“The ‘god your traditions created?’” Q’Enukki stared into the Prelate’s shifting eyes. “The people that your Global Police hunt never really forced anything on you—unlike others who have claimed to speak for deity with terror, bombs, and slaughter. The bomb-throwers and murderers you bend over backwards to appease, while those who speak peace and truth, you allow to be murdered, and murder yourselves.”
The Televangelist said, “Surely we can negotiate—we are all people of faith.” He never could quite look Q’Enukki fully in the face.
“We have not been sent to negotiate,” Q’Enukki replied. “The time of ambassadors was finished a generation ago. Our ambassadors were withdrawn at that time. You have suppressed truth by erasing categories, and behaved as if you had the right to re-create the Creator after your own whims. Worse, you’ve despised the blood of his Ram.”
“You misunderstand.” The Prelate smiled. “We’ve evolved. We no longer need primitive rites and fearful omens. We’ve grown beyond all that.”
Q’Enukki’s voice sank cold as the abyss. “This isn’t about you.”
Far above their heads, the core fragments of Tiamatu glared down from the void. They would not pass close enough this time to annihilate the Earth, merely to hurl some of their captive asteroids her way. A comet they had drawn into the inner solar system would dissolve on impact over central Asia, and poison a third of the Earth’s drinkable water supply with the curse of Umara—bitterness—wormwood. One of the asteroids would strike the Pacific Ocean, reducing a third of all ocean water to what looked like blood.
This terrible day in the World-end of Fire neared its end. Q’Enukki looked forward to the brighter time soon to follow.
The repeating millennia of rebirth, growth, conflict, power, complacency, decay, and catastrophe would not go on forever in cycles of fate. No slow unwinding of random motions toward eventual universal heat-death would grind away to some empty last gasp. History was going somewhere. The final chain of events now unfolded. It was only a matter of months. Redemption was coming, and Q’Enukki would see it when he met the One who had sent for him again, face to face.
They would not be alone.
Appendix
Some Foundational Questions and a Quick Look at Global Flood Theories and Noah’s Ark
There is a myth alive in today’s hyper-secularist intellectual community. The fallacy is that science can only rest on an exclusively materialistic worldview because only that worldview does not demand unprovable articles of faith.
What the supporters of this view do not tell us (perhaps because they hide the truth even from themselves) is that their materialistic worldview also demands articles of faith that are often even more unprovable than those based on a supernatural Creator. How can one prove that nothing supernatural ever happens? How does one prove that “the universe is all there is, and all there ever was,” as Carl Sagan once insisted? One can only accept such things by faith—and a shaky faith at best.
One general conclusion we can find in experimental science is that causes have more intrinsic order and usable energy than their effects. Since it is self-evident that Nature is a system of effects (some of which are secondary causes), then logically Nature demands a super-natural cause, because it demands a cause of greater potential energy and order than itself. Factor in the increasingly self-evident observation that information is also a fundamental entity of reality, in addition to matter, energy, and space-time, and we see that 19th century Materialistic Naturalism is no longer a sufficient philosophical foundation for all science, let alone every other form of studying the real world.
We have reached another paradigm-breaking moment in the sciences—one driven not by religion in itself, but by the natural implications of Information Theory, which is that science upon which we base our vast computer technology. Information cannot be explained naturalistically in terms of its origin, and the fact that it exists at all in Nature, apart from human design, severely undercuts the reasonableness of the assumption that the origin of everything else is explainable in exclusively naturalistic terms.
The problem is not so much that science, as a method, is limited to examining phenomena in a naturalistic way—Methodological Naturalism can detect the inference of design when that is the best explanation for the evidence. The problem is that we have been sold an over-arching—even religious (in that it demands faith in the unprovable)—worldview based on an Ideological Naturalism, an assumption that demands exclusively naturalistic explanations for absolutely everything, no matter what the subject. The difference is real:
It rather begs the question of why did it become so important that absolutely everything be explained in purely materialistic, naturalistic terms to begin with? What droves that desire? Once I started asking these questions of history, I discovered a lot of emotionalism driving that thing we often call the “Enlightenment,” which led to Modernism, which has now broken down into an anti-rational Postmodernism.
The Emperor had no clothes. For just one example, how can one prove that the language code in the DNA molecule is a product of impersonal natural forces when the inference of design is so overwhelming? (A language code inside living cells is a formidable conceptual hurdle for those who demand a purely naturalistic impersonal origin for life. Who wrote the code?) No wall of techno-babble can get past this, and I have heard many try to use techno-babble to blast past it who did not know that I knew the techno-babble they were using. Scientists who agree with me revealed this problem to me, and educated my understanding.
Nor is it logical to suppose a Darwinian creator, who lets off the First Cause and leaves it all to run on autopilot. Molecule-to-man evolution no longer fits experimental observations. Notice, I used a careful term here—molecule-to-man evolution. Natural selection removes genetic information in the process of speciation. Mutations only distort that information.
For molecule-to-man evolution to fit the empirical facts, the process would need to add new information at each supposed stage. While that would require an intelligence, there simply is not any real evidence that this is how it happened. Darwinian Evolution did not discover how species originated in an empirical, experimental way; it simply provided what seemed to be a plausible origin of species explanation at a time when scientists thought that “simple cells” were little more than a rudimentary animated jelly.
We now know that cells are anything but simple, and that protein molecules are functional 3-D nano-machines in a cellular environment that looks more like a microminiaturized industrial city than an animated jelly sack. Even evolutionary biologists must use design-engineering models to understand the living cell.
As to why the idea that God used molecule-to-man evolution is absurd, that’s simple: It fits neither the evidence, nor logic. Darwinism arose under materialistic assumptions that only matter, energy, space, and time were basic entities of reality. While a god could be added as a part of such a reality to keep the religious masses quiet, it was not necessary to the assumptions, and any such addition was by concession. We are now finding that information is also a basic entity of reality—on both micro and macro scales. (The uniqueness of Earth’s planet and location regarding life support involves astronomically huge odds against naturalistic, time-plus-chance explanations on multiple levels, and increasing evidence that the distance redshifts of remote galactic clusters are incremental rather than gradual is a virtual smoking gun that places our galaxy near the center of a bounded universe.)
Is it any wonder that ideological litmus tests, and political tactics such as exposed in Ben Stein’s documentary No Intelligence Allowed have become normative in a politically prostituted academic system?
The Religious Wars of the 17th century, 200 years before Darwin doubtless fanned the emotions that drove the desire for an exclusively naturalistic explanation for origins, and one can trace the development of ideas from there. The point is, our civilization has a remarkably naïve trust in Popular Science as a social institu
tion—often one far more naive than Medieval Europe’s trust in an institutional church’s Divine protection from error. What people forget is that science, as a usable method, got its start in that same Medieval Europe, often inside the church.
There are many roads to a dying, authority-based science, not all of which require the influence of a formal theistic religion. Once science cannot go where the evidence leads, be it inconvenient for a religious authority, or for an ideological materialistic one in academia, the endgame is the same. It may take generations to get there mechanically, but breakdown is never a pretty place to go.
It is becoming clearer to more people each day that the door is open for creationistic views in honest intellectual discussions that do not eliminate them in an a priori fashion because of their violation of dogmatic materialist faith tenets. The door never really closed because of evidence to begin with.
A growing number of scientists see the situation I have just described. Some have become Creationists, while many others simply focus on the design inference in Nature. Either way, we must reckon with the implication that if much of our “popular science” rests on dogmatic ideological faith-assumptions that turn out to be wrong, then so are many of the dominant beliefs about prehistory taught as “fact” in schools today. Origins is primarily a historical and worldview-based question, anyway. Science lends a helpful assist in parts, but it is not designed for the subject matter.
The truth is likely not as my novels depicts in every detail, but events like a global flood and a unique creation sequence of the cosmos should again be on the table for the intellectually honest.
As a work of speculative fiction, The Windows of Heaven portrays a pre-Deluge society with advanced technology that is more fanciful than some serious students of biblical and ancient history would like. I want it made clear that the possibility of a Genesis Ark does not rest on the prediluvians having so advanced a technology. A more down-to-earth non-fiction study of the workability of the Ark using relatively primitive technology is found in John Woodmorappe’s Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, which I used for parts of my research. Woodmorappe’s book is far more effective than anything I could write at showing the pretentiousness of arguments against the historic possibility and plausibility of Noah’s Ark.
Novels have a different purpose.
Individual Creationist/Catastrophist scientific theories about the Flood are also open to falsification, even if we accept a belief in the global flood as a tenet of faith. Nor is it an unreasonable faith tenet, since evidence of catastrophe involving water exists almost everywhere we look, whether interpreted as multiple catastrophes or parts of an interrelated one. Everybody has faith tenets of one form or another at the foundations of their thinking; there is no avoiding them at the bottom line—even for the naturalist.
Many global flood models have extraordinarily elegant explanatory power about what we find in the fossil record, though each has problems at certain points too—as is true with all popular mainstream naturalistic theories as well. Theoretic problems in global flood geology are generally no larger than those found in evolutionary Earth history models.
Global flood models consistent with a straightforward reading of Genesis as history seem most easily divided for popular overview into three broad categories. One group of theories sees the bulk of the fossil record as laid down in the Noahic Flood via some form of catastrophic plate tectonics. Another sees much of the fossil record as being produced by centuries-long tectonic instability in the immediate post-Flood era. Theorists from both camps have made significant contributions to the study of the fossil record along Genesis-based worldview assumptions. A third camp does not look to plate tectonics, as usually defined, at all. It too has models worth considering.
My story takes a rather hybrid approach. I figure something like a global deluge would leave many different signatures, and that unique conditions in certain places would produce many anomalies within a fossil record that showed a generally similar worldwide layering pattern. One would expect to find some difficult-to-explain things within over-all patterns best explained by a series of tectonic plate-driven flooding events. (I thought that the tectonics-based models explained more of the data, though not to an absolute exclusion of non-tectonic driven events.)
I used a “perfect storm” scenario in The Tides of Nemesis.
A yearlong global flood is not, geologically speaking, a single event. Nor should we assume that the world went immediately back to normal in its wake. Genesis 8:22 tells us that in the new world cycles of planting and harvest, day and night, cold and heat, and summer to winter “would not cease.” That’s not the same as saying they would never be disturbed (as in Joshua’s long day).
It is interesting that “cold and heat” and “summer and winter” list as two different categories. Could it be that “cold and heat” refer to something different from the normal seasons? One thinks perhaps of “ice ages” and episodes of global warming, but Genesis is not that specific. We really don’t know. Could the intention of the text be to communicate that these cycles would continue in one form or another, despite short-term instabilities, and not cease until the end? If so, that leaves plenty of room for catastrophic post-Flood tectonic adjustments in prehistory not mentioned in Genesis.
The only promise from God was that there would never again be a deluge to wipe out all land-based life, or to destroy these cycles. He has kept his word. We need to be careful we don’t make Genesis say more than it actually does, and recognize that we are apt to be carrying some highly technical “Information Age” assumptions into our reading of the text that may not have been intended by the writers—both divine and human. I’m sure I’ve done this too. As a novelist, I’m honest about it. In fact, I had to do it in order to write novels on the subject.
Another assumption to avoid is that Genesis tells us about everything that happened. Certain details stand out in the Genesis account, but that does not mean we can infer that events not mentioned in Genesis could not have played major roles in the global flood and its aftermath. We do not want to make any arguments from silence. I doubt any one theory could account for it all. I would expect nothing less from such a cataclysm.
We should also be careful to make clear conceptual distinctions. What Genesis generically reveals and our theories about what Genesis reveals, are two different things.
Of the “fossil record is mostly Flood-caused” theories, the best-developed one I have encountered is Dr. John Baumgardner’s “Runaway Subduction” model, which I used as the primary flood engine for this story. Dr. Baumgardner worked as a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Labs from the 1980s until after the turn of the millennium. He is well published in both secular and creationist science journals and got his Ph.D. in geophysics at UCLA. Last time I talked with him, he worked as a full-time professor at the Institute for Creation Research near San Diego, where he was a driving force behind the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) study.
The RATE research initiative subjected the epistemology and methodology of radioisotope geological dating techniques to a long overdue rational and experimental criticism. This has yielded many surprises by asking and experimentally answering questions that it has not occurred to mainstream Earth scientists to ask.
Far from being the “attack on science,” the mainstream media claims, this is actually good for science because it encourages the exploration of new questions. Unexpected finds made by the RATE studies include Carbon-14 inside of diamonds and inside of fossils far older than the C-14 half-life permits. For more information on this fascinating scientific inquiry, see icr.org, and do a search string on RATE.
Dr. Baumgardner’s Runaway Subduction model does not invoke extra-planetary causes like the “core fragments” I depict in The Windows of Heaven. Increasing radiation in the Earth’s mantle, which I also depict in the story, triggers this model. To the best of my understanding from his papers and from conversing with him, Dr. Baumgardner’s mode
l does not exclude meteor impacts during or after the global cataclysm, it simply does not require them. Other flood models depend much on meteor bombardments.
Another well-developed global flood model is Dr. Walt Brown’s Hydroplate Tectonics, laid out in his book In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood. Dr. Brown was a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1970s. Hydroplate Tectonics uses much the same data as Runaway Subduction, except that it calls for a layer of pressurized hot water between the Earth’s mantle and crust before the Flood.
The Earth’s crust ruptured along the lines of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, and the Pangaean super-continent broke apart, spreading on the lubrication of the escaping water, until the crustal plates met resistance, and slowed. The mechanism of Brown’s theory is different from Baumgardner’s, though the end product is similar.
Some global flood theories that see the fossil record as the result of the yearlong Noahic Flood do not invoke mainstream plate tectonics. This is good in the long term, because in the history of both science and religion the “mainstream” does not always prove to be right in the end.
Dr. Michael Oard’s “vertical tectonics” sees the old world’s continents sinking to become the post-Deluge world’s sea floors, and the prediluvian sea floors rising to become our landmasses. That is an oversimplification of Dr. Oard’s hypothesis, however. Those interested in a detailed look should read Dr. Oard’s papers in Creation, formerly called Technical Journal, which features creationist theorists from varied global flood theory camps. Competing theories are healthy for the sciences. The lively debates in such forums ensure the exploration of varied possibilities.
For that reason, it is good that those who suspect the fossil record is a product of post-Deluge catastrophism are exploring another major global flood possibility. Barry Setterfield’s theoretic sequence of post-Flood cataclysms in his booklet Creation and Catastrophe maps the Noahic Flood as the first in a series of geo-catastrophe episodes over many centuries.
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 40