3rd International Conference on Creationism - report

The Pre-Flood / Flood Boundary:
as defined in Grand Canyon, Arizona
and Eastern Mojave Desert, California



by Steven A. Austin and Kurt P. Wise


In the course of some recent correspondence with a critic of young-earth creationism, I was asked whether I found it odd that after all these years, creationists were still not able to point with any certainty to the location of the pre-Flood/Flood or Flood/post-Flood boundaries in the geological record. Why, if Flood geology had any merit, could we not do this? I replied that Flood geology is still a very young area of study with only a handful of qualified people addressing these issues - after all, there are many highly contentious, unresolved issues in uniformitarian stratigraphy even after 250 years of work by many thousands of professional geologists worldwide! Besides, creationists have until recently been concentrating on making the case for catastrophism in the geological record. Only now that it is more widely accepted that major catastrophic events have taken place are we turning our attention to the refinement and systematisation of our own model. This will involve the identification of these important boundaries in the rock record.

At Pittsburgh, some progress was made. Dr Steven Austin and Dr Kurt Wise's paper is a major contribution to creationist thinking on the location of the pre-Flood/Flood boundary. The presentation began with an historical overview of previous attempts to define this boundary, and the criteria used to identify it. Dr Austin and Dr Wise suggested that each definition failed when applied to actual sequences of strata.

In their lecture, the authors proposed five revised or new criteria which they believe will be sufficient to define the pre-Flood/Flood boundary worldwide. In brief summary, they suggest that this boundary will be associated with five geological discontinuities.

  1. A mechanical-erosional discontinuity (ED).

    The pre-Flood/Flood boundary is likely to coincide with the most substantial, or one of the most substantial, unconformities in any particular stratigraphic section.

  2. A time or age discontinuity (AD).

    Associated with the dominant unconformity in a section, we might expect to find exceptionally thick and/or coarse conglomeratic deposits, containing fragments of underlying lithified sediments, of great areal extent.

  3. A tectonic discontinuity (TD).

    Also associated with the beginning of the Flood, we would expect the greatest amount of tectonic disturbance (eg. rapid changes in sediment thickness, megaclasts, megaslides, detachment faulting, convoluted bedding).

  4. A sedimentary discontinuity (SD).

    Waning energies associated with deepening water would mean that the Flood would deposit a megasequence of upward-fining clastics, capped by chemical sediments.

    The largest such sequence sitting above a mechanically-eroded unconformity is likely to mark the initiation of the Flood.

  5. A palaeontological discontinuity (PD).

    Under normal conditions, the probability of fossilisation is proportional to the rate of sedimentation. Therefore, plant, animal, and fungal fossils would be expected in high abundance only above the pre-Flood/Flood boundary.

The strength of this analysis is that it does not rely on a single criterion; it uses five criteria to help us identify the boundary unambiguously. The authors spent some time in their lecture applying these criteria to the stratigraphic sequences in the Grand Canyon and the eastern Mojave Desert. Of course, it should be noted that not every area will allow the simultaneous use of all five criteria, and our conclusions about such an area would be more tentative.

Dr Austin and Dr Wise are currently preparing a technical monograph on this subject, to be published by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). This book will be a valuable contribution to the creationist literature, and a step forward in the development of the creationist model of earth history. However, as Dr Wise repeatedly emphasised throughout the Pittsburgh conference, the real work is only just beginning. The five criteria outlined in this paper provide us with a tool. Now all we need are armies of enthusiastic creationist geologists to go into the field equipped with these criteria and ready to apply them section by section!

Paul Garner (1994)

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