“Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in it-self according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day” (Genesis1:9-13 NKJV).
“And God said, Let the water which is under the heaven be collected into one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And the water which was under the heaven was collected into its places, and the dry land appeared. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gatherings of the waters he called Seas, and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the herb of grass bearing seed according to its kind and according to its likeness, and the fruit-tree bearing fruit whose seed is in it, according to its kind on the earth, and it was so. And the earth brought forth the herb of grass bearing seed according to its kind and according to its likeness, and the fruit tree bearing fruit whose seed is in it, according to its kind on the earth, and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.” (Genesis 1:9-13 LXX)
SUPER-CONTINENT PANGAEA
On the Third Creation Day, God formed a gigantic land mass, a vast ocean, and plant life. When God formed the Earth’s supercontinent, He caused a gigantic portion of the Earth’s crust rise above the ocean surface and a single landmass appeared. In Genesis 1:1, God made three main layers: the crust (on the outside), the mantle (underneath the crust), and the core (the Earth’s center). The core made up of an inner core and an outer core. Creation scientists sometime refer to the supercontinent that God made as Pangaea. Before the global flood, Pangaea covered about half the Earth and was surrounded by a world ocean called Panthalassa. Early during the global flood, Pangaea began to break apart. Its segments, Laurasia (composed of all the present-day northern continents) and Gondwana (the present-day southern continents) gradually receded during the early post-flood days of Peleg (Genesis 10:25), resulting in the formation of the Atlantic and Indian oceans. This means the pre-flood Earth’s surface was probably covered by 50 percent landmass and 50 percent water, according to many creation science researchers. Most of the Earth’s water was located in deep chambers beneath the solid ground. This means that during the third creation day, the Earth changed from a watery sphere into a planet with an irregular surface with ocean basins and a single continental landmass covered with plant life. The plant life existed in the in the ocean and on land (Genesis 1:9-13 LXX).
When the dry land and all its attendant elements appeared, a solid granite crust provided form for the surface of the young planet. The ferromagnetic core maintained alignment of the magnetic field. Radioactive elements with adjacent moderating units formed foundations and a controlled nuclear reactor within earth’s interior. The hydrocarbon masses assumed their role as a swaddling band to moderate temperatures in the adjacent water reservoirs. These warm waters fountain up through granite, clays, and sands to re-circulate back into the subterranean reservoir and form a dynamic Hydro-cycle. A great super-continent was outlined on the planet’s surface. Luxuriant plants were created with their fruit and seeds fully formed, thus incorporating “immediate youth” and “functional maturity, according to Dr. Carl Baugh.
SUPER-OCEAN PANTHALASSA
The super-ocean Panthalassa surrounded the super-continent Pangaea during the pre-flood generations. This ocean included the Pacific Ocean to the west and north and the Tethys Ocean to the southeast. This ocean became the Pacific Ocean, following the closing of the Tethys basin and the breakup of Pangaea, which created the Atlantic, Arctic, and Indian Ocean basins following the great flood. The Pan-thalassic is often called the Paleo-Pacific (“old Pacific”) because the Pacific Ocean developed from the great flood to the Present. Today the ocean covers nearly 75 percent of the Earth’s surface and is divided into major oceans and smaller seas. The three principal oceans, the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian, are largely delimited by land and submarine topographic boundaries. All are connected to what is sometimes called the Southern Ocean, the waters encircling Antarctica. Important marginal seas, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, are partially enclosed by landmasses or island arcs. The largest are the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas, Caribbean and adjacent waters, Mediterranean, Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Yellow and China Seas, and Sea of Japan.
PLANT LIFE
The plants God made comprise many kinds of mosses, liverworts, ferns, herbaceous and woody plants, bushes, vines, trees, and various other forms living in the Earth and its waters. These plants range in size and complexity from small, nonvascular mosses, which depend on direct contact with surface water, to giant sequoia trees, the largest living organisms, which can draw water and minerals through their vascular systems to elevations of more than 100 meters. During the pre-Flood era, plants decorated the entire landmass because there were no desert regions with extreme hot or cold temperatures. Pre-flood human populations could feast on a variety of plants that became extinct or corrupted after the great flood.
THE PRE-FLOOD EARTH
The pre-flood Earth that God made on the Third Creation Day was good. God himself called the Earth Good. When God calls something He created good, then it is perfect. The Earth that we live on today is far from perfect, and cannot be the original Earth God had first created. The pre-flood Earth that God created must have had perfect topography, perfect weather conditions, perfect water supply, perfect landscape, and perfect growth conditions. The Earth was a single land mass, because the waters were commanded to gather to one place (into one ocean). The Garden of Eden was probably created in the center of the Earth’s surface.
According to Genesis, God had created a perfect land mass, called Earth. After 10 generations spanning almost 2,000 years, God destroyed the Earth (land mass) by a universal Flood. This destruction is described in Genesis chapters 6 to 9. The first mention of islands is after the global Flood (Genesis 10:5). The Flood was an event of unprecedented magnitude. A few creation scientists underestimate its magnitude. They are content to establish it was universal, covered all land mass, destroyed all life and caused the deposition of fossils in sedimentary rock layers. They assume the continents were pretty much the same way before the Flood. They do not accept that after the Flood we had a new arrangement of land mass. The breakup of the super-continent was the major impact of the Flood.
Today some creation science researchers know that the planet Earth has expanded in physical size by 25 percent because of the global flood during Noah’s generation (Genesis 7: 1-24) and the division of the Earth during age of Peleg (Genesis 10:25). The Earth expanded rapidly when the global flood began and it continued its expansion for another 150 years before slowing down to the gradual expansion rate existing today. The scientific evidence supporting this theory includes continental drift theory, the ocean floors, and reduced gravity. The solar day on the pre-flood Earth was roughly 22 hours long because the planet Earth was roughly 25 percent smaller. This fact means the pre-flood patriarchs lived for a very long time, but they were 25 percent younger in age. Dinosaurs reach gigantic size because of reduced gravity, which caused these reptiles to support their massive weight, according to researcher Stan Deyo.
AFTER THEIR KIND
All the plants God made reproduce after their kind because they have seed in themselves. This agrees with what we see in nature today, but conflicts with Darwinism. Evolution would say that, given enough time, the kinds of living things would develop into different kinds; therefore, all the present kinds came from one original kind. However, the Bible says the living things reproduce after their own kind. There is great diversity or variation within each kind, allowing for adaptation to environment, but each kind remains the same kind. This reproduction after the same kind, which we continue to observe today, occurs because of the power of seed. Scientists have now confirmed that each kind of living thing has its own seed, and that seed has genes and chromosomes that determine the kind of plant that will develop from the seed. These genes and chromosomes came, in turn, from the parent plants. There is some variation within the genes and chromosomes of each kind of plant, allowing diversity and adaptation to environment. Still each seed produces the same kind of living thing from which it came, just as Genesis says. This fact is taught, not just in Genesis chapters one and two, but also elsewhere throughout the Bible, and is used as the basis for fundamental, scientific fact.
CREATION WITH MATURITY (“APPARENCE OF AGE”)
The Genesis creation account describes the plants as having seed in themselves from the very beginning. They were created mature on the very first day of their creation, as was later done with the animals, Adam and Eve. They are described as being capable of propagating from the first day of their existence. This is miraculous, of course. Normally a plant or animal takes weeks, months, or years to mature to the point it can reproduce. The point here, however, is that, if a person were to observe these full-grown plants one day after they had been made and if he were to assume that they had grown to maturity gradually as modern plants do, he would have concluded them to be weeks, months, or years old. However, they would have been only one day old. This is called “creation with apparent age.” God plainly tells us here what He did; therefore, there is nothing deceitful about this. He created everything to do its job from the day they were created.
Because all things were made supernaturally, there was no reason why He should make them immature. He could make them mature as easily as He could make them immature. In addition, by making them mature, He formed a functioning, operational Earth. After the six days of creation, all was set in motion to function properly on an ongoing basis, just as it can function today. Had things been made immature, the Earth would have taken years to reach the point of mature function. Who would have cared for the immature animals as they grew? By making them mature, God made it possible for them to care for them, to reproduce, and to care for their offspring, from the very beginning. The same principle would apply to all that God made. Everything was capable of functioning from the very beginning.
By today’s natural laws, it would have taken things years to develop and for things to become operational and biologically functional. This explains one reason why people today misjudge the age of the universe. If we assume that all things were originally immature, as many Darwinists assume, and that all things proceed by the same naturalistic processes as exist today, then we will inevitably judge nature to be much older than it really is. However, the Bible describes a very young, but fully mature creation in the beginning, which appears to be many thousands, many millions, and few billions of years old to the secular scientific community. This same truth would apply to the formation of dry land. If we assume that the mountains arose from gradual processes such as we observe today, the formation of mountains would have taken millennia. However, the Bible says that, what may appear to have taken millions of years by modern processes, really occurred in one day by God’s miracles of creation, according to Dr. Henry Morris.
CREATION DAY THREE ANALYSIS
The third day involved the formation of the dry land, in contrast to the seas, and plants to live on that land. Again, this was done by the power of God’s word, and again what was done was declared by God to be good. The creation of the super-continent and super-ocean on this day formed the original Earth. Today, some creation scientists are convinced that all the continents were once joined together into a single continental landmass before the great flood and the generation of Peleg (Genesis 10:25). The theory of continental breakup postulated that a single supercontinent fragmented during Noah’s flood before completely separating into the seven major continents during the days of Peleg and shortly afterwards. The similarity of rock strata in the Americas and Africa are evidence to support this theory. These massive geophysical activities occurred during and after the great flood followed by a rebirth of a new post-flood world thousands of years ago.
We first discover evidence for the expanding Earth with the first complete theory of continental drift proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener. Wegener postulated that a single supercontinent, which he called Pangaea, fragmented late in the Triassic Period and that the parts began to move away from one another. He pointed to the similarity of rock strata in the Americas and Africa as evidence to support his hypothesis. Wegener’s ideas received support from the concepts of seafloor spreading and plate tectonic
CREATION SCIENCE SOURCES
The New King James Version (NKJV); The Alexandrian Septuagint LXX translated by Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton; Halley’s Bible Handbook by Henry Halley; Three Views on Creation and Evolution by J.P. Morland & J.M. Reynolds; Understanding Creation by Mark Worthon & Hill Roberts; Understanding The Bible by Kendell H. Easley; The Dead Sea Scrolls by Craig A. Evans; Christian Apologetics by Doug Powell; Theories of the Universe by Gary F. Moring; String Theory by George Musser; The New Answers by Ken Ham; Biblical Creationism by Henry Morris; Genesis Conflict by Walter Veith, Unformed and Unfilled by Dr. Weston Fields; Creation by Dr. Grant Jeffrey; Starlight and Time by Dr. Russell Humphreys; Panorama of Creation by Dr. Carl Baugh; Speed of Light by Barry Setterfield; D.K Science Encyclopedia. Commentary on Genesis by David E Pratte; The Garden of Eden DVD by Dr. Stan Deyo. New King James Version (NKJV). Septuagint (LXX).