Chapter 5

Divine Providence

CONTINENTAL PLATES

The Bible clearly states that God originally created the world with all the ocean water on one side of the planet and all the continental land masses on the other side of the planet. The Noahic Flood broke up the land masses when "all the fountains of the great deep [underground water were] broken up" (Gen. 7:11b) about 2,325 BC and the continents separated when Peleg [2] (which means "earthquake") was born, "for in his days was the earth divided" (Gen. 10:25b) about 2,225 BC, one hundred years later.

The realization that the world has not always been what it is today has been understood for thousands of years. In the Fourth Century BC, Aristotle wondered about the existence of marine fossils on high mountains above the sea. Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th Century noticed the fossils of large shoals of fish above the plains of Italy. The deluge of the Flood was the commonly accepted explanation for the fossils until the Enlightenment of the 18th Century.

The first suggestion of continental division came from a biblical scholar, the English cleric, Thomas Burnet in 1681 when he published his book, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, which postulated that the opening of the deep caused the continents to be pushed apart [3]. In the mid 18th Century his work was attacked by French naturalist, Georges LeClerc, who suggested that the Earth started as a white hot mass torn from the sun by some astronomical force. Yet even Benjamin Franklin thought the Earth must be a thin crust floating on a fluid interior, which would be capable of being broken by violent movement [4] .

While secular thinking came to dominate the world on geology, an eccentric American living in Paris, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, in 1858 wrote a book called, La Creation et Ses Mysteres Devoiles [5], which combined LeClerc's theory of a molten earth with a biblical view of continents amassing on one side as the Earth cooled, then was torn apart by the Flood. Because of his including the biblical Flood, secular scientists of his day dismissed his work - which shows their anti-biblical bias. It would be ironic if we discovered that the Earth's core wasn't molten at all (believed because of LeCleric's theory, evolutionary teachings, volcanic magma, and a measurable increase in the Earth's underground temperature), but rather was made of water instead!

The theory of continental plates had its first modern appearance through geologist Frank B. Taylor in 1908 who studied mountain formation of the Andes, Rockies, Alps, and Himalayas. His paper submitted to the Geological Society of America proposed that mountains were formed as tidal forces - caused possibly by the moon which he believed was a comet caught in the Earth's gravity - pushed continents together. Shortly after his proposal German astronomer and meteorologist Alfred Wegener developed the continental plate theory of today. It remained a controversial theory for many decades until 1967 when geophysicist W. Jason Morgan made a mathematical calculation of the Mid Atlantic Ridge that demonstrated the accuracy of plate positioning. Further evidence of plant and animal fossils and life convinced the secular community of the reality of plate tectonics. What the biblical community proposed 500 years earlier has become a secular doctrine today.

The theory is called, "Plate Tectonics," and teaches that the crust of the Earth is broken into continental and oceanic plates. While disregarding the Scriptures, secular scientists claim that the Earth was two large land masses 320 million years ago called Laurussia in the north and. Gondwanna in the south that converged 250 million years ago as one vast continent called Pangaea [6]. Through time the continents broke up into the continents that we have today.

At the time of creation all the continental plates were together as one land mass. It should be noted that all these plates have their own fault lines which could cause further break ups of the land. The theory of tectonics postulates that the mountain ranges were formed as the plates collided into each other at the time of separation, or as one plate was submerged beneath another plate. Since this did not happen until after the Flood, the land of the creation was flat with perhaps some rolling hills.