UNIFORMITARIANISM — The belief that geologic processes seen today are the same as those of the past. Popularized by geologist Charles Lyell in the early 1800s, this means processes of building up and eroding down mountains have been fairly constant, allowing for the estimation of their ages. The practice of determining ages based on current rates of change has influenced the dating of such things as caverns, trees and ice packs, and it is fundamental for the use of carbon 14 and other types of radiometric dating.

CATASTROPHISM — The belief that many of the features of the earth’s surface can best be explained by catastrophic events, such as the Flood. It is the rough opposite of uniformitarianism, which holds that most features can better be explained by long, slow processes.. Catastrophists are often creationists (though not always), believing that such geologic features as the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley are better explained by rapid water deposition and erosion than by long age processes.

ICE AGE — In the standard chronology there have been many so-called ice ages where the world was thought to have gone through a major cooling period, but we are referring to the more “recent” one characterized by fossils found in the Pleistocene layer of the Geologic Column. Besides fossil evidence (where there is an abundance of animals more adapted to cooler climates, like mammoths), generally cited is geologic evidence (glacial erosion) and chemical evidence (in ice cores) in support. The last ice age ended supposedly about 10,000 years ago. Creationists believe there was an intense period of climate instability after the Flood, likely lasting several centuries; meteorologist Michael Oard has promoted this model of rapid change as best explaining such remarkable occurrences as mammoths frozen and preserved with food still in their mouths.

FLOOD, The — The event (sometimes called “Noah’s Flood”) recorded in Genesis 6-9 where God destroyed a world He considered as having become too violent to allow to continue. Jesus considered it as an example of God’s future judgment of the world. The fossil record and the many thousand cubic miles of sedimentary rock in the world’s crust suggest such a catastrophe has happened. Most ancient cultures recall a flood in earth’s early history. The language of Genesis makes it clear that it was not a local flood: the need for a boat, 120 years of preparation, the repeated phrases of “everything that breathed under heaven” was destroyed, the requirement of male and female animals to repopulate the earth, the promise from God that He would never send a worldwide flood again and made rainbows as a sign of that pledge (local floods have continued), the “fountains of the deep” bursting forth, suggesting major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and a source of water injected into the atmosphere that would be sufficient for such an inundation and so on. Even Bible scholars who doubt the Flood support the position that the author of Genesis certainly thought it worldwide.

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