You’ve been through the public schools.

You’ve heard biology teachers speak confidently of ape men and of the evolution of the peppered moth in England during the Industrial Revolution.

In earth science you’ve been taught about the extinction of dinosaurs 60 million years ago, and about the slow decay of radio-active elements which “proves that the earth is 4.6 billion years old (that “.6” gives it an extra dose of credibility).

If you took an astronomy class in high school or college, you learned that distant stars are billions of light years away, so the universe must have existed for billions of years in order for light from those stars to reach the earth.

You may believe the Bible and accept the Book of Genesis by faith, yet you have lingering questions from your years of indoctrination in evolution. I know the feeling. I was an evolutionist all through high school and eight years of college. After I became a Christian, I assumed that believing in the literal truth of Genesis came as part of the “package” – but I still didn’t know how science squared with the Bible.

During a conversation back then a friend asked me, “Where do the ice ages fit in?” I didn’t know. All I knew was, you can’t sweep a seventeen-thousand-trillion-ton ice cap under the rug. So I continued to believe in the Bible, but I also continued to wonder …

A few years later, I asked another friend of mine if he knew of any books which had been written on this subject, and he gave me his copy of Scientific Creationism by Dr. Henry Morris. I read it and was very surprised by both the amount and quality of scientific evidence supporting Genesis and opposing evolution.

Later I started reading other books on creation science, such as Morris’ classic Genesis Flood and Paul Taylor’s Illustrated Origins Answer Book, and I came to the joyful conclusion that there really were answers for all the evolutionism I had absorbed over the years. No longer did I need to believe the Bible while thinking, “Yes, but what about this and what about that?”

Probably the best single book I’ve read for answering these kinds of nagging questions is In the Beginning by Dr. Walter Brown, Jr. Even among creationist books it’s unique in showing exactly how 17 major features of the earth were produced by the Flood and its after effects. If you’ve ever wanted a Bible-based explanation for ice ages, the extinction of dinosaurs, earthquakes, volcanoes, mountains, even the formation of the Grand Canyon – it’s all there.

According to In the Beginning, the earth was originally created with a granite outer crust which completely encircled the globe. On top of this crust were the primordial seas. Beneath the crust was a layer of water under tremendous pressure from the weight of the underlying granite. This subterranean water would have constituted the “great deep” mentioned in Genesis 7:11, while the overlying granite crust with its seas may have been the “firmament” mentioned in Genesis 1:7.

According to this book’s explanation of how the Flood happened, pressure was building up in the water trapped below the crust. Then, when God ordained the Flood, the pressure became so great that it caused a minute crack to open up in the granite.

Once this crack had started, tremendous concentrations of stress at its ends caused it to grow at almost the speed of sound in the rock. Just as a rip suddenly goes down the length of a piece of overstretched cloth, it raced around the whole earth at a speed of over 10,000 miles per hour.

Instantly, the superheated water from below came roaring up through the entire length of the crack with unimaginable power and violence, and in “the same day were all the fountains of the deep broken up” (Genesis 7:11).

The fountains jetted upward into awesome, towering clouds of water and mud, bursting in the upper atmosphere into a tremendous spray which violent winds carried around the earth. And “the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:11-12).

Not only was there a torrential downpour of rain, but some of the water which had rushed upward reached altitudes high above the stratosphere, where it froze. It then returned to earth as massive ice dumps, instantly burying and freezing mammoths and other animals which are still preserved in the modern Arctic.

As the steam and water continued to thunder up through the crack, they tore tens of millions of cubic miles of sediment from its granite sides with erosive power thousands of times greater than that of any modern flood. Muddy water poured out across the earth’s surface, uprooting plants and engulfing animals and people.

As erosion along the walls of the crack continued, it ate back hundreds of miles and started to carve outlines of the modern continents from what remained of the granite crust. Finally, in the newly-forming Atlantic basin so much of the crust had been removed that the earth’s underlying mantle, until then compressed by the crust’s great weight, suddenly began to expand upward like a giant compressed spring which has just been released.

As the mantle rose up, it pushed against the continents, and they began to slide away from it. Lubricated underneath by the remaining subterranean water, North and South America slid westward, while Europe, Asia and Africa went toward the east. Moving slowly at first but accelerating steadily, these massive granite juggernauts traveled a thousand miles in less than three days. Finally, as the water beneath them was depleted, they came grinding to a halt in their present positions.

As a rug pushed across a wooden floor crumples at its edges, great mountain ranges such as the Rockies and the Andes crumpled upward from the resistance which the continents encountered at their edges. The weight of these great mountains caused their granite roots to sink down part way into the mantle below. This displaced some of the molten rock, and it moved over to push up huge plateaus such as the Colorado Plateau.

At the same time, intense friction from these colossal earth movements melted great quantities of subterranean rock, which poured forth in volcanoes and lava flows. Masses of rock cracked and shifted, shaking the ground with violent earthquakes. Even today, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in regions where the crust of the earth is still slowly readjusting from the effects of the Flood.

As the continents were compressed, they began to rise up out of the flood waters, which started draining into the newly-created ocean basins. Noah’s Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. When its occupants finally staggered out, they found a world far different from the one they had left behind. The pre-Flood earth had a warm, gentle landscape clothed with luxuriant vegetation. The world a half year later was torn, ravaged, almost devoid of plant life.

Noah had probably taken dinosaurs on board the ark – young ones which wouldn’t occupy much room. Occasionally there have been surprising reports of dinosaurian creatures since the Flood, during the Middle Ages and even up to the present. However, most dinosaurs, with their voracious appetites, soon died out in the post-Flood world.

Even after the Flood waters had receded, the drama continued to unfold. Much water had been left behind on the continents in the form of huge lakes. Remnants of some of these, such as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, still exist today. Others, which received too much rainfall and drainage from higher elevations, eventually began overflowing their basins.

Once an overflow had started, erosion at the rim of the lake took place at an accelerating pace, and soon a new kind of flood was unleashed – water and mud thundering across the landscape as from a dam burst, concentrating into channels and carving the Grand Canyon and other canyons out of the soft sedimentary rocks recently left from the great Flood.

For many years oceans remained warm from the heat of the subterranean water. This created a moist climate with dense clouds, heavy rainfall, and, in the higher latitudes, snowfalls as much as 100 times greater than those of today. This snow accumulated into thick ice packs which finally began to flow outward – the ice age was under way.

This is only the broadest outline of how the Flood shaped the modern earth, with its mountains, volcanic peaks, glaciers, canyons and sedimentary rocks filled with the fossil remains of countless plants and animals overcome by the deluge.

In the Beginning fills in the details with scientifically precise, yet easily understandable language. This book will also tell you how light from the most distant stars could have reached the earth in only a few years … why we can’t always trust radiocarbon dating … why the moon couldn’t be billions of years old … how the different races of people came to be … why evolution is not only unscientific, but can’t be reconciled with the Bible at all.

If you’ve ever had any unanswered questions about science and the Bible, In the Beginning may provide the answers you’ve been looking for.

In the Beginning is available at Christian bookstores through Spring Arbor Distributors, or can be ordered by sending $9.00 plus .90 shipping and handling to:

Center for Scientific Creation
5612 N. 20th Place
Phoenix, AZ 85016