In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood () is a 2008 book by Young Earth Creationist Walt Brown, an engineer with a degree from MIT. The book is divided into 2 parts. Part I is a list of 131 PRATTs that "debunk" evolution (1-42), "debunk" deep time (43-93), and support global flooding. Part II lays out the foundations (haha, hydroplate puns) for Brown's the Hydroplate "Theory" for how the Flood could've happened. The book is freely available online.In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood Center for Scientific Creation
The first part consists of 131 (!) sound-bites "summaries" in outline form of categories of scientific evidence that support a sudden creation and oppose gradual evolution, divided itself into three sections: Life Sciences, Astronomical and Physical Sciences, and Earth Sciences" (each then further subdivided into 3 subsections). In practice he attempts to disprove evolution, and then assume the only other explanation is YHWH as opposed to the multitude of other gods or other supernatural explanations. Brown's arguments are as varied in subject as they are in fallacies. His favorites seem to be Straw man, Argument from incredulity, Science was wrong before, and Science doesn't know everything. He contradicts himself a lot and reveals himself in the latter parts to be supremely bad at math. On the rare occasion he actually understands the scientific theory or model he's trying to disprove, he relies on previous incorrect models, or blatantly ignores newer research and evidence (research that has come out decades before his most recent update to the book which, as of this writing, was 2013).
The kindest thing to say about him is that he's ignorant about much of science, but it's also possible he willfully lies about what models say and what research has shown to try and pass off his own pet hypothesis as true.
The second part covers the Flood, and Brown's Hydroplate theory. It's pretty bad, and a few of the chapters are covered as he mentions them within the 131 points. The main Hydroplate Theory article has more info on the general idea, but down below you'll see Brown's particular take on it, along with some basic mathematics of how it'd destroy the planet. Enjoy!
==Part I: The Scientific Case for Creation==
===Life Sciences===
==== Organic Evolution Has Never Been Observed ====
===== 1. The Law of Biogenesis =====
===== 2. Acquired Characteristics =====
===== 3. Mendel’s Laws =====
===== 4. Bounded Variations =====
===== 5. Natural Selection =====
===== 6. Mutations =====
===== 7. Fruit Flies =====
===== 8. Complex Molecules and Organs =====
===== 9. Fully-Developed Organs =====
===== 10. Distinct Types =====
===== 11. Altruism =====
===== 12. Extraterrestrial Life? =====
===== 13. Language =====
 
===== 14. Speech =====
===== 15. Codes, Programs, and Information =====
===== 16. Compatible Senders and Receivers =====
====The Arguments for Evolution Are Outdated and Often Illogical.====
===== 17. Acquired Characteristics =====
===== 18. Vestigial Organs =====
===== 19. Two-Celled Life? =====
===== 20. Embryology =====
===== 21. Rapid Burial =====
===== 22. Parallel Strata =====
===== 23. Fossil Gaps =====
===== 24. The Cambrian Explosion =====
===== 25. Out-of-Sequence Fossils =====
=====26. Ape-Men?=====
===== 27. Fossil Man =====
==== Life Is So Complex That Chance Processes, Even over Billions of Years, Cannot Explain How Life Began. ====
We almost just skipped this section by writing in giant bold letters "The Theory of Evolution doesn't cover the origin of life any more than the Theory of Gravity covers the origin of matter and energy." But then we remembered that, ostensibly, this book is supposed to be providing a scientific case for creation. So far, the only thing Dr. Brown has done is attempt to disprove evolution. Presumably because after that the only explanation left is YHWH. And since evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis, it seemed fair to skip this section.
But we will not, because maybe, just maybe, Dr. Brown will stray from attempting to do what scientists haven't been able to do for well over a hundred years, and provide some actual concrete evidence for creationism! Or he'll stick to his guns and keep misrepresenting science in the hopes his readers will be too complacent to do their own research. Take your bets now!
===== 28. Chemical Elements of Life =====
===== 29. Proteins =====
===== 30. The First Cell =====
===== 31. Barriers, Buffers, and Chemical Pathways =====
===== 32. Genetic Distances =====
===== 33. Genetic Information =====
===== 34. DNA and Proteins =====
===== 35. Handedness: Left and Right =====
===== 36. Metamorphosis =====
===== 37. Sexual Reproduction =====
===== 38. Symbiotic Relationships =====
===== 39. Immune Systems =====
===== 40. Improbabilities =====
===== 41. Living Technology =====
===== 42. The Validity of Thought =====
==== Life Sciences Conclusion ====
=== Astronomical and Physical Sciences ===
==== Theories for the Evolution of the Solar System and Universe Are Unscientific and Hopelessly Inadequate. ====
===== 43. Strange Planets =====
===== Is Pluto a Planet? =====
Quick answer: no
===== 44. Earth: The Water Planet =====
===== 45. Molten Earth? =====
===== 46. Evolving Planets? =====
Ah, here we see where some of the "evolution" stuff might be coming from in the astronomy section of the book. It looks like there's some confusion at work between evolution in the original, general sense (meaning gradual change over time) and the theory of evolution (which is specifically about how life forms change over time). If Dr. Brown is simply unaware of the distinction this can be chalked up to a misunderstanding on his part, though typically the big names in creationism are aware of these sorts of double meanings and take advantage of them to deceive the rank and file.
===== Have Planets Been Discovered Outside the Solar System? =====
This section is Brown basically pointing out that when we started being able to see and study solar systems that aren't ours, a few of the models developed when we only had our system as an example turned out to be wrong. He quotes a couple astronomers saying that "this is the end for established theories" and "these are difficult to explain with current models." Yeah, Dr. Brown, that's what science does. When data comes along that doesn't fit our models, we update the models.
It's telling that Brown once complained that the Theory of Evolution was too good at fitting the evidence available (#17). That's because all scientific Theories are crafted around the data. Dr. Brown's way of operating is forcing the data to fit his models, which results in him simultaneously claiming bacteria are simple when they should be "the most evolved", and that bacteria are incredibly complex, and that both fit his world-view. It results in him claiming evolution says that children evolved before adults, and that adults evolved before children, and both mean it's wrong. It results in him claiming Pluto is a planet, except when he has to make a point about how exceptional Earth is for having lots of water whereby suddenly he forgets about Pluto.
It seems that Brown just has a knee-jerk reaction to the word 'evolution,' despite the fact that the word, when used by astronomers, has nothing to do with biological evolution, similar to how Andrew Schlafly has a knee-jerk reaction to the word 'relativity'. It's not that Brown is afraid of the idea of an Earth or solar system that evolves changes, since his own Hydroplate Hypothesis involves making drastic changes to both.
===== 47. Planetary Rings =====
===== 48. Origin of the Moon =====
===== 49. Evolution of the Solar System? =====
===== 50. Faint Young Sun =====
Just because science doesn't have all the answers doesn't mean Goddidit.
Brown describes a scenario, which is still debated as to whether it happened (though if it did it happened over three billion years after Earth's formation, when the sun was only a bit weaker than today), and claims that life couldn't evolve if it happened, which is blatantly false (and he provides no citation for the claim). Even if the surface of the Earth were frozen, ice is a good insulator, and geothermal vents — you know, the places life likely evolved — would still have liquid water, while volcanoes would still belch greenhouse gasses that would eventually overcome the rise in albedo (which is the prevailing hypothesis as to how we broke out of the various potential-snowball ice ages of the Precambrian. in far higher concentrations than today, usually "forgetting" to mention those moments were always followed by a "hothouse Earth" with no glaciers anywhere and tropical life at the poles.)
Brown also states which means he apparently has forgotten that photosynthetic plants are a thing. It's okay, Dr. Brown, the writers of the Bible forgot about plants, too.
===== 51. Mountains of Venus =====
===== 52. Space, Time, and Matter =====
 -- Dr. Walter Brown, In the Beginning
Wow, a lot to unpack here. First, his citation is from 1939. While the Big Bang Theory did exist back then, it didn't have the observational evidence it has now, and was competing against other ideas. There's been nearly a century of scientific advances since then, and the Big Bang Theory has solidified as the best way of explaining what we see, and does explain the origin of time and space. Matter's a slightly different, if connected, field, over which there is still debate.
It should be noted that the Big Bang Theory probably doesn't satisfy Brown, because it doesn't explain how these things came to be, but instead provides mechanisms for how they behaved in the first few seconds of the universe's existence. If Brown or other creationists want causal relationships before the first Planck time, they'll be waiting for a while, for various reasons:
*We don't know whether "time" even existed before the Big Bang, so asking what was before it to cause it may be like asking what's south of the South Pole. The question could very well be meaningless.
*Current models of physics break down at time periods very close to the start of the universe. It could be that the models will be updated with better ones, or that the current physical laws "condensed" out of the chaos in that first Planck time, and therefore no model of physics can describe what happened because there were no laws upon which to build the models. Which, again, makes the question of what caused it meaningless (or at least unanswerable).
In truth, what happened "before" the Big Bang and immediately thereafter might never be known with 100% certainty. The best we can do, and what we are currently doing, is formulating models that can explain what likely happened, which agrees with what we see (what we see being everything from the distribution of matter in the universe and the near-uniformity of the CMB. Even non-observations such as the lack of seeing evaporating black holes is a data point that has to be taken into consideration for these models, because those first fractions of a second drastically affect the universe that resulted from them.)
Sure, in the absence of 100% certain knowledge, you can claim anything you want, but unless that claim is as robust as the Big Bang Theory and its child-models which involve everything from astrophysics to quantum mechanics to string theory, your claim just isn't as strong as those built by people who are studying every aspect they can about the universe. You could claim the Big Bang was farted out of a unicorn, and it might be impossible to disprove it, but it's also meaningless if the current laws of physics formed after the singularity and inflation.
Yes, the entire universe could have been created by YHWH 6,000 years ago with the appearance of being 13.8 billion years old. It could have also have been created by You last Thursday with the appearance of being 13.8 billion years old. Neither of these are disprovable, and both are equally valid to what happened before the beginning of the universe (if there even is was a "before", if the word "before" has any meaning prior to the Big Bang). The universe could be a simulation, or a turtle's dream, or any of an infinite number of possibilities. What links them all is that it appears the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and behaves in a certain way. Science is about trying to figure out how it behaves, regardless of the "real"ness of the evidence. If you are content with your personal hypothesis for how the evidence is faked, be it by YHWH or You or a computer simulation or a space-turtle's dream, then you have no business talking about science. We could wake up tomorrow where the laws of the universe are all different because it turns out they had been faked by a deity, that gravity really is Intelligent falling, that atoms are held together by the literal hands of Jesus. But until that happens there is value in figuring out these laws and how they interact and how they acted upon the past to create the present, and how they'll further act on the present to create the future. If you don't see that value, then, again, you have no business in the sciences.
===== 53. A Beginning =====
===== 54. The First Law of Thermodynamics =====
Ah, we knew the Laws of Thermodynamics had to show up in here somewhere. Well, let's get this over with.
===== 55. Second Law of Thermodynamics =====
===== 56. Big Bang? =====
There is a lot of BS in this section, ranging from basic errors in current cosmological models to outright lies, to pointing out that science doesn't know everything. The book starts this section with a big aside on Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but for now we'll just focus on the larger main section under this heading, and handle Brown's lies about those two things as we go.
This section is one of the largest in the book, probably the largest so far, so instead of directly quoting it word-for-word, we'll summarize, and use quotes only sparingly. If you're new to the Big Bang, cosmology, and/or the ideas and evidence behind Dark Matter and Dark Energy, check out the main articles we have on those topics:
With that out of the way, let us begin!
Right off the bat, Brown claims the entire theory was based on three bits of evidence, and presumes that knocking over those three bits will collapse the whole theory like a house of cards and presumably leave YHWH as the only remaining option. He says these three bits are: red-shifting, the CMB, and the prevalence of hydrogen in the universe.
In fact, the big bang was proposed well before we knew about the CMB, and was a logical conclusion to the direct observation that the farther away something was, the faster it appeared to be moving away from us. It was as though everything exploded outward in a "big bang" (a name given to it to point out how silly the idea was; the prevailing cosmological theories of the time involved a static, eternal universe). As physics developed and scientists began figuring out just what the universe was like in the early years of this proposed expansion, it was clear there was a time when the universe would've been opaque plasma. Since it's not that now, there must've been a transition to transparency, meaning that no matter the direction you look you'll eventually see nothing but the photons that emerged from that opaque plasma: a universe-wide cosmic background radiation.
When that radiation was subsequently discovered (by accident), the Big Bang Theory solidified as the best way to explain the cosmos. The photons had red-shifted due to the expansion of the universe to low-energy microwaves, which is why it's called the "Cosmic Microwave Background" or CMB for short.
The Big Bang Theory has undergone several revisions, mostly as to how much and how quickly the universe expanded. The numbers change to fit with observations about how much of what matter should have been produced after the plasma soup condensed into atoms. We know the ratios that did form, because we can look up and measure them; the trick is fitting the model to those ratios. So Dr. Brown's third pillar is less of a point of evidence for the Big Bang Theory, and more a point of data that's currently being used to refine it.
One of the more interesting developments was the discovery that the universe's expansion was accelerating. Brown poses this as a problem to the Big Bang Theory, which in its infancy (coming down from the high of a static cosmos) did claim that the mass and energy within the universe would cause, gravitationally, the expansion to slow. In fact it's just an interesting data point, one which might possibly call into question a lot of our various laws, but is more probably just a law we haven't yet figured out yet. We call it "Dark Energy", because we don't know what it is. We do know that it exists, because we can see the accelerating expansion.
It's possible Dark Energy is just a fundamental property of spacetime, a negative-pressure force just as gravity is a positive-pressure force that's a fundamental property of matter and energy. It's also possible the expansion of the universe is simply the result of geometry. We don't yet know what it is, but contrary to what Brown claims, it has been seen and measured. That's how we know it exists. An analogy would be early humans looking at rainbows, and not knowing what they were, and so just slapped on a name to refer to the strange phenomenon. The rainbows exist and have been observed, and early humans even would know the general mechanics of them: happening before or after it rains, but still not know the mechanism. We're at that point with Dark Energy.
Also unrelated to the Big Bang Theory is the issue of Dark Matter, again posed by Brown as something invented by evolutionists big-bang theorists to protect their precious theory: 
As with Dark Energy, the discovery that galactic rotations behaved as though there were a lot more matter that we couldn't directly see was an interesting data point, but not a death blow to the Big Bang Theory. When scientists saw that galaxies spun as though there was a lot of extra matter they couldn't directly see, they presumed there was a lot of extra matter they couldn't directly see, and gave it a name: Dark Matter.
Since then there's been even more observations, including direct measurements of the location and quantity of dark matter. You see, even though it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force, it does interact with gravity, and we can see the effects of gravity.Clowe, Douglas; Gonzalez, Anthony; Markevich, Maxim (2003). "Weak lensing mass reconstruction of the interacting cluster 1E0657-558: Direct evidence for the existence of dark matter". Astrophys. J. 604 (2): 596–603. arXiv:astro-ph/0312273 Freely accessible. doi:10.1086/381970. Gravitational lensing has shown us where dark matter is, and allowed us to measure some of its properties. Read more here The universe behaves exactly as if there's about five times more dark matter than "regular" matter, which is why astronomers believe there's five times more dark matter than regular matter.
Instead, Dr. Brown is saying to take the evidence that the universe behaves as though there's a type of matter that is abundant and doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, and conclude that therefore there exists a being that doesn't interact with any of the four fundamental forces of the universe. Pretty much the definition of a non sequitur.
Next Brown talks about element ratios, both hydrogen and lithium. This is an area of physics still being worked on, and depends on the state and conditions of the very early universe. To add to Brown's list, we also don't really know how galaxies and supermassive black holes formed as quickly as they appear to have formed. Science doesn't have all the answers, otherwise it'd stop. The difference between scientists and Dr. Brown is that scientists look at the lack of answers and try to answer them, gathering data, making models and predictions, testing them against observations, and repeating that process over and over until a model doesn't break. Brown, on the other hand, looks at the lack of answers, shrugs, says "Goddidit", and walks away content.
Dr. Brown eventually gets around to "other problems" including the starlight problem: which has a simple explanation: inflation, and "we don't know how galaxies formed so early after the Big Bang, but we're working on it." The great thing about it is his 'distant galaxies' bit says that stars must have formed in a smaller universe, which was then "stretched out" into what we see today. Sounds a lot like the Big Bang Theory there, Brown.
He claims the Big Bang shouldn't produce rotating bodies: apparently not realizing that slightly-different linear motion, say between two clumps of gas, whose gravity can overcome inflation, will express their slightly-different velocities as rotation the more they come together.
Brown then calls out yet another part of cosmology that's still being developed: why there was more matter than antimatter. In truth, we don't know. The answer could overturn a lot of physics, or it could merge quantum mechanics and general relativity. Or, more likely, it could just open up a lot of other questions. Brown then asks the wrongly-asked question of what caused the Big Bang, which is not only a question we can't currently answer, it's a question that may not even have an answer. It may, in fact, not even be a question that applies to anything at all! If there truly was no before the Big Bang, then there was no before in which its cause could exist.
Putting aside the fact that "before the Big Bang" may be a meaningless statement, the answer is inflation. We know by looking into space that cosmic inflation can and does overcome gravity easily: only the local group of galaxies is close enough to us to be gravitationally bound to us. Everything else is and, for most cosmic models, will forever be pulled away due to Dark Energy. At the start of the Big Bang, inflation was so fast and powerful that it ripped gravitational bonds apart.
Yes, some observations, such as stars that appear older than the universe itself, have been made. Likewise observations that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light have been made. It's also true that observations that stars disappear over horizons as you move south have been made. Sometimes the observation itself is wrong or misinterpreted, while with others it's the cosmological model that needs updating. The observation of stars have pushed back the age of the universe by a few billion years, and the presence of distant galaxies is still being used to figure out how the universe operated in its early years. Cosmological models aren't static objects rooted in dogma, but mathematical ideas that can be molded to match the evidence.
And finally, for completeness' sake, this gem: No, Dr. Brown, all observations point to the Big Bang, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, galaxies, black holes, atomic fusion, and yes, even evolution, both cosmological and biological, as the way the universe works. That's why we have those models. If anything seriously disagreed with them on a fundamental level we would replace them with other models that did agree with the evidence. If, as Brown seems to believe, science is dogmatic, we wouldn't even have the Big Bang Theory, because astrophysicists would've dogmatically held to the eternal universe model with Einstein's Cosmological Constant to keep gravity from crushing everything. We wouldn't even have the Theory of Evolution because biologists would've dogmatically held to the spontaneous generation model. We wouldn't have Germ Theory because doctors would've held to humorism and miasmatic models of disease. We only have the models Brown dislikes because of observations and evidence. What Dr. Brown and others like him are doing is tantamount to pointing at a brick in a building and claiming the builders forgot to put that brick into the building.
===== 57. Heavy Elements =====
===== 58. Interstellar Gas =====
===== 59. Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram =====
===== 60. Fast Binaries =====
===== 61. Star Births? Stellar Evolution? =====
===== 62. Galaxies =====
==== Techniques That Argue for an Old Earth Are Either Illogical or Based on Unreasonable Assumptions. ====
===== 63. Radiometric Dating =====
===== The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity =====
Despite this chapter's name, it actually lays the foundations (haha, hydroplate puns) for his Hydroplate theory. This may go on a bit, and seemingly detract from the point of this first part (namely disproving modern science proving creationism), but since Brown references it here, and the chapter's a part of the book itself, let's just get it over with.
This chapter is unfortunately not as outwardly insane as Time Cube, though it makes about as much physical sense. It's clearly the result of an educated person trying to find validation for his beliefs. In between Brown explaining what Carbon-14 is and how electron capture works, there is the fabrication of a model convoluted mess so insane you really kinda have to read it for yourself. Or don't, and spare yourself the headache.
Brown first claims that radioactive decay rates can be altered very slightly by pressure (increasing electron capture), by distance from the sun, and by unproven electrical mechanisms invented by "major" corporations that now have patents (because patents are the way to tell if something works). His final way to alter radioactive decay is based on, so far, the result of a single lab that studied highly-positively-charged isotopes. Basically, they stripped atoms of all or most of their electrons to study how that affected beta decay, which turned out to be a lot, with even stable elements experiencing decay.Not sure what journal this is for, if any, but I'm giving Brown the benefit of the doubt: Beta Decay of Highly Charged Ions. The only scientific papers I could find on the matter all referenced the one lab and how it might be a promising area of research, but considering the lab did its thing more than 20 years ago, it's probably not as exciting as Brown claims it to be.
After talking for a bit about nucleic stability, the Strong Force, and neutron stars, Brown goes on an aside about fusion, something that requires careful setups of plasma, magnetic fields, and electric generation. This is important later.
He then covers various atomic isotopes, like Carbon-14, Potassium-40, Helium-3, and a few other things. Then, this gem: He goes on to recite anecdotes from the 19th Century (back when opium was legal and widely-used). He even has the audacity to say Surely Brown knows that earthquakes didn't just happen in the 19th Century, and while there have historically been some phenomena thought to be myth until very recently, none of these phenomena have been actually documented. It's not that we don't have earthquakes any more, as Haiti, Japan, and Chile can testify. There's no reports or footage of flames, or lightning shooting from the ground. Just like ghosts and Bigfoot, reports of oddities during earthquakes haven't increased with the increased availability of recording devices. So yes, it's very likely Brown's citations were just the result of frightened 19th Century people possibly high on opium.
This wouldn't be such a big deal, but it turns out these 19th Century anecdotes form the bedrock (lol hydroplate puns) to Brown's theory. Before he gets around to explaining why he took time out of his physics chapter to go on about 19th Century hearsay, he claims that the upper dozen or so kilometers of the Earth's crust has enough radioactive material to account for all heat coming from the Earth, a claim that doesn't seem to have any scientific backing. On the one hand, we can't directly analyze material from below 13 km, because the deepest we've ever dug is 12.3 km.The is still the deepest artificial point on Earth. On the other hand, we can measure neutrinos coming from radioactive decay far deeper in the Earth, which is how we know that about half of the thermal energy Earth radiates into space is due to radioactive decay.Gando, A., Dwyer, D. A., McKeown, R. D., & Zhang, C. (2011). Partial radiogenic heat model for Earth revealed by geoneutrino measurements. Nature Geoscience, 4(9), 647–651. So on the face of it the claim is bogus: the crust can't account for all the heat, because we know there's heat being produced deeper than the crust.
Brown then spends a bit talking about radiohalos, and then gets into the meat of his claim. Now bear with me, because this gets intense.
Basically, Brown's sub-crustal ocean of super-critical water (presumably heated by the wrath of YHWH) ruptures out of the crust, causing the entire Earth's surface to flutter like a flag in wind. Peizo-electric effects, proven to exist in the earth's crust by those 19th Century fear-and-opium-induced hallucinations, create extreme voltages within the crust, bathing the Earth in neutron radiation that creates various isotopes and kills most everything on Earth because the crust basically becomes a . The intense voltages also turned bits of the crust into plasma. This plasma fused crustal material either Z-pinched — you know the thing that requires very careful and specific setup to get to work — or via physical impact from the collapse of the plasma bubbles, like intense cavitation. The heat from this fusion further heated the water, which increased the flapping crust, which magically produces more electricity, which magically fuses more, which heats the water more, and so on. For weeks.
Crucially, Brown's method of fusion isn't just Z-pinching, which has been done for decades. It involves a fancy new fusion invented by some Russians in 2007. And by "invented" we of course mean "immediately pushed for a patent, published an 800-page book on how revolutionary it is, and wrote exactly 0 papers for peer-review." Ten years later, they remain about as obscure as perpetual-motion quacks, so clearly their invention was truly revolutionary.Neither they nor their lab has a Wikipedia page; they're not mentioned in any significant scientific papers. Anyway, back to the Flood.
The superheated and superpressurized water then calmly mixes with surface water, erupts from the crust at suddenly near-absolute-zero temperatures to fall back as ice to flash-freeze everything only those things which froze quickly, and was rocketed into space at over 32 miles per second to form comets, craters on the Moon, and all asteroids and TNOs, which means his "fountains of the deep" would've taken a significant fraction of Earth's current mass.Gladman, Brett; et al. (August 2001). "The structure of the Kuiper belt". Astronomical Journal. 122 (2): 1051–1066. Bibcode:2001AJ....122.1051G. doi:10.1086/322080 His reasoning for how superheated fusion-water becomes nearly absolute zero is because he needs the water to reach 32 miles per second to account for long-period retrograde comets, and calculated that for superheated, superpressurized water to reach those speeds would require it to decrease in pressure so quickly as to become near absolute zero. He then uses that calculation to show that superheated, superpressurized water accelerating so that it would reach near absolute zero would be accelerated fast enough to become long-period retrograde comets, in glorious circular reasoning. This doesn't seem contrived at all, does it?
Brown's theory relies on that electrical energy becoming thermal energy, which triggers more nuclear thermal energy, only some of which is converted to electrical energy (which is thereby very quickly converted back into thermal energy). In other words, by his own admission, this would've melted "much of the earth" during the Flood.
During the weeks of the entire Earth's crust being an active fusion reactor producing all of the heavy elements we see on Earth today, especially the radioactive ones, the newly-formed elements begin to decay. Brown bases his assertion that the decay rates increased dramatically on two things: first that patents have been issued for electronic devices that supposedly speed up decay a billionfold, and second that there's a lot of electricity rolling around in the Earth's crust (according to 19th Century tales). (The amount of radiogenic heat, along with the energy required to create all Trans-Neptunian Objects, is covered at the end of the article. In short: it'd destroy the Earth.)
Far from providing a scientific way for his flood to work, Brown has cobbled together a model that is less likely than just saying "God conjured water from the ether, dumped it on Earth, then made the water vanish, while giving everything the appearance of being billions of years old just to troll future humans whom God endowed with reason."
===== 64. Corals and Caves =====
===== 65. Index Fossils =====
===== 66. Humanlike Footprints =====
===== 67. Geological Column =====
===== 68. Old DNA, Bacteria, Proteins, and Soft Tissue? =====
===== 69. Human Artifacts =====
===== 70. Parallel Layers =====
==== Most Scientific Dating Techniques Indicate That the Earth, Solar System, and Universe Are Young. ====
===== 71. Helium =====
===== 72. Lead and Helium Diffusion =====
===== 73. Excess Fluid Pressure =====
===== 74. Volcanic Debris =====
===== 75. River Sediments =====
===== 76. Continental Erosion =====
===== 77. Dissolved Metals =====
===== 78. Crater Creep =====
===== 79. Shallow Meteorites =====
===== 80. Moon Dust =====
===== 81. Meteoritic Dust =====
===== 82. Rapid Cooling =====
===== 83. Moon Recession =====
===== 84. Hot Moon =====
===== 85. Young Comets =====
===== 86. Small Comets =====
===== 87. Hot Planets =====
===== 88. Solar Wind =====
===== 89. Poynting-Robertson Effect =====
===== 90. Supernova Remnants =====
===== 91. Connected Galaxies =====
===== 92. Unstable Galaxies =====
===== 93. Galaxy Clusters =====
==== Conclusion ====
=== Earth Sciences ===
==== Noah’s Ark Probably Exists. ====
Spoiler: it doesn't. See the Talk Origins article about this.
===== 94. Ancient Historians =====
===== 95. British Scientists =====
===== 96. James Bryce =====
===== 97. Turkish Commissioners =====
===== 98. George Hagopian =====
===== 99. Russian Expeditions =====
===== 100. Ed Davis =====
===== 101. George Greene =====
===== 102. Gregor Schwinghammer =====
==== 103 - 127 Many of the Earth’s Previously Unexplained Features Can Be Explained by a Cataclysmic Flood. ====
==== The Seemingly Impossible Events of a Worldwide Flood Are Credible, If Examined Closely. ====
Here Brown breaks from trying to provide compelling evidence for Creation and the Flood, and his last four points are just trying to make the Flood not sound as ridiculous as it is.
===== 128. Water above Mountains? =====
===== 129. Seashells on Mountaintops =====
===== 130. Flood Legends =====
===== 131. Was There Room? =====
Spoiler: No there wasn't
 	Mammal	Bird 	Reptile 	Totals
Species 	5937 	10500	10450 	26887
Genera 	1258 	2158 	1053Couldn't find any firm numbers, so I just counted the number of wikipedia pages under and its child sub-categories.	4469
Families	156 	200 	77 	433
Orders 	28 	39 	16 	83
 	Mammal	Bird	Reptile 	Totals 	Totals with Extant
Species 	— 	— 	— 	— 	—
Genera 	1760 	Over 1440While Wikipedia does have a it's not easily regexable, nor searchable for genera. I did get Family and Order estimates off this list, because both follow standard naming conventions. This number comes from my best attempt to get everything,
 but it misses a huge chunk of the list.	2226 	Over 5426	Over 9895
Families	437 	348 	428Extinct reptiles are more often classed using clades and not taxonomy. While they do have genera, those genera don't belong to families or orders.	Over 1213	Over 1646
Orders 	75 	44 	69 	Over 188 	Over 271
== Conclusion ==
This book was written by a creationist for creationists to help validate their beliefs. Brown's modus operandi is to ignore any science since the 1950s, and claim that therefore there are lots of things that are unexplained, and that his model is the only thing that can explain them. Instead of looking at the evidence and following where it leads, Brown looks at the evidence and asks himself how it could fit into a recent creation and worldwide flood. The result of this is a mish-mash of contradictions and fallacies. Brown conveniently breaks the book up into bite-sized bits, which masks these errors, so in the effort of undoing his hard work let's juxtapose them.
=== Overview of contradictions ===
#Nature can't create new genetic material (#1-5) except when it does (#6)
#Humans are the only organisms to use language (#13, #14) except when bacteria do it (#41)
#Bacteria are too simple (#4) and too complex (#41) to have evolved.
#Strata are too parallel (#22, #70) and not parallel enough (#67) for the Earth to be old
#Flowers appeared during (#24) and well after (#25) the Cambrian.
#There aren't enough (#23) and too many (#26) proto-human fossils.
#It's impossible (#34) and easy (#35) for complex systems to evolve.
#Pluto is ("Is Pluto a Planet") and isn't (#44) a planet.
#Earth has too much (#44) and not enough (#86) water.
#Volcanoes don't exist (#45) except when there's too many of them (#74)
#There's not enough (#74) and too much (#76) continental crust.
#There's not enough (#49) and too much (#88, #89) dust in the solar system.
#Venus is too cold (#51) and too hot (#87).
#The planets are too dissimilar ("Astronomical and Physical Sciences") and not dissimilar enough (#44, #48) to have formed from a disk of material.
#Planetary rings are too thick (#47) and too thin (#48) to be old.
#Earth shouldn't be spinning (#46) and isn't spinning fast enough (#48)
#Meteorites hitting Earth are too rare (#45) and too frequent (#81)
#There's no evidence for dark energy (#56), except when there is (#56)
#There's no evidence for dark matter (#56), except when there is (#92, #93)
#There's no evidence for plate tectonics (#76), except when there is (#75, #104, #105, #106, #107, #108, #113, #114, #115, #121, #123)
#The universe had a beginning (#53), except when the universe is eternal and unchanging (#61)
#Speciation is impossible (#7), except when it's easy and quick (#131)
=== Overview of logical fallacies ===
Here's a list of the most egregious fallacies Brown uses.
Fallacy 	Offending Points 	Count
Straw man 	2, 23, 28, 29, 30, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70	21
Argument from incredulity 	6, 8, 15, 17, 29, 30, 31, 34, 38, 61, 62 	11
Science was wrong before 	2, 20, 26, 43, 48, 52, 57, 65, 68, 69 	10
Science doesn't know everything	1, 8, 11, 13, 35, 36, 48, 52, 60, 62 	10
Appeal to Authority 	2, 36, 41, 42, 53 	5
Red herring 	12, 33, 36, 40, 64 	5
=== Overview of outright lies ===
Here's a list of all the points where Brown either didn't do basic research, or chose to lie about the evidence available. All of these are debunked by direct observational evidence that existed in 2013 when (as of this writing) Brown last updated the book:
Fallacy	Offending Points 	Count
Lies 	7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 28, 34, 45, 48, 51, 56, 57, 58, 61, 65, 66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 85, 87, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127	55
=== Overview of bad math ===
Several times in the book Brown mentions some natural process that, when extrapolated backward, proves the Earth is young. He gives answers without showing his work, and since the actual calculations don't agree with his results, he either never did them, or is just terrible at mathematics.
Subject 	Brown's Result 	Actual Result 	Degree of Error
Meteoric dust accumulation on Earth over 3.5 billion years (#81)	16 feet 	3 inches 	64x
Lunar recession over 4.5 billion years (#83) 	More than 384,399 km 	171,000 km 	At least 2x
Energy released by his Fountains of the Deep 	Between 2.259×1027 and 4.369×1032 JBrown says the energy released was around "1,800 trillion hydrogen bombs". The smallest hydrogen (by which he presumably means "thermonuclear" aka fusion) bomb I could find is the variable-yield B61, which has a low setting of 0.3 kilotons, or 1.26×1012 joules. The largest hydrogen bomb was the Tsar Bomba at 58 Megatons (designed for 100, but to date only the half-yield version has been tested), or 2.427×1017 joules.	At least 9.3×1032 J	Between 2.1x and 411,687x
=== Fun with math ===
==== Energy released ====
There are two major catastrophic things Brown says happened during the flood:
#All the Earth's heavy elements were created and decayed at rates billions of times quicker than today
#All of the Trans-Neptunian Objects were thrown from the Earth and to their current orbits.
Both of these represent mind-boggling amounts of energy. Just how much? Let's find out!
For elements lighter than iron, fusing two nuclei together tends to release energy. For elements heavier than iron, it takes energy to fuse. If the resulting atom is unstable, this can be thought of as a battery: the energy is stored, and will be released later when the atom decays. There are a lot of stable elements above iron, so it's not a perfect battery, but the analogy's pretty good.
We know the decay rates of radioactive elements within the Earth's crust and mantle, and because decay rates are quite stable (barring supernatural processes) we know how much energy was being produced by radioactive decay in the past, and how much we have left. By integrating the equation, we can calculate the total amount of radiogenic energy produced for any given span of time, as well as for all time since the formation of the Earth.
 	Integration Span	Energy
Total 	0 - ∞ 	3.968×1019 TJWolfram Alpha:
 Integration of 100×e(-0.358t) from 0 to infinity multiplied by the number of seconds per billion years
Prior to now 	0 - 4.5 	3.174×1019 TJWolfram Alpha: Integration of 100×e(-0.358t) from 0 to 4.5 multiplied by the number of seconds per billion years
Previous 4,000 years	4.499996 - 4.5 	1.135×1013 TJWolfram Alpha: Integration of 100×e(-0.358t) from 4.499996 to 4.5 multiplied by the number of seconds per billion years
Next 4,000 years 	4.5 - 4.500004 	1.135×1013 TJWolfram Alpha: Integration of 100×e(-0.358t) from 4.5 to 4.500004 multiplied by the number of seconds per billion years
Remaining 	4.5 - ∞ 	7.935×1018 TJWolfram Alpha:Integration of 100×e(-0.358t) from 4.5 to infinity multiplied by the number of seconds per billion years
Brown says Z-pinch fusion created all the heavy elements in the Earth's crust during the time when the Earth's crust was flapping like a flag in a stiff wind. This involved exothermic fusion leading up to iron, and endothermic fusion from iron and above. He also claims that heat from the accelerated decay helped fuel the creation of more heavy elements, which is why the decay didn't melt the Earth's crust. Since not every heavy element produced would've decayed, it could've also sucked up the heat from the exothermic reactions. In the end, however, we know around 7.935×1018 TJ wasn't reused, since it's still stored as radioactive elements. That means that energy had to come from somewhere, and since the exothermic fusion is already used to create stable endothermic fusion products, maybe, just maybe, Brown can escape from destroying the Earth by taking the energy from the TNO generation. 
We know from these calculations that creating the Trans-Neptunian Objects required no less than 9.3×1020 TJ. We also can figure out how much energy each energysink can absorb before it destroys the Earth, or otherwise renders it uninhabitable:
Energy Sink 	Explanation 	Max Capacity
Kinetic (deformation)	The amount of energy it'd take to literally rip the planet apart, and spread its bits so that they wouldn't gravitationally come back together. 	2.49×1032 J
Radioactive Elements 	While the total energy stored in heavy elements was 3.968×1031 J, most of that (3.174×1031 J) decayed within the 40 days of the fountaining, and the energy released in decay since the flood is so tiny in comparison to the energy left to be released, only the energy left to be released could be considered an energysink. 	7.935×1030 J
Rotational 	The Earth is currently spinning about once every 24 hours. If it were about once every two hoursQuora: How fast would the earth need to spin for it to tear itself apart? (about 12 times faster than now) it would be destroyed. Therefore, the max energy that could be used this way would be if the pre-flood Earth were spinning just under once every two hours, was slowed to a stop, then further accelerated to be where it is now, which is 13 times the current rotational energy.	2.778×1030 J
Light 	The amount of light energy, assuming it's only at a frequency at which water's the most transparent, it would take to boil all of the Earth's oceans, rendering Earth uninhabitable. 	2.227×1028 JHeat capacity of liquid water is 4180 J/(LK), so to raise 1 L of water by 200 K would take 8.36×105 J. Miltiplied by the 1.332*1021 Liters of water on Earth is 1.114×1027 J. Divide that by the 5×10-2 that water absorbs of photonic light at its most translucent.
Thermal (atmosphere) 	The amount of heat it'd take to turn the entire atmosphere into a plasma (simply raising it to 100°C was so small as to be insignificant) 	9.064×1026 JWolfram Alpha: Mass of the atmosphere multiplied by heat capacity of air multiplied by the number of Kelvin required to turn air into a plasma. See here for how hot air needs to be to become a plasma.
Thermal (ground) 	The amount of heat it'd take to melt the crust 	6.2×1026 J
Total Sink Capacity 	Total amount of energy to almost, but not quite, destroy the Earth 	2.597×1032 J
We have a minimum of 9.3×1032 J we need to dissipate. Enough to destroy the Earth 3.58 times over. Sorry, Doc. Unfortunately for you, there's no evidence the Earth was destroyed about 4000 years ago (or ever, for that matter)Citation: look outside.
==== Freezing the earth ====
In direct contradiction to the math above, Brown claims that near-absolute-zero ice fell down on the Earth and caused an ice age, freezing all the mammoths and the like instantly. When water falls, its potential energy gets converted to kinetic energy. When it hit the ground, that kinetic energy is turned into a different kind of kinetic energy we call "heat". Because the specific heat of water is so high, this isn't noticeable on human scales — you'd have to drop liquid water 427 meters to have enough energy to raise it a single Kelvin — but Brown's talking about dropping ice from space. Unfortunately he doesn't give a timeframe of when and for how long the ice fell, but he does say all the mammoths were frozen pre-flood thereby burying them with the trilobites under hundreds of meters of flood sediment, so it had to have happened within the 40 days of fountaining. Of course how the ice remained frozen while half an ocean's worth of hot water covered everything for a year is left as an exercise to the reader.
Calculating how much energy it takes to heat water is a fairly simple exercise in unit cancellation. Specific heat is measured in Joules per Kilogram Kelvin (J/kgK). Before we look up what the specific heat of water is in various states, let's solve for the equations we'll be using, namely how hot you can get water with the energy produced by dropping it from a height h with a heat capacity of C:
:\text{C} \frac{\text{kg} \cdot \text{m}^2}{\text{s}^2 \cdot \text{K}} = 1 \text{kg} \cdot 9.81\frac{\text{m}}{\text{s}^2} \cdot \text{h}\text{m}
Solving for h is clear: just divide C by the acceleration due to gravity. For simplicity's sake that's 9.81 m/s2, because over distances of tens of kilometers it doesn't change all that much. Unit cancellation shows we're on the right track, as it results in meters per Kelvin. Note that the mass of the water cancels itself out, so the result doesn't care how much water you're dropping: if you drop a tiny bit, it'll have less energy, but it also needs less energy to heat.
Air resistance also doesn't factor in, because potential energy is potential energy. Having air in the way just means it'll be converted to thermal energy over a longer period of time; it'll still be the same amount of energy in the end. We also need to consider the energy required to melt ice, and boil water, called the Enthalpy of Fusion and Enthalpy of Vaporization respectively.
With these tools, let's build a table!
Temp 	State 	Specific Heat 	Meters to raise by one Kelvin	Meters to traverse the entire state's temperature range
0-273 	Solid 	2108 J/kgK 	214.883 	58,663
Enthalpy of Fusion 	— 	333,550 J/kg 	— 	34,000
273-373 	Liquid	4187 J/kgK 	426.81 	42,681
Enthalpy of Vaporization	— 	2,257,000 J/kg	— 	230,071
373+ 	Gas 	1996 J/kgK 	121.9 	—
As you can see, even dropping absolute-zero ice from 60 kilometers is enough to turn it to just-below-freezing ice. Dropping it from the edge of space at 100 kilometers is enough to further melt the ice into warm rain. But we know the ice didn't just come from the edge of space, because the vast majority of those fountains were spewing at 16.5 km/s, well over Earth's escape velocity. That means there was some amount of water that traveled just to the edge of Earth's sphere of influence, then fell back down, reaching a max potential energy of just under 6.25×107 Joules (the kinetic energy of something traveling Earth's escape velocity). Under a constant gravitational acceleration field of 9.81 m/s2 (like we're using in the table) that equates to an altitude of 6371 km.
Using our table, we know it only takes 365.4 km to turn absolute-zero ice into steam, which means the remaining energy would just heat up that steam, to nearly 30,000 Kelvin (several times hotter than the sun). Of course, in reality a lot of that energy would go into the atmosphere and planet itself, but the result is still thermal energy going into the Earth. To prevent the planet from boiling, that energy would have to be absorbed by the still-cold water that didn't go as high, meaning the average height of water shot from the fountains would have to be less than 365.4 km. To prevent even just heating up the Earth the average height would have to be less than 99 km (that'd heat the fountain water up to 15°C), for an average fountain velocity of a mere 1.39 km/s.
If the fountain velocity followed a standard bell-curve, peaking at 16.5 km/s, the majority of water that fell back to Earth would come from very high up. Far from creating an ice-age, Brown's model would push the Earth closer to a runaway greenhouse effect.If the average height of water that returned to earth had only half the energy required to leave Earth entirely (again, if the velocities of water coming out of the fountains followed a bell curve, it would actually be far higher), only about a Lake Superior's worth of water could fall before the Earth's atmosphere literally boiled. Air has a heat capacity of around 1012 J/(kg K), and the atmosphere is around 5.14×1018 kg, so it'd take about 5.21×1023 J to heat it up by 100 Kelvin. Divide that by the 31.25 million Joules the average liter of water would have (half of what it'd need to leave Earth entirely) means only 1.67×1016 L could boil the atmosphere. Less than one percent of Greenland's ice-cap.
=== Theological implications ===
Brown's flood relies mainly on 2 things:
#The Earth was created with a huge amount of water — at least five hundred times more than is currently on EarthBrown says only half the Earth's oceans, but to create the TNOs (which are mostly ice) would require 1.7×1024 kg of material, most of that being water. — trapped in a world-spanning subterranean ocean 60 miles beneath the surface of the Earth
#Tidal forces heating that water until its pressure overcomes the weight of rock and it bursts through at no less than 16.5 km/s.
Note that nowhere does YHWH actually trigger the flood. The only part the god had was in setting up the initial conditions, which means that no matter what happened, roughly 2,000 years after creation, the flood would occur.
That means there's no way God didn't know Adam and Eve would sin, and their descendants would deserve getting wholly destroyed, because otherwise the Flood might've happened during the Garden of Eden, which would've been awkward to say the least. In other words, YHWH set up the universe with the full knowledge that he'd have to kill almost everyone a mere 2000 years down the road, and so provided a way for that to happen while he just sat back and watched.
As the famous verse goes, For God so loved the world that he set up its destruction and the deaths of millions of humans and billions of innocent animals just for giggles.
Alternatively, the god that forgot about magnetoception and how to build a proper eye when building its favorite creatures also forgot about the impending flood until a few hundred years before it was set to blow. YHWH found some random guy, told him he was the Chosen One and that he needs to build a box to keep creation alive in. When it's all over the deity just makes sure that the history books say that humanity totally deserved it. After all, Noah and his family aren't going to complain... YHWH gets to cause and watch senseless destruction, and then won't even be blamed for it — the perfect crime!
== See Also ==
*Young Earth creationism
*Evidence against a recent creation
*Hydroplate theory
*Global flood
== External Links ==
*The book itself
*A reply to a late-80s/early-90s draft of Brown's book by Jim Lippard.
*Brown's response to Lippard.
*Lippard's response to Brown's response.
*Brown's response to Lippard's response to Brown's response.
*Lippard's ultimate response to Brown's response to Lippard's response to ...
*A rebuttal to Brown's hydroplate theory, and how it supposedly created the world we see today.
*A (relatively) succinct review on Amazon.
*Old Earth Ministries (a creationist organization) debuking Brown's hydroplate hypothesis
*CreationWiki's page on Brown's book.
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Books
Category:Creationist claims
Category:Engineer woo
Category:Gish Gallops
Category:Refutations
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