Sorry Barry, but at age 87, and suffering from back ache, one thing I can’t do is swing heavy weights around my head. I will have to back out of that experiment.
The mechanism of the Flood presented in the UM seems to me to be as plausible as any of the various theories about the formation of the earth, the moon, and the origin of the earth’s oceans. These are all fundamental scientific questions, and over the history of science there have been many THEORIES presented for all three: The ruling ones now are 1) accretion for the earth’s formation, 2) a large impactor on the earth for the formation of the moon, and some combination of water in the original rocks, plus bombardments by comets and/or asteroiods for the origin of the oceans. But there are problems with all of these THEORIES, so they are not universally held and are in constant flux, and they are–and will always remain, theoretical. No humans were around to observe them at the time any of them allegedly appeared. The same is true for the mechanism of the Flood–if it was caused by the near passage of anothe celestial object, either no one observed it or no one recorded it. But plenty of people experienced the flood itself, and some form of it has been recorded in the history of almost every ancient people. We call it the human history of the earthy. So were these all just local or was it world wide? The UM argues that it was world wide, and suggest a plausible mechanism for it. The mechanism has to provide for some other source than rainfall or ocean water. And so it does–the argument that the earth is a hydroplanet, so that most of the water for the flood came from under the crust . An enormous quantity of verifiable evidence is provided for that in the hydroplanet chapter, and an enormous amount of physical evidences are provided for the reality of a flood that covered the earth by miles and not just feet, in the universal flood chapter. Scientists such as yourself may disagree with that evidence, but so do you with the larger questions which I cited at the beginning of this piece. An ever changing “consensus” proves nothing. Scientific truth is not a matter of majority opinion. The UM repeatedly asks and attempts to answer “fundamental questions.” In Every field of science! It does not claim infallibility. No one can do that. But it does open up entirely new fields of debate, inquiry and study: “Millenial Science!”