We make use of only a small amount of our possible mental resources. Our retention, reasoning and recall abilities are quite limited when you consider the potential the mind has for much greater thought processing. Why do we have that potential but not the ability?
Archaeologists have given us a view of our ancestors as being decedents of apes with limited mental capacity. In reality our ancestors were formed in the image of the one who created them...and He was not an ape. To be able to engineer living material out of inanimate molecules and then giving those molecules the ability to recreate themselves when necessary takes more than the reasoning powers of a mind that is working below the par of its maximum potential. If we are created in the image of God then our minds should have had the ability to work at levels that are far above those of modern man.
If life originated at the hands of a creator then imagine our original ancestors and their perfectly formed and healthy brains, brains that had the capacity to think and reason at or near 100% efficiency. Not only that, but those intelligent people who lived before the flood had the benefit of living for nearly a thousand years and had acquired the accumulated knowledge of everyone who had lived around them and before them. They did not need books, pen and paper, or computers to keep track of everything. They had perfect recall and that is scary when you think of those great intellects bending the power of their minds to devising the ways and means of creating new strains of evil. That is scary indeed.
"Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.So the Lord said, 'I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.' But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." - Genesis 6:5-8.
God could see that humanity was on the verge of destroying itself because of a growing self-centeredness that made them completely evil and vicious toward one another and all of creation. Instead of allowing the violence of humanity to reach the point where they destroyed themselves he decided to intervene and save the handful of people who still believed in doing things the right way...his way. In the end there were only eight people who were saved in the world. "Noah and Noah's sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark." – Genesis 7:13-15.
There were at least two noticeable results of the aftermath of the flood that destroyed the civilization that Noah, his sons and their wives grew up in. The first thing we notice is that the descendants of Noah and his family didn't live as long as their ancestors. Those before the flood lived nearly one thousand years; after the flood the descendants of Noah's children decreased by half and that life span continued to decrease until we see it at the point it is today. One resource that explains the possible reasoning behind that decrease may be found here: https://answersingenesis.org/bible-questions/why-did-people-have-shorter-lives-after-flood/.
The same factors responsible for the decrease in lifespan are most likely also responsible for the lessening of brain function from what it was originally at the time of creation. It is now well known how genetics, diet and environment play such a vital role in the quality of life for us all.
After mapping the DNA of the human genome we are told that there are three billion letters that make up the genome. Only about 1.5% of those letters are coded to create proteins and 25% of the letters make up the genes themselves and regulate what the genes do. It is unknown what functions the remaining 73.5% of genes have. Scientists have labeled them as “junk” DNA that have no purpose and believe they may be duplicated information that was left over from our evolutionary past.
Moving away from the evolutionary explanation for a while I would like to suggest that at one time the entire three billion letters of the human genome were utilized.
It is my personal belief that our abilities as once perfect human beings have gradually diminished over the millennia. One of the reasons for that degradation is the result of a drastic change in the physical environment of the Earth after the flood. The diets of those who survived the flood were seriously affected as well. The rich plant based food source that was once so readily available throughout the Earth had been largely destroyed because of the devastation of the planet’s surface. It was after the flood that God told the survivors that flesh food could be eaten to supplement the world wide loss of vegetable protein.
I would also like to suggest another reason for the “junk” DNA that no longer appears to have a function.
What would we be like if the human race continued to function at as high a level as it did when it was first created? I believe our eyesight would be more acute than that of a bird of prey which can see eight times better than a human. A Greater Wax Moth can hear frequencies of up to 300 kHz while our hearing is rated at about 20 kHz. Black bears have been known to travel in a straight line to reach a source of food it could smell from eighteen miles away. With just these three abilities, along with the mental capacities we had at the time of creation, we would be the deadliest creatures on the planet.
I believe that the one who created us in the first place understood our destructive potentials and decided to take steps to limit our abilities by turning off certain gene sequences that at one time gave us greater mental and physical abilities. I personally believe the “junk” DNA in the human genome are disabled sequences that would have given us much, much greater abilities than we have at the present.
Before the flood humanity was on the verge of destroying itself. “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” - Genesis 6:5. Our creator knew that, if left unchecked, those superior abilities we once had would have continued to be used for evil until we finally DID succeed in reaching the end of our path to destruction. I believe it was in merciful kindness that our abilities were toned down/limited to the point they are. When you consider humanities past and the way many people are today then you can imagine what this world would be like if our abilities had not been curbed.
Here is where I am going to go off on a tangent and throw a wrench into the machinery of many people’s thinking; the thinking of those who claim to understand everything there is to know about the formation of this Earth. The surface features we see around us today are a result of the destruction that was brought about by the flood. Hang in there for a few pages and you will see how everything fits in with what I have talked about so far and what I will be talking about later on.
I mentioned in the previous chapter that I believe this Earth was actually formed by layering the solid material of its composition over the surface of water with a very high sodium chloride, or salt content to it. Salt makes water very dense. The oceans of the world contain 3.5% salt. The Dead Sea contains 34.2% salt and it is impossible for a person to naturally sink below the surface. You can lie down in the water and you will float like a leaf. Well, a heavy leaf anyway. The water of The Great Salt Lake varies according to the amount of fresh water that flows into it throughout the year and although lower in salt concentration it can have the same buoyancy effect as the Dead Sea.
Water with a high salt content is dense. Because of that density objects that would normally sink to the bottom of a jar of fresh water will actually float to the top of the jar of water if the salt content is high enough.
Here is the classroom experiment of the day. First you are going to need a glass gallon jar. Then you will have to find dry, sedimentary soil materials of different kinds, or sandstone and other sedimentary rock and crush them until they are the consistency of powder. It is important that the material you have is crushed into a powder as fine as ash because that would have been the consistency of the material when the surface of the Earth was created from the ash that was freely floating in the water surrounding the Earth's molten core...in the beginning. Your experiment will also turn out rather impressive if the materials you have ground up are different colors.
After you have done the grinding to powder thing, mix equal amounts of those materials until they are completely blended together. When you have finished with that, scoop out a heaping cup of the blended mixture and dump it into a clear gallon jar; one with a lid. Add concentrated salt water to the jar until it is ¾ full. You will have to add enough salt to the water until it has the ability to float, or suspend, the blended, powdery material you have placed in the jar. (Although you CAN put too much salt in water the most the water will be able to "absorb", at room temperature, will be about 38% of its volume.)
Screw the lid on tight and shake the contents until they are completely mixed together. After it has been well shaken, not stirred, (Sorry Mr. Bond) place the jar on the counter and let it sit for a day. Just go about your business; it will still be there tomorrow at this same time. See you tomorrow.
Well, here we are again. Let’s take a look at what we have in our jars now.
Most of the material you placed into the jar has floated to the top and it should be in layers, right? The heavier materials are on the bottom layers and the lighter materials are at the top.
The lesson that can be learned from all this is that materials of different densities (weights) will always find their specific center of gravity (their natural buoyancy) when they are suspended (allowed to float) in a high concentration of sodium chloride (salt).
Although I will not say that this is how God created the solid surface of the Earth it is very possible that all of this lightweight but solid substance could have been brought to the surface of the water by enriching that water with salt. In the process it became layered so that it would best protect and serve the inhabitants of the planet who were to be brought onto the scene later.
The lighter, solid materials found their way to the surface of the water and became the surface of this earth. So, we now have an earth with heavy, molten elements at the core; that core is surrounded by dense saltwater and layers of lighter earth are surrounding the saltwater.
The core of this earth was, in effect, a giant low-level nuclear furnace and was being kept cooled by the surrounding saltwater. The saltwater was heated as a result of the earth's core and that heated water was then naturally forced, by venting and/or percolation, up through the softer, permeable layers of the outer crust. The soft, permeable crust filtered the salt out of the water in the process. When the water was eventually vented onto the surface of the Earth as steam/mist, or bubbled up onto the surface as springs, it had become fresh, clean, distilled water. The purest water you could ever have. The water had also lost most of the heat it had absorbed as it passed through and onto the surface of the earth.
Scientists wonder where the high content of salt found in the rocks of this planet came from. As the heated water that surrounded the core percolated up through the nearly 20 miles of soft earth, the concentrated salt in the water was filtered out; becoming trapped in the crust material of the earth. The soil of the Earth is not soft and porous as it was before the flood because of the disruption of the entire surface of this planet that occurred during the flood. Now, because of the large “cooling” areas of the oceans that were created by that global destruction, the pressure cooker effects of percolation and venting are no longer possible; except for places where small scale geothermal venting is evident (Yellowstone National Park for instance). Because the pre-flood venting no longer exists and because of the extreme weight of the surface material that now makes up the surface of this planet, the water that once permeated that surface material has long since been squeezed and drained from the surface of the Earth, causing that surface to harden into what we now see as different types of rock. Water erosion continues to send a runoff of the salt that was trapped in the rocky surface and the soil, into the oceans of the world.
We are told in the book of Genesis that it had not rained on this planet until after the surface of this world was broken up. Before then, a mist came up from the ground and effectively watered the surface of the Earth. – Genesis 2:4-6. In other words, there were many geysers and vents scattered over the surface of the planet; letting off steam so to speak. The Earth was actually a planet-sized greenhouse.
In the next chapter you will understand how this Earth came to be in the condition that it is in at the present day…because of the effects of a global flood…not as the result of continental drift.