VM44 said:
: I do not have access right now to the Watchtower CD Library, could someone check and tell me what the Watchotwer now says is the source for the Great Flood waters?
I'm certain that they still teach the same thing they've been teaching since the 1960s. The 1989 book The Bible: God's Word or Mans? teaches the canopy idea, and this is still considered "present truth" by the Society. At least, nothing has been printed since then abandoning, or even suggesting a backing away from, the canopy notion. Of course, having been thoroughly trashed in the 1990s on science, they haven't printed much of anything on the old chestnuts like Noah's Flood.
: Do they still believe the theory of Isaac Vail that the waters came from above and that there was a water canopy in orbit about the earth?
More or less, but not in anything near the form Vail envisioned and the Society promoted up through the 1950s. They printed nothing at all on the canopy idea for about ten years, and then about 1965 started printing nonsense largely taken from Morris and Whitcomb's 1961 book The Genesis Flood.
: or does the Watchtower now say that the canopy was a vapor layer, not in orbit, but a simply above the atmosphere?
Yes, but they're very vague about it. This, of course, prevents them from being nailed down on details.
: Also, if either of these beliefs are taught by the Watchtower, then why have they not done a rigorous thermo-hydrodynamic analysis of what these models imply?
You're not serious! That's like asking why they don't publish anything on rocket science -- no one in Bethel is competent enough to understand the issues, much less teach about them.
However, one young-earth creationist published his Ph.D. thesis in book form: The Waters Above - Earth's Pre-Flood Vapor Canopy (Joseph C. Dillow, Moody Press, 1981). Dillow did a careful physical analysis of the idea that a layer of pure water vapor could overlie the atmosphere in the form of a vapor canopy. The first thing he figured out was that the amount of water in such a canopy could not exceed the equivalent of about ten meters of water, or life processes could not go on as we know them. Then he found out that, even if such a layer could be miraculously created, it wouldn't be stable, since separated gases tend to mix at the slightest bit of turbulence at the boundary. He ended his book on a sad note that it would take a lot more effort to justify that a canopy could exist. So far as I know, no subsequent YECs have taken up the challenge.
In the late 1980s I had a discussion with a Circuit Overseer about the impossibility of a shell-like vapor canopy being in orbit. They guy absolutely could not understand why a shell of vapor could not be in orbit. I tried to explain that if the shell were rotating as a relatively rigid mass, it could only have the proper orbital velocity at its equator, and everywhere else it would tend to sink down. He couldn't understand why the orbital velocity at the poles was necessarily zero. This is the sort of dummy that inhabits Bethel, so it's no wonder they don't publish anything solid anymore. The last of the old timers who used to spearhead the nonsense is gone -- Harry Peloyan recently died, and Colin Quackenbush has severe Alzheimer's.
AlanF