Focusing on the evidence, you ask yourself: “Can the self-watering system tell me the last time anyone was here?”

That the flood occurred evokes measures of mirth in a good many of you.  You’re way past considering it.  It’s a fairy tale; a myth.  At best, it’s a fictional story included in the book of Genesis to give us religious messages.

I disagree.  I believe the Genesis account of the global flood is not only true, but it provides accurate information that can unlock vast measures of scientific insight as to how and why the Earth looks & behaves as it does.

Before getting into the flood itself, let me set the table with a few things that you should consider carefully.  While I don’t know your life’s story, I do know that most of you were never taught some of the things that I’m going to discuss while prefacing the flood.

I’ve been all the way through B&M schools from K through Grad School, and I never once heard any of the things mentioned that I’m going to begin with today.

So, here we go…

Imagine you’re a detective working to solve the disappearance of a person who vanished sometime during the past three months (unknown exactly when).  Upon arriving at their home, you find that all of their possessions are still in the house, including their wallet and cell phone.  The door of the garage was found open, and their yellow car was neither there, nor anywhere else on the property.

In the kitchen, you notice a self-watering system for nine potted plants.  Does that mean they left for a planned and extended period of time?  But… that doesn’t seem to fit with the fact that their wallet and cell phone are present.  What a mystery!

Focusing on what scant evidence you DO have, you ask yourself: “Is it possible that the self-watering system can help me determine the last time anyone was in the house?”

You send for the lab people and they get to work.  They measure the water level in the pan, then place an identical pan with the same amount of water on that very counter in that very house.  They find line of the exact same type being used in the watering system, and they run a piece of it from the water in their pan to a potted plant of their own.  Then they start a stopwatch.  From that, they compute the rate of flow of water from the pan as it moves along the line and into the potted soil.

Looking back at the system in the pic, they measure the lengths of each of the nine bits of line being used.  From their careful timing of the rate of water flow in their own line, they calculate the net volume of water that would move along the nine lines in the subject system every hour.

Having previously measured the pan and calculated the volume of water it can hold, and figured how much of that water goes out of the pan via the watering lines, and having noted the depth of the water in the pan when it was first found, they conclude how much time has passed from the moment the pan was filled until the day you arrived to start the investigation.

“Twenty-two days, and around nine or ten hours.”  They report to you.

You ponder the idea of starting a detailed search through all of the recordings from city-owned and commercial security cameras in the ten-block area around the house, zeroing in on a period twenty-two to twenty-three days ago.

Hang on… You step back for a moment to review what you know.  Very quickly, you see that there are assumptions that you’d have to accept if you were to use the timeframe provided by the lab technicians.

Here’s an incomplete list of those assumptions:

1. That you know how much water was in the pan the last time it was filled.
2. That nothing and no one has acted to add or remove water since it was last filled.
3. That no potted plants were added to the system after the pan was last filled.
4. That no potted plants were removed from the system after the pan was last filled.
5. That the watering system is a closed system.

By changing any of the first four conditions, you realize that the timeframe could be altered, and maybe significantly so.  And, the fact that it’s an open system presents an unknowable array of effects that might influence the level of water in the pan (and, therefore, the timeline).

As lead detective on the case, you reject with regret the timeline provided by the lab, and you assign additional detectives to go through the numerous video records, expanding the date range to include every day from the last time the person had been seen until the date they were reported missing.

The watering system, you decide, has just got too many unknown variables to provide a valid and accurate time frame for your search.

ἡ ὁδὸς  ἡ ἀλήθεια  ἡ ζωή

This exercise has been, of course, an illustration to get you thinking about the starting conditions of processes that we’ve been taught to accept as dependable.  Well… here’s a question for you:  How come we don’t apply this kind of logical thinking to the use of radiometric dating methods?

Radiometric dating methods measure the ratios of parent-to-daughter elements in materials being examined.  Today, and under controlled conditions, radioactive elements decay at predictable rates.  This predictable decay rate is known as the half-life.

Uranium-238, for instance, decays into stable lead (Pb) with a half-life of about 4.47 billion years.  That means that if a certain rock had a million U-238 atoms, then about 4.47 billion years later, roughly 500,000 of those atoms would have decayed into stable Pb.

By measuring the present ratio of U-238 to Pb in a certain rock or artifact, a conclusion is reached about the age of that material (actually, the Potassium-Argon radiometric dating method is used commonly to date rocks.  The Uranium-Lead example above is merely for discussion).

The idea behind the radiometric dating method is a basic concept that we’ve been taught from middle school through graduate school.  Radiometric dating methods have been used to establish the ages of numerous rocks and artifacts; even to help determine the age of the Earth – pretty important stuff, don’t you think?

So… why would we assume to know the starting conditions among the initial ratios of parent and daughter elements?  I mean, we’ve got to assume a starting ratio in order to extract a presumed age of the material from the data.  Without an assumed starting ratio, we can’t get anything related to time from the test.

And, why would we assume that the system is closed; that nothing acts upon, or has ever acted upon, the material to change the observed decay rates in the elements since the item was first formed?

Could reliance upon those assumptions be why the results of radiometric dating methods are sometimes completely useless?

If we know that the results of some radiometric ratios are completely useless, why would we accept as accurate any ages based on the radiometric ratios?  Why would we accept these results over here, but not those results over there?

Why do we not apply the same standards of judging the validity of measurements in our dating of minerals & artifacts as any reasonable detective would apply in examining the evidence of a case?

The Whys I’ll leave to another discussion (perhaps).  What’s relevant for my purpose here is to point out the obvious:  That we do NOT know the initial starting ratios of elements in any rock or artifact.  And, we don’t know if anything has ever acted upon the material to alter the decay rates of the elements.

We cannot know those initial ratios.

We almost certainly will never know for sure whether anything has acted on the material.

If the assumptions can be shown to be flawed, then the results of any process utilizing the assumptions must be also considered flawed.  Repeating for emphasis: If we cannot know the initial ratios, then we cannot provide an accurate date from the observed ratios.

It’s not possible.

To look just a bit further into the issue, are there any known forces that can alter observed decay rates in radioactive elements?  So glad you asked!  The answer is a resounding YES.

The presence of a plasma field can change decay rates among radioactive elements influenced by the plasma field.  In fact, the presence of a plasma field can create conditions wherein the decay rates become nearly instantaneous.  That’s right:  Millions or even billions of years of otherwise “normal” decay can occur in seconds, even fractions of seconds, when the elements are subjected to a plasma field.

Ah, but do plasma fields exist in nature?  Of course they do!  One common source of plasma fields is shown here:

That’s right:  Lightning.  Why does lightning relate to this discussion?  Because of “Earthquake Lights” which are also known as “Ground Lightning.”

The photo above was taken in Quebec in November of 1988.  What’s happening in the ground is that certain types of rock have piezoelectric qualities.  When subjected to stress, the rock experiences electrostatic discharges between various points.

The stresses placed on rock formations in the vicinity of a slipping, buckling, or otherwise moving plate is staggering, and as those stresses reach the point of causing movement, ground lightning occurs, placing brief but powerful plasma fields in the rock.  This would create in that rock (and in any material in the vicinity of the discharge) conditions wherein near-instantaneous decay among radioactive elements would occur.

During the global flood recorded in Genesis, continent-sized plates began moving as the result of the geologic stress.  That’s right:  I believe in Continental Drift.  However, the continental drifting took place over days or weeks, not millions of years.  It happened quite fast.  Not only did the plates move, but all along the cracks that had opened in the crust of the Earth, the plates were flexing continuously for upward of several months as the fountains of the great deep emptied through the cracks.

Ground lightning would have been happening all over the globe – and nearly continuously – for months.

That’s a lot of plasma fields.

Thereafter, the occurrences would have dwindled at a gradual rate as the Earth settled into its new shape and topography, and the associated earthquakes lessened in frequency.

While it would be difficult to say precisely where any particular ground lightning effect took place, it’s also difficult to imagine places that would NOT have been subject to some level of influence by a plasma field during, and in the years immediately after, the global flood.

Radiometric dating methods are flawed in that the material under analysis by those methods did not reside in a closed laboratory; rather, in the open system of the Earth’s soils and rocks, all of which were/are subject to outside forces, including plasma fields (a common occurrence during and after the global flood).

Further, radiometric dating methods are flawed in that they rely on presuming the starting conditions of the material under test; specifically, the starting ratios of parent/daughter elements, which is unknowable.

Finally, radiometric dating methods sometimes provide known wrong results; sometimes wildly inaccurate results.  You can google any combination of words looking for radiometric dating errors and return examples of blind samples coming back with inaccurate results.

So… if we know the results are sometimes inaccurate on items for which the ages are KNOWN, then why would we accept as credible the results on items for which the ages are NOT known?

How do we decide which results to keep and which results to reject?

We don’t know those things.  Period.

How many of us, including those with advanced degrees in the sciences, have ever been taught anything about the factors & assumptions inherent in radiometric dating methods, or anything about observable, naturally occurring processes that can produce the almost instantaneous decay of unstable elements?  And, really, at the end of the day, why should the age of the Earth matter?

In partial response to those questions, we aren’t told about these things because old-Earth theories are propped up by radiometric dating methods.  Accuracy is secondary.  What matters is being able to put on a lab coat and then hold up a really big number to the world.

Driving God from the Earth is, and always has been, the goal of old-Earth theory.  To think otherwise is to ignore an extensive array of evidence to the contrary.

We live in a society influenced heavily by an atheistic body of scientists who have no intention of ever offering validity to the Genesis account of creation, and to the global flood.

Even when the evidence piles up against their theory.

Even when the evidence piles up for Genesis.

Radiometric dating methods rely on unsupportable assumptions, have returned wildly inaccurate results on objects of known ages, and yet are still taught as valid at all levels of the American education system.

I’ve told you these things because you should consider them now and, also, after I go into the observed evidence for the global flood; the very global flood that’s described in the book of Genesis.