B17-Flood.txt All these files are available on http://www.grahamkendall.net/ Modified 11/15/2008 Email grahamkendall74135@yahoo.com I am found on IRC Efnet/Undernet/Dalnet as glk All are free to use any of this material without limit. ****************************************************************************** Some of this matertial is from online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (7th Edition) by Dr.Walt Brown. Copyright 1995-2002,Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved. === Table 1-3. World's water supply relative to 1-liter total total. Source Amount (ml) Percent of Total Oceans 973 or 4 cups 97 (approximately) Icecaps/glaciers 21 or 1.5 tablespoons 2.1 Groundwater (down to 13,000 ft) 6.1 or .5 tablespoon 0.6 Saline lakes 0.08 or 2 drops 0.1 Freshwater lakes 0.09 or 2 drops 0.1 Soil moisture 0.05 or 1 drop 0.005 Atmosphere 0.01 or 1/5 drop 0.001 Rivers not enough to be measured 0.0001 (The above table from an EPA web site...here is the link: http://www.epa.gov/ORD/WebPubs/fresh/fresh.pdf ) === Apart from UtNephishtim in the Gilgamesh Epic, there was Ziusudra from a Sumerian text dated 1700 BC (frikken old) and Atrahasis from a Babylonian epic of a slightly later date. Some clay deposits dated to 2900 2600 BC were found at Ur, Kish and Shuruppak, which present some problems in trying to explain their presence. The majority opinion, however, seems to be that these deposits can not account for a cataclysmic event of the size portrayed in the texts. == http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html#NearEast == For the sceptics, the biblical Flood narrative has been confirmed in many ancient Mesopotamian 'myths' such as the Epics of Atrahasis, Gilgamesh and Ziusudra, the wording of which suggest a common origin. Atrahasis (extremely wise) was the Akkadian name for Noah. The following are some extracts from these parallel Flood stories. "the decision that mankind is to be destroyed" Ziusudra iv,157-158 "The gods commanded total destruction" Atrahasis II,viii,34 "The great gods decided to make a deluge" Gilgamesh XI,14 "God...decided to make an end of all flesh" Genesis 6:13 "Enki...over the capitals the storm will sweep" Ziusudra iv,156 "He [Enki] told him of the coming of the flood" Atrahasis III,i,37 "Kronos...said...mankind would be destroyed by a flood" Berossus "God said to Noah...I will bring a flood" Genesis 6:13,17 "...the huge boat" Ziusudra v,207 "Build a ship" Atrahasis III,i,22 "Build a ship" Gilgamesh XI,24 "build a boat" Berossus "Make yourself an ark" Genesis 6:14 "your family, your relatives" Atrahasis DT,42(w),8 "he sent his family on board" Atrahasis III,ii,42 "into the ship all my family and relatives" Gilgamesh XI,84 "Go into the ark, you and all your household" Genesis 7:1 "who protected the seed of mankind" Ziusudra vi,259 "Bring into the ship the seed of life of everything" Gilgamesh XI,27 "to keep their seed alive" Genesis 7:3 (KJV) "coming of the flood on the seventh night" Atrahasis,III,i,37 "after seven days the waters of the flood came" Genesis 7:10 "consigned the peoples to destruction" Atrahasis III,iii,54 "All mankind was turned to clay" Gilgamesh XI,133 "And all flesh died...and every man" Genesis 7:21 "On Mount Nisir the boat grounded" Gilgamesh XI,140 "the boat had grounded upon a mountain" Berossus "After Khsisuthros... landed ... a long mountain" Moses of Khoren "the ark came to rest upon the mountains" Genesis 8:4. Ref: http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p045A.html == Have you ever thought about that? Just 4,350 years ago, there were only eight people alive on planet earth. For any intelligent person, this raises quite a few questions, with this one being the most important: Where did all of the different races and cultures that we see today come from? From those eight people came the Chinese, the Africans, the Europeans, the Indians, the American Indians, the Aztecs, the Aborigines, the Vikings, the Eskimos, the Greeks, the Romans and so on. Apparently they all came from these eight people. Starting from scratch in 2348 BCE, how could all of those races and cultures arise? It is, of course, impossible for a variety of reasons, but let's gloss over it for now. As you continue thinking about it, the questions keep coming. For example, how did Noah build the boat? How could four men and four women find, harvest, season, transport, cut, shape, assemble and seal all of the trees needed for a ship 450 feet long and 75 feet wide? That is a huge ship. For comparison, the Mayflower (which brought the Pilgrims from England to America) was only about 95 feet long, 25 feet wide and displaced 180 tons. [ref] The Mayflower was a big boat able to hold over 100 people, but it was a pipsqueak compared to the ark. Using the simplest multiplication, the ark would encompass about 14 Mayflowers, and would therefore weigh at least 5 million pounds. However, because the ark is so much larger, it would have to be far stronger than the Mayflower, making it far heavier. The very largest ships built at the height of the wooden shipbuilding era (the late 1800s) had a maximum keel length of about 250 feet, and the ark is nearly twice that big. This was an amazing vessel. And it was all built by four men and four women. It is impossible to imagine that eight people could build a boat that big. It is also impossible to imagine a 450 foot long wooden vessel. But let's gloss over that. Perhaps God helped? But if God were going to help, he would simply manifest a boat from thin air. There is no need for Noah to build it as described in the Bible. What about the animals, and all of their food? There are about 1.75 million known species of plants and animals (mammals, birds, insects, etc.) crawling around on the planet today, so they must have all been on the ark. There may be more than 10 million species total -- scientists do not really know because we have come nowhere close to cataloging all of the species found on earth. [ref] We don't think about this because we are not biologists, but there are a lot more species on the planet today than most people realize. There are, for example, 20 differences species of vultures. Just vultures. There are 23 species of crocodilians. There are 40,000 species of spiders. And so on. And they all have highly specialized diets. Imagine 40,000 little spider cages, and imagine feeding all 40,000 pairs of spiders. Along with all 160,000 species of moths. And all 17,500 species of butterflies. [ref] And all 350,000 species of beetles. Etc. Is the boat big enough to hold millions of species? No. And it is definitely not big enough to hold all of the food they need for hundreds of days. For example, one panda bear needs about 30 pounds of fresh bamboo every day -- not something readily available on a boat unless you have a large bamboo grove handy. Similarly, koala bears need fresh eucalyptus leaves. Walruses eat fish and lots of them. Lions eat antelope. Vultures eat carrion. One elephant eats something like 100 pounds of food per day. And so on. All of that food also means a whole lot of manure and urine. Imagine mucking out a barn that holds millions of animals. Could eight people do it? Certainly not. Then there is the commute. How did all of the animals found on the far corners of the planet today commute to the Middle East to board the ark? For example, how did pairs of kangaroos, koala bears, etc. commute thousands of miles (not to mention the treacherous ocean crossing) from Australia to the ark? How did walruses and polar bears and penguins make it? What about all of the specialized species in the South American rain forests? In South America, there are 130 species of legionary ants (forget all the other kinds of ants) that we know of. How did they get to Noah? Then they also had to commute back. And they all had to eat their highly specialized foods along the way. Then there is the DNA. There is no evidence in the DNA record that every animal species on the planet came from a single breeding pair that started reproducing 4,350 years ago. The amount of inbreeding in every species (along with the human species) would be tremendous. And what about the plants? All of them would be killed too by many months underwater. It would take awhile for things like eucalyptus trees and bamboo groves to grow back, assuming their seeds survived the floods. == http://bibleapologetics.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/carol-hill-flood-hydrology-1.pdf == The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IV. Published 1908. New York: The historicity of the Biblical Flood account is confirmed by the tradition existing in all places and at all times as to the occurrence of a similar catastrophe. F. von Schwarz (Sintfluth) == The 6th Dynasty lasted from 2,322 B.C. to 2,151 B.C. It was the last dynasty of the Old Kingdom, which spanned the 3rd millennium B.C. and was the first peak of pharaonic civilization. This is the traditional time of the Flood. === Long ago, it is said, Tibet was almost totally inundated. Removal of the waters was done by a god whose chief temple is at Durgeedin, Gya. Taking compassion on the few survivors, who in that age were little better than monkeys, he drew off the waters through Bengal, and by sending teachers among them, humanized the race. Those people repopulated the land. [Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (1800; reprint, New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House, 1971), 224.] == One hesitates to even try to get ones head around the Noah story but in our relentless quest for understanding we must boldly venture forward. God despised everything he had created, human and animal except Noah, his wife and his sons, Shem, Ham, Japhet and their wives and so decides to wipe the slate clean and start again. Our great creator screwed up bad and created a bunch of murderous land grabbing sex maniacs so they had to get the chop. Then god made it rain for 40 days and nights and the whole of the earth is covered with water, one presumes Mount Everest as well, so this water covered the earth at a depth of at least 8.5 kilometers. There isnt enough water on earth to cover the earth to that depth, since water finds its own level the diameter of the earth with that covering of water had to have increased by 17 Klms, but I suppose god created all the water he needed then made it disappear later. But before this god tells Noah to build a small ship and put himself his wife, his family and all of the animals in it. This ark or small ship as we would call it today is 300 cubits by 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. Lets say a cubit is 18 inches (about 250mm) this small ship is 450 feet (135 meters) long, 75 feet (22.5 meters) wide and 45 feet (13.5 meters) high (actually estimated to be 480 feet long). Noah obviously was a skilled shipwright and had access to a forest of Gopher wood, timber cutters, timber haulers, sawmillers, foundries for nails which obviously must have been near by. 6,000 tons is a reasonable rough estimate of timber required to build a small wooden ship this length, how did Noah handle the logistics since there is no mention of an army of workers. 6,000 tons of logs would keep a modern sawmill busy for a couple of years. The laying of the keel of any ship is the foundation of the whole structure, how did Noah lay 450 feet of keel (half the length of the Titanic, one and a half football fields), apparently by himself without the lifting gear, without structural steel, without the fasteners we have today, lets say Noah had access to logs 50 foot long (possibly 6 to 8 tons each), he had to join 9 of these into an absolutely rigid platform for the rest of the ship to be built on, not to mention the rest of the planking, 3 decks, ribbing and internal structure of the ship and enclosures for the animals. You cant just build a rectangular box as a small ship, a rectangular box is structurally unsound and requires extensive bracing (steel) to hold it together. How many tons of pitch did he need to seal the hull, how many tons of nails (no screws then), bolts etc (no bolts then either), did he need to hold the thing together, but ask any shipwright about building a 450 foot wooden ship and they will laugh at you. Noah did not build such a small ship. The longest wooden ship ever built (i.e. historically verified) was the USS Wyoming. This vessel, which was, at 110 meters long, 25 meters shorter than Noahs ark, was found to be so unstable that it could only be used for short coastal hauls to avoid rough conditions further out to sea. The huge structural stresses that developed in the USS Wyoming made the ship sag and leak badly. Water thus had to be pumped out continuously to prevent the ship from sinking. Now we come to another insurmountable intellectual problem, how did Noah collect all of the pairs of animals, from the African ostrich to the Andean alpaca the Tasmanian devil, the Antarctic an albatross, the American bald eagle, the South American jaguar, the Galapagos Island tortoise, the Chinese Panda, the arctic goose, the Siberian tiger, the Antarctican penguins. Noah must have been something of a sailor himself to do a world circumnavigation single handed, not to mention catching all the animals, storing food for these animals, presumably fresh meat for the carnivores, hay, grass for the cows, bison, elephants, hippopotamuses, wildebeests, buffalos, sheep, goats and kangaroos, seeds, berries, insects for the birds and rodents, insects for bats, white ants for the ant eaters and echidnas, fresh flowers for the bees and butterflies, fresh fruit and leaves for the monkeys and possums, rotten meat for the parasites, worms, maggots and bacteria, bamboo shoots for the pandas, lichen and moss for the arctic reindeers, seal meat for the polar bears, ice to keep the polar bears cool, rats, mice, frogs for the snakes, to mention only a few specific dietary requirements for specific animals. Elephants eat at least 150kg of vegetable matter a day, 10 months supply for two elephants is 90 tons. Either Noah had another ship as large as the one he built while collecting animals or he made a lot of trips to a lot of places with a smaller ship. Unfortunately a lot of animals with short life spans would have died waiting for Noah to finish his ship so he would have had to make more trips to collect these animals, maybe they breed in captivity or maybe he left them till last and did a lightening circumnavigation and rounded them up just before it stared raining. How were the animals restrained, before and during the voyage, between 1.5 to 2 million species of animals in a volume of 450 x 75 x 45 feet, what a madhouse, everything trying to eat everything else, actually, what a crock of myths, it did not happen, it could not happen. How long did it take to build his small ship and who if not Noah was out rounding up Bengali tigers and South American boa constrictors. Lets be generous and give Noah 5 years to build his ship, to round up all the animals another 2 years (actually 7 days is stated in the bible), now where did he keep the animals he had already caught while he is out catching more, who fed and watered them, you know, bamboo shoots to feed the Pandas are bit scarce in the holy land, the logistic are simply mind numbing. This small ship floated around for nearly 10 months with Noah and his family feeding and watering 1.5 to 2 million species of animals in volume of 40 to 50,000 cubic meters, all of the excreta was carried up and thrown out of one window. Apparently no animals died or ate each other during this voyage. So Noahs small ship comes to rest and presumably Noah lets all the animals go, but there is nothing for them to eat except maybe some dried out seaweed and the carnivores politely refrain from eating any of the other animals. So the Pandas start the long trek back to China, the Australian animals, kangaroos, wombats, Tasmanian tigers, emus, numbats and bilbies have a long swim ahead so they get going straight away, same as the polar bears, bison and elk, all of the insects, bugs, fleas, spiders hitch a rid on their backs. After Noahs ship landed on dry ground and hes got a few spare clean animals and around so he puts on a giant barbecue for god who thinks the aroma of these burning carcasses was mighty soothing. == Robert M. Best Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth Fort Myers, Florida: Enlil Press, 1999 == Let's see, no plants left alive after the Flood. A very limited supply of animals. Herbivores - starve to death quickly, or are eaten by the carnivores. Carnivores - starve to death immediately after. == There are other problems with the Noah's ark story, such as where your Bible tells you that he took seven of each ritually clean animal and they went onto the ark by pairs. == Early versions of the Gilgamesh epic date from the first part of the 2nd millennium BC. Utnapishtim, the counterpart of Noah in the story, relates his experiences to the hero Gilgamesh. Advised by the god Ea that his city is to be destroyed by flood, Utnapishtim is told to build a ship for his family, servants & animals. After a seven-day flood, the vessel comes to rest on a mountaintop. The wrath of the gods has been appeased, & Utnapishtim & his wife are granted immortality. Some similarities: 1. Both Noah & Utnapishtim were instructed to build an Ark to survive a global deluge. 2. Both Noah and Utnapishtim were instructed to gather two (male & female) of each species of animal. (The Bible of course also mentions seven of each clean animals.) 3. Both were righteous men. 4. Both Arks came to rest atop mountains (Noah's Ark on Mt. Arrarat, Utnapishtim's on Mt. Nimush) 5. Both released doves & ravens after the deluge.Also, the goddess Ishtar, wearing a rainbow-like necklace, descends to earth to attend Mr. & Mrs. Utnapishtim's sacrificial ceremony celebrating survival, where she makes a promise:"Upon reaching shore, Utnapishtim prepared a sacrifice. The gods of heaven were famished and gathered around the altar. Ishtar came down wearing a necklace of lapis lazuli made of beads shaped like flies. She said she would forget neither her necklace nor this calamitynor would she forgive Enlil, since the flood was his idea and he never discussed it with the other gods. When Enlil arrived to partake of the sacrifice, he saw the boat and lost his temper. He demanded to know how anyone escaped the flood, since he intended it to destroy everyone. After Ninurta named the culprit, Ea himself spoke up. He chastised Enlil for creating the flood and said that if he wanted to punish someone, he should have made the punishment fit the crime. Not everyone deserved to die. He said that plagues, wolves, and famine could be used to kill some people instead of all people at once." The Sumerian-Babylonian tale was reshaped by Canaanite (Ugaritic) & later Hebrew writers into a narrative about a world-wide flood, their chief God & the fate of humanity. == The first pharaoh of the 6th dynasty. Teti's reign was from 2323 BCE to 2291 BCE. == http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah's_Ark == Noah's Flood: Myth upon myth upon.... Most of us are aware of the Noah's Flood story. People of the earth evil. God upset. Floods the world but saves Noah & family and enough animals to re-populate the world. But, for an interesting "another take" on that story, link over to the Wikipedia story about the same, with inputs concerning the other Abrahamic religions and their look at the whole thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah's_Ark#cite_note-14 The ark itself. Skeptics have, for a long time, questioned how a small family with no boat-building experience could have accomplished the ark; what kind of wood was used; that the dimensions are larger than any known successful wooden ship; and that it could not have held all the animals and the food and water necessary to keep them alive. So let's explore comments on that: Origen stated that Moses had been thinking of the (larger) Egyptian cubit, meaning the Ark was even larger vs the historically successful wooden ships! Origen also speculated that the ark was a truncated pyramid, rectangular rather than square at its base, and tapering to a square peak one cubit on a side. (I'm still trying to figure out how a rectangularly-based pyramid ends up being square at the top???) In Islam, surah 29:14 says the Ark was a thing of boards and nails (nails? Wiki says nails date back to early Roman times, around 9th century B.C. -- Noah was supposedly long before that). A contemporary of Muhammad wrote that Allah revealed to him (Mohammad) that the ark was to be modeled after a bird's belly and be made from teak wood (hmmm, isn't teak a native of Asia, not the mid-east??) Also, with those instructions, reportedly Noah planted a tree (from whence the seed?) which in only 20 years grew to a size such that it gave Noah all the wood he needed (to build a ship with almost half the displacement of the Titanic? Yeah, sure). A Persian historian writing in 915 A.D. said that the first animal to board the ark was an ant, and the last a donkey (in which Satan was hiding). He also wrote that when Jesus' apostles wanted to learn about the ark from an eye witness, he (Jesus) resurrected Noah's son Ham from the dead, who told them more. Even explaining that in order to handle all the dung produced by the animals, Noah had miraculously caused a pair of hogs to come out of the elephant's tail. But what was wrong with already on board hogs?? And the poor elephant, such a BM! Maybe a bit of anti-constipation medicine was called for. And oh yeah, in order to get rid of a stowaway rat, Noah made a pair of cats come from the lion's nose. (again, what was wrong with the cats already on board?) This dude also wrote that each plank in the ark contained the name of a prophet, except for three missing planks. Those planks were brought from Egypt by Og, son of Anak, who was the only giant allowed to survive the flood (more on that later). He also mentioned that the body of Adam was put aboard in the middle to divide the men from the women (that DEFINITELY sounds Islamic). The references to Og take us back to Jewish Rabbinical traditions. They stated that there had been no need to distinguish between clean and unclean animals before this time, the clean animals made themselves known by kneeling before Noah as they entered the Ark. A differing opinion said that the Ark itself distinguished clean from unclean, admitting seven of the first and two of the second. (did that include the specially-produced hogs and cats???) The traditions further tell us that Noah was engaged both day and night in feeding and caring for the animals, and did not sleep for the entire year aboard the Ark.(kind of sounds like not eating or drinking for 40 days and nights, doesn't it?) Not only that, the animals were the best of their species, and so behaved with utmost goodness. They abstained from procreation, so that the number of creatures that disembarked was exactly equal to the number that embarked. And, this dude Og. One story says he was so big he had to stay outside the ark, with Noah passing him food through a hole cut in the wall of the ark (but doesn't clarify whether they built an extension on the ark, or pulled him along in another little boat). In fact, if you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Og we find that Og strolled behind the ark during the deluge! (talk about being tall... strolling through water deep enough to at least cover Mt. Arrarat [at just a tad under 17,000 feet]) but then, a guy who can live for 3,000 years can pretty well do anything. These rabbis also stated that refuse was stored on the lowest of the Ark's three decks, humans and clean beasts on the second, and the unclean animals and birds on the top. A differing opinion placed the refuse in the utmost story, from where it was shoveled into the sea through a trapdoor. This is in direct disagreement with the Islamic thought that on the first of the three levels wild and domesticated animals were lodged, in the second the human beings, and in the third the birds. And how did Noah and the gang manage to work below decks day and night? Candles? Lamps? Nah. Precious stones, bright as midday, provided light. (lots of precious stones that reflect existing light, but can anyone name one that PRODUCES light??) The Mandaeans of the southern Iraqi marshes believe that the ark was built of sandalwood and was cubic in shape, with a length, width and height of 30 gama (the length of an arm); its final resting place is said to be Egypt. In spite of the fact that by 1700 few natural historians could justify a literal interpretation of the Noah's Ark narrative, a telephone poll conducted by ABCNEWS/Primetime in 2004, 60% of US residents believe the story of Noah's Ark is literally true! Isn't it amazing how one, false myth could be interpreted so many different ways and still end up believed by so many in this modern, scientific time. SAD! a telephone poll conducted by ABCNEWS/Primetime in 2004, 60% of US residents believe the story of Noah's Ark is literally true == http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v14/i4/report.asp Wyatt Ark expose == A specialist is China's panda, which eats almost nothing but bamboo, or Australia's koala bear, which eats eucalyptus leaves almost exclusively. == Also, besides the mist from Genesis 2, how about evaporation from the oceans, seas, lakes, ponds & rivers? We know that there were rivers, because they're named in the same chapter. Was there no evaporation before the Flood? Did God not start the hydrological cycle until after the Flood? How could it not rain? Now if, like the authors of Genesis, you don't know about the hydrological cycle, but instead imagine that rain falls from the "waters above" when God opens the "windows of heaven" in the solid dome over the earth, then lack of rain before Noah makes sense. == http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter6.html flood problems == > The water of the great flood of Noah's time came > from one or many comets that came to earth and > melted in our atmosphere. Let's have fun with math. The earth is about 6.378 x 10^6 meters in radius. The volume of the earth is 1,083,206,246, 123,080,000, 000 m^3. Let's add 5 miles, or about 8 kilometers, to the earth's radius so that we can account for enough water to cover everything (Mt. Everest being 5 miles high). That volume would be 1,090,957,908, 751,700,000, 000 m^3. So we need enough comets to bring a total of 7,751,662,628, 619,940,000 meter^3 of water. That's 2,047,781,655 e+12 gallons. == If this vapor canopy blocked out sunlight, how then did plants, algae & cyanobacteria photosynthesize? Was it only visible wavelengths of light that were blocked out? If so, how did people or animals relying on those wavelengths see anything? They certainly would not have been able to see the stars and the moon. Yet the Bible discusses those heavenly bodies. == According to the creationists, all humans alive today are descended from 8 people who got off a Really Big Boat. Anyone who understands junior high genetics will know that 8 people have between them a maximum possible of 16 different alleles for each genetic locus (in reality, the 8 people on the Big Boat would have had even FEWER, since some of them were descended from others and thus shared alleles, but for the sake of argument we will give the creationists every possible benefit of the doubt and assume that they were ALL heterozygous and shared no alleles at all in common). That means, if the creationists are correct that "most mutations are deleterious" and that "no new genetic information can appear through mutation", there can not be any human genetic locus anywhere today with more than 16 alleles, since that is the MAXIMUM that could have gotten off the Big Boat. Do you have that mathematical analysis of how fast mutations would have to have happened for current human traits to have come from eight individuals 4,000 years ago in a public place? But wait ---------- today we find human genetic loci (such as hemoglobin or the HLA complex) that have well over *400* different alleles (indeed some have over *700* different alleles). Hmmmm. Since there could have only been 16 possible on the Big Boat, and since there are over 400 now, and since 400 is more than 16, that means that somehow the GENETIC INFORMATION INCREASED from the time they got off the Big Boat until now. === In order to board the Ark before the rising flood waters drowned them, how did birds like dodos from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, moas & kiwis from New Zealand, giant flightless geese from the Big Island of Hawaii, etc, get to the ancient Near East, then back home again after the Flood? Of course the same applies to all other species unable to cross the oceans & continents to Noah's area, such as wombats, wallabies, koalas & kangaroos from Australia. Even were they able to make the trip somehow, what did they eat en route? If it took so many miracles for the Ark to be filled up, why did God not use some other means of killing all those innocent creatures & blameless children (& fetuses) than drowning? This is quite aside from the fact that vast armadas of Arks couldn't hold all the species of animals, plants & fungi needing rescue from a global flood, itself impossible, of course. If the Arks instead of species held genera, families or orders of living things, then please show evidence of evolution so rapid as to fill the world up with the billions of species arising from these few organisms in 4500 years, the vast majority of which must also have gone extinct in that time. == http://samlbsblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/water-for-noahs-flood.html == http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CH400-CH599 === Think about it. God is omnipotent. God can do anything. God wants to punish the Bad people of the world. God does this by *poof*, they're all gone.... uh, no. God brings a flood. Why? Nobody knows. An omnipotent god doesn't need to bring on a flood. An omnipotent god doesn't need to slaughter untold millions of innocent children, devestate global ecosystems, and bring on the death of billions of anials and plants. Okay, but God, the omnipotent being, wants some humans to survive the flood, so he *poofs* them to safe... uh, no. He makes Noah build a boat. A boat beyond Noah's technology. So, he is forcing Noah to do work that can't work without another miracle. I mean, it would take so long to build the boat that his first boards would be rotting by the time he finished building the last of it, requiring him to start over! So, God makes Noah do work that is meaningless and has to be supplemented with miracles, but JUST some miracles, not others. Noah must be made to labor and slave away... for some reason. Of course, having built a boat, a global flood would smash it into kindling. The largest wooden boat in actual history was smaller than the ark, had a metal frame the ark lacked, required constant pumping to keep it afloat (the boards undulate with each passing wave, allowing water in along the boat's length. At that size, this problem is inescapable) . Noah had metal pumping technology, right? And, of course, the boat was restricted to operation in the near-shore areas because the waves out at the open sea would have destroyed it easily. So, you're taking a boat larger than this deathtrap, without a metal frame, with no pumping technology, with quite primitive wood construction, and putting it into the largest, most violent storm in history... == http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html === There are some 5,400 species of mammals alive today, spread across 153 families. The creationists seem to be arguing that a "kind" is akin to a family so there would have been 153 mammal "kinds" onboard the Ark (less if one takes a different assumption of a higher grouping). So, the number of species must have increased from 153 to 5,400 in 4,400 years That is an increase of 5,247 or 1.15 new species a year on average. So in the last 46 years since Morris and Whitcomb published their geology crapola, we would expect to have seen 66 new species of mammals to emerge, complete with genetic codes that show a reduction in the amount of information in their genes. Wait a minute, though. 99 percent of species are extinct. So we would expect 99 times more species to have evolved over the last 46 years 5,439 to be precise. So, the number of mammal species in the world would have doubled in 46 years 118 a year. It's worse than that, though. If 99% of species are extinct, then 99% of "kinds" (i.e., families) are likely to be extinct as well, which suggests that the Ark must have contained 15,147 pairs of mammal "kinds" or 30,294 mammals. Wait a minute again, though. What about all those dinosaurs presumably another 30,000 or so animals given that, by and large, they occupied the same ecological niches as mammals do today. Strewth I've just remembered. There are the reptiles (another 30,000 and the amphibians another 30,000. Damn it, then there are the birds. There are approximately 8,600 species of birds alive today which suggests that there were 48,000 different "kinds" of bird on the Ark if only pairs were involved. However, the nutters consider these to be clean so there would have been seven of each "kind" giving a total of 168,000. So we would expect to see around 188 new species of bird to have evolved in the last 46 years. Pity nobody in history have observed such rapid speciation and none of the creationists have measured the decline in genetic information which must, according to their "science", be readily available evidence. So, in total, there were 289,000 animals on the ark excluding all the creepy crawlies. This can't be right!!! There are currently only 5,400 species of mammals and 8,600 species of birds. Assuming that there are 5,400 species of reptiles alive today and 5,400 species of amphibians, that gives a total of 24,800 species. So the number of species is far lower than the number of kinds on the Ark. I thought it was meant to be the other way round! Somewhere the creationists need to look at simple maths. == Problems with a global flood: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html The geologic column and its implications for the flood: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geocolumn/ Dinosaur footprints in coal: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/coalprints.html == Surface area of the earth: 510,065,600 square kilometers Highest point: 8.84443 kilometers (rock under ice & snow of Mt. Everest) Amount of water needed for Noah's Flood: more than 4.5112394 billion cubic kilometers. Converting this volume into a sphere (4/3 X Pi X the cube of its radius) produces a body measuring around 2050 kilometers in diameter. I don't know the average composition of comets entering the inner solar system, but will assume water ice accounts for roughly half of its volume, with other ices, rocky dust & crust the remainder. Please correct me if this is wrong, but a single comet carrying enough water for Noah's flood could reasonably be expected to extend about four thousand kilometers. There are few if any that big. == For example, discussing the Flood creationists: They need to explain how the Phanerozoic sediments and different fossils species were suspended in the Flood's waters and then selectively desposited during later Flood days as different density lithologic units within various sedimentary structures along with the lower-density hydrocarbon fluids. === http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter6.html The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church's Response to Extrabiblical Evidence by Davis A. Young Foundation, Fall and Flood by Glenn R. Morton ==== Records of flourishing civilizations in China, Egypt, Babylon, and Mesopotamia exist straight through the flood era of 2500-2000 BCE. == The largest ancient ship was described by Plutarch, a quadragintareme built for Ptolemy IV of Egypt in about 200 BC. It was 128 m long, required 4,000 rowers and 400 other crew, and could support a force of 3,000 marines on its decks. He wrote, "This ship was only for show. It scarcely differed from buildings which are rooted in the ground and had great difficulty in being put to sea." The ark was bigger than this naval vessel. Even if you date the flood to only 4500 years ago, such an undertaking was beyond actual technology of that time. A Nile barge isn't an ocean-going vessel. Also, none of these large ships were rectangular prisms like a milk carton. The reference to "in a cubit shalt thou finish it above" is from KJV Genesis 6:16. == A farmer and his sons built a boat 3000 years ago large enough and equipped with all the special food for 50,000 species of weavils, 950 species of bats, 6000 katydids, 165,000 moths and butterflies. === The ark as described in Genesis simply couldn't hold the weight of animals, food & water needed for a year. And then as noted, there's the need for food once the ark came to rest, so that the lions & tigers & bears, etc, didn't eat all the sheep, goats, giraffes, buffalo, bison, zebus, cattle, zebras, horses, pigs, elephants, rhinos, camels, donkeys, etc. == "For instance, given the Ark's reported dimensions (300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits ? Gen. 6:15), its displacement would have been something like 40,000 tons. A rectangular solid of the Ark's dimensions would have a displacement of about 45,000 tons; since the Ark had curved sides rather than straight, that 45-kiloton figure is a maximum upper limit. "Why is this a problem? Because the Ark would not have been physically capable of carrying all the food necessary to keep its passengers alive during the year-plus-change of the Flood. == This calculation ignores the enormous problem of water. An elephant drinks 30 gallons a day! == The olive tree normally grows below 5000 feet altitude. == The web site http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Water_cycle says that there are 1370 million cubic kilometers of water in the oceans. it also says that there are 0.013 million cubic kilometers of water in the atmosphere. That's a ratio of about 100,000 to 1. In other words, if there was ZERO water in the atmosphere but suddenly water evaporated to the amount that is currently in the atmosphere, then about 1 / 100,000 of the depth of water on Earth would evaporate. I read somewhere that the average ocean depth is 2 kilometers. (If you have a better number, let me know.) 1/100,000 of 2 kilometers is .02 meters. That's less than an inch. So if ALL of the water in the atmosphere is the result of evaporation after the flood, then you have explained where a bit less than one inch of water went! == http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Fossil_Sorting == the YEC ideology REQUIRES such information additions, since Noah's alleged big boat only carried the alleles from 8 humans, 5 of whom were closely related to the captain and his wife and the other three not too distantly related, ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN CLAIMS. The existence of more than 400 alleles at somepoints in the human genome today totally refutes any claim of mutation not being able to supply new information. == http://creationwiki.org/Grand_Canyon_was_carved_by_retreating_Flood_waters Here are the main points: 1. You still have the problem explaining how this was caused by a GLOBAL flood when it occurs in only ONE place. Why are there not other grand canyons surrounding all the margins of all continents? 2. The Grand Canyon contains some major meanders upstream of the Grand Canyon, the San Juan River (around Gooseneck State Park, southeast Utah) has some of the most extreme meandering imaginable. The canyon is 1,000 feet high, with the river flowing five miles while progressing one mile as the crow flies. 3. Along the Grand Canyon are tributaries, which are as deep as the Grand Canyon itself. These tributaries are roughly perpendicular to the main canyon. A sudden massive flood would not produce such a pattern. 4. The depth-to-width ratio is incorrect for a flood. The Scablands in Washington state were produced by such a flood and show such features . Such features are also seen on Mars at Kasei Vallis and Ares Vallis. They do not appear in the Grand Canyon. Compare relief maps of the two areas to see for yourself. I consider these to be the most obvious problems. == This article is an expanded version of an original manuscript that was published in American Scientist, March/April, 1998, vol. 86, n. 2, p. 160-173. P. 16. Grand Canyon Erosion In the Austin model (1994) the sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon were all deposited during the early part of the "flood-year, " later to be incised into a canyon by the receding waters. The model requires the newly deposited rocks to become strong enough within a few months after deposition to stand as mile high cliffs in violation of all reasonable calculations from hydrology, soil mechanics, and strength of materials. Some rock types, for example, some limestones, become lithified soon after deposition, but most sandstones and shales require major loss of water, compaction, and/or chemical cement to become a strong rock, processes which involve significant amounts of time. This is especially true for very fine grained muds in which low permeability makes complete dewatering almost impossible in any short period of time. Simple loading of other materials on top will not do; trapped water in the muds would cause sudden liquifaction of the entire mass, a phenomenon known to hydraulic engineers as the "sudden draw down condition." Rapid drainage commonly results in collapse of oversteepened cut banks as flood swollen rivers subside. Mudstones in the young Grand Canyon model should have behaved in the same way but would have collapsed even more readily than canal and river banks considering Canyon cliff heights are measured not in meters but more than a thousand meters === The Amazon River Basin has more different species and genera than anywhere else on Earth. Yet it is about as far away from Mt. Ararat as anyplace on Earth. Why did all of those "kinds" of animals decide to go ONLY there? How did all of these animals KNOW to go in the direction they went? How did they know that there was, for example, a jungle on the other side of a desert that they had to cross. Did they have travel guides? And why didn't ANY of these animals leave any fossil evidence? Do you have any idea of the significance of finding a Koala Bear fossil in, say, the Middle East? Or a Panda Bear fossil there? There are thousands of possibilities of potential out-of-place fossils. == Genesis says it didn't rain before the flood (plants were watered by a mist that rose from the ground). Why are many plants adapted to (created?) to catch water falling from the sky? If it didn't rain, does that mean that water evaporation and condensation worked differently? Genesis also says that there were no rainbows until after this rain from Hell. Did light not refract the same way? How could our eyes work? == This flood is first mentioned in the old Sumerian/ Mesopotamian story about Gilgamesh. Its written on clay tablet no:11 which contains according to scholars; the "true" original version of Noah and the Ark. This story is dated as early as: BC:3600. http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/ == The Genesis story describes how mankind had become obnoxious to God; they were hopelessly sinful and wicked. In the Babylonian story, they were too numerous and noisy. The Gods (or God) decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds. The Gods (or God) knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah. The Gods (or God) ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew). The hero initially complainedabout the assignment to build the boat The ark would be sealed with pitch. The ark would have with many internal compartments It would have a single door It would have at least one window. The ark was built and loaded with the hero, a few other humans, and samples from all species of other land animals. A great rain covered the land with water. The mountains were initially covered with water. The ark landed on a mountain in the Middle East. The hero sent out birds at regular intervals to find if any dry land was in the vicinity. The first two birds returned to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice. God (or the Gods in the Epic of Gilgamesh) smelled the roasted meat of the sacrifice. The hero was blessed. The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again. The were a number of differences between the two stories: Noah received his instructions directly from Jehovah; Ut-Napishtim received them indirectly during a dream. Noah's ark was 3 stories high and rectangular in shape. Two estimated dimensions are 547 x 91 ft. and 450 x 75 ft. The Babylonian ark was 6 stories high and square. Ut-Napishtim invited additional people on board: a pilot and some skilled workmen. Noah's ark landed on Mt. Ararat; Ut-Napishtim'sat on Mt. Nisir; these locations are both in the Middle East, and are located few hundred miles apart In the Bible, some of the water emerged from beneath the earth. And the rains from above lasted for 40 days and nights. A 40 day interval often symbolized a period of judgment in the Hebrew Scriptures. 2 In the Babylonian account, the water came only in the form of rain, and lasted only 6 days. Noah released a raven once and a dove twice; Ut-Napishtim released three birds: a dove, swallow and raven. ============ Since you cannot build a boat large enough to hold a pair (or possibly seven pairs) of all kinds of animals, and since there is no way for the animals to all get to the one place where the Ark was built, and since there is no way to explain how those same animals all got to their current (generally very narrow) geographical locations, and since fish are either freshwater or saltwater so that they cannot all of them cannot have existed in a global flood, and since there is no geological evidence of a global flood, and since there are about 1000 other problems with your hypothesis, no one over the mental age of six or so cannot really believe that the story of Noah is anything but a complete and total myth. === And some things that are impossible. >> ...a water ring surrounding the planet combined with >> high levels of water in the atmosphere which all >> collapsed back to the surface at once. maybe the >> magnetic field increased to a point at which this >> allowed this to occur? This is one of those impossible things. Water molecules have mass. Therefore they are attracted by the mass of the Earth. When that attraction takes place, it is called "rain". But, individuallly, water molecules have very little mass. So the force of gravity can be offset by two factors: temperature and air pressure. There are laws in Physics called "thermodynamics" that control factors such as what temperatures and what amount of air pressure is required to support certain water volumes. We experience this phenomenon ourselves in the summertime. Clearly there is more water in the air during the summer (because of the increased temperatures) than there is in the winter. According to Whitcomb and Morris book The Genesis Flooda?, the flood would require something like 75 Million cubic miles of water from this canopy. (Note not gallons, not cubic feet - but millions of CUBIC MILES of water.) (The authors assert that this canopy would have increased the volume of the ocean by 30 per cent. This would mean that 30/100 of the original ocean volume, or something like 30/130 of the present ocean volume, came from the canopy. On page 387 of the book the authors calculate that there are currently 340 million cubic feet of water on the Earth's surface. Simple calculations, based on numbers taken directly from the book, show that there should have been roughly 75 million cubic miles of water in this proposed canopy (340 times 30 divided by 130).) Of course, there are problems with that amount of water in the atmosphere. One problem is that such a large amount of water in the atmosphere would prevent anyone from seeing stars - or even the sun - in the sky. It would be like it was always the darkest night on Earth. Plants could not grow in such darkness. As an aside, for the YEC, Genesis 1:14-15 states: [14] And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, [15] and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth." However 75 MILLION CUBIC MILES OF WATER would prevent any such view of the heavenly bodies. So if this canopy was the source of water for the flood of Noah, then this passage in the Bible is false. But, in addition to THAT unexplainable problem. we have to consider what levels of temperature and air pressure are necessary to support such a massive amount of water in the atmosphere. There are things called "steam tables" that allow us to do these sorts of calculations. To support the quantity of water that is 20,000,000 times more than what is now in the atmosphere the temperature and/or the air pressure would have to be MUCH higher than it is now. If the air pressure and temperature had been the same as now, the water canopy would have collapsed in rain immediately after the creation of the water canopy was completed. How much higher would they have to be? There are multiple combinations of pressure and temperature that work. From any such point in the steam tables, if you increase the pressure, you can lower the temperature to compensate. One combination that is about at the midpoint value for temperature and pressure is 500 degrees Fahrenheit and 970 pounds per square inch of air pressure (as opposed to the current 15 pounds per square inch of pressure that the atmosphere currently exerts.) As an example of how this could be modified, we could increase the air pressure by two times this hypothesized atmospheric pressure to 1000 pounds per square inch and lower the temperature by about 15 degrees to compensate. Any such an environment would "pressure cook" all life on Earth in very short order. Even if living things could survive in such an atmosphere - and such an idea is clearly impossible - the increased pressure would also cause nitrogen narcosis. Adam and Eve, and the antediluvian generations, would be in a perpetual narcotic stupor! Obviously the existence of a "water canopy" is a completely absurd proposition. As more evidence of this, we can look at the planet Venus. Venus has an atmosphere that you could call a "water canopy" (though it does not contain nearly the amount of liquid necessary to flood the Earth and actually consists primarily of Carbon Dioxide). The air temperature on Venus is a mere 482 degrees centigrade (about 900 degrees Fahrenheit). Pizzas cannot exist in that environment. == The story of Noah and the flood is only one of many ridiculous biblical tales with no authentication or plausibility of any kind. It is an impossible story. 1. The largest boat ever built could not even come close to housing Noah, his sons, wives and two of every type of animal on earth. And this was a boat built of wood many thousands of years ago. There are 1.7 million KNOWN species of animals on this planet. This is patently impossible, using only materials and tools available to Noah, to build an ark large enough to hold all these creatures, together with suitable environments for each of them to live in, keeping them all separated so they don't eat or kill each other. And then provide room and an environments for many hundreds of millions of known species of insects, plants, molds etc. on this planet? 2. Where did they house all of the new born during this ten month escapade? 3. In addition, the ship would have to carry a TEN MONTHS supply of food and fresh water for the people and thousands of animals for them to survive. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. How did they dispose of the thousands of tons of feces? It must have been one stinking ship! 4. Now according to the Bible the earth was flooded for ten months. This would kill off all the vegetation. What did the animals eat for an additional year or more after the flood subsided? 5. Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn't germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11. 6. And according to this myth, Noah was also over 600 years old! == The Black Sea flood (typically dated 7500+ years ago) was probably too early for Noah's flood. Bernard Ramm documents another flood in the Caspian Sea area about 6000 years ago. Numerous people have have documented the Shurrupak (lower Mesopotamia) flood dated from 4500 to 7500 years ago. The Bible says that Noah's Flood was global, but the Black Sea flood was only local. The Bible says the Flood covered the highest mountains, but the Black Sea flood only rose by a few hundred feet. It didnt even cover the mountains in the local area. The Bible says that Noah built an Ark, but the Black Sea flood needed no such vessel. The water came up so slowly that the residents would have walked to higher land. The Bible says that everyone outside the Ark drowned, but the Black Sea flood simply displaced the residents. The Bible says that only the animals and birds on the Ark survived, but not so with the local Black Sea flood. The Bible says there was forty days of rain, but the Black Sea flood had no rain. The Bible says that the Flood ended when the waters went down and land was dry. But the waters of the Black Sea flood have not gone down yet. The list could go on. There is absolutely no resemblance whatever between the Black Sea flood and the biblical Flood of Noah. Ussher's Bible-based chronology places the Flood of Noah at 2348 BC. The Shurrupak flood took over a year to drain into the Persian Gulf. It is the flood of the Gilgamesh Epic. It completely destroyed the Akkadian speaking empire in southern Mesopotamia but left the Sumerians to the north unscathed. == "A comet brought the Flood waters." A comet has a lot of gravitational potential energy. That energy will be converted mostly to heat when a comet falls to earth. A comet containing the amount of water required to flood the entire Earth would have raised the temperature of the water past boiling. Any initial kinetic energy of the comet would make the problem worse. Calculations by two scientists - Soroka and Nelson (see the reference below) - show that the impact of a comet large enough to bring sufficient water to cause the flood would release about 5 x 10**29 joules of energy. For comparison, the energy released in the asteroid impact which likely caused the extinction of the dinosaurs is estimated at 10^8 megatons, or about 4.2 10^23 joules - that is SIX ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less. A comet bringing enough mass to cause a global flood would cause a far greater catastrophe than the flood itself and would undoubtedly destroy all life on Earth - including Noah's family and the Ark. (Read Soroka, Leonard G. and Charles L. Nelson, 1983. "Physical constraints on the Noachian Deluge". Journal of Geological Education 31: 135-139. ) Note: (Name for later issues has been changed) == Why go throught the trouble of having Noah build an ark so large to house two of all those animals when YHWH supposedly had the power to create them over again? Unless for some reason (evolution) YHWH found it easier to save the animals than re-create them? == http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html Flood problems === From Ian Plimer - 'Telling Lies For God' (Random House: Sydney,1994) "(p. 125) Humans are the only host for numerous diseases including measles, pneumococcal pneumonia, typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox. leprosy, poliomyelitis, five types of syphilis and gonorrhoea, AIDS, hepatitis, shingles, four types of malarial parasites, two types of tapeworm, an intestinal worm, hookworm, three agents of filariasis, two species of Schistosoma, pinworm, three types of lice, various types of fever (for example, Japanese river fever), kuru, just to mention a few. ... The transmission of kuru must have placed inordinate ethical burdens on the already overtaxed Noah. Kuru is only transmitted by cannibalism, by eating the brains of another human afflicted with the disease. ... Noah's family must have carried a veritable hospital of diseases because this was the only way that diseases endemic to hominoids could have survived the 'Great Flood'." Note Armadillos can carry leprosy. All the animals would be similarly diseased. == http://www.plesiosaur.com/creationism/kangaroos_and_the_flood/kangaoos.htm Great antiflood reference. == I don't know of any creationists who feel that there were fish on the Ark. There are two types of fish: freshwater and saltwater. A very, very small number of fish can live in either type of water. The salmon is an example. But more than 90% of fish species are exclusively one or the other. People who raise and sell tropical fish have never found a set of water conditions where both types of fish will survive together for any period of time. (For example, the web site http://fishandexotics.tripod.com/id18.htm discusses the problems in converting fish tanks from freshwater to salt water.) But, according to the Flood account, all of these fish lived in the same worldwide body of water. Therefore another way to show that the Flood happened - or could have happened - would be to get a swimming pool somewhere, fill it with water of some salinity level, put in many different species of both freshwater and salt water fish and wait a year. If after that year they are all still alive. That shouldn't be too expensive to test. Of course this would be just a start. You would still have to explain the small geographic ranges for many species of fish. (If freshwater fish could swim throughout the ocean during the time of the Flood, why is it that nearly every species resides in only a relatively small geographical area? Also why are there no remains of salt water fish in the freshwater lakes - even the large ones like the Great Lakes? You would think that as the flood waters subsided the fish would not be smart enough to know which areas of the globe would be freshwater and others salt water and go to the right spot in EVERY case.) == How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence of fossils in the deposits? Roughly 1.5 x 10^15 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. Poldervaart, Arie, 1955. Chemistry of the earth's crust. pp. 119-144 In: Poldervaart, A., ed., Crust of the Earth, Geological Society of America Special Paper 62, Waverly Press, MD.] A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits. 6. How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter Bignot, G., 1985. Micropaleontology Boston: IHRDC, p. 75.]. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. [Twenhofel, William H., 1961. Treatise on Sedimentation, Dover, p. 50-52.] In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter. 7. How could the Flood deposit layers of solid salt? Such layers are sometimes meters in width, interbedded with sediments containing marine fossils. This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and have characteristic fossils on either side. Therefore, if the fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there are, it seems, only two choices: (2) the salt is a later intrusion. I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils. [Jackson, M.P.A., et al., 1990. Salt diapirs of the Great Kavir, Central Iran. Geological Society of America, Memoir 177, 139pp.] == Johnsen, S. J., H. B. Clausen, W. Dansgaard, K. Fuhrer, N. Gundestrap, C. U. Hammer, P. Iversen, J. Jouzel, B. Stauffer, & J. P. Steffensen, 1992. "Irregular glacial interstadials recorded in a new Greenland ice core". Nature 359: 311-313. Alley, R. B., D. A. Meese, C. A. Shuman, A. J. Gow, K.C. Taylor, P. M. Grootes, J. W. C. White, M. Ram, E. W. Waddington, P. A. Mayewski, & G. A. Zielinski, 1993. "Abrupt increase in Greenland snow accumulation at the end of the Younger Dryas event". Nature 362: 527-529. == A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up? == Here are just a small sampling of the problems related just to the animals on the Ark: 1. How did animals from all over the Earth get to the Ark? 2. How did 8 people care for those animals (I've seen estimates that there are something like 50 million different species)? 3. Many, many animals have special diets. How were those taken care of? 4. Many animals will only eat fresh foods. How was the food kept fresh? 5. What happened to all of the waste? 6. How did the animals disperse after the flood? 7. What happened with the fish? This would seem to be a no-brainer because we are speaking of a flood here, but with only a handful of exceptions, fish either live in fresh water or salt water - NOT BOTH. If the water for the flood was salty, for example, how did the fresh water fish survive? (Moreover, how did those fish get to the Ark.) Consider point 6 a bit. The Bible clearly states that the Ark landed on or near Mt. Ararat. That is desert. Wouldn't all of the desert animals have simply stayed right there? Why in particular would the species which currently exist in the American Southwest, such as the Gila Monster, leave an environment that is PERFECT for them and instead travel many thousands of miles through rivers, and over mountains in order to get someplace which they couldn't possibly be smart enough to know existed when they left? And they did all of this without leaving any evidence such as a single fossil behind on their journey! There are literally hundreds of problems with the Ark story. How can you possibly say that it is not far fetched? According to the Bible the Ark was about 450 feet long.The longest WOODEN ships in MODERN seas are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped. Creationists look at the long list of problems and say that God could have performed one miracle after another miracle to eliminate each and every problem. True enough. But that is not really an answer. == There are 360 known species of hummingbirds. == Genesis 6:15 : "And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits." A cubit is an ancient unit of linear measure, originally equal to the length of the forearm from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow. Obviously people vary in size so this unit-of-measure is somewhat inexact, but it is considered to vary from about 17 to 22 inches. == The Ark The bending moment induced at a hull length of 515 feet of 467,700 ft-tons is about 56% above normal bending moments of around 300,000 ft-tons seen on tankers with similar dimensions and a block coefficient of about 0.7. The bending moment induced at a hull length of 450 feet of 272,500 ft-tons is about 51% above normal bending moments of around 180,000 ft-tons seen on tankers with similar dimensions and a block coefficient of about 0.7. Assigning even non-conservative section modulus estimates based on a theoretical and ideal wooden timber construction, we find that the stresses at the deck and hull bottom are triple the normal range of safe-stress limits for construction timbers. As a preliminary conclusion, it is fairly safe to say that this particular hull-shape exceeds the fiber-stress capacity of all known woods of reasonably workable densities. Therefore, this particular design would be considered non-viable, failing to maintain proper hull integrity in an open ocean. That is ... this hull would break up due to it's enormous size and the fact that it is too long for normal wooden timber construction. Furthermore, this design is so radically beyond the limitations of the assumed design material and method (i.e. wooden timber, box-like construction), that for all practical purposes it is not even worth the time and effort of a design analysis. == The flood lasted for a year and a huge influx of fresh water would have killed almost all marine life == Obviously, if there were a number of arks, the total carrying capacity is greatly increased, addressing the objections raised on the basis of the room available in the ark for all the animals. The arks can individually be smaller, reducing the problems associated with large wooden boats. Moreover, the problem of how marsupials got to Australia is eliminated: obviously they were all loaded into one of the arks, and it came to rest in Australia - there is even the 'geological' formation (actually the remains of an ark) to show where it came to rest. I'm surprised nobody has ever put forward this eminently sensible explanation, which overcomes many of the scientific objections to the Biblical account. Perhaps someone should set up a web site. Also the one carrying the dinosaurs and wooly mammoths didn't survive the voyage, hence their extinction. == Explain how reptile footprints got into the Coconino sandstone in the Grand Canyon, keeping in mind the geologic setting and the surrounding several hundred miles of sediments. == Not all trackways show signs of desication, but that's not a problem for conventional geology, but it is for the floodites, since soft mud can be covered by sediment too, if the mud or sand that they are in is not covered by swift water. Which would mean that they pretty much would all have to be at or very near the bottom of the geological column, since the flood had to cover the highest mountains with 15 cubits of water at the end of those 40 days, and by the same token, all the sediment would have almost had to have been deopsited prior to that since the vast majority of track bearing layers overlay a much vaster thichness of sedimentary rock of marine origin, which the floodites claim was deposited by the flood in the first place. == 1) Geologically; Instead of literally thousands of different rock layers displaying unique characteristics, there would be one main, extremely thick, layer that would consist of course sediments at the bottom, grading to fine silts and clays at the top. The only exceptions would be recently deposited layers that weathered out, and that too would be mainly silts. Also, there would be no evaporite deposits or anhydrite layers anywhere within that flood layer. What we actually see is just the opposite, we see multiple layers of rock displaying unique characteristics, each demonstrating unique depositional environments, few of which point to flood deposits, and those that do indicate a flood deposit are regional in extent only. Also, the evaporite an anhydrous layers would not exist, except only as surface deposits, such as the salt flats in Utah. But, since there are several salt deposits scattered throughout the geologic column, including one that lies at a depth of nearly a mile in the gulf state region. Since evaporites can only be deposited in shallow hyper saturated waters that have had their source of water cut off, there is no way that the sediments that underlay, and overlay the salt deposit can be the result of a WWF. Also, any redistribution of the sediments from the receding flood waters would also follow the same pattern, plus the layers of sediment at the continental shelf margins would have been scoured away as the water that was above the continental land mass would have increased in velocity as it flowed into the ocean basins. And we do find just the opposite. The continental shelves contains thousands of feet of sediment in the gulf coast region. 2) Paleontology; The fossil record would not record a succession of species, nor would it display an increase in diversity across the range of phylum, classes, orders, or genera. The fossil record would instead be sorted according to their specific gravity and mass. In other words, heavy dense organisms such as clams, oysters, and large organisms, such as the larger dinosaurs and mammals, would be largely present in the lower sediments only. In other words we should find species such as _Exogyra rugosa_, an oyster that has an extemely heavy shell at the bottom of the geological column, instead of only the late Cretaceous layers. We should fine the Apatosaur at the bottom, mixed in with ankylosaurs, rhino and turtles. Also, we should find human remains scattered through the geological column, mixed in with other man-sized organisms. Mammals should be mixed with dinosaurs, and ocean organisms should be mixed with terrestrial organisms. The fossil layer would also be concentrated largely to the lower layers too, since most organisms, even large ones, would have decayed, fallen apart, and sank during a year long flood. What do we find in the fossil record? We find populations of organisms that increase in diversity, and they generally follow a pattern of increased size. We do not find classes of vertebrates organisms mixed throughout the geologic column, as they would as the result of death from a WWF. We do not see birds below a certain aged layer, we do not see mammals below a certain aged layer, we do not find dinosaurs below a certain aged layer, we do not find any tetrapod at all below a certain aged layer, we do not find boney fishes below a certain aged layer, and so on. The same pattern goes for species, and genera. If there had been a WWF, the fossil record would be a hodge-podge of mixed species, genera, families, orders, and classes. There would not be the orderly progression we do find, despite any "gaps" in any particular linage == Flood water source. To support a quantity of water that is 20,000,000 times more than what is now in the atmosphere the temperature and/or the air pressure would have to be much, much higher than it is now. If the air pressure and temperature had been the same as now, the water canopy would have collapsed in rain immediately after the creation was completed. How much higher would they have to be? There are multiple combinations of pressure and temperature that work. From any such point if you increase the pressure, you can lower the temperature a bit to compensate. If you increase the temperature, you can lower the air pressure. One combination that is about a midpoint value for temperature and pressure to support this much water is 500 degrees Fahrenheit and 970 pounds per square inch of air pressure (as opposed to the current 15 pounds per square inch of pressure that the atmosphere currently exerts.) (As an example of how this could be modified, we could increase the air pressure by two times the current atmospheric pressure - from 970 to 1000 pounds per square inch - and lower the temperature by about 15 degrees.) Any such environment would "pressure cool" all life on Earth in very short order. (See http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/additional_ topics/flood.html for a discussion of these values.) -- It is claimed that the flood produced about 10,000 feet of water, most of it from the vapor canopy, with the remainder from the fountains of the deep. I pointed out that 10,000 feet of water is about 3000 meters, and as 10 meters exerts a pressure of 1 atmosphere, 3000 meters will exert about 300 atmospheres. There are even more obvious and less technical problems with the type of water canopy that would be required for a global flood. We've all experienced cloudy days and nights. You cannot see the moon or stars on such nights and you cannot even see the sun in very cloudy conditions, such as those immediately preceding a severe thunderstorm. A water canopy such as that described by Whitcomb would have resembled a cloudier day than any of those reading this post have ever experienced. People living under such a canopy would have lived in eternal darkness with no idea that there was a moon, stars or even a sun. It is unlikely that they would have even understood "night" and "day". Yet the Biblical accounts of the pre-diluvian world contain numerous references to the heavenly bodies. == Consider the nature of the sediments that required thousand of years to be deposited. In some cases, millions. Then there's the fossils. Some of these sedimentary layers are composed completely by fragments of a type of sea creature called a crinoid. some of these layers cover thousands of square miles, and are around 1000 feet thick. Where did they all live? == Do some research on the extent of the fossiliforous rocks, their volume, number of critters per cubic yard, then try to figure out where they all lived if they are supposed tobe the result of being buried by the Flood. == There are vast amounts of carbon in the formations, as carbonates, coal and gas. Where was all this carbon before the Flood? In the atmosphere? == http://home.entouch.net/dmd/toomanyanimals.htm == A great many creationists seem to like to call for lots and lots of amazingly rapid speciations within the kinds, far more speciations more rapidly than any evolutionary biologist would find reasonable] after Noah's Flood, as a way to minimize the ridiculous crowding on the alleged Ark. For example, they'll claim that the entire cat family Felidae would have radiated from a single pair of cat-kind ancestors on the Ark, in just a few thousand years. == Ihe Ark had one window of 18 to 24 inches). A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above (Genesis 6:16). How much air can enter such a wondow? == On pages 32-33 of his book "Biblical Cosmology and Modern Science", Henry Morris, the founder of the ICR says, "But the main reason for insisting on the universal Flood as a fact of history and as the primary vehicle for geological interpretation is that God's Word plainly teaches it! No geologic difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." Note the phrase "real or imagined". According to Dr.Morris even REAL geological difficulties should not be used to disuade anyone from a belief in the literal nature of scripture. == When did granite batholiths form? Some of these are intruded into older sediments and have younger sediments on their eroded top surfaces. It takes a long time for magma to cool into granite, nor does granite erode very quickly. How does a global flood explain angular unconformities? These are where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted) and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top. They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed. How could the Flood deposit layers of solid salt? Such layers are sometimes meters in thickness, interbedded with sediments containing marine fossils. This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and have characteristic fossils on either side. Therefore, if the fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there are, it seems, only two choices: How were hematite layers laid down? Standard theory is that they were laid down before Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen. In an oxygen-rich regime, they would almost certainly be impossible. How do you explain fossil mineralization? Mineralization is the replacement of the original material with a different mineral. Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly mineralized, including some that biblical archaeology says are quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the earth in this diluvian geology. For example, remains of Egyptian commoners buried near the time of Moses aren't extensively mineralized. Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite variable mineralization. Dinosaur remains are usually extensively mineralized. == The bristlecone pine shows it is 4765 year old, meaning it survived the Flood. How did flood sediments get underneath it? Ditto for Damascus at 6000 years old. == Grand Canyon questions: 1. Do you think each of the formations found in the canyon represent a short term catastrophic event? If so, how does that fit into your model? 2. How do you explain the different lithologies represented in the formations found in the canyon? What were the sources of those sediments that were carried by your catastrophic events? 3. Do you suggest that each formation had time to lithify prior to the depostion of the overlying strata? If so, how long and what was going on during that time? If not, why are there sharp rather than gradual contacts between the formations assuming a catastrophic event would be very turbulent? What about tilted formations? == The smallest creatures that have the highest energy costs. Tigers spend most of their time lounging around dozing, while shrews have to frantically eat their own body weight or quickly starve. == Palm Valley in central Australia is host to a unique species of palm, Livingstonia mariae, found nowhere else in the world. == 1. The three-toed sloth generally does not move at all. It stays in trees and sleeps. When it does move it travels at a maximum speed of three miles an hour. How did the sloth get from Turkey to Central America? 2. How did the dodo get to an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean?? It must have lived on islands. (If they didn't, they would have been easy prey for other animals.) 3. How did koalas get to Australia. They also move very slowly. The koala can eat only certain types of fresh gum leaves. Australia has around 500 species of eucalyptus (gum) trees. Koalas eat the leaves of about 20 species, with the blue gum a favorite. Recent work has shown that the koala's insistence on eucalyptus is actually an addiction to certain chemicals in the leaf which it first eats in the mother's milk == There is no way that ALL species of aquatic life could survive in water of the same salinity. Of course if the fish were brought on the Ark, there is another problem. That problem is explaining how the freshwater fish got to their specific habitats. Piranhas are only found naturally in South America. That is a long way from Mount Ararat. For their habitat they require large, warm, slow-moving rivers. The Amazon River basin is ideal, but there are many places on Earth with conditions identical to those. Piranhas could survive very well in many other places, yet they are found in only this one place. How did they get just to that one place if the Noachian Flood is true? Clearly they couldn't have walked there. Species estimates of plants worldwide range from 310,000 to 422,000 species) Oh and a conservative tabulation of the number of positively identified species of algae has been given as 3400, just in the Republic of Moldova! == Gen. 7:21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: (KJV) NIV Gen. 7:21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Gen 7: 23: "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." Gen 7:23 He wiped out every living thing that was on the surface of the ground, from mankind to livestock, to creatures that crawl, to the birds of the sky, and they were wiped off the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. HSCB translation: == There is a detailed written history that goes back to 2952 BC. Included in that history are confirmed documentation of eclipses. There is no break in that history to account for a global flood. == Most modern zoos have far fewer than 16,000 species and require very large staffs in order to maintain a smaller number of animals. === The earth (Heb. erets) is used 46 times in the Flood account in Genesis 69, as well as in Genesis 1. The explicit link to the big picture of creation, especially in Genesis 6:67, clearly implies a universal Flood. Furthermore, the judgment of God is pronounced not just on all flesh, but on the earth: And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them. And, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. (Gen. 6:13) `Upon the face of all the earth' (Gen. 7:3, 8:9) clearly connects with the same phrase in the creation account where Adam and Eve are given the plants on Earth to eat (Gen. 1:29). Clearly, in God's decree the mandate is universalthe whole earth is their domain. God uses the phrase in Genesis also of the dispersal of people at the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:8,9)again, the context is the whole land surface of the globe. The exact phrase is used nowhere else in Genesis. `Face of the ground' used five times in the Flood account, also connects back to the universal context of creation (Gen. 2:6), again emphasizing the universality of the Flood. `All flesh' (Heb. kolbasar) is used 12 times in the Flood account and nowhere else in Genesis. God said he would destroy `all flesh,' apart from those on the Ark (Gen. 6:13,17),5 and He did (Gen. 7:21 22). In the context of the Flood, `all flesh' clearly includes all nostril-breathing land animals as well as mankind see Genesis 7:21 23. `All flesh' could not have been confined to a Mesopotamian valley. `Every living thing' (Heb. kol chai), is again used in the Flood account (Gen. 6:19, 8:1,17) and in the creation account (Gen. 1:28). In the creation account the phrase is used in the context of Adam and Eve's dominion over the animals. God said (Gen. 7:4) that He would destroy `every living thing' He had made and this happened only Noah and those with him on the Ark survived (Gen. 7:23). `Under the whole heaven' (Gen. 7:19) is used six times outside of the Flood account in the Old Testament, and always with a universal meaning (Deut. 2:25, 4:19, Job 28:24, 37:3, 41:11, Daniel 9:12). For example, `Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine,' said the Lord (Job 41:11). `All the fountains of the great deep.' The fountains of the great deep are mentioned only in the Flood account (Gen. 7:11, 8:2) and Proverbs 8:28. `The deep' (Heb. tehom) relates back to creation (Gen. 1:2) where it refers to the one ocean covering the whole world before the land was formed. And it was not just `the fountains of the great deep' but `all the fountains of the great deep' which broke open. A special Hebrew word was reserved for the Flood or Deluge: Mabbul. In every one of the 13 occasions this word is used, it refers to Noah's Flood. Its one use outside of Genesis, Psalm 29:10, refers to the universal sovereignty of God in presiding over the Deluge. The New Testament also has a special word reserved for the Flood, cataclysmos, from which we derive our English word `cataclysm.' === There are many formations within the geologic column that consist of alternations of land-formed sediments with marine sediments, again often with large amounts of in situ fossils that appear to have lived in a natural habitat. A single one-year flood event could not have produced these formations. Also alternations of turbidites with shales cannot occur quickly. In one formation in the USA (well inside the limits of the geologic column) there exist 15,000 such alternations, complete with fossil burrower colonies in the shale layers. For this to form in a year, a shale layer would need to harden every 35 minutes. == http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html == The geological record is not uniformly distributed; it is organized in layers call strata. Look at the Grand Canyon. Do the rocks look uniformly distributed to you? They don't look uniformly distributed to anyone else either. More specifically a flood stratum has particular characteristics that make it easy to recognize. There are two kinds of sediments: high energy and low energy sediment. Based on simple laboratory tests and field observations of actual floods, it can be shown that high-energy sediments, such as gravel, are deposited during the height of floods. Low energy sediments, such as siltstone, mudstone and claystone, are deposited during the waning of the floods. Thus if there is a worldwide flood we would expect that there would be a uniform worldwide sedimentary formation with the high-energy sediments (ancient gravel, sands) at the bottom and the low energy sediments at the top. We would not see a uniform distribution. == http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html == Unless God performed two miracles. The first miracle was the Flood itself. The second miracle was some type of global "housecleaning" that removed all evidence of the Flood. He would have had to perform a whole series of miracles. He had to produce the water, get rid of the excess heat, get the animals safely to the Ark, provide sustenance for them on the ark, get rid of the water, get the animals safely back to their locations, and on and on and on. He also would have had to construct rock layers, crystals, radiometric ratios, and fossils embedded in rock, all just the right way to trick us all (except the fundies who are the only people on earth who see this trickery for what it truly is). == The sea life in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are quite different species. They have not mixed recently. == New Testament: `the flood came and took them all away' (Jesus, Matt. 24:39); `the flood came and destroyed them all' (Jesus, Luke 17:27); `did not spare the ancient world [Greek: kosmos], but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly' (2 Peter 2:5); `a few, that is eight people, were saved through the water' (1 Peter 3:20); Noah `condemned the world' through his faith in God (Heb. 11:7); `the world that then was, being flooded by water, perished' (2 Pet 3:6). All these statements presuppose a global Flood, not some localized event. == Let me see if I understand this story. One old man and his three sons built a wooden boat the size of an aircraft carrier, despite the fact that wood isn't strong enough for that--a wooden boat that size it would collapse under its own weight. Oh, and they did this in the middle of a desert, where there IS NO WOOD. And then one old man and his three sons got either two or seven living specimens (depending on whether the animal was kosher or not) of every living species of animal on Earth. Somehow he did this, living in ancient Israel four or five thousand years ago. Somehow he got penguins, and kept them from dying of heatstroke in the desert, and polar bears too, and kangaroos, and grizzly bears, and spiders and snakes and scorpions. He got specimens of all living animal and bird species from all over the planet Earth and somehow kept them from dying of heat, or cold, or thirst, or heatstroke, and he kept them from eating each other. And this ark--which, vast though it was, wasn't even large enough to have room for a single breeding pair of every species of INSECT known to exist today--also had enough food on it for all these animals. Right? Got that? Let's continue. And then the just and loving Creator of the Universe exterminated all land-dwelling life on Earth because he objected to the sexual behavior that went on in certain cities--because of this he killed babies, old people, animals, birds, everything. He did this with a mysterious flood, with mysterious waters that came from nowhere, were so high that they were over the tops of the highest mountains in the world (five miles high--that means water was five miles deep or more all over the Earth's surface), then these mysterious flood waters vanished again leaving no trace and there's not a trace of this vast flood in the fossil record or the geological record, even though in geological terms 5000 years is an eyeblink and the world would be filthy with evidence of it all. Also this mysterious flood did all this without diluting the salt concentration in the Earth's oceans so far that the salt-water fish would die. And all the salt washed into freshwater lakes and rivers by the mystery global flood didn't kill all the fresh-water fish. Still with me? There's more and you haven't seen anything yet. It gets BETTER, ladies and germs. After the Ark came to rest and the flood waters receded, God made a rainbow for Noah and the kids. It was the first rainbow in the history of the universe, because evidently up until that point raindrops in the Earth's atmosphere did not refract sunlight and separate it into its component colors. And, of course, once released from the Ark all these animals marched down the gangplank peacefully and walked tens of thousands of miles, most of them also having to swim across thousands of miles of ocean on the way, to get back where they were supposed to be. They even managed to go in the right directions--no polar bears went south, no penguins went north. They did this without the polar bears and penguins dying of heatstroke in the desert. And they all went inerrantly back where they were supposed to be, the hundreds of species of bats, and the lemurs, and the storks, and the mice, and the voles, and the chimpanzees, and the meerkats, and the elephants, and the squirrels, and the crocodiles, and dozens of species of wasps, and so on, all of them. The lions, tigers, and grizzly bears also refrained from eating all of the kangaroos and deer and wildebeests the moment they were let out of the Ark, despite the fact that it must have been a long and hungry trip for them. But wait, THERE'S MORE. All living land-dwelling species on Earth are descended from populations of just one breeding pair, or just a few breeding pairs, about five thousand years ago. Including humans--all breeds and types of humanity, in all their variations and diversity, are descended from fewer than a dozen people less than six thousand years ago. Pygmies, Laplanders, Amerinds, the Chinese, European whites, the Bantu, the Hindustanis, all of them. All the vast differences in language, in culture, in physical anthropology, all appeared in that interval between the Great Flood, supposedly 5000 years ago, and the dawn of recorded history--which was, uh, about six thousand years ago. Is this it? Is this the literal truth from the literally true Bible which is God's inerrant word? === Young Earth creationism and flood geology were tested most from the moment people started doing what we would now recognize as science. These stories were refuted by English geologists Hutton and Adam Sedgwick in the early 1800s.. == I was watching TBN late on Sunday night, and Carl Baugh of the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, was talking about Noah's Flood and the vapor canopy. He had a supposed expert in the studio with a supposed impressive display of computer calculations relevant to Noah's Flood. One of his arguments was that before Noah's Flood the year was 360 days long, this was a prophetic year, but he argued that it was a real year. His argument was that the earth was rotating more slowly then, but when the vapor canopy collapsed the earth's rotation speeded up so a year became the present value of 365.25 days. Never mind that he contradicts Kent Hovind who claims that the earth rotated much quicker a few 1000 years ago, or indeed himself, as he claims that the canopy was solid hydrogen. Anyway, his argument was that the earth speeded up due to the law of conservation of angular momentum. I decided to do some calculations to see what values I would get, by starting with the present earth and raising the canopy back up into the sky. Given I omega = I' omega' where I and I' are respectively the moment of inertia of the earth before restoring the canopy and I' is that value after, and omega and omega' are the corresponding angular velocities, I solved for the weight of the canopy assuming it was raised to a height of 50 Km, given the initial moment of inertia of the earth (I = 8.07x10^37 Kg m^2) the mean radius of the earth (r = 1.2735x10^7 m) and the ratio omega/omega' = 365.25/365. With the total mass of the canopy divided by 4 pi r^2 I obtained and astounding surface density of 6.8 x 10^8 Kg/m^2, or 6.8 x 10^4 Kg/cm^2, i.e. 68 tonne/cm^2. As 1 Atmosphere is about 1 Kg/cm^2, this corresponds to an additional pressure due to the canopy which is 68,000 times higher than atmopheric pressure. I knew I would get absurd figures, but I wanted to do the real calculations, and shows that this aspect of creationism can be refuted with freshman physics and maths. It may be an excellent exercise to give students as a homework problem. Christopher Sharp == Many fossils show evidence of being scavenged, something not possible if buried in a single flood. Thats not to mention the various layers that could not have been laid down by flooding. == Cetaceans breathe in exactly the same way that you and I do but still are, in the case of whales and dolphins, dependent upon the ocean for their survival. They definitely have the breath of life, so according to YEC global flood geology, they should have all died. So, all of the cetaceans (whales and dolphins, especially) categorically should *not* be here unless one of the following is true: 1) Cetaceans were created by God after the Flood, suggesting more than one creation event. 2) Something that represented the cetacean kind shuffled off the Ark and managed to evolve (or adapt if you're not comfortable with the e word) in an astonishingly short amount of time into all of the cetacean species that we know today. 3) There actually were representatives of all known modern and extinct whale, dolphin, seal/sea lion, and manatee species on the Ark. 4) The Flood wasn't global, and cetaceans were able to survive perfectly well because the Flood never reached/affected them. 5) There was no Flood at all. Which do you think it was? You are aware that not all flowering plants are especially beautiful, yes? And that the ones that *are* beautiful are less concerned about their appeal to human aesthetics as they are about, for instance, their appeal to a pollinating insect species? But how did they survive that flood in the first place? Let me suggest an experiment for you to undertake. Select one flowering plant -- even one like a water lily, which would be used to growing in very wet soil -- and stick it in a pot on the bottom of a vessel containing, say, six feet of salty, silty water. Wait 150 days, then pull it out and tell me what you see. I'll bet you anything that all you'll have is a dead water lily. Likewise, take some of the silt that settled in that vat of water and plant a dry seed in it that never touched the salty, silty water (in order to simulate the seeds floating on mats of vegetation that I've heard so much about in creationist circles). Wait to me how all the plants of the world would have repopulated themselves so quickly after a global, catastrosphic Flood. I'll give you a hint: Unless the pre-Flood plants were vastly different in every way from modern plants -- and that those vastly different plants left no trace of themselves in the fossil record -- and then somehow became different after the flood, then it's quite impossible for such speedy plant repopulation to have happened without miraculous intervention. == Paleopalynology(ancient pollen) and biogeography really kill the flood "explanation" for the fossil record. And why did these Australian marsupials go back to the only part of the entire world that has any fossil remains of their close relatives, down in what creationists might call flood sediments? Some sort of homing instinct drawing them to ancestral grave sites? == Evolutionary theory says that lodgepole pine trees evolved earlier than black oak trees, and thus should be found deeper in fossil strata. Flood geology says that since lodgepole pine trees exist at or near the timberline in mountainous regions, and black oaks live in lowland swamps, we should find fossils of lodgepole pine higher in fossil strata than the oaks. Can you guess where we find these fossils, == Look in the geologic record of the following delicate fossils or evidence for land deposition: fossilized dinosaur nests, ant nests, termite nests, bird nests, fragile wasp nests, complex rodent burrows, animal dung, tracks of land animals, raindrop imprint, mud cracks, bird feathers, ferns, insects.All these features are found deep in the geological record --Ken Harding In regard to fossils these are three very important predictions if the global flood really occurred: 1. None of the marine fossils would be encrusted by other fossils or show any sign of boring by organisms after death. 2. None of the vertebrate fossils should show signs of scavenging or prolonged weathering by exposure on the ground. 3. None of the vertebrate fossils should be encrusted by pedogenic carbonate such as the fossils in the Karoo of South Africa and the Badlands of South Dakota --Ken Harding. Oyster-like creatures are found from bottom to top in the geologic record- strange for slow-moving bottom dwellers...If they all once lived together, why do whales, seals,placoderms and oricthyosaurs not appear with modern fishes in fossilized marine environments --Michael Pitman, Adam & Evolution. There are fossil ammonites whose beautiful spiral shells contain buoyancy chamgers and are therefore very light - yet they're never found in the upper levels. --Alan Hayward, Creation & Evolution. There is a relative order to the fossilized species for plants found in the geologic record for which flood geology cannot account, unless you can imagine apple and orange trees with Nike sneakers on their roots, racing past the magnolias and primitive mammals, leaving the gingkos back there with the dinosaurs, when the flood waters began to rise Frank R. Zindler, Creationism on the Rocks. A flood strong enough to move all the sediments of the earth would tend to mix the different types of animals and plants into one big mishmash...The fossils are in the right order for evolution but not for hydraulic selection.The light animals refuse to stay in the shallow rocks and the dense animals refuse to stay in the deep rocks...trilobites, light fragile creatures resembling pill bugs tend to be found only in the deepest rocks. Christopher Gregory Weber, Common Creationist Attacks on Geology. To these, I would add that sea turtles, which are denser than water and sink as soon as they die, are always found *higher* in the strata than ammonites, whose shells are hollow and therefore can float for a considerable time after they die. == There is no evidence to support the idea of an Ark, a global flood or even a man called Noah. It claims that the story in the Book of Genesis was a fabrication inspired by the story of King Gilgamesh, who was caught up in a flood while trying to transport his own livestock. Gilgamesh, who was King of Uruk in Babylonia in around 2,700 BC, had a shaved head and wore make up as well as a kilt. He bore no resemblance to the traditional image of Noah as displayed in countless paintings. He and his family were stranded at sea when a freak flood swept them from the river they were in. Unable to drink seawater they stayed alive by drinking the beer that they were transporting. == Examples of materials a Noah flood would not produce Crinoidal limestone, Magnesian limestone, Chalk, Shales, Pyrite, Tuff, Basalt, Marble, Anhydrite, Salt, Granite, Quartz, Banded Gneiss, Dolerite, Flint, Chert, Septarian nodules, Quartz conglomerate, Larvikite, Rhomb porphyry, Mica schists, Garnetiferous schists, Serpentinite, Jasper, Jet, Brockram, Greywacke, Coal, Helium. Materials a flood would deposit Sand and mud == The existence of 300 flood stories may not be an assumption. But it's a big jump in logic to assume that they're all based on the same flood, rather than on separate local events (apart from the whole bunch of Mideast cultures who've copied myths from each other wholesale). Isn't it funny how the later versions suddenly start resembling the Judeo-Xtian ones after the country was converted? == Grasses live everywhere in every environment ... they are not found only on high ground. Yet, they are only found at the top of the fossil record ... by your theory, grasses would only be found on mountaintops ... ever seen a grass grow someplace other than a mountaintop? Fossil formations are almost always almost level, not deposited on a mountain which animals and plants ascended as the flood rose. == The duration of the event implies that, during the flood, enormous energies (from heat of condensation of all that rain, heat released by fall from a great height, to heat from all those volcanic eruptions needed to intersperse observed igneous rocks amidst the supposed flood sediments) would be released -- enought to sterilize the planet. The existence of *any* fossils from pre-Flood sediments imply that we ought to find fossils from *all* (or at least most) known kinds in the preFlood strata -- and we clearly don't. A global flood implies a single, clearly-marked, flood layer all over the world, but no such clear single layer exists. The absence of drainage features where the flood waters drained off the continents is inexplicable, unless the flood waters were removed miraculously. And there is more, of course, but in short, the type and duration of the flood is incompatible with the observed evidence. == The flood of Noah was based on Ubar-Tutu's deluge for example, or the Goddess Mami fashioning the first men and women out of clay figurines, and then breathing into them the "breath of life" according to documents that are at least 1,000 years older than the Genesis re-write. Its also highly suspicious that all the documents of your faith are of Hebrew/Mesopotamian origin. Why don't Indians or Samoans or Chinese share your fables? The flood of Noah was based on Ubar Tutu's deluge, according not only to geological evidence but also archeaological evidence in the form of the Sumerian King List. That same story, in its original version is also detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh as well as Atrahasis, both of which credit the elder gods in an age when Yahweh seems unheard of by anyone. == Rudimentary ecology shows that turning the menagerie loose on a planet where the waters of a year-long global flood have only just receded would result in a vast dying. Geology attributed most of the strata of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic to sedimentation in water. Even so, they don't attribue all these strata to underwater sedimentation (some is wind-blown sediment, some volcanic, some the result of erosion of older rocks). And they don't attribute even the water-laid sediments to the same sort of bodies of water; geologists and paleontologists routinely distinguish among marine and freshwater sediments. == What were these hypothetical cages made of, and how much mass would they contribute? Bronze age technology!!! == An elephant eats about three hundred pounds of food a day, well over fifty tons a year. How much food will we need to bring along to deliver 50 tons to each elephant? How much will rot? A similar amount of water would be necessary. How do you keep fresh water on this ship for a year? An equal mass of urine and feces would result. == All seeds do NOT survive extended soaking, especially in salt water. Some don't even survive 6 months in the best of conditions. Insects could not have survived aboard floating vegetation, except for a few psocids and maybe an earwig or two. He didn't have enough to feed everything for 380 days, much less afterwards. == How did common diseases, especially STD's, survive the flood ? Did Noah's party have gonorrhea, syphilis, bacterial vaginosis, HIV/AIDS, Chlamydia, Genital Herpes, pubic lice, Trichomonas vaginalis, Vaginal yeast infections, Molluscum Contagiosum, Scabies, bedbugs, and Genital Warts. This sounds like a rather uncomfortable voyage. These are diseases that require human hosts. == The adult mayfly's life is so short - just a few hours or days at most - that sometimes it doesn't even have time to eat before dying. Its main goal before quitting this earth: to reproduce. Fortunately, the mayfly DOES spend from several months to several years as a nymph. It molts many times before emerging from a lake or pond as a fullgrown adult. Adult mayflies on the ark would have died in a few days, and the larvae of many mayflies require shallow fresh running water. Cicadas spend 13 to 17 years underground before emerging to mate and die. == Older Than Djoser? Have Researchers Found the Oldest Stone Structure in Egypt Possibly in the World at the Step Pyramid? Egypt Revealed magazine An enigmatic cut-stone structure with massive walls seems to be older even than the Step Pyramid complex of King Djoser (2668-2649 B.C.) and that would mean rewriting the history books of ancient Egypt, for the Djoser pyramid has long been cited as the oldest stone building in the world Second Dynasty (around 2900 B.C.). == It doesn't matter how big the animals were when the entered the ark it matters how big they were the day before they got off. Since most megafauna reach near-adult size within a year, and since the Bible states they were on the ark for 382 days (Gen. 8:13-14), Noah would have been dealing with mostly animals of near-adult size. Furthermore, the mammals would need to have been weaned before they entered the ark, or else Noah would have needed either their adult mothers or a herd of adult aurochs (precursor to cattle) aboard. For the several species of elephant, that means they would be more than one year old before boarding. Woodmorappe's species count is a bit shy of reality. There are approximately 3,000 known extant species of amphibian and 18,100 known extant species of amniote (mammals, reptiles, birds). Of the 5,000 extant species of mammal, about 1,700 are rodents and less than 100 are cetaceans. There are over 750,000 extant species of insect, 2000 extant species of centipede, 7000 extant species of millipede, and 35,000 extant species of arachnid; essentially all terrestrial. If you start adding extinct species the list gets far larger. How were all the carnivores were kept alive for 382 days without refrigerated food? Did he load extra gazelles for the leopards? How large a stash of alder leaves was kept for the beavers? How much bamboo for the pandas? What kind of breeding environment was maintained for the animals who reach reproductive age in much less than 382 days? How were the climactic conditions maintained for warm-adapted and cold-adapted animals? == I do have some questions about the ark contents. Which of the following were on the ark ? parasites sexually transmitted diseases bacteria insects fish other marine organisms extinct organisms how many different species were on the ark ? == These questions are focused on the creationist claim that a mythical flood is responsible for the fossil record. Why are moles and modern birds found in layers millions of years above large flying reptiles How is it possible to have 9,000 years of tree rings and 420,000 years of ice cores that show no sign of a flood ? What type of world wide flood leaves trees unaffected ? Why are non-flowering plants below flowering plants ? Why are many modern plants absent in the lower layers ? Why are modern coral reefs consistently above stromatolitic and other reef types ? Why aren't human artefacts found in the lower levels ? Did the stone tools run for the hills too ? Why are there animal tracks found on adjacent layers of alleged flood sediment ? Why are there animal burrows in virtually every layer of alleged flood sediment ? How did 150 meteorites make dry land craters during the flood ? Why are hominids always found far above the K-T boundary and dinosaurs always near or below it ? How come we have 100's of alleles today when Noah's crew had no more than 16 ? How did animals get back to their proper location even on different continents after the flood ? Please discuss mammals --- Marsupials getting to Australia, polar bears to the arctic and Panda's to China as wells as turtles, snakes, sloths, insects making it back to their location specific destination. == The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. You cannot build a wooden ship/box like the Ark. The maximum is about 300 feet, and the wood needs considerable steel reinforcement. Today's largest wooden ship is the Jahre Viking: 1,503 feet long and 226 feet wide. However, the supposed Ark was much larger than the largest practical wooden ships built using steel reinforcement and iron nails and modern pumps, none of which were available in the Bronze Age. Working huge wooden structures with bronze is not efficient. A large shed would be required to prevent decay over the years it took to build. == What do you imagine that those empirical consequences of the Flood would have been? Geologists have their own ideas, of course -- a single vast layer of sediment, with fossils sorted by size and density rather than phylogeny, with drainage channels along the edges of the (immediately post-diluvian) continents, and massive fractures where mountains had been "raised up" and sea basins lowered. They would expect any igneous layers sandwiched among flood sediments to yield radiometric dates of less than 10,000 years -- and to all date to the same era, rather than different eras millions of centuries apart. They would expect to find the crushed remains of human settlements and human burials under the lowest level of flood sediments. They observe none of this, of course. That, not the "supernatural" character of the Noachic Flood, is why mainstream geology rejects the flood as an event, or as an explanation for any portion of the geological column. == Many species can handle both fresh and seawater (salmon, sturgeon), but many more can't. == It doesn't matter how big the animals were when the entered the ark it matters how big they were the day before they got off. Since most megafauna reach near-adult size within a year, and since the Bible states they were on the ark for 382 days (Gen. 8:13-14), Noah would have been dealing with mostly animals of near-adult size. Furthermore, the mammals would need to have been weaned before they entered the ark, or else Noah would have needed either their adult mothers or a herd of adult aurochs (precursor to cattle) aboard. For the several species of elephant, that means they would be more than one year old before boarding. Woodmorappe's species count is a bit shy of reality. There are approximately 3,000 known extant species of amphibian and 18,100 known extant species of amniote (mammals, reptiles, birds). Of the 5,000 extant species of mammal, about 1,700 are rodents and less than 100 are cetaceans. There are over 750,000 extant species of insect, 2000 extant species of centipede, 7000 extant species of millipede, and 35,000 extant species of arachnid; essentially all terrestrial. If you start adding extinct species the list gets far larger. How were all the carnivores were kept alive for 382 days without refrigerated food? Did he load extra gazelles for the leopards? How large a stash of alder leaves was kept for the beavers? How much bamboo for the pandas, how many fresh eucalyptus leaves for the koalas? What kind of breeding environment was maintained for the animals who reach reproductive age in much less than 382 days? How were the climactic conditions maintained for warm-adapted and cold-adapted animals? == There are a lot of stories about a great flood that wiped out all of mankind except for those in the chosen boat. Well then, which of the stories are lies? Don't you see, either the biblical account of the flood is a lie or all the others are because only one group of people made it through alive.Only one can be true. So if the biblical story is true, the others are lies and you shouldn't use them as proof of the flood. == Flood Problems Animal burrows in alleged flood sediment (AFS) Animal track in AFS Dry land meteor impacts in AFS A layer of ash, iridium and impact ejecta at the K-T boundary Cycles of marine sediment and dry land layers (non marine layers consist of terrestrial fossils both plants and animals and NO marine fossils) in AFS Salt deposits many mundreds of feet thick. Sand dunes in AFS (how can you have a desert in the middle of a flood?) Radiometric dating techiniques are consistent with each other and relative dating techniques. They confirm the evolutionary timeframe. Fossil evidence: The fossil record is sorted on an evolutionary timeframe and in evolutionary order. General overview of the 3.5 billion year fossil record -- in order of first appearance: first bacteria before first multicellular organism before first shelled organisms before first insects before first amphibians before first reptiles before first dinosaurs before first birds before first placental mammals before first first apes before first hominids. Specific fossil relationships that defy flood geology: Moles above flying dinosaurs. Flowering plants above non-flowering plants Dinosaurs only below the K-T boundary, primates only above it Ammonites sorted by internal complexity, more complex show up later in the fossil record. Hominids are only found in the top layers. No hominid fossils nor hominid artefact is found below the Cenozoic. Creationists claim that humans are sorted last because they ran for the hills during the flood. Did their artefacts run too ? Both hominids and modern humans are typically found in association with their artifacts indicating that the running for the hills scenario is bogus. Hominid fossils are not found on the tops of mountains. Modern humans are found above all other hominids Hominids are sorted in an evolutionary fashion. Order of first appearance in the fossil record: Sahelanthropus tchadensis (320380cc) Ardipithecus ramidus (dental and postcranial remains) Orrorin turgenesis (postcranial) Australopithecus anamensis (cranial capacity unknown) A. afarensis (mean of 470cc, range 375-540cc) A. bahrelghazali (cranial capacity unknown) A. africanus (440-480cc) A. garhi (c. 450cc) A. robustus (c. 475cc) A. boisei (c. 450cc) A. aethiopicus (c. 410cc) H. habilis (c. 500-800cc) H. erectus (c. 725-1250cc) H. heidelbergensis (c. 1300cc) H. neanderthalensis (c. 1350-1600cc) H. sapiens (c.1300-1500cc) How did the flood sort hominids in evolutionary order by brain size? == http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html == Ussher's date for the Deluge was 2348 BC. In the Flood story, if we take the topography of modern earth, we need at least 8 km of rain or 8*10^6 mm. Thats 200 meters of rain a day. === I calculated the volume of water necessary to make the flood. Everest (8850M) being covered in 40 days. That's 221.25M of water per day. Two football fields deep. Then envision the erosive effects it would have had only 6,000 years or so ago. Whatever happened would still be blatently around. There would be no top-soil at any significant elevation. It would all be in the ocean basins. That, and desalinization would probably have killed marine life. There are literally thousands of things that would have happened that didn' == The results of Noah's flood just happens to look exactly like 4.5 billion years of normal geology. == This law of faunal succession was worked out long before there was a theory of Evolution. It was observed in the rocks by canal builders in the 18th century. See the Smith map of England. It's an observation of fact. == In the KJV: Genesis 7:2 says, "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female." [3] "Of the fowls of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of the earth." In Genesis 7:8, is says, "Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth. [9] There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah. == No one can provide evidence of a global flood. No one can build a wooden ship the size of the ark that would be seaworthy. The ark, even with its dimensions, just isn't big enough, and we still have to feed the poor animals for a year. Once the flood is finished, the herbivores have to have something to eat. Then all the animals have got to find their way all over the planet. This isn't even talking about how much of the sealife (like crabs, freshwater fish and insects) were supposed to survive a year long deluge. == www.creationscience.com/ * How was the water suspended, and what caused it to fall all at once when it did? * If a canopy holding the eqivalent to more than 40 feet of water were part of the atmosphere, it would raise the atmospheric pressure accordingly, raising oxygen and nitrogen levels to toxic levels. * If the canopy began as vapor, the water from it would be superheated. Noah and company would be poached. If the water began as ice in orbit, the gravitational potential energy would likewise raise the temperature past boiling. Orbit speed is 5 miles a second. * A canopy of any significant thickness would have blocked a great deal of light, lowering the temperature of the earth greatly before the Flood. * Any water above the ozone layer would not be shielded from ultraviolet light, and the light would break apart the water molecules. How was the water contained? Rock, at least the rock which makes up the earth's crust, doesn't float. The water would have been forced to the surface long before Noah's time, or Adam's time for that matter. * Even a mile deep, the earth is boiling hot, and thus the reservoir of water would be superheated. Further heat would be added by the energy of the water falling from above the atmosphere. As with the vapor canopy model, Noah would have been poached. * Where is the evidence? The escaping waters would have eroded the sides of the fissures, producing poorly sorted basaltic erosional deposits. These would be concentrated mainly near the fissures, but some would be shot thousands of miles along with the water. (Noah would have had to worry about falling rocks along with the rain.) Such deposits would be quite noticeable but have never been seen. == Runaway subduction. John Baumgardner created the runaway subduction model, which proposes that the pre-Flood lithosphere (ocean floor), being denser than the underlying mantle, began sinking. The heat released in the process decreased the viscosity of the mantle, so the process accellerated catastrophically. All the original lithosphere became subducted; the rising magma which replaced it raised the ocean floor, causing sea levels to rise and boiling off enough of the ocean to cause 150 days of rain. When it cooled, the ocean floor lowered again, and the Flood waters receded. Sedimentary mountains such as the Sierras and Andes rose after the Flood by isostatic rebound. [Baumgardner, 1990a; Austin et al., 1994] * The main difficulty of this theory is that it admittedly doesn't work without miracles. [Baumgardner, 1990a, 1990b] The thermal diffusivity of the earth, for example, would have to increase 10,000 fold to get the subduction rates proposed [Matsumura, 1997], and miracles are also necessary to cool the new ocean floor and to raise sedimentary mountains in months rather than in the millions of years it would ordinarily take. * Baumgardner estimates a release of 10^28 joules from the subduction process. This is more than enough to boil off all the oceans. In addition, Baumgardner postulates that the mantle was much hotter before the Flood (giving it greater viscosity); that heat would have to go somewhere, too. * Cenozoic sediments are post-Flood according to this model. Yet fossils from Cenozoic sediments alone show a 65-million-year record of evolution, including a great deal of the diversification of mammals and angiosperms. * Subduction on the scale Baumgardner proposes would have produced very much more vulcanism around plate boundaries than we see. [Matsumura, New ocean basins. Most flood models (including those above, possibly excepting Hovind's) deal with the water after the flood by proposing that it became our present oceans. The earth's terrain, according to this model, was much, much flatter during the Flood, and through cataclysims, the mountains were pushed up and the ocean basins lowered. (Brown proposes that the cataclysms were caused by the crust sliding around on a cushion of water; Whitcomb & Morris don't give a cause.) http://www.creationscience.com/ * How could such a change be effected? To change the density and/or temperature of at least a quarter of the earth's crust fast enough to raise and lower the ocean floor in a matter of months would require mechanisms beyond any proposed in any of the flood models. * Why are most sediments on high ground? Most sediments are carried until the water slows down or stops. If the water stopped in the oceans, we should expect more sediments there. Baumgardner's own modelling shows that, during the Flood, currents would be faster over continents than over ocean basins [Baumgardner, 1994], so sediments should, on the whole, be removed from continents and deposited in ocean basins. Yet sediments on the ocean basin average 0.6 km thick, while on continents (including continental shelves), they average 2.6 km thick. [Poldervaart, 1955] * Where's the evidence? The water draining from the continents would have produced tremendous torrents. There is evidence of similar flooding in the Scablands of Washington state (from the draining of a. lake after the breaking of an ice dam several times) and on the far western floor of the Mediterranean Sea (from the ocean breaking through the Straits of Gibralter). Why is such evidence not found worldwide? * How did the ark survive the process? Such a wholesale restructuring of the earth's topography, compressed into just a few months, would have produced tsunamis large enough to circle the earth. The aftershocks alone would have been devastating for years afterwards. References Austin, Steven A., John R. Baumgardner, D. Russell Humphreys, Andrew A. Snelling, Larry Vardiman, & Kurt P. Wise, 1994. Catastrophic plate tectonics: a global flood model of earth history. Proceedings of the third international conference on creationism, technical symposium sessions, pp. 609-621. Brown, Walt, 1997. In the beginning: compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. (www.creationscience.com/onlinebook) http://www.creationscience.com/ Baumgardner, John R., 1990a. Changes accompanying Noah's Flood. Proceedings of the second international conference on creationism, vol. II, pp. 35-45. Baumgardner, John R., 1990b. The imparative of non-stationary natural law in relation to Noah's Flood. Creation Research Society Quarterly 27(3): 98-100. Baumgardner, John R., 1994. Patterns of ocean circulation over the continents during Noah's Flood. Proceedings of the third international conference on creationism, technical symposium sessions, pp. 77-86. Matsumura, Molleen, 1997. Miracles in, creationism out: "The geophysics of God". Reports of the National Center for Science Education 17(3): 29-32. Poldervaart, Arie, 1955. Chemistry of the earth's crust. pp. 119-144 In: Poldervaart, A., ed., Crust of the Earth, Geological Society of America Special Paper 62, Waverly Press, MD. Whitcomb, J.C. Jr. & H.M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia PA. === 6. Implications of a Flood A global flood would have produce evidence contrary to the evidence we see. How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood? Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up? South pole ice core sequences go back 800,000 years. How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions. Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up? Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. [Becker & Kromer, 1993; Becker et al, 1991; Stuvier et al, 1986] References Alley, R. B., D. A. Meese, C. A. Shuman, A. J. Gow, K.C. Taylor, P. M. Grootes, J. W. C. White, M. Ram, E. W. Waddington, P. A. Mayewski, & G. A. Zielinski, 1993. Abrupt increase in Greenland snow accumulation at the end of the Younger Dryas event. Nature 362: 527-529. Becker, B. & Kromer, B., 1993. The continental tree-ring record - absolute chronology, C-14 calibration and climatic-change at 11 KA. Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, 103 (1-2): 67-71. Becker, B., Kromer, B. & Trimborn, P., 1991. A stable-isotope tree-ring timescale of the late glacial Holocene boundary. Nature 353 (6345): 647-649. Johnsen, S. J., H. B. Clausen, W. Dansgaard, K. Fuhrer, N. Gundestrap, C. U. Hammer, P. Iversen, J. Jouzel, B. Stauffer, & J. P. Steffensen, 1992. Irregular glacial interstadials recorded in a new Greenland ice core. Nature 359: 311-313. Stuiver, Minze, et al, 1986. Radiocarbon age calibration back to 13,300 years BP and the 14 C age matching of the German Oak and US bristlecone pine chronologies. IN: Calibration issue / Stuiver, Minze, et al., Radiocarbon 28(2B): 969-979. 7. Producing the Geological Record Most people who believe in a global flood also believe that the flood was responsible for creating all fossil-bearing strata. (The alternative, that the strata were laid down slowly and thus represent a time sequence of several generations at least, would prove that some kind of evolutionary process occurred.) However, there is a great deal of contrary evidence. Before you argue that fossil evidence was dated and interpreted to meet evolutionary assumptions, remember that the geological column and the relative dates therein were laid out by people who believed divine creation, before Darwin even formulated his theory. (See, for example, Moore [1973], or the closing pages of Dawson [1868].) Why are geological eras consistent worldwide? How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras and several different (independent) radiometric and nonradiometric dating methods? [e.g., Short et al, 1991] How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for evolution? Ecological zonation, hydrodynamic sorting, and differential escape fail to explain: * the extremely good sorting observed. Why didn't at least one dinosaur make it to the high ground with the elephants? * the relative positions of plants and other non-motile life. (Yun, 1989, describes beautifully preserved algae from Late Precambrian sediments. Why don't any modern-looking plants appear that low in the geological column?) * why some groups of organisms, such as mollusks, are found in many geologic strata. * why organisms (such as brachiopods) which are very similar hydrodynamically (all nearly the same size, shape, and weight) are still perfectly sorted. * why extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present animals didn't survive as well. Why did no pterodons make it to high ground? * how coral reefs hundreds of feet thick and miles long were preserved intact with other fossils below them. * why small organisms dominate the lower strata, whereas fluid mechanics says they would sink slower and thus end up in upper strata. * why artifacts such as footprints and burrows are also sorted. [Crimes & Droser, 1992] * why no human artifacts are found except in the very uppermost strata. If, at the time of the Flood, the earth was overpopulated by people with technology for shipbuilding, why were none of their tools or buildings mixed with with trilobite or dinosaur fossils? * why different parts of the same organisms are sorted together. Pollen and spores are found in association with the trunks, leaves, branches, and roots produced by the same plants [Stewart, 1983]. * why ecological information is consistent within but not between layers. Fossil pollen is one of the more important indicators of different levels of strata. Each plant has different and distinct pollen, and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the pollen hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the climatic evidence is different for each layer? How do surface features appear far from the surface? Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have originated only on the surface, such as: * Rain drops. [Robb, 1992] * River channels. [Miall, 1996, especially chpt. 6] * Wind-blown dunes. [Kocurek & Dott, 1981; Clemmenson & Abrahamsen, 1983; Hubert & Mertz, 1984] * Beaches. * Glacial deposits. [Eyles & Miall, 1984] * Burrows. [Crimes & Droser, 1992; Thackray, 1994] * In-place trees. [Cristie & McMillan, 1991] * Soil. [Reinhardt & Sigleo, 1989; Wright, 1986, 1994] * Desiccation cracks. [Andrews, 1988; Robb, 1992] * Footprints. [Gore, 1993, has a photograph (p. 16-17) showing dinosaur footprints in one layer with water ripples in layers above and below it. Gilette & Lockley, 1989, have several more examples, including dinosaur footprints on top of a coal seam (p. 361-366).] * Meteorites and meteor craters. [Grieve, 1997; Schmitz et al, 1997] * Coral reefs. [Wilson, 1975] * Cave systems. [James & Choquette, 1988] How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic flood? How does a global flood explain angular unconformities? These are where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted) and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top. They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed. How were mountains and valleys formed? Many very tall mountains are composed of sedimentary rocks. (The summit of Everest is composed of deep-marine limestone, with fossils of ocean-bottom dwelling crinoids [Gansser, 1964].) If these were formed during the Flood, how did they reach their present height, and when were the valleys between them eroded away? Keep in mind that many valleys were clearly carved by glacial erosion, which is a slow process. When did granite batholiths form? Some of these are intruded into older sediments and have younger sediments on their eroded top surfaces. It takes a long time for magma to cool into granite, nor does granite erode very quickly. [For example, see Donohoe & Grantham, 1989, for locations of contact between the South Mountain Batholith and the Meugma Group of sediments, as well as some angular unconformities.] How can a single flood be responsible for such extensively detailed layering? One formation in New Jersey is six kilometers thick. If we grant 400 days for this to settle, and ignore possible compaction since the Flood, we still have 15 meters of sediment settling per day. And yet despite this, the chemical properties of the rock are neatly layered, with great changes (e.g.) in percent carbonate occurring within a few centimeters in the vertical direction. How does such a neat sorting process occur in the violent context of a universal flood dropping 15 meters of sediment per day? How can you explain a thin layer of high carbonate sediment being deposited over an area of ten thousand square kilometers for some thirty minutes, followed by thirty minutes of low carbonate deposition, etc.? [Zimmer, 1992] How do you explain the formation of varves? The Green River formation in Wyoming contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves, identical to those being laid down today in certain lakes. The sediments are so fine that each layer would have required over a month to settle. How could a flood deposit layered fossil forests? Stratigraphic sections showing a dozen or more mature forests layered atop each other--all with upright trunks, in-place roots, and well-developed soil--appear in many locations. One example, the Joggins section along the Bay of Fundy, shows a continuous section 2750 meters thick (along a 48-km sea cliff) with multiple in-place forests, some separated by hundreds of feet of strata, some even showing evidence of forest fires. [Ferguson, 1988. For other examples, see Dawson, 1868; Cristie & McMillan, 1991; Gastaldo, 1990; Yuretich, 1994.] Creationists point to logs sinking in a lake below Mt. St. Helens as an example of how a flood can deposit vertical trunks, but deposition by flood fails to explain the roots, the soil, the layering, and other features found in such places. Where did all the heat go? If the geologic record was deposited in a year, then the events it records must also have occurred within a year. Some of these events release significant amounts of heat. * Magma. The geologic record includes roughly 8 x 10^24 grams of lava flows and igneous intrusions. Assuming (conservatively) a specific heat of 0.15, this magma would release 5.4 x 10^27 joules while cooling 1100 degrees C. In addition, the heat of crystalization as the magma solidifies would release a great deal more heat. * Limestone formation. There are roughly 5 x 10^23 grams of limestone in the earth's sediments [Poldervaart, 1955], and the formation of calcite releases about 11,290 joules/gram [Weast, 1974, p. D63]. If only 10% of the limestone were formed during the Flood, the 5.6 x 10^26 joules of heat released would be enough to boil the flood waters. * Meteorite impacts. Erosion and crustal movements have erased an unknown number of impact craters on earth, but Creationists Whitcomb and DeYoung suggest that cratering to the extent seen on the Moon and Mercury occurred on earth during the year of Noah's Flood. The heat from just one of the largest lunar impacts released an estimated 3 x 10^26 joules; the same sized object falling to earth would release even more energy. [Fezer, pp. 45-46] 150 known meteorite craters are observed. * Other. Other possibly significant heat sources are radioactive decay (some Creationists claim that radioactive decay rates were much higher during the Flood to account for consistently old radiometric dates); biological decay (think of the heat released in compost piles); and compression of sediments. 5.6 x 10^26 joules is enough to heat the oceans to boiling. 3.7 x 10^27 joules will vaporize them completely. Since steam and air have a lower heat capacity than water, the steam released will quickly raise the temperature of the atmosphere over 1000 C. At these temperatures, much of the atmosphere would boil off the Earth. Aside from losing its atmosphere, Earth can only get rid of heat by radiating it to space, and it can't radiate significantly more heat than it gets from the sun unless it is a great deal hotter than it is now. (It is very nearly at thermal equilibrium now.) If there weren't many millions of years to radiate the heat from the above processes, the earth would still be unlivably hot. As shown in section 5, all the mechanisms proposed for causing the Flood already provide more than enough energy to vaporize it as well. These additional factors only make the heat problem worse. How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence of fossils in the deposits? Roughly 1.5 x 10^15 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. [Poldervaart, 1955] A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits. All the carbon in the formations was once carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter [Bignot, 1985]. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. [Twenhofel, 1961] In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter. How could the Flood deposit layers of solid salt? Such layers are sometimes meters in width, interbedded with sediments containing marine fossils. This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and have characteristic fossils on either side. Therefore, if the fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there are, it seems, only two choices: (1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at the same time, during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or (2) the salt is a later intrusion. I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils. [Jackson et al, 1990] How were sedimentary deposits recrystalized and plastically deformed in the short time since the Flood? The stretched pebble conglomerate in Death Valley National Monument (Wildrose Canyon Rd., 15 mi. south of Hwy. 190), for example, contains streambed pebbles metamorphosed to quartzite and stretched to 3 or more times their original length. Plastically deformed stone is also common around salt diapirs [Jackson et al, 1990]. How were hematite layers laid down? Standard theory is that they were laid down before Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen. In an oxygen-rich regime, they would almost certainly be impossible. How do you explain fossil mineralization? Mineralization is the replacement of the original material with a different mineral. * Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly mineralized, including some that biblical archaeology says are quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the earth in this diluvian geology. For example, remains of Egyptian commoners buried near the time of Moses aren't extensively mineralized. * Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite variable mineralization. * Dinosaur remains are often extensively mineralized. * Trilobite remains are usually mineralized - and in different sites, fossils of the same species are composed of different materials. How are these observations explained by a sorted deposition of remains in a single episode of global flooding? How does a flood explain the accuracy of "coral clocks"? The moon is slowly sapping the earth's rotational energy. The earth should have rotated more quickly in the distant past, meaning that a day would have been less than 24 hours, and there would have been more days per year. Corals can be dated by the number of "daily" growth layers per "annual" growth layer. Devonian corals, for example, show nearly 400 days per year. There is an exceedingly strong correlation between the "supposed age" of a wide range of fossils (corals, stromatolites, and a few others -- collected from geologic formations throughout the column and from locations all over the world) and the number of days per year that their growth pattern shows. The agreement between these clocks, and radiometric dating, and the theory of superposition is a little hard to explain away as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in a 300-day-long flood. [Rosenberg & Runcorn, 1975; Scrutton, 1965; Wells, 1963] Where were all the fossilized animals when they were alive? Schadewald [1982] writes: "Scientific creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the remains of animals that perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in 'fossil graveyards' as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood. "Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate [land] fossils on earth. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded." A thousand kilometers' length of arctic coastal plain, according to experts in Leningrad, contains about 500,000 tons of tusks. Even assuming that the entire population was preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia had wall-to-wall mammoths before this "event." Even if there was room physically for all the large animals which now exist only as fossils, how could they have all coexisted in a stable ecology before the Flood? Montana alone would have had to support a diversity of herbivores orders of magnitude larger than anything now observed. Where did all the organic material in the fossil record come from? There are 1.16 x 10^13 metric tons of coal reserves, and at least 100 times that much unrecoverable organic matter in sediments. A typical forest, even if it covered the entire earth, would supply only 1.9 x 10^13 metric tons. [Ricklefs, 1993, p. 149] How do you explain the relative commonness of aquatic fossils? A flood would have washed over everything equally, so terrestrial organisms should be roughly as abundant as aquatic ones (or more abundant, since Creationists hypothesize greater land area before the Flood) in the fossil record. Yet shallow marine environments account for by far the most fossils. References Andrews, J. E., 1988. Soil-zone microfabrics in calcrete and in desiccation cracks from the Upper Jurassic Purbeck Formation of Dorset. Geological Journal 23(3): 261-270. Bignot, G., 1985. Micropaleontology Boston: IHRDC, p. 75. Clemmenson, L.B. and Abrahamsen, K., 1983. Aeolian stratification in desert sediments, Arran basin (Permian), Scotland. Sedimentology 30: 311-339. Crimes, Peter, and Mary L Droser, 1992. Trace fossils and bioturbation: the other fossil record. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 23: 339-360. Cristie, R.L., and McMillan, N.J. (eds.), 1991. Tertiary fossil forests of the Geodetic Hills, Axel Heiberg Island, Arctic Archipelago, Geological Survey of Canada, Bulletin 403., 227pp. Dawson, J.W., 1868. Acadian Geology. The Geological Structure, Organic Remains, and Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, 2nd edition. MacMillan and Co.: London, 694pp. Donohoe, H.V. Jr. and Grantham, R.G. (eds.), 1989. Geological Highway Map of Nova Scotia, 2nd edition. Atlantic Geoscience Society, Halifax, Nova Scotia. AGS Special Publication no. 1, 1:640 000. Eyles, N. and Miall, A.D., 1984, Glacial Facies. IN: Walker, R.G., Facies Models, 2nd edition. Geoscience Canada, Reprint Series 1: 15-38. Ferguson, Laing, 1988. The fossil cliffs of Joggins. Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Fezer, Karl D., 1993. "Creationism: Please Don't Call It Science" Creation/Evolution, 13:1 (Summer 1993), 45-49. Gansser, A., 1964. Geology of the Himalayas, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., New York. Gastaldo, R. A., 1990, Early Pennsylvanian swamp forests in the Mary Lee coal zone, Warrior Basin, Alabama. in R. A. Gastaldo et. al., Carboniferous Coastal Environments and Paleocommunities of the Mary Lee Coal Zone, Marion and Walker Counties, Alabama. Guidebook for the Field Trip VI, Alabama Geological Survey, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. pp. 41-54. Gilette, D.D. and Lockley, M.G. (eds.), 1989. Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 454pp. Gore, Rick, 1993. Dinosaurs. National Geographic, 183(1) (Jan. 1993): 2-54. Grieve, R. A. F., 1997. Extraterrestrial impact events: the record in the rocks and the stratigraphic record. Palaeogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology 132: 5-23. Hubert, J.F., and Mertz, K.A., Jr., 1984. Eolian sandstones in Upper Triassic-Lower Jurassic red beds of the Fundy Basin, Nova Scotia. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, 54: 798-810. Jackson, M.P.A., et al., 1990. Salt diapirs of the Great Kavir, Central Iran. Geological Society of America, Memoir 177, 139pp. James, N. P. & P. W. Choquette (eds.), 1988. Paleokarst, Springer-Verlag, New York. Kocurek, G., and Dott, R.H., 1981. Distinctions and uses of stratification types in the interpretation of eolian sand. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, 51(2): 579-595. Miall, A. D., 1996. The Geology of Fluvial Deposits, Springer-Verlag, New York. Moore, James R., 1973. "Charles Lyell and the Noachian Deluge", in Dundes, 1988, The Flood Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley. Newell, N., 1982. Creation and Evolution, Columbia U. Press, p. 62. Poldervaart, Arie, 1955. Chemistry of the earth's crust. pp. 119-144 In: Poldervaart, A., ed., Crust of the Earth, Geological Society of America Special Paper 62, Waverly Press, MD. Reinhardt, J., and Sigleo, W.R. (eds.), 1989. Paleosols and weathering through geologic time: principles and applications. Geological Society of America Special Paper 216, 181pp. Ricklefs, Robert, 1993. The Economy of Nature, W. H. Freeman, New York. Robb, A. J. III, 1992. Rain-impact microtopography (RIM); an experimental analogue for fossil examples from the Maroon Formation, Colorado. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 62(3): 530-535. Rosenberg, G. D. & Runcorn, S. K. (Eds), 1975. Growth rhythms and the history of the earth's rotation. Willey Interscience, New York. Schadewald, Robert, 1982. Six 'Flood' arguments Creationists can't answer. Creation/Evolution 9: 12-17. Schmitz, B., B. Peucker-Ehrenbrink, M. Lindstrom, & M. Tassinari, 1997. Accretion rates of meteorites and cosmic dust in the Early Ordovician. Science 278: 88-90. Scrutton, C. T., ( 1964 ) 1965. Periodicity in Devonian coral growth. Palaeontology, 7(4): 552-558, Plates 86-87. Short, D. A., J. G. Mengel, T. J. Crowley, W. T. Hyde and G. R. North, 1991. Filtering of Milankovitch Cycles by Earth's Geography. Quaternary Research. 35, 157-173. (Re an independent method of dating the Green River formation) Stewart, W.N., 1983. Paleontology and the Evolution of Plants. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 405pp. Thackray, G. D., 1994. Fossil nest of sweat bees (Halictinae) from a Miocene paleosol, Rusinga Island, western Kenya. Journal of Paleontology 68(4): 795-800. Twenhofel, William H., 1961. Treatise on Sedimentation, Dover, p. 50-52. Weast, Robert C., 1974. Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 55th edition, CRC Press, Cleveland, OH. Wells, J. W., 1963. Coral growth and geochronometry. Nature 197: 948-950. Whitcomb, J.C. Jr. & H.M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia PA. Wilson, J. L., 1975. Carbonate Facies in Geologic History. Springer-Verlag, New York. Wright, V. P. (ed.), 1986. Paleosols: Their Recognition and Interpretation, Princeton University Press, New Jersey. Wright, V. P., 1994. Paleosols in shallow marine sequences. Earth-Science Reviews, 37: 367-395. See also pp. 135-137. Yun, Zhang, 1989. Multicellular thallophytes with differentiated tissues from Late Proterozoic phosphate rocks of South China. Lethaia 22: 113-132. Yuretich, Richard F., 1984. Yellowstone fossil forests: New evidence for burial in place, Geology 12, 159-162. See also Fritz, W.J. & Yuretich, R.F., Comment and reply, Geology 20, 638-639. Zimmer, Carl, 1992. Peeling the big blue banana. Discover 13(1): 46-47. 8. Species Survival and Post-Flood Ecology "He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground," the Bible says (Gen 7:23). If the Flood was as described, that must have been an understatement. How did all the modern plant species survive? * Many plants (seeds and all) would be killed by being submerged for a few months. This is especially true if they were soaked in salt water. Some mangroves, coconuts, and other coastal species have seed which could be expected to survive the Flood itself, but what of the rest? * Most seeds would have been buried under many feet (even miles) of sediment. This is deep enough to prevent spouting. * Most plants require established soils to grow--soils which would have been stripped by the Flood. * Some plants germinate only after being exposed to fire or after being ingested by animals; these conditions would be rare (to put it mildly) after the Flood. * Noah could not have gathered seeds for all plants because not all plants produce seeds, and a variety of plant seeds can't survive a year before germinating. [Garwood, 1989; Benzing, 1990; Densmore & Zasada, 1983] Also, how did he distribute them all over the world? How did all the fish survive? Some require cool clear water, some need brackish water, some need ocean water, some need water even saltier. A flood would have destroyed at least some of these habitats. How did sensitive marine life such as coral survive? Since most coral are found in shallow water, the turbidity created by the runoff from the land would effectively cut them off from the sun. The silt covering the reef after the rains were over would kill all the coral. By the way, the rates at which coral deposits calcium are well known, and some highly mature reefs (such a the great barrier) have been around for millions of years to be deposited to their observed thickness. Coral dies below a certain depth. How did diseases survive? Many diseases can't survive in hosts other than humans. Many others can only survive in humans and in short-lived arthropod vectors. The list includes typhus, measles, smallpox, polio, gonorrhea, syphilis. For these diseases to have survived the Flood, they must all have infected one or more of the eight people aboard the Ark. Other animals aboard the ark must have suffered from multiple diseases, too, since there are other diseases specific to other animals, and the nonspecific diseases must have been somewhere. Host-specific diseases which don't kill their host generally can't survive long, since the host's immune system eliminates them. (This doesn't apply to diseases such as HIV and malaria which can hide from the immune system.) For example, measles can't last for more than a few weeks in a community of less than 250,000 [Keeling & Grenfell, 1997] because it needs nonresistant hosts to infect. Since the human population aboard the ark was somewhat less than 250,000, measles and many other infectious diseases would have gone extinct during the Flood. Smallpox is an example. Some diseases that can affect a wide range of species would have found conditions on the Ark ideal for a plague. Avian viruses, for example, would have spread through the many birds on the ark. Other plagues would have affected the mammals and reptiles. Even these plague pathogens, though, would have died out after all their prospecive hosts were either dead or resistant. How did short-lived species survive? Adult mayflies on the ark would have died in a few days, and the larvae of many mayflies require shallow fresh running water. Many other insects would face similar problems. How could more than a handful of species survive in a devastated habitat? The Flood would have destroyed the food and shelter which most species need to survive. How did predators survive? How could more than a handful of the predator species on the ark have survived, with only two individuals of their prey to eat? All of the predators at the top of the food pyramid require larger numbers of food animals beneath them on the pyramid, which in turn require large numbers of the animals they prey on, and so on, down to the primary producers (plants etc.) at the bottom. And if the predators survived, how did the other animals survive being preyed on? How could more than a handful of species survive random influences that affect populations? Isolated populations with fewer than 20 members are usually doomed even when extraordinary measures are taken to protect them. [Simberloff, 1988] References Benzing, D. H., 1990. Vascular Epiphytes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Densmore, R. and J. Zasada, 1983. Seed dispersal and dormancy patterns in northern willows: ecological and evolutionary significance. Canadian Journal of Botany 61: 3207-3216. Garwood, N. C., 1989. Tropical soil seed banks: a review. pp. 149-209 In: Leck, M. A., V. T. Parker, and R. L. Simpson (eds.), Ecology of Soil Seed Banks, Academic Press, San Diego Keeling, M.J. & B.T. Grenfell, 1997. Disease extinction and community size: modeling the persistence of measles. Science 275: 65-67. Simberloff, Daniel, 1988. The contribution of population and community biology to conservation science. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 19: 473-511. 9. Species Distribution and Diversity How did animals get to their present ranges? How did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the Arctic, sloths to Central America, etc., when the kinds of environment they require to live doesn't exist between the two points. How did so many unique species get to remote islands? How were ecological interdependencies preserved as animals migrated from Ararat? Did the yucca and the yucca moth migrate together across the Atlantic? Were there, a few thousand years ago, unbroken giant sequoia forests between Ararat and California to allow indigenous bark and cone beetles to migrate? Fig trees and fig wasps are totally interdependent. Why are so many animals found only in limited ranges? Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in Indonesia? Why are lemurs limited to Madagascar? The same argument applies to any number of groups of plants and animals. Why is inbreeding depression not a problem in most species? Harmful recessive alleles occur in significant numbers in most species. (Humans have, on average, 3 to 4 lethal recessive alleles each.) When close relatives breed, the offspring are more likely to be homozygous for these harmful alleles, to the detriment of the offspring. Such inbreeding depression still shows up in cheetahs; they have about 1/6th the number of motile spermatozoa as domestic cats, and of those, almost 80% show morphological abnormalities. [O'Brien et al, 1987] How could more than a handful of species survive the inbreeding depression that comes with establishing a population from a single mating pair? References O'Brien, S. J., D. E. Wildt, M. Bush, T. M. Caro, C. FitzGibbon, I. Aggundey & R. E. Leakey, 1987. East African cheetahs: Evidence for two population bottlenecks? Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84: 508-511. 10. Historical Aspects Why is there no mention of the Flood in the records of Egyptian or Chinese civilizations which existed at the time? Biblical dates (I Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation lengths given in Genesis) place the Flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first temple. We can construct reliable chronologies for near Eastern history, particularly for Egypt, from many kinds of records from the literate cultures in the near East. These records are independent of, but supported by, dating methods such as dendrochronology and carbon-14. The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B.C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood around 2250 B.C. Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have written records dating well back before 2250 B.C. (the Great Pyramid, for example dates to the 26th century B.C., 300 years before the Biblical date for the Flood). No sign in Egyptian inscriptions of this global flood around 2250 B.C. How did the human population rebound so fast? Geneologies in Genesis put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19]. How did the world population regrow so fast to make its construction (and the city around it) possible? Similarly, there would have been very few people around to build Stonehenge and the Pyramids, found the Sumarian and Indus Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc. Why do other flood myths vary so greatly from the Genesis account? Flood myths are fairly common worldwide, and if they came from a common source, we should expect similarities in most of them. Instead, the myths show great diversity. [Bailey, 1989, pp. 5-10; Isaak, 1997] For example, people survive on high land or trees in the myths about as often as on boats or rafts, and no other flood myth includes a covenant not to destroy all life again. Why should we expect Genesis to be accurate? We know that other people's sacred stories change over time [Baaren, 1972] and that changes to the Genesis Flood story have occurred in later traditions [Ginzberg, 1909; Utley, 1961]. Is it not reasonable to assume that changes occurred between the story's origin and its being written down in its present form? References Baaren, Th. P., 1972. The flexibility of myth. Studies in the History of Religions, 22: 199-206. Reprinted in Dundes, A. (ed), 1984, Sacred Narrative, University of California Press, Berkeley. Bailey, Lloyd R., 1989. Noah: the person and the story in history and tradition. University of South Carolina Press, SC. Ginzberg, Louis, 1909. The Legends of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 145-169, Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia. Reprinted as "Noah and the Flood in Jewish legend" in: Dundes, Alan (ed.), 1988. The Flood Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, pp. 319-336. Isaak, Mark, 1997. Flood stories from around the world. http://www.talkorigins.org/faq/flood-myths.html. Utley, Francis Lee, 1961. Internationaler Kongress der Volkserzahlungsforscher in Kiel und Kopenhagen, pp. 446-463, Walter De Gruyter, Berlin. Reprinted as "The Devil in the Ark (AaTh 825)" in: Dundes, Alan (ed.), 1988. The Flood Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, pp. 337-356. 11. Logical, Philosophical, and Theological Points Are flood models consistent with the Bible? Creationists who write about the Flood often contradict the very story they're trying to support. For example, Whitcomb & Morris [1961, p. 69n] suggest that large numbers of kinds of land animals became extinct because of the Flood, while Genesis repeatedly says that Noah was ordered to take a representative sample of all kinds of land animals on the Ark to save them from extinction, and that Noah did as ordered. Woodmorappe [1996, p. 3] wants to leave invertebrates (i.e., just about "every creeping thing on the ground") off the ark. Why should we give credence to a story whose most ardent supporters abandon when it's inconvenient? How can a literal interpretation be appropriate if the text is self-contradictory? Genesis 6:20 and 7:14-15 say there were two of each kind of fowl and clean beasts, yet Genesis 7:2-3,5 says they came in sevens. How can a literal interpretation be consistent with reality? How could Noah have gathered male and female of each kind [Gen. 7:15-16] when some species are asexual, others are parthenogenic and have only females, and others (such as earthworms) are hermaphrodites? And what about social animals like ants and termites which need the whole nest to survive? Why stop with the Flood story? If your style of Biblical interpretation makes you take the Flood literally, then shouldn't you also believe in a flat and stationary earth? [Dan. 4:10-11, Matt. 4:8, 1 Chron. 16:30, Psalms 93:1, ...] In fact, is there any reason at all why the Flood story should be taken literally? Jesus used parables; why wouldn't God do so, too? Does a global flood make the whole Bible less credible? Davis Young, an Evangelical and geologist, wrote [p. 163]: "The maintenance of modern creationism and Flood geology not only is useless apologetically with unbelieving scientists, it is harmful. Although many who have no scientific training have been swayed by creationist arguments, the unbelieving scientist will reason that a Christianity that believes in such nonsense must be a religion not worthy of his interest. . . . Modern creationism in this sense is apologetically and evangelistically ineffective. It could even be a hindrance to the gospel. "Another possible danger is that in presenting the gospel to the lost and in defending God's truth we ourselves will seem to be false. It is time for Christian people to recognize that the defense of this modern, young-Earth, Flood-geology creationism is simply not truthful. It is simply not in accord with the facts that God has given. Creationism must be abandoned by Christians before harm is done. . . What moral laws did pre-flood people disobey? Were people after the flood more moral? ." == G. Brent Dalrymple studied core samples from a large collection of recently erupted magmas. The point was to see the rate of outgassing, and also see what the amount of retention of Ar as a function of depth into lava flows. Absolute dates are the hard part. Radiometric ages are in U-Pb years, or U-Th years, or fission-track years, or whatever the method you are using is. Because it has worked out that the different types of dating give the same ages, the interpretation of radiometric ages as calendar ages is defensible. The mainstream view of geology is not some sort of politically forced viewpoint. Indeed, while you may believe that your ideas are original, they really are things that mainstream scientist have thought of and have abandoned. Indeed, one example is the search for contacts for the Flood. Much of the early efforts of geologists was spent trying to describe and explain geology in terms of a worldwide Flood, because, of the tradition that those investigators were brought up in. Being honest investigators, however, geologists were forced to abandon the Flood completely when those ideas simply didn't stack up against observations. There actually would have to be two flood contacts---one at the top of the flood layer and one at the bottom. So, you have the basement---the rock below the sediments---, but on top you have nothing. There is no identifiable boundary between something that can be called "the Flood" and later sediments. That is the great disappointment that geologists of the 19th century faced. Of course. However, we are not talking "simultaneous" to the second, but within a windows of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or a few millions of years. In the case of the Permo-Triassic boundary, there were massive flood basalts in Siberia, as well as eruptions in what is now Texas. These eruptions spanned several millions of years at or near the boundary of the upper Permian, and the lower Triassic. There were others as well spanning the same time, but these two sets are the best known. Incidentally there are kilometer thick deposits of flood basalts in Siberia. Such a basalt would still be hot and molten in its interior if your short timetable were correct. Indeed, rocks cool because of their thermal conductivities---no amount of external cooling will change the maximum rate at which the interior of a molten body can cool. All of those eruptions did happen simultaneously, on the scale of geologic time, and within the time resolution of radiometric dating. Indeed, if you consider all of the eruptions over the past 1000 years or 10,000 years, then the globe is covered with simultaneously erupted volcanic material. So, no, there is nothing anomalous about the global availablility of volcanic for radiometric dating in older rock units, it's pretty much what we see today. The point is that because we have no mechanism to make the dates be skewed in a systematic way. We are forced to trust the dates as being the ages of the events. There is no scientific alternative. Indeed, when we consider the formation of such deposits as the Permian aged sand sea deposits in the western US, or the thick limestone sequences that exist around the world, both which require lengthy times for formation, a long time span is implied from the basic assumptions of geology. (With tree rings alone, we can refute any and all 6000 year timetables easily.) The homogenization of metamorphic rocks is rare. The homogenization of igneous melts is a given. Changing the initial D/Di ratio simply slides the isochron up or down, it does not change the slope of the curve. The slope is what gives the age. Glen Morton is a geophysicist who has carefully examined many of the claims of so-called creation scientists. He used to to be a young-earth gobal-flood creation scientist in league with ICR, but after many years in the oil industry he found that the majority of the ideas of so-called creation scientists are not in accordance with what is observed in geology. == In order for decay rates to change, not just one but *several* well studied physical constants would have to change. And if those physical constants were to change more than an infinitesimal amount, particles like the proton and neutron would be impossible -- let alone stars and planets. == When the gods decided to destroy humankind by flood, their intentions was transmitted to Ziusudra, a human priest-king. Although the information is missing, but on the basis of the Babylonian flood story, it assumed that Ziusudra build a huge boat and saved himself, his family and animals and birds. In any case, the story picks up after the flood had raged for seven days and seven nights and the sun god, Utu, broke forth from the clouds to warm the earth. It should be noted that the number seven will appear over and over again in Near Eastern literature where it serves as a symbol of completion. After Ziusudra prostrated himself and made sacrificial offerings of sheep and cattle to the gods, he was given "life like a god" (immortality) and was transported to Dilmun, the earthly paradise where the "sun rises." The flood story was later retold with a new hero in the epic story of Gilgamesh, the fifth king of the dynasty of Uruk according the Sumerian King List. The story relates the royal search for meaning and purpose in life--a search for human identy. According to the epic, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (ancient Erech), was the offspring of a goddess (Aruru) and a human father. He violated his regal role as shepherd of the people and abused his subjects. When they appealed to the gods, Aruru created an alter ego named Enkidu who was a man of the wilds who ran with the animals and freed them from hunders' traps. His work interfered with the work of the trappers and hunters who complained to Gilgamesh, who dispatched a temple harlot to woo Enkidu away from his animal associations. After spending seven days and seven nights with the woman (again the symbolic number seven appears), Enkidu found that he was no longer acceptable to the animals; he had joined the human family. When he learned of Gilgamesh's bullying behavior, he was incensed and decided to go to Uruk to confront the king. The temple prostitute clothed him with part of her skirt and taught him how to eat as a human." This material is from Gerald Larue's book: Freethought across the Centuries: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment == One interesting case is Glenn Morton, who wrote many articles for the ICS and remained a Creationist right through his geology degree, until he actually started working with seismic data and realised that *conventional* geology produced the oil whereas "creationist geology" produced only contradictions. He is still a creationist, in that he is a Bible-believing Christian, but he no longer accepts the young-earth global-flood ideas of the scientific creationist movement. The source rocks for petroleum are generally shales and sometimes limestones, which have a high concentration of organic material. These invariably are adjacent to the reservoir rock sequences. This is pretty obvious when you look at the geology. It is ad hoc, because the last time you mentioned this, you predicted that there would be no fossils in your alleged flood sequences. Now that you know that there are fossils, you are having to make up gentle places in the flood. We are talking about fossils that, in their original plant form were as delicate as paper. You were predicting that there would be no fossils. Indeed, because we may obtain the same appearance of the coal by normal (no global flood) deposition and post-depositional compaction and heating, there mainstream geologist's explanation is still the better one. Actually, you have quite a disparity to explain. These anthracite fields are Mississippian-Pensylvanian and Permian. Furthermore, what is seen are the same rock types, in the same order as are seen in non-anthracite coal deposits. It is not single layers that are correlated, but large collections of rock layers. Unfortunately, there is no such pre-flood post-flood candidate horizon that is visible in the geologic record. Unfortunately, the labels are not simply labels, they are descriptions of the rock units. You cannot make one geologic age into another without introducing an inconsistency into your description of geology. How about soft coals that grade into hard coals? If you increase the deposition by putting an extremely large quantity of sediment into the water, you change the appearance of the resulting sedimentary rock in a predictable way. Yet, the rocks do not appear to be the result of that type of deposition. Interpreting a rock unit as being the result of a catastrophic process is justified only if the character of the rock is in agreement with that interpretation. Most of the sedimentary rock sequences do not have that appearance, which is why geologists do not go for catastrophic interpretations. If the conditions are different, then the resulting rock types will tell us that they have been that way. The rocks are not consistent with catastrophic scenarios, in general. Geologists have performed similar experiments. The problem is that the grainsize distribution from a turbidity current type deposit is different from what we seen for most of geology. You will notice in your container of sediments that you have the large grains on the bottom and smaller grains on top. This is graded bedding. Now, some graded bedding is observed. These are highly locallized deposits consistent with the typical environments where we see modern turbidites. The majority of the geologic section does not consist of such deposits. This includes the majority of the rock where you want your flood to be. == Henry M. Morris, the dean of Scientific Creationism, argued that some aspects of the geological record might be "explained" by God miraculously guiding carcasses and sediments to settle, from the Flood, in places in which He, for His ineffable reasons, wanted them. The "appearance of age" argument for the apparent signs of an old Earth has been around since Gosse in the mid-19th century. So there are reasons to suspect (especially when you never say what evidence a global flood should leave) to think that "supernatural causes" are distinguished by their compatibility with *any* sort of empirical consequences. But I do not think that Baldwin meant that. Let us suppose that we did indeed find, in the geological record, "empirical consequences" explicable by no known geological phenomenon. All that would show is that it must be the result of some unknown cause; an unknown natural cause is surely as reasonable an assumption as a miracle. But let us suppose further that we found exactly the evidence that we would expect from covering the Earth's entire surface by some hydraulic cataclysm. Then we would have evidence for a global flood -- and no known or even easily conceivable natural mechanism for producing such a flood. But that would *not* establish that some unknown regularity of nature, rarely seen on this planet, did not produce the Flood. The problem is that we aren't nearly ignorant enough of the effects of a global flood for this to be true. We certainly ought to be able to spot the differences between sediments laid down in a year-long catastrophe as opposed to those laid down during the 600 million years of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Tertiary periods (the sediments usually attributed to the flood by "flood geologists"). That is, different causes can produce the same effect. Can you cite examples, or are you guessing? And again, this is irrelevant, unless you want to argue order to hide the evidence of His miracles. A young Earth should not have different layers of igneous rock yielding different isochron dates. A global flood should not sort fossils phylogenically rather than by size and shape. It ought to be easy to distinguish the empirical effects of the causes you wish to be considered. Now all you need to do as either tell us what the empirical consequences of the creation model are, or accept the judgment of the generations of scientists (many of the Christians, some of them creationists) who concluded and remain convinced that the Earth is very old, and there was no global flood. Show me the distinctive predictions of the creation model that have not been falsified == I would think the results of a flood would be so discernable. After all, the geological column was discovered, and its interpretation as the result of millions of years of various processes rather than that of a year-long hydraulic cataclysm established by, creationists who started out as believers in such a flood == Another Christian scientist said, "Creationism is an incredible pain in the neck, neither honest nor useful, and the people who advocate it have no idea how much damage they are doing to the credibility of belief." [quoted in Easterbrook, 1997, p. 891] Does the Flood story indicate an omnipotent God? If God is omnipotent, why not kill what He wanted killed directly? Why resort to a roundabout method that requires innumerable additional miracles? The whole idea was to rid the wicked people from the world. Did it work? Finally, even if the flood model weren't riddled by all these problems, why should we accept it? What it does attempt to explain is already explained far more accurately, consistently, and thoroughly by conventional geology and biology, and the flood model leaves many other things unexplained, even unexplainable. How is flood geology useful? References Easterbrook, Gregg, 1997. Science and God: a warming trend? Science 277: 890-893. Whitcomb, J.C. Jr. & H.M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia PA. Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's ark: A feasibility study. Institute for Creation Research, Santee, California. Young, Davis, 1988. Christianity and the Age of the Earth. Artisan Sales, Thousand Oaks, CA. Acknowledgements I thank the following people for their contributions and helpful comments: Bob Grumbine, Joel J. Hanes, Paul V. Heinrich, Bill Hyde, William H. Jefferys, Andrew MacRae, Thomas Marlowe, Glenn R. Morton, Chris Nedin, Kevin L. O'Brien, Chris Stassen -- Mark Isaak atta@best.com http://www.best.com/~atta ====== According to some Flood geologists, most of the fossils found in the Earths geology were killed and buried in the Flood. Given that most diatoms, coccoliths, forams, and radiolaria are extinct, fossil species, I just assumed this meant they lived and died during the Flood, along with all the other fossil creatures that supposedly lived and died then, but you are right. I suppose some of them could have lived beforehand. If so, it is rather puzzling,though, that some of them only show up until fairly late in the Flood stratigraphy (e.g., diatoms and coccoliths do not show up until the Jurassic), while others are quite early (e.g., forams and radiolaria are found in the Cambrian), and they all show beautiful fossil succession. Where do you think these vast volumes of skeletons were prior to the Flood, if they were not produced during it? And how did they get so neatly ordered (there is good documentation of the stratigraphic order in Lipps (1993))? Bold, H.C. and Wynne, M.J., 1985. Introduction to the Algae: Structure and Reproduction. Second Edition. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, 720pp.Lipps, J.H. (ed.), 1993. Fossil Prokaryotes and Protists. Blackwell Scientific Publications: Boston, 342 pp. Problems exist for the thick deposits of foraminiferal, radiolarian, and coccolith oozes that are found here and there on the Earths surface (e.g., chalk), and are also composed primarily of vast numbers of microscopic planktonic skeletons (there is good documentation of these others microfossil groups in Lipps (1993), among other places). These tiny skeletons settle out of the water column very slowly (think of how fast clay settles out of water), even assuming that they could be produced in the huge numbers needed in the short time of the Flood. The chalk cliffs of Dover, England, are about 300 feet high. == If a person studies the documented examples of catastrophic floods, especially the Channeled Scablands, they find that a truly catastrophic one simply does not carve a narrow, sinuous assymetrical canyon. Rather, it would spread out and scour a large area. This is also seen in the Martian images that are interpreted to be landforms created by massive floods.The surroundings of the Grand Canyon show no trace of a flood. == Many plants are almost totally dependent upon insects for pollenization and reproduction.Some also depend on birds and animals.Such plants could not have survived for more than a single life cycle much less millions of years(again, plants came on day 3. Wasps and fig trees. The Darwin deep flower plant and butterfly with a matching tongue. == Flood Problems glk Eight people could not care for millions of species. Sloths would have a problem getting back to Cental America. A wooden boat the size of the Ark would collapse,with no iron nails or braces. The millions of species of plants and animals would not survive a year on the Ark and afterward, on a flood ruined world. Most require special fresh food. One olive tree can not feed many animals for very long. If all the stories about the Ararat region are true about the Ark, the whole area is one vast Ark parking lot. There are about 220,000 known plant species and millions of animal species, each requiring a special environment to survive. The Flood requires 5.5 miles of additional water and then you must get rid of it. The South pole ice caps contain 800,000 yearly layers of ice over older unlayered ice. The atmosphere has one inch of water vapor. The disease smallpox could not survive in only 8 people. Thus, the flood is a myth, not a physical event. The traditional date for the Flood is about 2300 BC, when pyramids were being built. There is too much genetic diversity in animals and people to have the populations reduced to only a few people, plants, and animals about 2300 BC.. The cave paintings of the ice age survive, over 30,000 years old. The physical evidence refutes the Flood story. The sea life and fresh water life could not survive a flood 5.5 miles deep. Olive trees could not live a year under water and do not grow on mountain tops. The world distribution of plants and animals does not reflect migration from Turkey about 2300 BC. There is no historical date which fits the flood story. The flood would have to be a mile deep to reach the base of the mountains of Ararat and 17,000 feet to reach the peaks. It would be 5.5 miles deep to cover Mt. Everest. The maximum possible evaporation rate is 160 inches of water a year. During the Flood, all the animals ran up a hill and the mammals ran fastest, then the reptiles, then the amphibians, then the fish and last all the trilobites died at the bottom of the hill. (Creationist explanation for the fossil distribution.) Tell me why the Australian animal and plant life are found nowhere else in the whole world. Jesus sinned when he lied about the flood, in Matthew. Where did the water came from or went, and how 8 people cared for millions of animals, and how special dietary needs of highly specialized insects were met, and how plant life survived, and how a primitive technology managed to build a boat the size of which the best wooden shipbuilders the world has ever had couldn't, and how koalas got to Australia while leaving neither their own bones nor any Eucalyptus trees behind them. If Noah really existed and was warned of a coming regional flood, then : 1. He and his family could flee to a distant and flood-safe place. There was no need to build a big ark and to consume so much resource and time on it. 2. You would not have expected such heavy words (of judgment and of annilation) direct from the mouth of God on all creation ; 3. The Bible would not have devoted so much space and detailed description to it if it's just a regional flood. A very few species of plants have seeds that can float for months in seawater and remain viable. Many plants have seeds with no dormancy; these would die right away. Many plants reproduce by spores, not seeds; some of these also lack dormancy. 1] There are large floods somewhere in the world almost every year-- so where are all the modern examples of flood-generated, floating rafts of live vegetation? Show us any evidence of months-old floating forests [there arent any]. 2] The salty water would kill nearly all species of plants apart from mangroves and other halophytes. Very few trees might possibly survive a brief flood this way, by floating but none would live and root after a year at sea. Besides, you have to argue for a _submerged_ survival of the olive [_Olea europea_], since the Biblical bird-returning-with-an-olive-sprig-as-the -sign-of-the-end-of-the-flood bit makes no sense if the olive twigs were always exposed as part of a floating forest. Theres another obvious experiment for the ICR: let them sink pots of seeds and whole potted plants of various species deep in an estuary, and tether others and let them float uprooted, and see if they can be made to grow after a year. Extremely few (if any) plants or seeds will still be alive. The veggie mats [even if they really formed and somehow magically didnt break up and sink] cant explain: 1] the survival of all the vast numbers of very salt-intolerant species; 2] all the many dampness-intolerant, desert-adapted species; 3] the many kinds of lichens and mosses, etc. that only grow attached to big rocks [its kinda hard to get them to float]; 4] the many plants restricted to the sheltered deep shade of rain forests; 5] the obligate symbioses like fig wasps and yucca moths, etc. You also completely fail to explain biogeography [Why are all the hundreds of Cactaceae only in the Americas, but African deserts have hundreds of superficially cactus-like _Euphorbia_ species, and the cactus-like family Didieriaceae exists only in Madagascar? Why are there hundreds of Eucalypts only in Australia?], paleobotany [why did no Lepidodendrons or other Paleozoic plants make it into the floating mats?], and paleopalynology [how does the dispersed fossil pollen and spore record show any strict taxonomicstratigraphicgeographic correlations [it does] if all strata were formed in a single flood? Why are there no pollen or spores in Precambrian or older Paleozoic strata? Pollen really gets around and sporopollenin is nearly indestructable; with the total lack of spores it sure looks like the strata were formed before land plants...]. If fossils formed during the flood and modern animals and plants arrived at their present distributions only after the flood, then tell us how it is that all the living kangaroos are now found in the only part of the world where fossil kangaroos are found [both wholly extinct types and types much like the living ones]? How did so many plants and animals dispersing after the flood somehow home to the only places where all their ancient kin were buried [presumably in flood sediments]? And why are there no traces of any typical Australian marsupials anywhere between Australia and the alleged ark landing site [Ararat, right?] How did the vertically migrating plankton masses, which incidently form the basis for the oceanic food chain, survive the upper layers of fresh water? This claim of a flat bottomed, square cornered boat is nonsense. Why do you think that ships are rounded and longer than they are wide? Flat surfaces are a lot weaker than compound curved surfaces, look at how a dome is self supporting but a flat roof needs lots of support. Also how would you waterproof a sharp corner composed of butted planks? A box shape is also a non-starter when it comes to stability. What makes you say it would be very stable and not easily capsized? Quite the opposite is true. Try ballasting a flat square boat, see what happens when a wave hits the flat hard side. Ships and boats are the shape they are because its the best shape for riding a swell and keeping the bow into a wind or current. Speed of cutting through the water has nothing to do with it. Cutting through waves is more important. The Genesis Flood: the biblical record and its scientific implications. (1961) By John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris. Baker Book House: Grand Rapids, Michigan. ISBN: 0-8010-9501-8. Genesis 7:21-23 Every living thing that moved on the face of the Earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the Earth, and all mankind. Everything that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the Earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the Earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. Consider the mayflies. These insects are classified in an order named Ephemerida, in recognition of their ephemeral existence. All but one or two days of their entire lives are spent as aquatic larvae. At last they emerge from the water, try out their new-found wings, perpetuate their race - and perish. How were these saved aboard the Ark? The following is a list from Noahs Ark A feasibilty Study Number of animals (Male & Female) present from each order-class on ark. Passeriformes 2,236 Squamata 1,938 Rodentia 1,746 Artiodactyla 1,144 Carnivora 696 Therapsida 508 Marsupialia 468 Perrissodactyla 436 Chiroptera 412 Primates 412 Insectivora 404 Saurischia 390 Gruiformes 280 Ornithischia 278 Apodiformes 276 Notoungulata 252 Edentata 250 Charadriiformes 208 Condylartha 198 Galliformes 176 Falconiformes 170 Psittaciformes 164 Captorhinida 152 Thecodontia 144 Piciformes 128 (add remaining 61 land-vertebrate orders 15,754 -- Noah begat his sons at the age of 500 (Genesis 5:32.) Gen 6:10 says And Noah begat three sons. It is not until Genesis 6:13 that God said Build a boat (Paraphrased.) So Noah was informed of the impending flood, and told to build the Ark after he begat his sons at the age of 500. Then in Genesis 7:6, it says that Noah was in his 600th year when the flood began "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." (2 Pet 3:5-7 KJV) KJV "all the high hills that were under the whole heaven, were covered" RSV "all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered." NIV "all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.".... Genesis 7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. KJV The Ararat mountains are 17,000 feet high. Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet high. Did the Nephilim survive the Flood or not? After the Flood, there is still mention of the Nephilim in the Bible. So did the Nephilim survive the flood, and if so how, or was there another outbreak of Nephilim? If there was another outbreak of Nephilim, were these different sons of God having sexual relations with daughters of men or what? So what happened to the sons of God that were the fathers of this new batch of Nephilim? Whatever happened to the Nephilim in the end? Did they all get wiped out? Did some survive? The Bible says that ONLY Noah and his family (those in the ark) survived the deluge. Ge 7:13,21,22 says, On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished--birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. (NIV) Thus no Nephilim survived. After the great earthwide flood, the word Nephilim appears at Num 13:33, We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them. (NIV) Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. (Genesis 7:22) I assume almost no vegetation survived the deluge so did Noah have to replant or reseed the entire world? There are about 220,000 known species of plants. -- The story of Noah in the bible is based on an earlier legend. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written by the Sumerians long before Genesis was written down. We have tablets dating as far back as 2000 BCE which contain portions of the Gilgamesh story, with the earliest surviving record of the flood dating to 1900 BCE. The Old Testament of the Bible was not pulled together until about 600 BCE from primarily oral tradition, and the oldest surviving versions of the Old Testament are even more recent than that. -- Assuming that the waters covered the tops of all the mountains (the tallest one being about 29,000 feet = 8,840 m, and that it did in fact rain 40 days, and 40 nights, that we would need to have 221 m of rain per day. The atmosphere can hold one inch of water on the average. -- The river flood on which the Sumerian flood myth was based occurred at the beginning of the Early Dynastic I Period which has been radiocarbon dated to 2900 BCE. Layers of flood debris have been found in Kish, Uruk, and Shuruppak (where Noah was king). But Ur and other cities were not flooded by the river flood of 2900 BCE. ----- The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story. Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, someone who built an watertight house to escape the flood. Gilgamesh actually met him, if you believe the story. Gilgamesh brought the story home. Utnapishtim describes exactly what he did before, after, and during the Flood. The hut of Utnapishtim is at least as physically possible as the Ark is, and had more room for animals. The earliest written records of Gilgaamesh are older than the earliest known written records of the Bible. Noah is always described by an unknown third party observer, and Noahs story has well known contradictions. As far as I can tell, neither Gilgamesh nor Utnapishtim had any ulterior motives for lying. The Sumerian Adam was known as Adapu. This is at least 2000 years previous, (original story must have started much earlier than this) Adapu was gonna go pay Anu a visit. Adapu was told by another God to not drink the water or eat the food when you see Adapu. Adapu was brought up to heaven by winged creatures.Adapu confronts Anu. Anu offers the water and the food. Adapu refuses. Anu says OK Send him back to Earth. -- I have seen the following positions frequently: 1. All mountains are young, but some date from before the flood. this is accompanied by amazing contortions of physics to explain where the water for the flood came from. 2. All mountains are young and all date from after the flood. That way much less water is required. All mountains like Everest arose in a matter of days after the flood. That's how they clam fossils got on top. 3. Plate tectonics is an evolutionist lie because the Earth isn't that old. However, all of the continents were in one place right after the flood, so the animals could get to them after they came out of the ark. The continents then zoomed to their present locations right after the flood. None of this rapid movement left any signs of having happened, and it didn't cause any distress to the passengers. "In the days of Peleg, the land was divided." If you stick around here long enough, you will see just about anything you can imagine proposed as the obvious and Biblically supported truth. -- Why do so many of the earths ancient cultures have flood legends? Because a lot of cultures lived close to rivers or estuaries. It turns out that most cultures DONT have a flood legend. Richard Andree did a comprehensive study of flood traditions in 1891 in Die Flutsagen: Ethnographicsh Betrachtet. He found no flood traditions in Arabia, China, Japan, northern and central Asia, Africa, and much of Europe. http:www.talkorigins.orgfaqsflood-myths.html http:www.best.com~attafloods.htm http:emporium.turnpike.netCcsarksld007.htm Noah flood http:www2.uic.edu~vuleticwilliam.html anti-flood http:www.christianseparatist.orgbriefssb4.05.htm flood http:home.flash.net~mortongrgeo.htm geology refuting the flood http:www.isource.net~grmortongflood.htm no world flood(fossils) http:trueorigin.orgarkdefen.htm flood defense http:www.infidels.orglibrarymagazinestsr199322noah93.html No Noah flood http:www.flood-myth.comcreation.htm Local flood http:www.ghgcorp.comhollawayflood.html pro-flood http:www.cs.unc.edu~plaisted pro-flood http:www.flood-myth.compitman -- COMPUTER MODELING OF THE LARGE-SCALE TECTONICS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GENESIS FLOOD JOHN R. BAUMGARDNER, Ph.D.(fundie) This paper uses 3-D numerical modeling in spherical geometry of the earths mantle and lithosphere to demonstrate that rapid plate tectonics driven by runaway subduction of the pre-Flood ocean floor is able to account for this unique pattern of large-scale tectonic change and to do so within the Biblical time frame. The next sentences after the above really should be something like, To achieve these results it is necessary to assume that mantle viscosity and other parameters took on some really weird values not actually observed in any modern rocks under any conditions of temperature and pressure, and later changed instantaneously to their current values. Other miracles are also liberally invoked. Is that how he deals with the heat? Continents plowing around at those speeds release quite a bit of heat. == Definitions: Micro-evolution: evolution for which the evidence is so overwhelming that even the ICR can't deny it. Macro-evolution: evolution which is only proven beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond unreasonable doubt. -- Now, if you add up all the begats, the Genesis deluge would have occurred in the year 2348 B.C. That's in the fifth Egyptian dynasty, the Yao dynasty of China and a few other prospering civilizations. If a worldwide flood occured that set down the geologic column as we know it, where did that layer of iridium come from at the K-T boundary? Why would the iridium have been distributed in that way rather than distributed through the sediments? Where did all the salt and other evaporites like gypsum and anhydrite come from? Anhydrite is CaSO4 with no H2O and formed under only hot dry surface conditions. == Source: http:www.reasons.orgresourcesbooksc_tc_t2.html Hugh Ross, Interpretations of Early Church Leaders, _Creation And Time: A Biblical And Scientific Perspective on the Creation-Date Controversy_ (1994). == Copied from http:www.isource.net~grmortongeo.htm This article is about the nature of the Haymond beds in Southwestern Texas. The issues which this raised might be of some interest. The Haymond beds onsist of over 15,000 alternating layers of sand and shale. The sands have several characteristic sedimentary features which are found on turbidite deposits. Turbidites are deep water deposits in which each and the shale covering it is deposited over a long period of time. The Haymond rock formation in the USA is only a portion of the sedimentary column, with other rock formations above and below it. Yet the Haymond formation, less than a mile thick but extending over a large area, contains more than 30,000 _alternating_ layers of shale and sandstone - two entirely different types of rock. Earle F. McBride (McBride, 1969, p. 87-88) writes: Two thirds of the Haymond is composed of a repetitious alternation of fine-grained and very fine-grained olive brown sandstone and black shale in beds from a millimeter to 5 cm thick. The formation is estimated to have more than 15,000 sandstone beds greater than 5 mm thick. p. 87. Tool-mark casts (chiefly groove casts), flute casts and flute-lineation casts are common current-formed sole marks. Trace fossils in the form of sand-filled burrows are present on every sandstone sole, but nearly absent within sandstone beds. p. 88 For the non-geologist who is reading this this means that the burrows are in many formations and are made by creatures with lots of time to dig their burrows. The sandstones are the catastrophic deposit which covers and fills in the burrows with sand. The fact that there are no burrows in the sand proves that the sand was deposited rapidly. The Haymond formation of SW Texas consists of 15,000 layers of sand separated by 15,000 layers of shale. Shale settles very, very slowly in water (go look up Stokes Law). Some shale particles would take 50 years to settle though 100 feet of water. The sands in the Haymond formation are believed to be deposited rapidly, but the shales are deposited very slowly due to the physics of small particles falling in a viscous fluid. How do we know that this is the case? Because of the sand filled animal burrows on the bottom of each sand layer. What happened was that animals burrowed into the shales. Then a turbidite brought a sand layer down on top of the shale, burying the animal and filling the burrows with sand. Then nothing happens except shale deposition. I pointed out that if the all the sedimentary record had to be deposited in a year long flood of Noah, then given that the entire geologic column in this area is 5000 meters thick, and that the Haymond beds are 1300 m thick 13005000*365 days = 95 days for the Haymond beds to be deposited. Since there are 15,000 of these layers, then 15,00095 days = 157 layers per day need to be deposited. The problem is that the animals which made the burrows mentioned above, need some time to re-colonize and re-burrow the shale. Is it really reasonable to believe that 157 times per day or 6.5 times per hour, for all the burrowers to be buried, killed, and a new group colonize above them for the process to be repeated? Even allowing for a daily cycle, would require 41 years for this deposit to be laid down. What I have done is the examine each of the layers in the Williston Basin of Montana, North Dakota and southern Canada. The entire geologic column exists in this locale (contrary to young-earth creationist claims) so there is not likely to be anything significant missing here. I might mention that some of the beds I will discuss are quite extensive, covering large parts of the Western United States. I mention this because some of the articles refer to regions where the rocks, deeply buried in North Dakota, come to the surface far from that area. The 'Flood geologist' looking at the Haymond formation has a problem. How did the Flood bring in a thin layer of sand and deposit it over a large area, then bring in a thin layer of clay and allow this to settle quietly - all in a matter of minutes? And then repeat the whole performance _fifteen thousand times_? -- Native Americans were living in Central Florida some 7000 years ago. See (http:www.nbbd.comgodohistorywindover) for an easily accessible account of the find. Mr. Wyatts, Noahs Ark has been recently published in the September 1996, Journal of Geological Education that is authored by Dr. L. Gene Collins, and David Franklin Fasold. The abstract of the article, in part, reads: A natural rock structure near Dogubayazit, Turkey, has been misindentified as Noahs Ark. Microscopic studies of a supposed iron bracket show that it is derived from weathered volcanic minerals. Supposed metal-braced walls are natural concentrations of limonite and magnetite in steeply inclined sedimentary layers in the limbs of a doubly plunging syncline . Supposed fossilized gopherwood bark bark is crinkled metamorphosed peridotite.. The feature that Mr. Wyatt claims to be Noahs Ark is nothing more than a doubly plunging syncline. What Mr. Wyatt considers to be the hull of the ship consists of peridotite, a rock too brittle and heavy to have been part of a ship. Finally, the boulders claimed to be the anchors stones of Noahs Ark were examined and found to be composed of a local volcanic rock, andesite, not found in Mespotamia (Collins and Fasold 1996). The citation for this article is: Collins, L. Gene, and David Franklin Fasold (1996) Bogus Noahs Ark from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geological Structure. Journal of Geological Education. vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 439-444.  Ron Wyatt did not discover Noah's ark. He has claimed that he found regular iron deposits and petrified wood in a large, vaguely boat-shaped depression on a mountaintop in Turkey. Neither of these claims have been duplicated by any other researchers and the equipment Wyatt used to determine the later is actually a piece of pseudoscientific chicanery akin to a dowsing rod. The depression was the approximate length of the ark, but not the same width. There are many similar depressions on nearby mountians caused by mud flow, see the link below for pictures. Here's an article from a religious website that believes the Bible is 100% correct, detailing the flaws in Wyatt's claims: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1154.asp Trees can live an astonishingly long time. "Methuselah," a 4,700 year old California bristlecone pine, was already around when the first stone was laid on the Great Pyramid. Methuselah's older friend, another bristlecone dubbed "Prometheus," was dated at more than 4,900 years old, They somehow survived the Flood. --- There's a bird here in New Zealand called the 'Kiwi'. It can't fly and neither can it swim very well. Now did Noah make it all the way to New Zealand to rescue the Kiwi or has it come to be in the years since the flood? If the Kiwi left the Ark, and walked back to New Zealand - not that it can of course - why aren't there pockets of Kiwi populations all the way from the Middle East to New Zealand? -- How did any South American animal make it from the Ark? Certainly not via the Atlantic --there is no island chain that could have constituted a land bridge. It is possible to move across the Pacific, and there is fossil evidence that indicates that such migrations did occur (but not, sadly, of modern sloths). So, obviously, after the Flood subsided, the llamas, vicunas, nutrias, etc. (and yes, sloths), trotted along what is now known as the Silk Route until they reached the east coast of Asia, skirted around the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, continued northward to the agreeable climate of 65 degrees north latitude, crossed the Bering Strait to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska, clambered through the Canadian Rockies, continued southward along the coast of California, the rain forests of Mexico and Central America, and the Panama isthmus, until they reached their destination. The journey, at the most moderate calculation, was at least 16,000 miles and covered an incredible variety of terrains and climates. It is rather curious that to date no vicuna remains have been found in Alaska or Siberia; but those areas are pretty big, after all, and they have lots of unexplored territory. -- Explain to me why the same "cat kinds" that are buried in the fossil record appear both *before* and *after* Noah's flood, when only one "cat kind" is said to have survived the flood onboard the ark? The sequence goes like this: Diversity before the flood. Flood. Diversity drowned and gone. One cat kind pair alive on the ark.Cat couple gets off the ark and repopulates the Earth. Diversity again. Why the same forms? What are the genetic mechanisms that allow this to happen? -- If the "global flood" was supposed to be a time of very rapid (e.g., a year) deposition of huge amounts of sediment (kilometers in some places),yes, it can not account for many types of sessile (i.e. attached) organisms that are found in life position at various levels in the Earth's stratigraphy, because if deposition was rapid the organisms would have been smothered long before they could have grown (unless growth rates were somehow thousands of times faster during the flood). The real problem is *not* quickly generating the hard (or firm, or soft) surfaces for the organisms to grow on, because there are many situations where hard sediment surfaces can develop relatively quickly, and it can perhaps be speculated that some analogous processes were operating in the midst of a global flood. The real problem is for the organisms to become established on those surfaces, grow to maturity, and get buried numerous times in the midst of a global flood that was supposed to be dumping kilometres of sediments on top in a year or so. Any pause in deposition for organisms to become established and grow -- and there would have to be a great many of them to account for the evidence -- would add time to the duration of the flood, or imply that the deposition in the intervening times was that much more rapid. Creationist experiments There was the fresh water/salt water aquarium that didn't work out too well. Supposedly, the "Dr." Hovind has someone planning to raise lizards on a pressurized, oxygen enriched terrarium so show that dino's were nothing more than big lizards that grew into dinosaurs because of the pre-flood higher O2 and pressure of the atmosphere. Strange but true. (His reasoning is that they use hyperbaric chambers to help people recover from various injuries. So obviously, hyperbaric conditions are good for you, and you will live hundreds of years, and will turn a fence lizard into a velocirapter, and a three horned chameleon into a triceratops! This chamber was observed in the Carl Baugh creation museum in Glen Rose, Texas. It contained no dinosaurs. == No Mt. Ararat is shown in maps or mentioned by early geographers. The present Mt. Ararat was apparently named relatively recently. == Wooley was mistaken in his claims of finding deposits from the Noah flood about 1925. The flood strata he found at Ur were deposited about 3500 BCE, but were found only at Ur and Nineveh. Deposits of a flood was about 2900 BCE and strata dated then were found at Shuruppak, at Kish, at Uruk, and possibly Lagash. The earliest version of the Noachian flood myth began about the time writing was invented about 2600 BCE which was in the Early Dynastic Period. Max Mallowan suggested that the river flood of 2900 BCE that preceded the Early Dynastic Period was the basis of the Noah's flood story. == Flood myth urls http:www.talkorigins.orgfaqsflood-myths.html http:www.pr.state.az.ustextpimalegend.html http:www.answersingenesis.orgdocs3768.asp http:www.rain.orgcamp96chumash_myth1.html http:www.chickasaw.netlibraryflood.htm http:www.google.comsearch?q=cache:www.cowichan.orglegendslegend2.html http:www.cybercomm.net~grandpacretion.html http:www.optonline.comcomptonsceo01680_A.html http:templar.bess.netComp_namesbookofgodscretion.html http:www.hist.unt.eduane-09.htm http:www.custance.orgflood2ch2.html http:www.mistral.co.ukhammerwoodelgin.htm http:www.civilization.camembrsfphhaidahappr01e.html http:www.isd.netmboucherchoctawfloodlgn.htm http:www.wolfe.net~archivech11.html http:www.ilhawaii.net~stonyloreindx.html http:www.across.co.nzChineseNoah.htm http:members.xoom.com_XOOMgideonsArticleshaloween.htm http:home.fireplug.net~rshandstreamsscienceflood.html http:www.novia.net~toddvray2.html http:www.pibburns.comflood.htm http:www.indians.orgwelkergreatflo.htm http:personal.eunet.fipptilmaritilmari4.htm http:www.dreamscape.commorganapuck.htm http:www.prestoweb.capeoples-churchhalloween.html http:indigo.ie~legendsdates.html http:cristalweb.comethnowater.html http:www.greece-info.netdeucaliondeucalion.html http:www.eagle-net.orgphikentorbitjunewaysun.html http:www.whitestag.orgceremoniesws_myth.html http:www.alchemylab.comhyper_history.htm http:www.rae.orgdragons.html http:members.tripod.com~Diogenes_MacLughages.html http:pubpages.unh.edu~cbsirenmyth.html http:www.theosophy-nw.orgtheosnwworldafricarel-rook.htm http:members.tripod.com~Pythiauranus.html http:carver.pinc.comhomecowichanlegendslegend2.html http:www.geocities.comAthensAcropolis8669hathor.html -- Egypt http:www.icr.orgpubsimpimp-083.htm http:www.robibrad.demon.co.ukflood.htm Davis A. Youngs The Genesis Flood: A Case Study of the Churchs Response to Extrabiblical Evidence. Flood geology was dead by 1830. Adam Sedgwick, an Anglican minister and president of the Royal Geological Society, said his own public recantation in 1831 as he stepped down as president. == The San Diego Zoo is on 100 acres of land, and only houses a tiny fraction of the species that exist on our planet. It is also run by hundreds of doctors, nutritionists, and volunteers. == Insects fact sheet As an idea of how many insects Noah would have had to take on the ark, here is a list of insect orders with the number of species in each (source - Natural History Museum): COLLEMBOLA: 6000 eg. springtails THYSANURA: 370 eg. silverfish EPHEMEROPTERA: 2100 eg. mayflies ODONATA: 5500 eg. dragonflies PLECOPTERA: 2000 eg. stoneflies BLATTODEA: 3700 eg. cockroaches ISOPTERA: 2300 eg. termites MANTODEA: 1800 eg. mantids DERMAPTERA: 1800 eg. earwigs ORTHOPTERA: 20500 eg. grasshoppers PHASMATODEA: 2500 eg. stick insects PSCOPTERA: 3200 eg. bark lice PHTHIRAPTERA: 3000 eg. biting lice HEMIPTERA: 82000 eg. aphids THYSANOPTERA: 5000 eg. thrips MEGALOPTERA: 250 eg. alderflies RAPHIDIOPTERA: 175 eg. snakeflies NEUROPTERA: 5000 eg. ant-lions COLEOPTERA: 400000 eg. beetles MECOPTERA: 400 eg. scorpion flies SIPHONAPTERA: 2400 eg. fleas DIPTERA: 120000 eg. fruit-flies TRICHOPTERA: 10000 eg. caddisflies LEPIDOPTERA: 150000 eg. butterflies HYMENOPTERA: 130000 eg. ants, bees giving a grand total of approx. 965,420 different species of described insects, about a million (and these are just the species known to western science. There could be another several million unknown species). Given a male and female, make that at least two million insects aboard the ark, ranging in size from a millimetre, up to six inches in size, many having extremely specialised requirements for life, (not to mention quite an appetite for eating other insects. -- Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992; Alley et al, 1993] Many creationists claim that all fossil-bearing sediments were laid down during the Flood, so its quite a remarkable coincidence that the post-flood ones wound up in the very same place as the fossils. Did they have a homing instinct that caused them to migrate around the world to the graves of their kin without leaving any trace along the way? The simplistic theory of creationists, calling upon differing survivability quotients requires that every living thing on earth had to succumb to the waters of the flood at precisely the exact sequential moment, and at precisely the proper topographical spot for its species location in the record! If they had not, they would have been found either higher or lower in the fossil record. Every individual within a species which did not reach its predestined stratum level to die would have to be found at a different level-which would have tarnished the fossil record sequence. But the record has not been tarnished! Not one individual of any species has ever been out of order! Does it really seem likely that every individual of every species was so fine-tuned that not one of them failed the survival test to be found out of sequence? Such a thought is preposterous. Let us examine the floods water supply. The account reads: the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits (twenty-five feet) upward did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered. The account says the ark was finally dropped on the mountains of Ararat, which are seventeen thousand feet high. This, and the supposed extinction of all life, would lead us to conclude that all the mountains were covered, and this includes Mt. Everest. Now Everest happens to be 29,000 feet above sea level. There had to be sufficient water available to raise the water level to a height of nearly six miles to fulfill the word of the bible. 2 Simple arithmetic enables anyone to obtain the volume of water required to supply 30,000 feet of water over the entire face of the earth. To find the area of the earths surface, the formula 4*pi*(r squared) applies. 4 times 3.14 times 4000 squared equals 200 million square miles-the area of the earth. To obtain the number of cubic miles of water it takes to cover Mt. Everest (and of course, the rest of the earth to that height), simply multiply the area by the height of Everest in miles-200 million times 5.7 miles, and the produce is 1.14 BILLION CUBIC MILES! To simplify the arithmetic, we shall use the round figure of one billion cubic miles of water as that required to accomplish the flood requirements. On all this earth there is only one-third that amount of water! The atmosphere, the springs, the oceans, the seas, the rivers, the lakes, the ice caps-all of them together (see Encyclopedia Britannica) contain only 360 million cubic miles of water! Melt the ice caps and the oceans will rise only 270 feet. Squeeze every drop of water from the clouds and the air around us and A MERE ONE INCH OF RAIN WATER WILL COVER THE EARTH! According to The Air Around Us, By T. J. Chandler, earths atmosphere holds only 3000 cubic miles of water. Our present atmosphere, which holds only three thousand cubic miles of water, has a barometric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level. The atmosphere required to hold one billion cubic miles of water would have to extend to a height of TWO MILLION MILES, and have a barometric pressure of five million pounds per square inch at sea level. The mercury barometer needed to measure atmospheric pressure of that magnitude would have to be over 900,000 feet high (170 miles). The greatest natural environmental pressures known today on the earths surface are only around 15,000 psi at the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Obviously, if an atmosphere 300 time as severe as in the Mariana Trench prevailed generally in those biblical days, all of life was subjected to the above pressures. If the pressures were not enough to destroy life as we know it, it certainly would have been impossible for sunlight to have penetrated the depths of such an atmosphere to provide energy capable of sustaining the photosynthesis of plant life. How would Noah and animal life have been capable of seeing in the pitch blackness that an atmosphere two million miles thick would have placed upon the earth? -- In Usshers chronology, the Flood occurred 1656 years after creation (derived by adding up the ages at which the patriarchs in Genesis 5 gave birth to the next patriarch in the genealogy), which would place it at 2348 B.C. Seawater contains dissolved salts - around three percent on average. If a glass beaker of seawater is left in a warm room to evaporate slowly, what happens? If all the water is allowed to evaporate there will eventually be three layers of salts on the bottom of the beaker: first, a thin layer of calcium carbonate; then a thin layer of calcium sulfate; and finally a much thicker layer of sodium chloride [ordinary salt]. Between the layers there will generally be a very thin borderline zone where the two salts appear as a mixture. Minerals that were formed by the evaporation of seawater are called evaporites. Petroleum geologists know a great deal about evaporite deposits deep in the earths crust, because oil is often found beneath them. One such deposit is in the Delaware basin, among the oilfields of west Texas. There is an enormous buried reef found here, the Capitan reef, which once must have enclosed a vast ocean basin about ninety miles across and a hundred sixty miles long. Over a large area of the enclosed basin a huge deposit of calcium carbonatecalcium sulfate varves was laid down. There are about 200,000 of these varve couplets [meaning there are 400,000 separately identifiable layers], with an average total thickness of about 1,300 feet over much of the basin. They are so clearly distinguishable that some of the varve sequences can be identified like fingerprints. In this way some of the individual varves have been traced from oil-well to oil-well over a total distance of about forty miles. There seems only one way to explain these facts. At one time the seawater in this vast enclosed basin became sufficiently concentrated for some of the dissolved salts to start crystallizing. Each summer, evaporation would cause the salt concentration to increase, precipitating first the carbonate layer and then the sulfate. Sometimes the water in the basin became concentrated enough for sodium chloride to be precipitated also, but not often. Usually the winter rains would fall and often some fresh seawater would find its way into the basin, diluting the contents before the sodium chloride could crystallize, and causing the carbonatesulfate cycle start again the next summer. Flood Geology cannot account for the existence of the Delaware basin evaporites. Anderson, R.Y. and Kirkland, D.W., 1966. Intrabasin varve correlation. Geological Society of America Bulletin, v.77, p.241-256. -- SIZE OF THE ARK: 450 ft long, 57 ft wide, 45 ft tall. (three decks) AGE OF THE BUILDER: 600 years old CARGO: 7 of every clean animal male that walks the Earth and its mate (14 total each species) 2 of every unclean animal male that walks the Earth and its mate ( 4 total of each species) 7 of every bird male and its mate (14 total of each species) 8 humans (Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives) ALL the food the people and animals would need to eat. LOADING TIME: one week TIME IN THE ARK: one year, and ten days. WHAT SURVIVED THE FLOOD: only Noah, and those with him WHAT DIED: everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils. WHEN IT ALL HAPPENED: 2300 BC Making wooden ships much bigger than 210 feet long was not a good idea because they tended to hog on being launched; that is, they tended to bend, their bows and sterns to stick up out of the water at an angle, and their keels tended to crack under the strain. Even with steel frames, wooden ships bigger than 250 feet long tended to hog. Theres still mud at the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches today. No amount of flooding could compress mud into rock because mud contains water, which cant be compressed. And water cant squeeze water out of mud. if there was that much rain, it would lower the salinity of the oceans enough to kill every living thing in salt water. Our oceans today would be sterile. And the runoff would have made the freshwater rivers and lakes salty, killing all life in them. Then the salt residue on the land would have sterilized the soil. So any Noachian would have killed all water-bound life, plus all plants. How do you explain the continuance of life in this areas despite all that? -- The formation of calcium carbonate is exothermic, and theres roughly 5 * 10^17 tons of it. How much must have been formed during the Flood, though? Some comes from reworked sediments, but other limestone forms directly, and even the reworked sediments require cementation. Many freshwater organisms would be completely killed off by any salinity in the water. Many saltwater things would be killed off by a whole lot of added freshwater. Many shallow-water things couldnt survive at all in deep water. Such things and many others couldnt ever survive a global flood like the one described in the story, but they all do exist in the world today. Therefore, the Flood never happened. Things that require clean, clear shallow water [coral reefs and seaweeds]; things that need shallow, running freshwater streams [how would mayflies make it?]. Water plants and animals would be about as hard hit as the land plants and land animals. Its a big problem for the creationist ideas about all populations starting out as one or a few pairs just a few thousand years ago. Each individual can have at the most 2 alleles at each locus. For all the observed genetic variation to have arisen so recently from such a small number of founders would require ridiculous mutation rates unlike anything we see in nature. But how can the creationist explain the unique diversity of the Hawaiian islands or the isolation of marsupials in Australia? Why did so many of the marsupials migrate towards Australia, a journey that must have lasted longer than the lifespan of some of them. Furthermore, large numbers of fossils of the Australian types of marsupials [and their various extinct relatives] are found in Australia and nowhere else. So the Flood apologists also have to explain how it is that all the Australian animals somehow homed to the only place in the whole world where bones of their flood-victim kin got buried. The seeds for 900 types of plants, supposedly preserved from the flood somehow, ALL ended up in Hawaii, and nowhere else! Why is the large family Cactaceae strictly of the New World? Why is Africa instead supplied with lots of superficially cactus-like Euphorbia species? Why is the somewhat cactus-like [and cactus-related] family Didieriaceae found only in Madagascar? Why is the pineapple family Bromeliaceae similarly only of the Americas? How did Nothofagus get its present scattered S. hemisphere distribution? How much fresh meat does a lion, tiger, or bear require in a year? Why isnt there a single layer of sedimentation that we can see everywhere, instead of multiple layers? Why are all Paleozoic types of corals and clams in different layers from the similar modern versions? Why are no modern-type plant remains found with those of the Carboniferous coal forests?Why does the fossil record of _dispersed pollen and spores_ show such clear stratigraphy? Pollen cell walls are nearly indestructable during fossilization, and pollen _really_ gets around; some stray grains ought to have wound up in the wrong places if the whole world was washed by a worldwide flood that formed all the sediments. Why doesnt this occur? Why are they all sorted into the same layers as the plants that produced them, and sorted in such apparent fine year-to year detail that we can trace subtle climate changes? Why are there no pollen or spores to be found at all in the older Paleozoic layers that we think were formed before the first land plants evolved in the Ordovician & Silurian? -- Extracted from http:www.isource.net~grmortondmd.htm One thing is very clear to anyone who has studied geology, the world-wide flood, as envisioned by Whitcomb and Morris, is absolutely impossible. Animal burrows are found throughout the geologic column. Since one can not catastrophically deposit a hole in the ground, there must be a lot of time for the animals to dig and eat their way through the rocks making the burrows. This is especially true of certain limestone burrowing animals, the clionid sponges. Paleocaves, deep in the geologic column, are found (occasionally filled with oil) and these also can not be deposited catastrophically. Large holes in the rock are not the product of deposition. Footprints on layer after rock layer, vertically, clearly shows that the rock was NOT covered by deep water when it was deposited. Animals do not have long enough legs to leave footprints on the botton sediments during a worldwide flood which covered high mountains (Olsen, 1980, p. 18). There is a photo of an oil well core with 9-10 layers (years) worth of plant roots. This was pulled up from 7,000 feet in southern Colorado (Morton, 1995, p. 32). There is 3 dimensional seismic data which shows, river channels (Brown, 1993, p. 14-15), paleokarsts (sinkholes like what happens in Florida) and other features buried deeply in the geologic column. Since these features require much time to form, they could not be formed in the Flood. -- "The Grand Canyon was laid down during the flood and carved out while the strata was still plastic." You have unaccountably omitted any mechanism to stop the plastic Canyon walls from collapsing while the carving happened. For that matter, how much pressure would a mile or so of upper layers of rock put on the plastic lower layers, and what kept these soft layers from spreading out to fill the canyon just as soon as the river cut into it if they were the least bit plastic? No flood caused structures are seen outside of the Grand Canyon either. Where did the vast sediments come from to form the observed layers there and elsewhere? Something elsewhere had to erode. == The design of Noahs Ark shows clearly that it was designed by late stone age, early bronze age shepards who had seen rafts but not boats. The thing won't float. If it did, it would break up from the stresses of its incredibly silly construction on meeting its first wave. And it could not possibly carry even the 16,000 or so kinds of animals that some creationists say were all that was necessary for Noah to carry. (If we accept that 16,000 kind limit, we would then have other problems: like the incredibly rapid evolution necessary for said 16,000 to produce the current _millions_. Or the minor problem of what all 16,000 ate during and after the Flood.) == 1) Evaporite deposits located between flood deposits 2) Plants in growth positions, again between flood deposits 3) Structural differences between adjacent formations that, in a flood, would have had to have been deposited simultaneously 4) Glacial structures 5) Lack of evaporite deposits on top of everything 6) Lack of global continuity of any kind of flood deposit 7) Lack of water 8) Flood deposits showing structure clearly indicating they formed over years, not days or weeks 9) Antarctic ice sheets and arctic frozen tundra 10) Lack of sorting expected if a global flood really happened == There are hundreds of thousands of annually deposited layers of sediment in the Cariaco Basin off of Venezuela? == http:www.hsv.tis.net~ke4volevolvech5p2ng.html This is a quote from the above source: Animals of similar density would tend to be buried together. The reason most dinosaur bones are found in similar layers is most dinosaurs are lizards, and weigh about the same as lizards. The reason birds are found on the top soil of the geologic column is not because they evolved last but because the birds were the last ones to drown in the flood. When they do drown, they float because they have hollow feathers and hollow bones. In addition it says The glaciers were roaring across the terrain, possibly hundreds of miles an hour. As the ice pushed out further and further, it carved out all the glacial effects we now see today. They were then covered by two giant cold spots. When cold air meets cold air it rains. UnQuote-- == Donald Patten The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch Flood of Noah by Chuck Missler End of B17-Flood END***************************************************************************