Vapor canopy
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The vapor canopy is an idea adopted by some creationists which states that before the Great Flood the earth was surrounded by a "canopy" of water in either liquid, solid, or gas form, and that the water from the canopy contributed greatly to the flood waters. The earliest water canopy proposal was that of Isaac Vail in 1874, but the idea came to prominence in 1961 with the publication of the book The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.
Creationists are no longer agreed on the merits of the idea; for instance, Walt Brown's Center for Scientific Creation opposes it. It has also fallen into disfavor at Answers in Genesis[1], which now advocates the catastrophic plate tectonics model for the Flood. One major proponent is Kent Hovind.
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[edit] Scriptural basis for the vapor canopy
The basis for the idea is Genesis 1:6-7 (KJV):
- And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
- And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
Proponents of the canopy hold that the firmament described in the passage refers to the atmosphere, because Genesis 1:20 can be translated to state that God created birds to fly in the firmament. They note that the passage provides for waters both above and below the atmosphere, and infer that there was a canopy of water above the atmosphere before the flood.
Genesis 2:5-6 (KJV) is taken to provide that no rain fell before the flood, but the plants of the Earth were watered from a mist from underground:
- And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
- But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
Reinforced by this verse from Genesis, some creationists have speculated that enormous subterranean caverns, such as Mammoth Cave, were full of water before the Flood and that cracks and fissures in the Earth's surface were caused by upwelling. This is purportedly one of the two sources of the water which accounted for the Deluge.
- "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up,"
In Genesis 7:11 (KJV), the flood is described as beginning when the "windows of heaven were opened," which proponents of the canopy model believe refers to an antediluvian vapor canopy:
"and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights."
[edit] Physics of the vapor canopy
In order for the vapor canopy to explain a truly global flood covering the highest mountains (as apparently described in Genesis), the atmosphere would have had to have a composition of about 900 parts water vapor to one part of what we call air today. To prevent this from condensing, the temperature would have to be raised to the point where the partial pressure of water equals 900 atmospheres. This is equivalent to the surface of the planet having the same environment as a 13,000 psi boiler, completely inhospitable to any form of life.
Some creationists respond that the "vapor canopy" was composed not of vapor within the atmosphere, but of ice crystals above the atmosphere. (Morris's original proposal relied on water vapor, not ice.) Such a spherical shell of ice orbiting the earth above the atmosphere would not be physically stable.
Additionally, the fall of so great a quantity of ice (or of anything else) from so great a distance to the earth's surface would produce an enormous amount of heat converted from the gravitational potential energy of the ice. The consequence would have been not a flood but a poaching by superheated steam.
These issues can be mitigated somewhat by proposing that the vapor canopy was not the only source of water in the Flood (Genesis refers to "the fountains of the deep", interpreted by creationists as referring to some vast underground store of water), but if the canopy theory is to be of any use then the canopy needs to account for a substantial fraction of the water needed to submerge the highest mountains, and even reducing the figures above by a factor of 10 would not solve the problems.
[edit] Pre-Flood atmospheric conditions
Some creationists claim that in order for creatures of tremendous proportions like the dinosaurs to have existed, the content of oxygen in the atmosphere would have to have been much greater than its present-day amount of 20%. If this were in fact the case, they say, then dinosaurs such as the brachiosaur would have been much more able to deliver a healthy amount of oxygen to their tremendous bodies. This claim finds no support from modern biologists and paleontologists who are not creationists.
Some proponents of the vapor canopy suggest that a vapor canopy would have produced a higher atmospheric pressure and a higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere, and also helped to filter out ultraviolet light. The resulting conditions are claimed to be more hospitable to life, explaining the greatly extended human lifespans recorded in the book of Genesis. There is no independent evidence that such atmospheric conditions were ever in fact present on earth, or that such conditions would extend the human lifespan at all.
A "vapor canopy", whether made of water vapor or of ice, would greatly affect the earth's climate. Some advocates of the vapor canopy propose that it would have produced a milder and more uniform climate, more hospitable to life than the climate we now have. As seen in the previous section, however, an atmospheric water canopy would have raised the temperature on the surface of the earth well beyond the boiling point of water and also enormously increased the atmospheric pressure; either of these changes alone would have made life as we know it impossible.
[edit] References
- Temperature profiles for an optimized water vapor canopy — Research paper by Dr. Larry Vardiman.
- The Genesis Flood, by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, published 1961.
- The Demise and Fall of the Water Vapor Canopy by Glenn Morton, a geophysicist and former creationist.
- "Scientific Arguments Opposing a Canopy" by Walt Brown, a creationist opponent of the theory.
