Major Dimensions

© Tas Walker  May 05

Identifying the geological dimensions of biblical history

Starting with the Bible we can know the broad framework of Earth history because we believe the record is accurate. The chronology developed by Ussher is adopted, rounded to the nearest 100 years. We take the Earth to have been created by God out of nothing (ex nihilo) around 4000 BC. The flood, a cataclysm of world wide extent, occurred around 2300 BC. Although we are not sure at this stage exactly what proportion of the world's sedimentary rocks were deposited during the flood, we suspect it was probably significant. As we proceed with our inquiry these details will become clearer.

When we consider biblical history it is apparent that the creation and flood events, although of short duration, are the most important times for the Earth from a geological perspective. The creation event is pre-eminent, generating a volume of roughly 1,000,000 x 10⁶ cubic kilometers of material when the earth was formed. This is illustrated by the size of the sphere in the figure. Of lesser significance was the flood event which would have deposited some 300 to 700 x 10⁶ cubic kilometers of material. This is represented by the smaller sphere in the figure. To produce such large quantities of material in such a short time would involve intense geologic processes.

By contrast, the geologic processes observed operating today are orders of magnitude less intense. If the current rates of erosion and deposition are projected over the pre-flood or the post-flood era, then the total quantity of material deposited in either era would be less than 0.05 x 10⁶ cubic kilometers. Even if the rates applying during these eras were one or two orders of magnitude different from current rates, the material accumulated during these eras would still be much less than the material generated during the creation or flood event. The comparatively minuscule volume of material deposited in this time is illustrated by the essentially invisible sphere in the figure.

From a geological point of view, therefore, the history of the earth as recorded in the Bible can be divided into four parts which we refer to as the Creation event, the Lost-World era (pre-flood era), the Flood event, and the New-World era (post-flood era). The term "Lost-World era" refers to the time between the Creation and Flood events. It avoids ambiguity because the term "pre-flood" includes the Creation event.

The important conclusion from our consideration of the Biblical record is that the intensity of geologic processes were different for each of the four parts of world history. Because geologic effects were not uniform with time, the quantity of rock material deposited over the history of the Earth was not proportional to time. In our model some non-linear transformation must be made between the the historical record and the observed geology. This feature is the basic difference between a geological model based on the Bible and a model based on a rigid uniformitarianism.

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