Chapter Four - The Hydroplate Theory
The Hydroplate Theory has been proposed by Dr. Walt Brown, who is the founder of the Center for Scientific Creation. Dr. Brown received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) where he was a National Science Fellow. He has taught college courses in physics, mathematics, and computer science. Dr. Brown is a retired full colonel (Air Force), a West Point graduate, and former army ranger and paratrooper.In his 21 years of military duty, he served in the following capacities: Director of Benet Research, Development, and Engineering Laboratories in Albany, New York; tenured associate professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy; and Chief of Science and Technology Studies at the Air War College.
Dr. Brown’s experiences and training, I believe, made him uniquely capable of proposing and articulating a scientific theory which would explain the global flood of Noah’s day. The full theory and its multiple corollaries are completely and technically explained in Dr. Brown’s book, In the Beginning. Most of the pictures in this book are taken from In the Beginning. In fact, on many occasions, when explanations from Dr. Brown’s book could not be made any simpler, they were simply restated in this book.
The Purpose of the Theory
The primary purpose of the theory is to explain the global flood in the days of Noah; however, the theory brings insight and additional information to the entire account of the origins of the world in Genesis chapters 1-11.Starting with the foundation that the Genesis flood is a historically accurate, worldwide event, the theory endeavors to answer the two most obvious questions that such an event brings to the mind:
1. Where did all that water come from?
2. Where did it all go?
A simple answer to these questions could be that God simply created the water. While this is certainly possible (God can do anything he wants), it seems highly improbable. God created all things in 6 days, and on the 7th day he rested. Why did he rest? Did he need to regain his energy after 6 days of creation? Was God tired or exhausted? Of course not. The term rest in the context of God and his creation refers to the fact that God rested from his work of creation. In short, God stopped creating things ex nihilo (out of nothing). His creation was designed to continue on its own without need for God to specially create anything additional. All living things were created with “its seed in itself” so that living things could continue to produce more living things on their own. The earth, the stars, and the planets, were all perfectly set in motion so as to perfectly continue their rotations without God’s need for intervention.
Therefore, since God rested from his creation on the 7th day, it seems theologically inconsistent to conclude that the water of the flood was specially created by God to judge the world. Somehow, the water of the flood was already available for God to use when judgment time came.
The Hydroplate Theory explains where the water came from and where it went with great scientific accuracy and Biblical harmony. Additionally, many other so-called scientific mysteries and phenomena can be explained by the theory. Some of these mysteries and phenomena are:
- The Grand Canyon and other canyons
- Mid-Oceanic Ridge
- Continental Shelves and Slopes
- Ocean Trenches
- Earthquakes
- Magnetic Variations on the Ocean Floor
- Submarine Canyons
- Coal and Oil Formations
- Methane Hydrates
- The Ice Age
- Frozen Mammoths
- Major Mountain Ranges
- Overthrusts
- Volcanoes and Lava
- Geothermal Heat
- Strata and Layered Fossils
- Limestone
- Metamorphic Rock
- Plateaus
- Salt Domes
- Jigsaw Fit of the Continents
- Changing Axis Tilt
- Comets
- Asteroids and Meteoroids
All of these so-called scientific mysteries plainly appear to be the result of a sudden and unrepeatable event. This event was the global flood of Noah’s day, whose waters erupted from worldwide, subterranean (under the surface of the earth) chambers, with an energy release exceeding the explosion of ten billion hydrogen bombs!