But we can’t know that for certain. The suggestions are made that this vapor was a water vapor canopy up over the earth. There’s nothing in here about that. So, folks, you can’t be dogmatic about it. It seems a reasonable explanation. And the suggestion has been made that water vapor has the ability to transmit incoming solar radiation and to retain and to disperse much of the radiation reflected from the earth’s surface, so it would serve as a global greenhouse, maintaining a uniformly pleasant warm temperatures around the world. They say that with nearly uniform temperatures, great air mass movements would be inhibited, wind storms would be unknown. With no global air circulation the hydrological cycle of the present world could not be implemented, there could be no rain except directly over the bodies of water from which it might have evaporated. With no global air circulation because it’s all protected by this canopy, there would be no turbulence, no dust particles transported in the upper atmosphere. The water vapor in the canopy would have been stable and not precipitate itself.
Further, the planet would have been maintained not only at uniform temperature, but at comfortable uniform humidities by means of daily local evaporation and condensation like dew or ground fog. The combination further of warm temperature, adequate moisture everywhere would be conducive to extensive stands of lush vegetation over the world, no barren deserts and no ice caps. A vapor canopy would be effective in filtering out ultra-violet radiation, cosmic rays, other destructive energies and it goes on and on and on.
And then at the Flood when God wanted to drown the earth, He just broke that thing loose and it plunged to earth and we were all exposed to the ultra-violet life and life was shortened up and people just lived 60 years after that.
is that really the way it was? Well it doesn’t say that in Genesis. The text of Genesis doesn’t specify a canopy, but it does say there were waters above and waters below. There have been scientists, good creation scientists who have said this canopy doesn’t fly.
Robert Whitelaw(?) and Walter Brown summarized the difficulties like this. The heat problem, a large vapor or ice canopy would so increase heat that it would roast all living things if you have no movement of air and you just have this heat. The light problem, they suggest, starlight which God said would be for signs and seasons could scarcely have been seen and sunlight could not have reached through with sufficient heat to support tropical plants. The pressure problem, a vapor canopy holding more than 40 feet water would increase such high pressure at its base that its temperature would exceed 220 degrees fahrenheit.
The support problem neither vapor, liquid, nor ice canopy could have physically survived for the many centuries between creation and the Flood…a couple of thousand years. It would condense, evaporate or vaporize, it wouldn’t just stay there. And then the ultraviolet problem, a canopy surrounding the atmosphere would not have been protected from ultraviolet light which would have disassociated water into hydrogen and oxygen, thus immediately destroying the canopy….and on and on and on.
Look, I’m not going to get in to this argument. I haven’t got any idea. All I know is there was water here and water up there. That’s all I know. Now the canopy makes sense…there’s a canopy…there was one up there somewhere, there was water up there somewhere, obviously it didn’t do what all those…maybe it didn’t…maybe it wasn’t water like the first group of scientists said it was, and maybe it wasn’t doing what the second group of scientists thought it would do if it was up there. But it was up there.
Now you say…that’s a pretty simple non-scientific explanation. Well I’m a theologian, that’s what the Bible says, it doesn’t give an explanation of science. it just says water went up and some water stayed here. We could safely say this, the resolution may be as simple as this, God creating the kind of canopy, the kind of vault in the universe, the kind of water in the atmosphere that was controlled so as not to produce the ill effects that Whitelaw and Brown mentioned. We do know this, there was water up there and at the Flood water came pouring down, according to Genesis 7, and drowned the entire earth.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
