case for the idea that pre-Permian coal seams are Flood artifacts, while later Mesozoic (Dinosaur Age) coal is composed of different plant material, and resulted from a later catastrophe.
Such later global catastrophic events would only be non-universal in the sense that they did not “cut off every living thing” or “destroy the whole earth” at a time when the human population was still fairly small and isolated to one location.
Robinson later proposed that the Flood destroyed the original world down to its crystalline bedrock with no trace, citing that God intended to “utterly blot out” the old world, and that this meant there would be no trace left. The Genesis account does not demand such an extreme view of the term “blot out.” Some have challenged Robinson’s scenario by saying that such worldwide post-Flood cataclysmic activity would be so destructive as to put God dangerously close to breaking his word to Noah.
On the other hand, a series of post-Flood adjustment cataclysms would not necessarily have destroyed all land-based life, even with near global effects, provided limited post-Flood highlands were available for fleeing men and animals. Robinson’s scenario also makes the global dispersion of post-Flood animals easier to correlate to parts of the fossil evidence by placing most continental division into the post-Flood adjustment phase.
There are problems either way, but they are no greater conceptually than those faced by “mainstream” Uniformitarian evolutionary theories, which demand multiple occurrences of statistically absurd events to explain the development of life from non-life, and the regular input of new genetic information, despite the fact that natural selection actually removes such information. That is only to name a couple such problems for evolution.
As a novelist using runaway subduction as my main model, I had a real conundrum here. Either the continents separated by runaway subduction during the Noahic Flood or at some point after. It is hard to imagine any runaway subduction as a post-Flood “adjustment,” except maybe at some lesser rate after the main event or in later mountain-building cycles where the tsunamis were global, but survivable on stable highlands.
The Ararat region has Devonian sedimentary layers on the surface, which could indicate that it stood above later continental floods that deposited the Mesozoic and Cenozoic layers that contained rapidly migrating dinosaurs, birds, and mammals in lower elevations. This would have taken several hundred years at least, but not tens of thousands, or millions.
Processes once thought to take millions of years recently have been shown to happen rapidly, including strata deposition and canyon erosion (Mt. St. Helens), petrifaction of hats left in mines, fossilization, cave stalactite/stalagmite deposition, deposition of polystrate tree boles in multiple sediment layers (Spirit Lake, Mt. St. Helens), creation of oil and coal, and animal population explosions and speciation.
Some of Robinson and Setterfield’s arguments seemed compelling enough to use in shaping the last three chapters of The Tides of Nemesis, set in the immediate post-Flood world.
While not all global deluge theories will pan out in the end, recent discoveries that coal, oil, and other fossils do not take millions of years to form puts these ideas on the table. One of my purposes (but certainly not my only one) was to tell a story that introduced readers to new ways of thinking about earth history that are consistent with both a natural exposition of Genesis, and what can now be observed in the fossil record.
In doing this, I tried to provide an ancient techno-thriller-sized sampling of cataclysmic forces at work, some of which may prove wrongly sequenced. This will not be because the Genesis account has been “proven wrong,” but because I am fallible, and the epistemological limits of scientific and historic research may be unable to decipher some aspects of both the Biblical Flood and the fossil record, given present data.
I invite those with questions and doubts to explore the Suggested Reading below and decide for yourselves.
Suggested Reading
For a general understanding of science philosophy issues, and why science and faith are not totally separate and mutually exclusive domains in real life (even among Secularists):
Pearcey, Nancy R. & Thaxton, Charles B. The Soul of Science, Crossway Books (1994), Wheaton, Ill.
Eastman, Mark M.D., and Missler, Chuck. The Creator Beyond Time and Space, The Word for Today (1996)
Colson, Charles, and Pearcey, Nancy, How Now Shall We Live? (1999) Tyndale House
Mortenson, Terry, The Great Turning Point, (2004) Master Books
Powderly, K.G. Jr. One Faith – Many Transitions: World-views in Church History, Iuniverse (2002)
For understanding an alternative approach to microbiology and biochemistry that rejects evolution on “secular” scientific grounds:
From the point of view of scientists who are grappling with this issue without advocating Creationism, see Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler – 1986)
For a look into the growing realm of “Intelligent Design” biological theory, see molecular biologist M.J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (The Free Press – 1996).
How Intelligent Design arises logically from secular academic Information Theory: Werner Gitt’s In the Beginning was Information (CLV – 1997)
On Noah’s Ark:
Noah’s Ark: Thinking Outside the Box, Tim Lovett, Master Books 2008
Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, John Woodmorappe, ICR Books
Dating and interpreting the fossil record in general, human fossils in particular, and the advanced condition
ancient man:
For the fossil record of Flood geology, see Faith, Form, and Time by paleontologist Kurt P. Wise Ph.D. (Broadman & Holman, 2002)
The Genius of Ancient Man, Don Landis, Master Books, 2012
Thousands Not Billions: Challenging an Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth, Dr. Don DeYoung, Master Books 2005, (A layman’s overview of the Radioisotopes and Age of The Earth [RATE] experiments.)
Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! by biochemist Dr. Duane T. Gish (1995 - ICR Books)
The same problem with human fossil transitions is covered exhaustively in Marvin L. Lubenow’s updated Bones of Contention, (2004 – Baker Books)
For an excellent in-depth analysis of the statistical and ideological pitfalls involved with the reasoning used in modern radio-isotope dating methods by an expert in the field, read:
The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, by John Woodmorappe, ICR Books (1999)
The Genesis Flood, by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, (1961 – Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.)
Earth’s Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation, and the Flood, Dr. Andrew Snelling, (ICR Books, 2010)
For understanding an alternative scientific approach to cosmology and astronomy:
Starlight and Time, by physicist Dr. D. Russell Humphreys (1994), Master Books
Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, Dr. John Hartnett, CMI Books
Astronomy and the Bible, by astronomer Dr. Donald B. DeYoung, (1989), Baker Book House
For historical and fossil evidences that men and “dinosaurs” coexisted:
Cooper, Bill; After the Flood, ©1995 New Wine Press, W. Sussex,
Dragon Accounts in Historical Documents and the Bible, www.anzwers.org/free/livedragons/dragon.htm
Eric Lyons, Kyle Butt, Physical Evidence for the Coexistence of Dinosaurs and Humans, Parts 1 and 2, Apologetics Press 2008 http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=9&article=2416
Also by K.G. Powderly Jr. –
Dawn Apocalypse Rising – Book 1 of The Windows of Heaven
The Paladin’s Odyssey – Book 2 of The Windows of Heaven
A Broken Paradise – Book 3 of The Windows of Heaven
Gate of the Gods – Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven
One Faith – Many Transitions: World-views in Church History (Non-fiction)
The Ancient Landmarks of American Culture: Why Some Things Should Never Be Moved (Non-fiction)
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 41
