Cave Formation and the Genesis Flood

Speleology is the study of caves, but seems to be of lesser importance to geology as a whole. These holes come in many shapes and sizes. Secular geologists took the standard uniformitarian view that involves acidic water dripping down, but they are realizing that this view does not address observed evidence.

Admittedly, there are several areas where creation science needs more experts and more robust explanations. One of these is speleology. There are a few creationists who explore and discuss caves, and one aspect of the history comes from a rather surprising source.

"Church Organ" - Howe Caverns, Flickr / Shelby L. Bell (CC BY 2.0)

Exploring caves can be great fun, and being on an organized tour in some of the larger caves keeps people from wandering off and getting lost. Speleology is a younger discipline and based on the idea of water seeping down and carving out the caves. Studying caves began to be taken seriously in Romania. People didn't pay new ideas from the East no nevermind, including the interesting research from Ukraine. Although the explanatory power of the Genesis Flood was ignored, scientists were proposing a reversal of the top-down approach for cave formation.

All our lives we’ve heard that caves formed slowly, over tens of thousands of years, as surface water seeps into the earth. But recent discoveries are turning old assumptions upside down. The real story may be much more dramatic, as rising acidic waters cut vast caverns in as little as hours.

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The process by which the old way of thinking was transformed—from belief in slow processes to catastrophe—is almost as interesting as the findings themselves. These ideas weren’t formulated in Western Europe or the United States, but in the anti-God, communist Soviet bloc.

Among the leading cave experts who advocate this new view of catastrophic cave formation is a Christian and biblical creationist named Emil Silvestru. But he wasn’t a believer when he first learned about this Bible-affirming view. In fact, he was an atheist working for the world’s first institute for studying caves (located in communist Romania). He learned about catastrophic cave formation there, not in the West.

To read all of this very interesting article or listen to the audio version, click on "Caves—Underground and Upside Down."