“I WILL SEND RAIN ON THE
EARTH”
A Bible Student’s View of
the Genesis Flood
By Tom Couchman
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1A. About This Paper
For Christians who are concerned with the relationship of science and scripture, there are two Bible subjects which demand attention: the story of the creation in Genesis chapters one and two, and the story of the Flood in Genesis chapters six through eight. No one can give proper honor both to the plenary inspiration of God’s Word and to the findings of science about God’s creation without dealing with both of these biblical narratives.
This paper addresses one of them: viz, the Genesis Flood. I will discuss the Flood (capitalized when I am referring to the Flood) as a Bible student, and not as a scientist. I am not a scientist. Though I will refer to some of the findings of various scientific disciplines when it is appropriate to do so, anyone who reads this paper will be able to see by the generic and non-technical nature of my references how shallow my scientific knowledge is. I am a Bible student. I am convinced that one can state facts and reach conclusions, concerning which one can be reasonably confident, about the nature of the Flood and the effects of the Flood by applying common sense to statements in the Bible. “What can we learn about the Flood from scripture and plain reason?” is the main question I am trying to answer here.
I am writing this paper for
three reasons.
The first: anyone who allows the possibility that the cosmos is very ancient, and who claims to respect the authority of the Bible, must come to grips with (or at least admit that he is unable to come to grips with) the Bible story of the Flood. I am an old-earth creationist (OEC) and not a young-earth creationist (YEC); therefore, the Flood is one of the issues with which I must deal, at least to my own satisfaction.
I am an OEC, but one who has considerable sympathy for the YEC position. I insist that it is possible in principle to account for many geological phenomena in terms of the Flood and of other, unrecorded, catastrophic events. In other words, as an OEC who believes the Bible story of the Flood, I am open to non-uniformitarian interpretations of nature.
However … Here is the second reason for this paper.
A theistic scientist, a person who has received and absorbed the technical training in a scientific discipline which I have not, ought to be able to explain nature in terms of the works of God as recorded in scripture, where such explanations are theoretically possible and practical in terms of the details given in the Biblical narrative. A trained scientist who is a Bible-believer should be able to start with the Bible story of the Flood and, from that narrative, explain in considerable detail what effects that Flood ought to have produced, and then demonstrate that the hypothetical explanation he or she has given is not contradicted by any natural observation—or, even better, is supported by natural observation. A Bible-believing scientist who claims to be a “creation scientist” or a “Flood geologist” should be able to tell a detailed, Bible-based, scientific, reasonable story of the Flood.
Most popular YEC interpreters of the Flood usually do not render this basic service. Instead, they describe the Flood, in terms of explaining observed natural data, as a “magical” event. Instead of saying, “Based on the narrative found in scripture, the Flood produced this observed effect in the following manner …”; in effect, they claim, “The Flood did this … somehow.” They appear to expect their invocation of “water magic” to silence all criticism from anyone who accepts the authority of scripture, and they appear to be genuinely taken aback when a believer is dissatisfied.
Behind “the magic Flood” is, I think, a conviction among those who share my respect for the power of God and the integrity of scripture that, because the Flood was divinely triggered, because it was such a tremendous event, and—perhaps most importantly—because, as we shall see, the Bible says so little either about what the Flood did or what it didn’t do, it might have done anything. And a Flood which might have done anything might even have done everything. Thus, many people with presuppositional agendas have used the lack of information in scripture as a warrant for “proving” that the Flood produced whatever datum they want to explain. These expositors seek to make the notion that the Flood could have done anything an issue of commitment to divine revelation, and they chastise those who ask for a better explanation than “The Flood did this … somehow” for a lack of faith.
Let me be clear about what I believe. I have no doubt that the Flood was a stupendous catastrophe, perhaps the most sweeping event ever to strike the earth, undoubtedly the greatest disaster ever to befall humankind. It is not a lack of regard for the uniqueness and scope of the Flood which causes me to insist that those who claim the Flood did a particular thing explain how, reasonably, scientifically, and to a satisfactory level of detail. I should not have to suffer the charge of disrespect for the power of God or for the divine narrative when I ask someone to provide a detailed and credible explanation for some alleged Flood effect. After all, I am not putting God to the test by demanding that He cause a flood. He has already done so. But the Genesis narrative does not say that any feature of the surface of the earth either in that day or in this day was a result of the Flood. So it is no lack of faith in divine inspiration to ask that an interpretation of nature, even one which is rooted in respect for scripture, produce a “non-magical” explanation for natural phenomena.
Indeed, conscientious champions of creation-science have made this same kind of plea. In an issue of the Creation Research Society Quarterly which contained a (later discredited) article by the indefatigable, flamboyant and unreliable CRS geologist Clifford L. Burdick entitled “Discovery of Human Skeletons in Cretaceous Formation,” Dr. Walter E. Lammerts, the CRSQ editor, inserted the following cautionary note.
Admittedly this discovery [alleged human remains in a geological
formation which classical geology assigns to an age millions of years before
humans] offers as much of a problem for Flood geologists as for those of the
orthodox point of view. For it is
difficult to explain how two men could still be alive after such a depth of
strata had been deposited [referring to supposed Flood-deposited strata on top
of the cretaceous]. And if already
drowned, why were they not buried later in the Mesa Verde formation? A more detailed and clear cut concept of
just how the Flood accomplished its work is badly needed in order to be able to
see how such finds as these fit into theoretical expectations, or creationists
will be guilty of the same ad hoc explanations as evolutionary minded
colleagues.1
Lammerts was not being unreasonable, and neither am I. Anyone who elects to opt out of discussing geology on the grounds that the subject is irrelevant to salvation has my blessing. If someone wants to attempt to explain geology on catastrophist grounds, I have no problem with that stance either (whether I agree with a particular catastrophist explanation for some phenomenon is another issue, but I do respect and in fact encourage the effort). But when a person claims to have provided a “scientific” explanation for an observed fact on the basis of the Genesis Flood, that explanation has to explain. “The Flood did this … somehow” does not explain anything. “A WORLDWIDE CATASTROPHE, THE JUDGMENT OF A WRATHFUL GOD, A WORLD-CHANGING, SIN-CLEANSING, STUPENDOUS CATACLYSM, THE MOST SWEEPING UPHEAVAL IN WORLD HISTORY did this … somehow” does not explain anything either.
Should YEC scientific claims be summarily dismissed? Not at all! Some of these claims are carefully and thoughtfully made and deserve careful and thoughtful scrutiny even if the eventual outcome is that they are rejected as scientifically inadequate; after all, most scientific theories of all types are eventually rejected as scientifically inadequate. However, merely making a claim that favors Flood geology is not good enough: the claim must be logically and factually sound. Alas, far too many YEC scientists and apologists operate under a set of “rules of evidence” which go something like this: “If you claim you are explaining some aspect of nature in a way that is consistent with a young earth, you don’t really have to explain it at all; you just have to claim to explain it, and that’s enough.”
Let me give an example. Answers in Genesis is a popular YEC website (www.answersingenesis.org) which presents a variety of YEC arguments, some of them thought-provoking, and some them painful for a creationist to read. In an article posted at www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1137.asp (originally published in Creation Ex Nihilo), entitled “Coal Beds and Noah’s Flood,” Dr. Andrew Snelling argues that the Genesis Flood can account for all known coal reserves. Now, in the first place, I have no objection to Dr. Snelling or anyone else arguing that the Flood produced all the coal in the earth’s crust. In the second place, coal formation is not well-understood. On these two counts if not on others, it should be possible to posit a plausible hypothesis for the origin of coal based at least partly on the Flood.
Dr. Snelling begins his effort to present such a hypothesis with a citation from Holmes, Principles of Physical Geology (1965), that the average ratio of living matter to deposited coal is 12:1. He then proceeds to make the following series of assertions.
Modern
research shows that less than two meters of vegetation are needed to make one
meter of coal. Some observations made
by coal geologists working in mines (e.g. the compaction of coal around clay
“balls” included in some coal beds) suggest that the compaction ratio is
probably much less than 2:1 and more likely very close to 1:1. These observations destroy this objection to
coal bed formation during Noah’s Flood, since instead of today’s vegetation
volume only compacting down to 1-3% of known coal reserves (the usual claim of
geologists), today’s vegetation volume would compact down to at least 30% of
the known coal reserves.
There is not a single citation or reference here, even though Dr. Snelling, who as a trained geologist knows how controversial evidence ought to be presented, is making a “scientific” claim which differs by more than an order of magnitude from the accepted value. What “modern research” and “observations made by coal geologists”? He does not tell us. Even if he were right, he should not (though he obviously does) expect us to accept such assertions just because he has made them!
What about the other 70% of the coal reserves?
The evolutionists’ argument based on the volume of vegetation on today’s land surface ignores the fact that 60% of today’s land surface is covered by deserts or only sparse vegetation. In addition, there are the vast icy wastes of Antarctica beneath which are rock layers containing thick coal beds. So if all of today’s land surface was covered with the lush vegetation suggested by Antarctica’s coal beds, under the influence of a global sub-tropical greenhouse effect before Noah’s Flood … then the volume of such vegetation on today’s land surface would be sufficient to produce at least another 50% of the known coal reserves.
But this all assumes that the area of land surface available for vegetation growth has always been the same. This assumption simply is not correct. [Genesis 1:9-10] implies that, instead of land masses surrounded by seas … in the pre-Flood world there was one sea surrounded by one large land mass. The language used in Scripture also implies that that there was probably more land area then on the face of the globe than “seas.” … it is likely that there was at least twice as much land area available for vegetation growth in the pre-Flood world …
This, with no observational support whatsoever, with a dubious interpretation of scripture as his only warrant, is Dr. Snelling’s “scientific” argument for “Genesis coal”!
Wait, there is more. He quotes—with a valid citation this time, so his previous lapse cannot have been for want of knowing better—from Mary Archer, an “authority on solar energy”:
…the
amount of solar energy falling on the earth’s surface in 14 days is equal to
the known energy of the world’s supply of fossil fuels. [Archer] also said that only .03% of the
solar energy arriving at the earth’s surface is stored as chemical energy in
vegetation through photosynthetic processes.
He divides 14 days by .0003 to get 46,667 days—128 years—and claims:
So
we can conclude that only 128 years of plant growth at today’s rate and volume
is all that is required to provide the energy equivalent stored in today’s
known coal beds! There was, of course,
ample time between Creation and Noah’s Flood for such plant growth to
occur—1600 years, in fact.2
Well, yes, it would indeed take all the plants on earth 128 years to store the energy in all known coal reserves. But there are some embarrassingly obvious problems here. Dr. Snelling believes that all the coal on the earth, along with the sedimentary rock in which that coal is found, was produced not from 128 years’ plant growth or 1600 years’ plant growth but from the plants killed by the Flood—since mature “woody” growth produces very little coal, at most perhaps ten years’ growth! Furthermore, his analysis assumes that essentially all of the stored photosynthetic chemical energy (that is, all of that three percent of the sun’s energy which is captured by plants) was converted into coal. In fact, most of it must have been left on the surface of the post-diluvial earth where it simply decayed, as major volumes of plant material are postulated and required by YEC theories as “life rafts” for insect species which didn’t get into the ark, and to propagate post-Flood plant life. It appears that the advocates of Flood geology are giving the plants that were around at the time of the Flood a very ambitious set of tasks to perform: those plants must serve as “natural arks” for insects and as the progenitors of post-diluvian plant life, at the same time that they were being buried, sometimes miles underground, to begin forming all the coal which is found in the crust of the earth!
What really bothers me, as Dr. Snelling’s fellow-creationist, is that he obviously expects us to swallow his claims without question. Why else would he think that he can get away with making hearsay assertions that contradict, by a factor of more than ten, accepted values of plant-to-coal ratios, completely without attribution, and then claim these unsubstantiated assertions “destroy” the anti-Flood-geology case? Why else would he present a questionable scriptural interpretation as “science”? Why else would he claim to provide an analysis of conversion of plants to coal which proves absolutely nothing about what might have happened during the Flood?
That example is what I mean by: “You don’t really have to explain it, you just have to claim to explain it, and that’s enough.” I wish I could say Dr. Snelling’s article is atypical; but it is not. The majority—I will resist the temptation to say, “the vast majority”—of YEC “science” looks a lot like that effort: deeply unsatisfactory to any pious investigator. And one has to add the troubling thought that two major YEC sources—Answers in Genesis and Creation Ex Nihilo—published this piece of fluff without critical scrutiny.
As this negative example shows, an explanation is neither scientific nor scriptural just because the person who wrote it believes the Bible. Any attempted exposition of what the Flood did must begin with a careful study of the Flood narrative and must proceed along a track which is both logical and scientific. I find it extremely ironic that those who most loudly claim for themselves the mantle of respect for scripture have discarded what scripture itself says about the Flood and what reason might infer about the Bible story of the Flood, and have replaced scripture and reason with “the magic Flood.”
Now, on to my third reason for this writing.
There is an unsavory tactic which one sees much too often in YEC discussions of alleged Flood effects: a kind of “bait and switch.” Here is how it goes. An author claims he is going to provide a scientific explanation for how the Flood produced some observed natural phenomenon. He proceeds to attempt his explanation. So far, so good; I am very much in favor of “Flood science” as it attempts to describe how the natural energy of a supernaturally generated Flood might have produced phenomena which we can observe today. In other words, I have no objection to “Flood science” or “Flood geology” in principle.
But then along comes a party-pooper like myself, to show that the Flood cannot possibly have done what the author claims it did: because scripture does not say the Flood did it, because the floods which we observe today do not do it, and because a reasonable evaluation of the Genesis narrative does not allow one to conclude that there is any chance that the Flood did what the author claims. At that point, I will be denounced as an unbeliever: “You don’t have faith in the power of God!”
Note what has happened. The original claim was to provide a “scientific” explanation for a natural phenomenon, in terms of the “natural” effects of the Flood. But when I show the claim to be unscientific, unscriptural and unreasonable, my faith is attacked. “Faith” has been substituted for “science.” But the attackers will maintain that a valid “scientific” explanation for Flood effects has been provided. “You just can’t see it because you don’t believe.”
This tactic is nonsense. If I believe the Bible, I must accept on faith what the Bible tells me. I am not obliged to accept pseudo-scientific speculations about the nature of the pre-Flood earth, of supposed geological processes contemporaneous with the Flood, or of fanciful climatic and lithospheric phenomena subsequent to the Flood, because the Bible doesn’t record any such phenomena. I am not saying I would dismiss such claims out of hand; anyone who wants to propose a scientific explanation for a natural object in terms of the Flood or events at the time of the Flood is welcome to do so. But if scripture does not say it happened, it cannot cloak itself in the mantle of scriptural authority and demand the faithful allegiance of those who believe the Bible; it must be evaluated by the rules of science, and if it is not scientific and not reasonable I am absolutely justified in rejecting it. You can’t move a “scientific explanation” into the realm of “faith” to protect it from scientific scrutiny, then over into the realm of “science” to grab credit for valid “Flood geology.” If it’s not good science, and it’s not good exegesis, then it doesn’t stand much of a chance of being true.
Having said so much about why I am writing this paper, I need to say something about the approach I will have to take.
Any investigator of Flood effects is forced to draw conclusions and make inferences from the rather sparse statements of fact which the Genesis record provides us. As will be apparent especially in Chapters Three and Four, the Bible says almost nothing about what happened during the Flood or about what its effects were. There are statements made in the relevant texts which may be used properly and reasonably in formulating conclusions, but there is no escaping the fact that inference and, yes, even restrained speculation are essential to inferring Flood effects.
I say inference and restrained speculation are necessary. Of course, in the most general sense that statement may be held to be untrue: we don’t really have to make any inferences or engage in any speculation about what the Bible Flood story says. If we don’t, however—if we stick strictly to statements in scripture—then all the conclusions of Flood geology will have to be thrown out, for every one of those conclusions is based on inference and speculation—in too many cases wild, unreasonable and unscientific speculation. I do not object to the speculation, because anyone—OEC or YEC—who would provide a proposed compendium of Flood effects must speculate. I object to the unreasonable and unscientific nature of much of the published YEC speculation, and to its being presented not as speculation but as established fact (see the quotation from Dr. Snelling for one example).
I will therefore acknowledge that this paper contains conclusions and inferences which are based upon statements in scripture and findings of science. Unlike many published YEC authorities, however, I will clearly label my conclusions and inferences as such. When I do speculate, I will do so in accordance with scripture, consistent with what science has come to know about the effects of floods and of flowing water, and in as spare and restrained a manner as possible while still providing a reasonably complete answer to the question of what the Flood might have done. I will try, above all, to take a spiritually minded approach which honors the word of God.
Here is what the reader will find in the remaining chapters of this paper.
Chapter two briefly discusses the four major young-earth interpretations of the flood of which I am aware.
Chapter three presents what (little) scripture has to say about the antediluvian earth.
Chapter four explores the text of the Genesis Flood narrative.
Chapter five briefly examines the case for some proposed Flood-era effects.
Chapter six expands upon the scriptural statements presented in chapter three to expose the likely and the possible effects of a global flood.
Finally, chapter seven is a summary-level (as a non-scientist, that is all I am qualified to render) consideration of the geological phenomena which most YECs propose that the Flood explains, and an evaluation of the possibility that the Flood might indeed explain those phenomena.
CHAPTER TWO
YOUNG-EARTH INTERPETATIONS
OF THE FLOOD
Since the ultimate purpose of this paper is to ask the question, “Might the Flood have done this?” it will be useful to have in mind the main groupings of claims made by practitioners of “Flood geology.” YECs generally assert that most or all of the data testifying to the natural history of the earth are best explained as Flood-effects. It would be a misrepresentation, however, simply to lump all YEC views into one. There is both profound agreement and lively dispute among YECs about which interpretation of the Flood and of ancient prehistory in general is correct. In the interests of accuracy I will therefore take the time to distinguish briefly among the main YEC interpretations.
Though it may not be accurate to say “absolutely all YECs” accept the following assertions, essentially all of them do.
The Earth Is Relatively Young
As the term YEC implies, all YECs hold that the earth is relatively young—most commonly they say 6,000 to 10,000 years. However, it is arguable that anyone who holds the earth to be less than a few million years old can claim to be a YEC, since standard geology concludes the earth is between three and five billion years old, and all non-saltationist theories of macroevolution “require” at least a hundred million years. YEC computations are based on the genealogies recorded in the Bible, but not strictly so: most YECs are willing to acknowledge the presence of some gaps in the genealogical records, and will rely on inference and extra-scriptural sources to arrive at an age greater than the approximately 6,000 years that a strict genealogical summing would compute. There are also YECs who argue for a young earth within an ancient cosmos.
The Flood Was Miraculously
Caused
All YECs hold that the Flood recorded in Genesis was miraculously caused. That is, God did not providentially use a natural event to accomplish His purpose, as He did in other cases.
Flood Effects Were Natural
This assertion stands in contrast to, but not in contradiction of, the previous one. All YECs with whom I am familiar agree that though the Flood was the result of a divine miracle, once the event was underway the effects produced by the accumulating waters were natural.
It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this point. If the effects produced by the Flood were miraculous and therefore inscrutable, then there is no way to know what those effects might be; a flood which might miraculously have done anything also might have miraculously done nothing. Therefore, there can be no “Flood geology” without “natural” Flood effects.
God may, by miraculous (i.e., direct) means, trigger any number of catastrophic or non-catastrophic events the results of which may be discernable years or centuries later. Scripture asserts that a volcanic catastrophe destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and that a seismic (probably non-catastrophic) event was used to kill rebellious Israelites during the time of Moses. But once the event has been “triggered,” nature takes over. What we subsequently expect to see are entirely natural effects of a supernaturally triggered event. Thus, the rain which fell during the Flood made things wet, and the rising waters caused the ark to float in accord with Archimedes’ principle, and creatures caught outside the ark drowned or were battered to death by the force of the water.
Anyone who doubts the importance of this point should consider the following statement by the esteemed Dr. John C. Whitcomb, co-author of The Genesis Flood.
God maintains a definite economy of miracles. Otherwise, miracles would become commonplace
and would thus lose their uniqueness and significance … Apart from the specific
miracles mentioned in Scripture, which were necessary to begin and to terminate
this period of global judgment, the Flood accomplished its work of destruction
by purely natural processes that are capable of being studied to a
certain extent in hydraulics laboratories and in local flood situations today.3
That supernaturally caused events produce natural results is what allows us to distinguish between conclusions about the Flood which are reasonable and conclusions which are fanciful. Alleged Flood effects must be the same as those we observe when we see phenomena we know (or strongly suspect) were produced by accumulating water. This principle is the reason that the plea, “The Flood did this … somehow,” is unacceptable. When someone points to the Flood to explain natural data, we ought to see data which we know might have been produced by the Flood described in Genesis. When someone says, “The Flood did this,” of an effect which science or reason tell us the Genesis Flood could not produce, we are entitled to reject the explanation. And we have a responsibility to examine the scripture to see what effects the Genesis Flood might have wrought—which indeed is the design of this paper.
The Genesis Account Is
Reliable
All YECs with whom I am familiar stand by the reliability of the Genesis account of the Flood in all its particulars insofar as we can understand them. I hedge on their behalf because there are some statements about the Flood that we have no way of interpreting dogmatically: for example, we can draw a conclusion based on restrained and reasonable speculation, but we have no way of knowing beyond a reasonable doubt what “the springs of the great deep” were.
In terms of alleged effects of the Flood, I am aware of four major groups of YECs. I believe all YEC explanations of the Flood fit into one of these four groups.
Minimalist
A “minimalist” YEC Flood interpretation would hold that there are few or no geological and anthropological remnants of the Flood, on the grounds that a one-year flood would have produced very few effects which could be discerned thousands of years later. Minimalist YECs must find some explanation other than the Flood for geological data to be produced in a geologically short time. There are several potential explanations available. One is to say that God created the earth a few thousand years ago pretty much as we see it, with canyons which appear to have been cut by water but were not, and with fossils which appear to be the remnants of once-living organisms but are not. Another is to say that the earth is several millions of years old but not the billions of years that classical geology requires, and that multiple catastrophes over these millions of years produced both the geological record and the fossil record. A minimalist YEC interpretation is consistent with any reasonable reading of the Genesis record of the Flood. Most minimalists would probably hold that the Flood was global, but since they do not claim to be able to explain all of geology from the Flood they do not have as much at stake in a global Flood as other YECs.
Conservative
What I call the “conservative” YEC interpretation holds that Flood effects were confined to the outermost layer of the earth’s crust and the troposphere. A contrasting view is found in the next section. The conservative interpretation explains most or all data relating to the sedimentary rock and the fossils which are embedded in it as diluvial effects. According to the most popular versions of this view, there was no rain at all prior to the Flood, and in the process of generating the Flood God changed earth weather so that the atmospherics were different during and after the flood from what they had been before (however, I would hasten to add, not all adherents to the conservative position believe in the “water vapor canopy” hypothesis which I will explore presently, and one does not have to believe in a dramatic change in earth weather in order to believe that most or all of the sedimentary rock and fossils are Flood effects). Though there are variants of the conservative interpretation, in general those who hold this position would explain that the “basement” igneous and metamorphic rocks were original “creation rocks,” and that most or all of the rest should be regarded as Flood depositions.
As far as I am aware, essentially all “conservative Flood” advocates assert that the Flood was global—that the waters of the Flood covered the highest mountains on the entire planet. Only a global Flood, of course, could have produced sediments and fossils on all continents. On the other hand, “conservative Flood” proponents do not generally believe that the mountains themselves (except, of course, for those which are composed entirely of sedimentary rock) were a result of the Flood or events in the Flood year. They would hold that granitic mountains were probably created as we see them, and that cinder cones were produced by volcanoes, as they indeed appear to have been. This interpretation represents classic YEC “Flood geology” as originated by George McCready Price in the early 20th century, and as popularized in Whitcomb and Morris’ 1961 book The Genesis Flood.
Cosmic
What I call the “cosmic” YEC interpretation posits dramatic changes in every aspect of the earth and indeed in many features of the universe, all at about the same time as the Flood. On earth, the Flood-era was allegedly accompanied by rapid tectonic plate movement which produced the continental land masses and mountains which we see today. Most sedimentary rocks were laid during the Flood, as were “igneous intrusions” which are observable among the sedimentary rocks. According to many versions of this view, the Flood-era was associated with changes in universal constants such as the speed of light and the rate of radioactive decay, which are believed to have been many orders of magnitude greater in pre-Flood than in post-Flood times.
There is not much point in proposing a cosmic Flood which is not actually global. One of the advantages of this view is that it envisions an antediluvian earth which lacked any geological features other than low hills, thus reducing the amount of water required to cover the entire earth. Not all cosmic Flood advocates, however, claim that the earth had no antediluvian mountains.
Besides allowing the whole surface of the earth to be covered with a sea level rise of only a few hundred feet, the cosmic Flood seeks to overcome objections of insufficiency lodged against the conservative Flood by explaining essentially everything in terms of Flood-era events. However, there are advocates of changes in “cosmic constants” who do not subscribe to the theory that all geological data must be explained by a single Flood.
Many Catastrophes
Last but in my estimation certainly not least among YEC positions is what I call the “many catastrophes” interpretation, which views the Flood as only one among a (possibly great) number of catastrophes which supposedly took place in ancient times, each of which changed the globe in a significant way. According to this view we don’t have to depend on the Flood to account for all geological data. There can be as many great catastrophes as one wants to posit. The only difference between these other events and the Flood would have been that they did not happen in the region of Mesopotamia where the initial portions of the Bible story are set, and since they were not theologically significant the Bible writers simply did not record them.
Of course, the “many catastrophes” explanation may be worked into harmony with any of the other three interpretations, which is only one of what I consider to be many advantages it has. It does not require that each catastrophe be miraculous: a providential event such as a meteor strike could accomplish the required chaos. This interpretation does not even need a global Genesis Flood; geological phenomena in other parts of the world may be accounted for by some of the other catastrophes. Indeed, the “many catastrophes” view makes the Flood not unique but “just another catastrophe,” which may count against it in the minds of some YECs.
I mention the “many catastrophes” explanation here for the sake of the completeness of this chapter. The purpose of this paper is to study the Bible testimony about the Flood catastrophe, not to search for evidence that many catastrophes have happened during the course of pre-history and history. I am not going to say much about the possibility of multiple catastrophes in the rest of this paper, because this paper is about the Flood.
CHAPTER THREE
THE ANTEDILUVIAN EARTH
What was the nature of the antediluvian earth? If we can obtain a plausible answer to that question, we will have some means of estimating Flood effects, because—assuming the lapse of only a few thousand years since the Flood—the difference between the pre-Flood and the post-Flood earth (the earth we see today) would have been the effects of the Flood. As we examine relevant scriptures, I will warn you in advance, we shall find very few plain statements of fact about the pre-Flood earth. The Bible student will have to decide what suppositions are required, and separate legitimate suppositions from those which are gratuitous or even spurious.
Here are the texts from scripture which say something about the nature of the antediluvian earth (all quotations are from the NIV unless otherwise noted).
2Peter 3:4-7
They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes
on as it has since the beginning of creation.”
But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens
existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time
was deluged and destroyed. By the same
word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the
day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
What does this text tell us about the earth before the Flood? Not much. There are some statements here that allow speculation, but scripture does not point that speculation into any particular direction.
Peter’s intent is to show the folly of those who scoff at the promise of Jesus’ return. “Everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation,” they claim. Peter demurs: everything does not go on as it has since the beginning, for “the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.”
What is “the world of that time” which was destroyed? The Greek word kosmos can refer to: the universe, planet earth, the inhabited lands, the people living in the earth, materialism, the order of things, a vast collection (“the tongue is … a world of iniquity”—James 3:6). There are perhaps other shades of meaning. The most common way the term is used in the New Testament is in connection—direct or inferential—with people. Thus, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world (kosmos), but to save the world through him”—John 3:17. Christ did not come to save this planet. It is the population of the planet that He has come to save.
There is no other Greek word which Peter might have used to mean specifically the globe as opposed to the cosmic order, the social order or the people on the globe, so we simply cannot know whether he is attempting to tell us that the surface of the earth was completely erased and reconstituted, that the whole cosmic order was changed dramatically, that the social order was wiped out and reconstituted, or that the earth’s population was killed. Any of those meanings is completely consistent with Peter’s statement.
Likewise, the word for “destroyed”—apoleto—does not tell us anything beyond the fact that the world (order, earth, people on the earth?) of that time was destroyed. A form of the same word, used in John 3:16, is there translated “perish.”
Is there any difference between the pre- and post-Flood worlds given in the statement that “the earth was formed out of water and by water?” The King James text reads, “the earth standing out of the water and in the water,” which may point back to Genesis 1:9: “And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’” The only thing of which we can be certain with regard to Peter’s statement is that dry land existed among the waters by God’s pleasure, and at His word the same water destroyed much of the life upon that land.
In the same context, at 3:10, we find:
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the
elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be
laid bare.
This text would lead us to suppose that it was the physical world which was destroyed in the time of Noah, because it is the physical world which will be “laid bare” when Jesus returns. But notice the statement at verse 13:
But in keeping with his promise we are looking
forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
The problem with supposing that the physical world was destroyed in the time of Noah is that, in order to be consistent, we must suppose that in connection with the second coming of Jesus we are looking for a new physical world (as well as a new physical sky and associated objects within that sky); however, most of us would aver that we intend to be living in Heaven itself, not on a reconstructed earth under a reconstructed sky, after Jesus’ return. The only consistent definition of kosmos which occurs to me is “order or arrangement of things.” The antediluvian “order and arrangement of things” was destroyed by water in the time of Noah. There was a different “order and arrangement of things” which was brought into operation in connection with the coming of Christ (Isaiah 65:17). But this new order/arrangement will be the last which the physical globe on which we live will see. When He returns, Jesus will bring still another order/arrangement with Him.
What, then, can we infer from this text about how the world before the Flood was different from the world after the flood? Essentially nothing, except that the population of that world, less the cargo of the ark, was no longer alive. Certainly, the text allows speculation about significant changes in the natural order, but just as certainly it does not require such changes. Such speculations, in order to deserve serious attention, would have to be bolstered by scientific evidence.
Genesis 1:6-8
And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to
separate water from water.” So God made
the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above
it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was
morning—the second day.
Genesis 2:4-6
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they
were created. When the Lord God made the earth and the
heavens—and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and there was
no man to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the
whole surface of the ground—
Genesis 9:12-13
And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making
between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all
generations to come: I have set my
rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and
the earth.
I grouped these three texts because they are the basis of the famous “water-vapor canopy” thesis originated by George McCready Price and popularized by Whitcomb and Morris in The Genesis Flood. Briefly, the idea is this. Before the Flood there was no rain, because the atmosphere was different in pre-Flood days from the way it is today. There was a vast amount of water diffused uniformly in the upper elevations of the atmosphere. All the moisture needed for plant life either issued from subterranean sources or condensed out of the air (other versions render “streams came up from the earth” as “a mist came up from the earth”). The earth was much warmer then, a fact which accounts for fossilized plants such as giant ferns which would have required warmer and wetter quarters than the earth provides today. The canopy also shielded the earth from certain forms of radiation which today work to limit human life-spans, allowing people to live much longer then than they do now. After the Flood the elimination of the canopy and the institution of the atmospherics with which we are familiar resulted in the rainbow, a phenomenon which had never been observed before.
There is certainly no way to
disprove the “water-vapor canopy” hypothesis conclusively. On the other hand, scriptural support for it
is essentially nonexistent. An obvious
reading of the “the water above the expanse” is that this phrase refers to
clouds. Notice Psalm 104:2-3:
He wraps himself in light as with
a garment;
He stretches out the heavens like
a tent
And lays the beams of his upper
chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot,
and rides on the wings of the wind.
The “waters” of the “heavens” in this text are strongly identified with the clouds which are God’s chariot. This identification is confirmed in verse 13:
He waters the mountains from His upper chambers …
“Canopy” champions argue that the waters described in Genesis 1 cannot be clouds, for the waters in question are “above the expanse.” But consider Psalm 148:4:
Praise him you
highest heavens and you waters above the skies.
The “vapor canopy” theory says that the canopy was gone after the flood, that it was destroyed when “the floodgates of the heavens were opened”—Genesis 7:11. But there were “waters above the skies” in the days in which Psalm 148 was written—long after the Flood. Furthermore, this expression “the floodgates of the heavens” is used of contemporary possibilities in 2Kings 7:2, Isaiah 24:18 and Malachi 3:10. The notion that either of these expressions refers to a vapor canopy is raw speculation completely without scriptural basis.
Furthermore, the text in Genesis chapter two does not teach that thousands of years passed from the Creation to the Flood in which no rain fell. This statement refers only to the span of time between the provision of dry ground and the introduction of “shrubs of the field,” and it is arguable that it refers only to the Garden to be inhabited by Adam and Eve.
Another problem with the vapor canopy: how did people see the stars, which according to Genesis chapter one were visible for the tracking of seasons, through it? A thin layer of high cirrus clouds which would produce essentially no moisture if it fell as rain will block light from all but the brightest heavenly objects; enough frozen water to generate a significant amount of rainfall (see calculation to follow) would certainly prevent use of the stars for their divinely intended purpose.
Finally, there is no warrant in these texts for concluding that there had never been a rainbow before the Flood. On several occasions God invested covenant significance into already-existing practices or items: the seventh day and tithing are two obvious examples.
As problematical as is the vapor canopy idea scripturally, it fares no better scientifically. The canopy cannot have contained all atmospheric moisture; if all water were sucked out of the lower troposphere, plants and animals could not survive. There must have been at least as much water vapor disbursed in the air under the canopy as the air holds now, so the canopy must have contained water which is not observed in the atmosphere today. Significant amounts of water in a vapor canopy would raise the atmospheric pressure and, correspondingly, the air temperature at the earth’s surface.
According to canopy advocate Dr. Joseph Dillow, enough additional water to elevate sea level 40 feet would raise sea level atmospheric pressure to about 32 psi, with a corresponding increase in temperature. That increment might be tolerable for life, assuming the canopy spread the sun’s heat evenly around the earth (an assumption not easily supported by meteorology, but waive that difficulty for now). Increase the amount of water in the vapor canopy any more, and life on earth becomes impossible; thus, Dillow concluded, a canopy which would raise sea level about 40 feet if completely condensed into rain is the upper limit on what would allow life on earth to continue.4 Even so much water spread across the upper atmosphere would block very little cosmic radiation, so it isn’t much use accounting for longer life-spans.5
There is simply no way to explain how on an earth rotating on an inclined axis, with differential heating which must produce atmospheric convection, such a vapor canopy would have persisted intact for more than a few hours. In the final analysis, there does not seem to be any accounting for a persistent water vapor canopy without supposing continuous miraculous intervention. That supposition would be acceptable if we had a text in scripture mandating it, but we have no such text. We are left with a theory with a very dubious scriptural basis and absolutely no scientific standing.
Genesis 10:25
Two sons were born to Eber: one
was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided …
I have included this post-diluvian reference because some YECs postulate that it refers to the alleged fact that the “Pangea” of the pre-Flood earth was separated into today’s continental configuration during the life of Peleg (instead of just the single year of the Flood).
Plate tectonics is a well-established geological phenomenon which is accepted by many if not most YECs. The question is whether this text is describing it, and if so whether the current placement of the continents might have been reached in something like the 209 years in which Peleg lived. This speculation has some considerable advantages over the notion that all tectonic movement took place in a single year. However, it is still scientifically problematical. The floor of the Atlantic Ocean, which covers roughly 32 million square miles, with an average thickness of four miles, has been produced by movement of the crustal plates. Allowing 200 years for this rapid movement of the continents, 160,000 square miles—640,000 cubic miles—of new crust per year (1750 cubic miles per day) must be laid down as lava and cooled by the oceans. Not being a scientist I cannot be sure, but I doubt it is even possible for that much crust to be cooled so quickly, and even if it is theoretically possible that is a tremendous amount of heat for the earth’s oceans to absorb year after year for 200 years without profound damage to the marine ecosystem. Furthermore, there would have been a two-centuries-long earthquake catastrophe, starting near the Bible lands, yet no such catastrophe is recorded, nor is evidence for it found. If continental drift happened this way there ought to be some geological and anthropological data: at the very least, we ought to see the remains of cities which were frequently being reduced to rubble. There is no such evidence, no reason to posit two hundred years of the kind of “continuous catastrophe” which the creation of the Atlantic Ocean floor and all the great mountain ranges of earth would have produced if compressed into such a brief geological instant.
Does this scripture teach that the “division” of the earth means separation of the continents? The Hebrew word here translated “earth” is the generic word for that purpose: erets. It can refer to the entire globe, to a geographical region or to the people who live in a region. The word for “divided” is palag, and it occurs only here and in the same genealogy given in 1Chronicles. There is thus no way to specify the meaning of the word further.
In the context of this verse we find the story of the Tower of Babel and the division of the people by language. While we cannot be certain, it is reasonable to interpret this text as a reference to that event. The text does not suggest, and certainly does not require, the conclusion that all the continents were formed in the days of Peleg.
A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it
was separated into four headwaters. The
name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah,
where there is gold. (The gold of that
land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon;
it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east
side of Asshur. And the fourth river is
the Euphrates.
Of the four rivers named here, in the post-diluvian days when this statement was presumably written, the Tigris and Euphrates were well-known. The other two—the Havilah and the Gihon—may no longer have existed, or may have been called by other names, but the lands described would have been familiar. There is no indication from the text that the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers which are named in the text were different from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with which the people were later familiar. Thus, Mesopotamia in pre-Flood days must have been very similar topographically to what it was after the Flood, else the rivers and regions would have been different. The Great Rift Valley through which the Jordan River flows is a tectonic subduction zone. Certainly, if tectonic activity during or after the flood had dramatically altered the entire surface of the earth, one would not expect Mesopotamia, so near the Great Rift Valley, to emerge almost unscathed.
How different was the antediluvian earth from the earth today?
Scripture does not state that it was very different at all. Every inference from Bible texts which proposes significant changes in geology, topology or natural law in the Flood-era is highly speculative. We cannot say for this reason that any of these proposed changes is impossible, but it is binding something that God has not bound to assert that faith in God or confidence in the inspiration of scripture requires us to accept these speculations. And if neither faith in God nor confidence in the inspiration of scripture requires us to accept them, then neither faith in God nor confidence in the inspiration of scripture requires us to accept any theories of the Flood based on them.
Also to the point, if such changes happened, and happened so rapidly—in one year or within two hundred years—we should see in the geological record, or in the artifacts of the people who were alive at that time, evidence for these rapid catastrophic changes. We do not see it. Maybe a more imaginative look at the facts will permit a different interpretation which allows us to recognize this kind of evidence. For now, we have to say that the notion that the earth was vastly different in pre-Flood times from the way it is today is unsupported by any relevant science: geology, anthropology or hermeneutics.
Yet, this supposition of dramatic changes in the earth during the Flood-era is so strongly held as an article of faith among most YECs that they use it ubiquitously in their writings without either showing embarrassment or offering evidence. Considering that there is no scientific and no scriptural support for their speculations, that’s probably a good strategy: why call attention to such a glaring weakness in your position? What bothers me, as an OEC who is sympathetic to the aims of catastrophism, is that its practitioners have maneuvered young-earth science into a position in which it cannot survive unless evaluators allow the claim that the surface of the entire globe was destroyed during the Flood in a geological cataclysm. But why should even a sympathetic evaluator like me allow that claim? What evidence can they offer from the sciences that it is true? There is none; in fact, the sciences claim otherwise. What evidence can they offer from scripture? Only that some texts leave open the possibility. In the end, their real reason is this one: “The results of the Flood that we claim, and therefore the young-earth position that we espouse, cannot be maintained without it.”
Indeed, it is an irony that I find most sad that this notion of the catastrophic annihilation of the physical surface of the globe, and not the story of the Flood told in Genesis, has become the indispensable foundation of most “Flood geology” and YEC “science.”
And this substitution of a speculative, pseudo-scientific “foundation” for the Biblical foundation is the very reason that, when pressed to explain how the cataclysmic upheavals they postulate are reflected in the scientific record, YECs have absolutely no choice except to appeal to “the magic Flood.” “The world was so different before the Flood,” they plead, “that there is no explanation for the effects of the Flood.”
Sorry, but “magic” is not an acceptable replacement for scripture, reason or science. Anyone who wants to claim that the Flood produced miraculous effects may do so. But miraculous Flood effects, by definition, are not subject to scientific investigation, and miraculous Flood effects which are not documented in scripture—and none of the effects these self-proclaimed practitioners of “Flood science” claims is mentioned in scripture—are not provable from the only reliable source of information about the Flood. Therefore, no one who believes in miraculous Flood effects can claim to explain any feature of the earth’s surface today on the basis of “Flood geology,” because neither science nor scripture supports any such explanation. Indeed, for all anyone knows the “miracle” in the miraculous Flood might have been the concealment of all Flood effects. As a result, no one can claim the right to brand those who reject “the magic Flood” as heretics!
CHAPTER FOUR
WHAT SCRIPTURE SAYS ABOUT
THE FLOOD
Genesis chapters six through eight tell the story of the Flood. In this section of our discussion we seek to determine what specific historical claims scripture makes about the Flood, so that when we begin to consider possible Flood effects we will know what we ought to find.
I want at this point to issue a warning to the reader. In the discussion that follows I am going to be presenting evidence from scripture that the Flood story may legitimately be interpreted as the description of a local flood, not a global flood. I want to stress this point: I take no position on this issue. No conclusion in this paper about Flood effects requires a local Flood position; in fact, in Chapter Six I will assume for the sake of a speculative description of Flood effects that the Flood was global. I can live with either interpretation, and I don’t think the evidence points conclusively in either direction. I do want to insist that, as far as I am concerned, a conclusion that the Flood was local rather than global must be based on the testimony of scripture and the direct conclusions of plain reason, not on “external” science.
What does scripture say about the Flood? There are probably several logical approaches to deciding the order in which we might consider the statements made in scripture, but in this case I am simply going to take them in the order in which we find them in the Genesis text.
Genesis 6:5-7
The Lord saw
how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord
was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with
pain. So the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from
the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the
ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”
What was the reason for the Flood? The text tells us: God was sorry he had made humankind, because there was nothing but evil in the hearts of all people on the earth. Whatever mechanism God employed to assuage His regret, it would only work if every human being (with the exception of Noah and his family) were killed.
Did some animals also have to die? Note God’s language from the text: “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air…” Regarding animals as morally responsible for their actions is both metaphysically problematical and beyond the scope of this paper to investigate. I take it that most readers will concede that the animals of Noah’s time were not in themselves sinful. However, they were under the influence of sinful people, and there are texts in scripture which can reasonably be interpreted to teach that the sins of people can “infect” nature around them (cf. Romans 8:18-21). In other cases God directed that the animals associated with a sinful place be destroyed (Joshua 6:21). I can appreciate that some readers will have reservations about this point, but clearly God’s purpose required the removal of some animals along with sinful man.
What was the extent of the remedy? In other words, what did God have to do to accomplish His purpose? Noah and his family were selected to survive the Flood, and I think all readers will agree that this family was not composed of sinless people. It is the degree of moral depravity which is at issue. Likewise, there were animals which Noah was to take into the ark which would have been influenced by contact with the sinners around Noah, yet these animals were permitted to survive. We may thus see that God’s purpose here was not to create an environment from which the stain of sin had been completely eradicated—which is the redemptive work of Jesus Christ—but to remove from the earth the worst sinful influence. By the same token, the purpose of the Flood was not to erase all the effects of human sin. Some interpreters hold that entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) is a direct result of sin. That assertion is dubious, but allow it for the sake of this point: the Flood did not reverse the second law of thermodynamics. We can see therefore that God’s remedy is sufficient to accomplish His purpose, but not excessive in design or effect.
Genesis 6:19-21
You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures,
male and female, to keep them alive with you.
Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of
creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is
to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.
Genesis 7:1-4
The Lord then
said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found
you righteous in this generation. Take
with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of
every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind
of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the
earth. Seven days from now I will send
rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the
face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
How many animals did Noah and his family take into the ark? This question is tied to the question of the extent of the Flood—was it global or local? If the flood was global and covered the highest mountains on the earth, then most creatures not on the ark perished (water-dwellers, certain birds which are fish-eating and can rest on top of water, and probably insects would have been able to survive). If, on the other hand, the Flood affected only Mesopotamia, then the only creatures directly impacted by the Flood were the animals of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. I don’t know any way to answer this question definitively, but I will indicate why scripture may telling us that the only animals Noah needed to save were those native to that region.
Do God’s instructions give us information about the number of animals? They certainly do. It was God Who told Noah how big to make the ark. God knew how many animals Noah would have to preserve; in fact, it was apparently God who sent the animals which were to be saved to Noah: “Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.” One YEC has written that it was God’s decision which animals were to be placed into the ark, and that if God decided to exclude a species it was none of Noah’s business.6 Amen! However many animals would fit into an ark the size that God prescribed, that’s the number that God sent to Noah to be saved. If the ark was big enough to hold all the animals on the earth, then that’s how many God sent. If it was only big enough to hold the animals of Mesopotamia, then those are the ones God sent!
What are the volume limits of the number of animals on the ark? The ark had about 2 ¼ acres of floor space, if conventional estimates of the measure of a cubit are correct. However, about two-thirds of the space must have been used for food and water: God’s specific instruction is, “You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten.” It would seem very spare to ration, for the average animal, for an entire year, twice the volume of the animal’s body for food and water (the dog in my house, on a human-enforced diet, consumes his body volume in food in less than six months; the guinea pigs we used to have did the same in about four months). Even if the food took only one-third the volume inside the ark, water must have required another third of the volume. Rainwater could have been collected during the 40 days of rain, but it must be stored somewhere inside for the duration, as outside water would have been contaminated by seawater and decaying organic material. That leaves about 34,000 square feet of floor space to people and animals.
Some commentators have suggested that the animals were kept in cages and that the cages were stacked on top of one another.7 While stacking cages might be practical for very small animals, it seems to me that suggestion runs counter to the specific instruction that there were to be three decks on the ark, and that it would create serious hygienic problems as animals fouled the cages below them. Sheep are shipped in stacked cages in railroad boxcars, but boxcar cages are used for a few days at most; we are talking about housing animals for an entire year! If we exclude most insects from the animals to be kept on the ark (a very reasonable suggestion—insects could have survived on floating vegetation, which they would also have eaten), we can conclude that the average size of all the animals on the ark was about the size of a fox.
We could, without doing violence to reason, allow cages (lined to reduce fouling) and stacking of cages for beasts the size of rodents and smaller. We can’t stack too many cages, though, because the only way such a large number of animals can be fed and watered regularly is if food and water are placed so that many of the animals are free to reach them. If cages were stacked two-deep for roughly half the animals, and if the rest of the animals were kept in pens adjacent to food and water, and allowing for space for walking and working among the animals, we can probably cut the average floor space per animal to about four square feet. Taking an average floor space per animal of four square feet would allow 8,500 animals, roughly 4,200 different types of animals (seven pairs each of the clean animals).
How many animals needed to be saved? Species and sub-species of animals which we have on earth today can all have descended from a single ancestral general pair, so the number of different types of animals on the ark need not have equaled the number of species. Is 4,200 enough animal types to save all the genera of animals on the earth? In his book Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study John Woodmorappe has estimated that about 8,000 breeding pairs would be needed to save all genera except for fish and insects. Woodmorappe believes there was room on the ark for about 16,000 animals, but his estimates assume that cages containing animals would be stacked to fill each 15-foot deck, an assumption which is not impossible but which I find literally unbelievable for a year-long voyage.8
Is there a practical limit on the number of animals for which the people could have cared? God provided eight people to take care of the animals. I think it is reasonable to argue that the practical limit on the number of animals in the ark was the number for which eight people could care.9 If there were about 8,500 animals in the ark, if every animal received attention on average every fourth day, and if all the humans on the ark worked at this task, each human would have had to attend to an average 266 animals daily. Food and water could have been placed so that the animals fed themselves, if few were caged, but the people would have had to feed and water the caged animals and to get rid of all the waste in order for the ark to be habitable for a year. To suppose that each human on the ark attended on average 266 animals every day for over a year is a stretch, but it seems to me to be possible. However, if Woodmorappe is right, and there were 16,000 animals, each person would have had to attend to an average of 500 animals a day: clearly impossible. About 8,500 animals seems to me to be the maximum number which eight people could manage.
What would Jewish readers of this story have supposed? We have no way to know, but remember that the Jews were, as a people, animal-keepers, and would have known how many animals Noah and his family could host for a year. It would be interesting to hear what they would have said about a person caring for an average of 500 or even 266 animals per day!
Were there dinosaurs on the ark? If there were dinosaurs around in Noah’s day, and if God intended them to survive the flood, then He caused them to go to Noah, and they were on the ark. Many conservative Bible students maintain that God sent to Noah only the animals that He chose to survive the Flood, and that God did not choose the dinosaurs to survive.
Did some of the animals on the ark eat meat? Scripture gives us no reason to conclude that animals on the ark which were meat-eaters before the Flood and meat-eaters after the Flood were not meat-eaters for the year they were on the ark. It is not necessary for meat-eating animals to have freshly killed meat, but their meat would have had to be stored for over a year. It is difficult to imagine how storage of a large amount of meat would have been accomplished within the dank and humid ark without the meat spoiling. On the other hand, if the Flood was not global and the number of “survivor” animals on the ark were 8,000 or fewer, several hundred live animals could have been included not to survive the voyage but to serve as food for the meat-eaters.
If the Flood was global, would animals have had to travel vast distances to reach the ark? It is difficult to escape the conclusion they would have had to do so, and in some cases impossible to see how they would have managed. For example, kangaroos, koalas and platypuses are confined to Australia and New Zealand, and there is not a scintilla of evidence that they have ever lived anywhere else. Hundreds of miles of ocean separate them from the nearest land route to Mesopotamia. How did they make it to the ark? These animals are not swimmers! Did they “evolve,” post-Flood, from some family progenitor that was on the ark? (Marsupial evolution is a real problem for Darwinists, one for which no satisfactory solution has been suggested. Are we prepared to help the Darwinists explain marsupial evolution?) There is even a problem relating to animals from relatively nearby: for example, herd animals such as antelopes indigenous to the savannah of Africa. These animals are certainly physically capable of traveling from central Africa to Mesopotamia, but they never do so because almost all their waking hours are spent eating; they don’t have time for tourism! Polar bears might have survived if some polar ice had persisted atop the elevated sea level. But what about penguins? Did God miraculously transport these animals to Noah? Certainly He could have done so, but if He were going to do that, why not simply protect them from harm where they were?
Could not God have made the “impractical” possible? If God caused the Flood, could He not have taken care of the animals on the ark, making the resolution of practical issues such as the size of the ark, the amount of food, the presence of carnivores, etc., unnecessary? Certainly God could have done so, but the text says that He did not. He specifically told Noah to take “every kind of food” for the animals, and informed Noah that the animals would come to him “to be kept alive.” Practical issues matter, because the Bible says Noah and his family had the practical problem of feeding and taking care of these animals for over a year. Explaining how Noah and his family might have cared for 16,000 or more animals has driven some students to desperate levels of ingenuity. A popular suggestion is that once the animals were on the ark God “could have” put them into a semi-hibernation state. There’s no question He “could have,” but absolutely every indication from the text that God left Noah and his family with the job of taking care of the animals on this floating ranch. If God miraculously put the animals into some kind of hibernation, and miraculously reduced the amount of food they needed, and miraculously allowed the meat-eaters to live on hay, and miraculously stopped them from defecating—if it took a continuous application of miracle by God to keep the animals alive (not to mention a miracle to get some of them there)—what was the purpose of the ark?
Is there a “practical solution” to these issues? If the Flood was regional and not global, then the number of pairs of animals to be hosted on the ark is dramatically reduced.
Is there any scriptural reason to suspect that this menagerie did not include all species? We always interpret any statement in scripture in the context of what we know about God’s purpose in making it. We know that God’s purpose in sending the Flood was to erase the worst depravity of sin, and that in order to do so all people and any animals “corrupted” by human influence must be killed. Those which were doomed would include any domesticated animals, obviously, but also certain wild animals which were wont to come into contact with people: animals such as birds, bears, lions, wild sheep, reptiles, rodents, feral horses and oxen. Representatives of these animals, in addition to domesticated beasts, would have to be preserved.
But if the only area inundated was the region of Mesopotamia, would not the animal population be quickly replaced by in-migration from surrounding regions? Look at a relief map of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and notice what kind of terrain surrounds it: mountains and high desert. If the population of animals in this area were eliminated, it would probably be decades before replacements found their way into the area. Unlike seeds and insects, animals of significant size are not blown into an area on the winds or carried on the waters; they supply their own locomotion. But numerous modern examples show that once animals (including birds) are eliminated from a geographical location, replacements do not readily move into the vacated niche from surrounding areas, even when there are no topographical barriers to keep them from doing so.10 And there are formidable topographical barriers to in-migration of replacement animals from outside Mesopotamia.
What conclusions can we draw? I cannot draw any. I do hope I have made the point that, from the standpoint of the instructions and responsibilities God gave to Noah, suggesting that only local animals had to be included is consistent with the scriptural witness.
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth
day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst
forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
What was the source of the water which covered the earth? The scripture gives us two answers. First, it rained for forty days and nights. If we accept, for the sake of argument, Dillow’s calculations about the vapor canopy, and if we assume that all available moisture condensed into clouds and fell as rain, sea level would be raised about 41 feet. But this rain was not the only source of water. The text tells us that “all the springs of the great deep burst forth …” “The deep” obviously refers to the sea, and the Hebrew word tehom is most often used in that sense. But it can also imply waters under the earth, from which one would get well-water, as for example in Deuteronomy 33:13 and Ezekiel 31:4. We have no way of knowing for sure what these “springs” were, but it is reasonable to assume that they were subterranean aquifers, both under the oceans—sub-oceanic aquifers are known to exist—and under the land. Thus, in addition to the rain which was falling from clouds, the earth was inundated with water which God caused to burst from under the ground and under the seabed.
What might “the springs of the great deep burst forth” mean? This phrase plays prominently in YEC speculations about catastrophic Flood effects; however, they usually claim it’s not a speculation but a fact. YECs agree that “the deep”—tehom—refers primarily to the ocean, as just stated. They assert, however, that “the springs” mean not sea-bed aquifers, but the magmatic lower mantle of the earth’s crust. In fact, this phrase “the springs of the great deep burst forth” has come to be used by YECs such as John Baumgardner (concerning whose theory I will have more to say in Chapter Five) to represent the destruction of the crust of the old earth and the initiation of the laying of the current sea-bed by “runaway subduction.” Other YECs propose a related theory, that “the springs of the great deep burst forth” means that the sea-bed suddenly heaved upward, causing the water in the ocean basin to flood over the land surface (recall Dr. Andrew Snelling’s speculation that there was twice as much land then as there is today). According to this theory there were no high mountains such as we observe today—all orogeny took place either at the end of or in the immediate aftermath of the Flood, so with no more water than is on the earth today the highest mountains then on the earth would have been covered.
Is there any scriptural warrant for supposing that “the springs of the great deep burst forth” refers to a sea-bed upheaval? The word mayan (“spring” or “fountain”) when used in scripture, with a single exception, means specifically a source of water, not … uh … whatever it is the YECs claim it means in order to support their speculation. There is only one place—Psalm 87:7—in which it refers generically to “a source”; in every other instance it specifically means water. The term “burst forth”—baqa—in all occurrences means to be split or ruptured: Young’s literal translation is “to be cleft through.” A literal translation of this phrase in our modern terminology would be, “The undersea [and underground] aquifers were ruptured.” The Bible does not state or imply that the sea bed was destroyed.
Not only does scripture not teach this notion, there are plenty of scientific and practical problems with it. For one thing, a complete annihilation and reconstruction of the sea bed within the last 10,000 years could not have been accomplished without leaving fresh geologic evidence, and there is none. For another, displacement of the sea bed by the magnitude required to sustain this speculation, while the ark floated on top of the water, would have created such tumult on the surface of the ocean as to swamp the ark or batter it to bits. Some YECs say the sea-floor heaved, that a huge swell of magma burst through the mid-ocean ridge, that all the mountains were thrust upward during the Flood. Scripture does not say these things happened, and science says they did not.
How much water would have been required? We cannot answer this question without knowing both the extent of the Flood and the topology of the earth. “Cosmic Flood” advocates claim the surface of the earth at the beginning of the Flood had only hills and low mountains. For the moment, let me simply say that there are severe and probably insurmountable problems with that interpretation, with which I will deal in a bit more detail in Chapter Five. If the topology of the earth was much the same before the Flood as it is today, and if the Flood was global, sea level must have been raised about 30,000 feet in the span of 40 days. If the Flood was local and involved only the inundation of the low hills of Mesopotamia, a rise in sea level of 300-400 feet would suffice. If the Flood was local but the summit of Mt. Ararat was covered in water, that summit being nearly 17,000 feet above present sea level, then nearly 17,000 feet of water must be added to present sea level.
Would rainwater and water from aquifers have been enough? If all the water in the polar ice, glaciers, snowcaps, the atmosphere, all known aquifers and the “canopy” were added to the present ocean, sea level would be raised about 350 feet.11 The volume of water in undersea aquifers is not easily determined, but certainly if there were enough water to raise sea level by an additional 29,650 feet someone would have detected it: you just can’t “hide” that much water! Furthermore, if such a volume of water had erupted from the current sea bed there would be evidence (unless the entire sea bed was laid during the Flood-era) for such a massive rupture, and there is no such evidence. Therefore, if the Flood was global and covered the tops of the highest mountains on earth today, or if the Flood covered the top of Mt. Ararat, God must have “added” some water to what was on the earth, and He must have miraculously removed that water as the Flood abated. There is certainly no reason God could not have done such a thing; it is not outside the scope of His purpose, and definitely not beyond His power!
Genesis 7:17
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as
the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.
Genesis 7:24-8:5
The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty
days. But God remembered Noah and all
the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a
wind over the earth, and the waters receded.
Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been
closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the
earth. At the end of the hundred and
fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh
month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the
tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains
became visible.
Genesis 8:13-14
By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred
and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark
and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was
completely dry.
How long were Noah, his family and the animals in the ark? They began entering the ark seven days before the rain started (Genesis 7:4). Rain began on the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah’s 600th year. The ground was completely dry on the twenty-seventh day of the second month of Noah’s 601st year. They were in the ark for about a year and two weeks.
How long did the waters rise? The text says, “For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth…” I interpret that statement to mean that the maximum height of the water was reached in 40 days, at the end of which time both the rains and the outpouring from the aquifers stopped.
How long did the waters persist before they began to recede? Apparently they began to recede immediately. The text says, “The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days. … At the end of a hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest …” The hundred and fifty days must include the time of both the rain and the decline of the waters, as it is five months—150 days—from the start of the rain on the seventeenth day of the second month to the seventeenth day of the seventh month when the ark stopped floating.
How long did it take the water to recede? Apparently it took from about the 27th day of the third month, which would have been the date of cessation of rain and the time when the waters reached their greatest height, to the first day of the first month of Noah’s 601st year, the point when the earth was dry. That is, it took about 270 days for the waters to recede completely.
Is there any indication from these verses that the Flood might not have been global? There is this rather strange observation:
The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the
water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark
came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first
day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
On the seventeenth day of the seventh month the water was low enough that the mountains of Ararat snagged the ark—and we don’t even know that it was the highest peak of Mount Ararat on which the ark came to rest. But the tops of the mountains did not become visible above the declining waters for another two and one-half months. Did it take two and one-half months for sea level to go down from the water-line of the ark to the point at which the land on which the ark was resting could be seen? That is one possibility. Another is this one: the tops of the mountains to which the narrative refers are the tops of the hills of Mesopotamia with which Noah and his family would have been familiar. The top of Mount Ararat was never covered in water, so the ark came to rest on its slope while the water was still declining, and at length it declined sufficiently that the tops of these lower mountains became visible.
Genesis 7:17-23
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as
the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the
earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the
high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than
twenty feet. Every living thing that
moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures
that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.
Everything on dry land 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.
What was the extent of the Flood? This is indeed a key question, and there is no way to answer it definitively. English translations of the Bible indicate to us that the entire globe was flooded to a level above the tops of the highest mountains. But that would not necessarily have been the message the ancient Hebrews would have received from hearing this account in their language. The Hebrew word here translated “earth” is the word erets, which can refer to the whole earth or to any section of land down to the size of a field. For example, when the plague of locusts was inflicted upon Egypt, scripture says, “They covered all the ground (erets) until it was black.” I don’t know of anyone who would contend that the entire globe was covered with locusts. In 1Samuel 30:16 David is led to a raiding party which is described in the AV as “spread abroad upon all the earth (erets),” referring in fact only to a single field. I could continue this exercise of citing places where erets obviously refers to something less than the whole earth for a long time. In fact, according to a count in Young’s Analytical Concordance, in the AV erets is translated “earth” 677 times and “land,” “ground,” “field” or “country” a total of 1,694 times; furthermore, at least 100 of the 677 occurrences translated “earth” would more appropriately be rendered “land” or “ground.”12 Erets also refers to the entire globe, as in Genesis 1:1, which is why I also acknowledge and in fact insist that the Flood may have been global.
“All the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.” Expressions of this type are often used to mean, “everything that concerns you.” For example, as the Israelites began their conquest of Canaan God told them, “This very day I will begin to put the terror and fear of you on all the nations under heaven” (Deuteronomy 2:25). Do “all the nations” include the Chinese and American Indians? Surely not—it was those whom Israel was to dispossess that were meant. In his prophecy concerning Egypt through the pen of Ezekiel, God declares, “When I snuff you out I will cover the heavens and darken their stars” (Ezekiel 32:7). Surely this statement applies to the sky above Egypt, not the entire sky. A similar use of this expression in the NT is found in Acts 2:5: “Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.” The list of nations following in verses 9-10 manifestly does not include every nation on the planet, but it does include all the nations relevant to the context. On the other hand, the word “heaven” sometimes does mean the whole sky above the whole earth, leaving me again to insist on the possibility that the Flood was indeed global.
What kind of flood was needed to accomplish God’s purpose? Either a global or a regional flood would have worked. It is quite reasonable to imagine that the entire human population of the planet was concentrated in the Tigris-Euphrates valley and the highlands which form the Tigris-Euphrates headwaters. This area could easily have contained tens of millions of people. The Tigris-Euphrates valley is a topographical bathtub—the bottom-land except the extreme northwest is less than 500 feet above sea level in elevation, and surrounded by much higher plateaus and mountains. Had God miraculously concentrated rain clouds in this basin and in the surrounding highlands to produce torrential rains for 40 days, and burst the aquifers to cause the sea level to rise rapidly, no human or animal would have escaped. The combination of rain, snow being melted and washed down from higher mountains, and rising sea waters from what is today the Persian Gulf would have drowned every living thing within the first few days. Flight would have been futile, since all the land around is elevated—creatures trying to escape would have been swept to their deaths by the torrential waters cascading down on them. A flood confined to Mesopotamia would have produced sudden, swift and certain destruction, allowing no possibility of escape. Obviously, a global flood would also have done the job, but a global flood cannot be “proved” by the assertion that a local flood would have been insufficient.
Why did God not simply direct Noah to flee a local flood? There are practical reasons that flight would not have served God’s purposes. If Noah had convinced any of his neighbors that a watery destruction was coming, but without convincing them to repent, they could simply have followed him wherever he went, continuing the contamination of depravity and the misery which this righteous man had to be feeling in the presence of such wickedness. There is also the matter of God’s mercy. Noah is called “a preacher of righteousness” (2Peter 2:5), and Peter says that God “waited patiently in the days of Noah, while the ark was being built” (1Peter 3:20). Since Noah and his family had been chosen for salvation, God could have protected them from the effects of the Flood miraculously, without being “patient.” From the fact that Noah preached and God was patient, one may reasonably conclude that the mercy of God awaited repentance from Noah’s neighbors, who might then have been saved in the ark. The ark represented salvation to any who listened to Noah’s preaching, but if Noah and his family had simply emigrated to an unpopulated region of the earth there would have been no preaching and no hope of deliverance for anyone whose heart had not turned completely to wickedness. In the end, of course, no one listened. But God’s mercy cannot be indicted in light of the opportunity for salvation He provided.
Can We Reach A Conclusion?
I cannot reach a definitive conclusion on the extent of the Flood. In favor of a global flood is the apparent strength of assertions in English translations of the Bible such as: “All the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered”; “Every living thing that moved on the earth perished”; “Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out.” Certainly, these sweeping statements indicate a global flood. Contrariwise, the utilitarian and practical nature of God’s instructions to Noah is inescapable: God gave Noah a job to do, and the tools with which to do that job. There is absolutely no doubt that God knew how big a barge would be necessary to accommodate all the animals Noah had to save, and how many people it would take to care for those animals. If eight people on a vessel the size God prescribed for the ark could not save every animal on the earth, then the Flood was not global.
Is It A Question of What God
Could Do?
There is no doubt in my mind, nor should there be a doubt in anyone else’s mind, that God could have triggered a local flood of sufficient ferocity and swiftness to wipe out all human beings and all animals in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The only way to demonstrate that the Flood was not local would be to identify the anthropological detritus associated with the Flood and show that there were human inhabitants of areas outside of Mesopotamia who would have survived a merely local deluge. Keep in mind in this connection that even the inhabitants of lands outside Mesopotamia, if there were any, would not have been safe, since the Flood involved the raising of sea level; therefore, people living on the seacoast of other continents would have drowned. There is no doubt in my mind, nor should there be a doubt in anyone else’s mind, that God has the power to inundate the entire earth with water, to whatever depth suits His purpose. I cannot think of any way to prove that the Flood was not global.
Is It A Question of Believing
What the Bible Says?
Some readers of this paper may feel emotionally and instinctively that the question of the extent of the Flood is a test of the strength of one’s faith. The Bible—at least, in English translations—seems to weigh on the side of a global flood, palpably if not decisively. Therefore, the issue would appear to be: if practical objections to a global flood are raised, but the Bible says the Flood was global, then do you believe what the Bible says? Observe, though, that the “practical objections” expressed in this paper do not come from atheistic skeptics out to ridicule the Bible, but from within the Genesis narrative itself. It was God Who dictated the dimensions of the ark, the length of time the ark was used, and the number of animal-keepers on board. If God’s arrangements were insufficient to provide refuge for two representatives of every animal on the planet, then the Flood did not cover the whole planet.
How Can We Handle the
Question?
I do not have enough evidence to reach a conclusion. But consideration of Flood effects requires use of one view or the other, because it makes a lot of difference in terms of the effects of the Flood whether it was local or global. If the Flood was local, then effects of the Flood supposed by both “conservative” and “cosmic” Flood proponents are ruled out. The Flood cannot be invoked to explain most or all of the geology of the globe, since it did not cover the globe. In other words, if we conclude that the Flood was local, even though it may have killed every human not in the ark, we have arrived at the end of the discussion, a most unsatisfactory situation for both the writer of this paper and at least some of the readers. Therefore, in the consideration of Flood effects in Chapter Six, we will assume that the Flood was global.
CHAPTER FIVE
GOING COSMIC: CATASTROPHES AND CONSTANTS
I have already alluded to speculations about catastrophic changes in connection with the Flood-era, changes in everything from the speed of light to the topography of the earth, which are a part of the “cosmic Flood” scenario. As we have already seen, the Bible does not support any of these cosmic changes in the creation, but neither does it rule them out. Moreover, these cosmic changes are not, by any strict definition, “Flood effects.” It would convolute the chapter of this paper in which we think about the effects the Flood might have produced to turn aside frequently to deal with possible extra-diluvian catastrophes and changes in cosmic constants. And yet these effects are critical components of many YEC explanations. Therefore, in this section of the paper we will deal with “cosmic catastrophe.”
There are probably as many versions of the “cosmic Flood” as there are theorists, but most of the suggestions fall into the following categories.
I have already shown, in a previous section of the paper, that the vapor canopy hypothesis has very flimsy scriptural support as well as serious scientific problems. Pending better scriptural and scientific evidence, I cannot see any reason whatever to believe this hypothesis.
This theory was mentioned in the section of the previous chapter dealing with the statement “the springs of the great deep burst forth.” YEC writings are full of offhand statements the gist of which is that what the Bible does tell us happened—a Flood—is utterly insignificant in comparison with what the Bible does not tell us happened: massive vulcanism (see next section of this chapter), “runaway subduction” (see the section of this chapter after the next one) and the construction of all the high mountains. All these incredibly violent activities supposedly took place during the Flood or within a thousand or so years after the Flood. I will deal in this section with the supposition that there were no high mountains before the Flood and that all mountain-building happened during or immediately after the Flood, and I will deal with the other speculations in the following sections of this chapter.
1. The construction of all the mountains and higher hills of earth during the Flood year or immediately after it.
2. The upheaval of the ocean floor so that all the mountains then extant were flooded with the water available on the earth today.
What Are the Reasons for This
Theory?
1. It accounts for the inundation of the entire surface of the earth with only the water available in the seas today.
2. It can be brought into harmony with other notions of the reconfiguration of the surface of the globe.
1. If the surface of the earth were made completely uniform around the globe, the earth would be covered by 2.7 km of water.13 Under this water layer would be a coating of sediment—rock and soil—about 2 km in thickness (estimates of the amount of sediment and sedimentary rock range from 1-3 km of uniform thickness over the earth’s surface). Under this layer, in turn, would be the “basement” igneous and metamorphic rock, varying in thickness from about 7 km on the ocean floor to an average of about 70 km on the continents.14 For the rising and rushing waters of the Flood to deposit all the sediments which comprise sedimentary rock and topsoil today, the sediments must be suspended in the water. If all the sediment on the earth’s surface were mixed with all the water on the earth’s surface, the ratio would be 2.7 parts of water to 2 parts of sediment, a ratio which will not suspend sediments (try it yourself!). For all observed sediments to be suspended, transported and deposited, the amount of water must have been much greater. Therefore, the assertion that the only water available during the Flood was what is found in the oceans today seems to me to pose fatal problems for Flood geology.
2.
The erosive and transporting capacity of water is directly related
to the speed at which it flows.15
If the ground were essentially flat before the Flood, water would not
move fast enough to erode sediment efficiently, and very little of what
sediment was eroded would be suspended and transported. Rainwater would move slowly, along
essentially flat ground, to be met by the rising sea level. Slowly moving water can be very powerful—it
can displace boulders and destroy buildings—but it will suspend very little
sediment. Unconsolidated sediments, not
suspended in the waters, would have protected the rock below them from erosion,
further reducing the opportunity for the Flood during its duration to suspend
all sediments observed in the earth’s crust.
For sediments to have been suspended and transported, there must have
been gravity-driven flow, which depends on significant slope, which in turn
depends on the presence of higher mountains, not merely low hills.
3. There are sedimentary depositions at elevations above sea level which exceed the 2.7 km by which the sea level would rise above the level of sediments upon a uniformly shaped earth. For example, the Grand Mesa of Colorado contains sediments from the Green River formation (fossiliferous sedimentary rock) whose maximum height above sea level exceeds 2.8 km. If the ocean basins were completely eliminated by the upwelling of the sea floor—in other words, if the supposed restructuring of the surface of the earth resulted in a completely uniform crust under the sea—the waters available on the earth today would still fall short of rising high enough to deposit the Green River formation sediments within the Grand Mesa. That deficiency includes water sitting completely on top of 2 km of sedimentary rock; sediments configured in some way other than as a uniform layer beneath all the available water—which of course they had to be if some of them were being deposited!—would cause even a greater shortfall! Furthermore, the Green River sediments are overlaid by a layer of glacial sediments and a layer of volcanically deposited basalt.16 How did all these sediments reach their present position, if they were deposited by a Flood with no more water than exists on earth today?
4. As will be discussed in the section on “runaway subduction,” sea floor displacement, first rising to spill the waters onto the land, then sinking again to allow those waters to return to the sea bed, and all within the span of less than a year, would have produced so much heat and hydraulic turbulence that the ark would have been destroyed.
Does the Bible say the Mountains
Were Built During the Flood?
Some translations of Psalm 104 may provide a hint that mountain-building was happening during this time. For example, here is the Amplified Bible rendering of Psalm 104:5-8:
You laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be
moved forever. You covered the deep as
with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled; at the voice of Your thunder they
hasted away. The mountains rose, the
valleys sank down to the place which You appointed for them. You have set a boundary [for the waters]
which they may not pass over, that they turn not again to deluge the earth.
The New American Standard Version has a similar rendering. However, when other translations of verse 8 are considered, they leave doubt as to what should be the preferred reading. For example:
They
go up by the mountains; they go down by the
valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them (AV).
The
mountains rose up, the valleys sank down (RSV/ASV).
They flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys,
to the place you assigned for them (NIV).
…flowing over the hills, pouring down into the valleys to
the place appointed for them (NEB).
Not knowing Hebrew at all, and knowing very little of the Greek which was used to produce the Septuagint, there is no way I could say how this text ought to be translated. Those authorities who do know how to translate Hebrew and Greek, however, are divided on whether the statement “the mountains rose” is the sense which the original language meant to convey. If the doctrine of the creation of the mountains during the Flood year had been given by the Holy Spirit to support the bold assertions of Flood geology, one might suppose the statement of this fact would be less ambiguous than it obviously must be in the original languages.
Many “Flood geology” theories propose massive levels of vulcanism in connection with the Flood year and the years immediately following. These theories can be worked into harmony with theories of catastrophic sea-floor spreading (see next section), though not all advocates of accelerated vulcanism embrace “runaway subduction.”
Why Are Massive Levels of Volcanic Activity Proposed?
1. There are obviously plenty of volcanoes around the earth, and in many cases lithified ash falls are inter-layered with fossiliferous sedimentary deposits. If the Flood accounts for all (or most) of the fossils and the sediments (Chapter Seven will deal in detail with these required Flood effects), then it must account for the volcanic deposits as well.
2. In strata around the earth are many examples of “igneous intrusions” into pre-existing sedimentary rock. We know the sedimentary rock was already in place because the oozing of magma into the existing formations displaced the sedimentary rock in an obvious way. Sediments not already hardened would have been destroyed or deformed by the molten lava. If the Flood accounts for the layers of sedimentary rock under and on top of the igneous depositions, then it must account for the igneous rock as well.
3. All over the world there are igneous monoliths or “plutons” which can be determined to have been deposited in a single continuous episode (Stone Mountain, Georgia is an example), which at observed cooling rates would have required tens of thousands or (in the case of a granite formation in southern California) millions of years to cool. Some of these plutons are overlaid by fossiliferous sedimentary rock. It is handy to suppose that “all that water” served as a super heat sink, quickly cooling the igneous rock.
What Are the Problems with the Proposal of Massive Vulcanism?
1. Most important from a scriptural perspective, the Bible doesn’t mention any such thing. There are no references to “fire and brimstone” in the Flood story.
2. From the point of view of science, there is another serious problem: heat. All the known igneous depositions which are on top of or in the middle of sedimentary rocks (that is, excluding so-called “basement” igneous rock on which the lowest layers of sedimentary and metamorphic rock rest) had to cool. Whether these rocks are under water or trapped in the middle of existing sediments, there is a certain amount of heat which must be dissipated for the rocks to solidify. More water does not reduce the amount of heat which must be dissipated, though it may make the cooling somewhat more efficient. A rough calculation of the effect of cooling all the observed solid lava flows within the single year of the flood was done by Robert Moore: it would raise the temperature of all the water on the earth to 2,700 degrees centigrade!17 In other words, this is 27 times the amount of heat required to raise all the water in the ocean to the boiling point! Even if Moore’s calculation is wrong by an order of magnitude, 2.7 times the amount of heat required to boil all the water in the oceans is still far too much heat to allow this theory to be taken seriously as a scientific explanation for the events of the Flood.
3. The ark came to rest in the Ararat range. Mt. Ararat is itself a two-coned volcano, and volcanic peaks are abundant in the range in which it is found.18 If the entire process of the construction of this nearly 17,000-foot mountain occurred in less than a year, how did the ark which was in the immediate vicinity of all these nascent volcanoes escape destruction?
5E. “Runaway
Subduction” and Sea-Floor Spreading
I have also made reference to the theory of “runaway subduction” in previous sections of the paper, but I have only dealt with it to the extent of showing that scripture does not support it. I want now to devote a brief but adequate amount of attention to the scriptural and—at the generic level at which I am able to deal with them—the scientific aspects of this theory.
What is “Runaway Subduction”?
“Runaway subduction” is a theory propounded by Dr. John Baumgardner, an expert on computer-based finite element modeling. Dr. Baumgardner accepts plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading as valid descriptions of processes at work presently to produce seismic and volcanic phenomena. He proposes, however, that starting with “Pangea” a continental configuration very similar to what is now observed was produced in the single year of the Flood by an “avalanche” of the cold oceanic lithosphere (the crust of the ocean floor) into the molten lower mantle. That is, God miraculously changed the nature of the lower mantle to allow the lithosphere to plunge into it at the subduction zones. By this “runaway subduction,” the process of continental drift which is supposed by conventional science to have taken 100 to 150 million years actually took only one year. During this single year the entire ocean floor was re-created by a massive upwelling of magma at the mid-ocean ridges (the opposite ends of the plates from the subduction zones). At the end of the Flood-year God restored the “natural” behavior of the lower mantle we observe today (otherwise, this process would continue), stabilizing plate movement to the few inches a year which currently prevail. As a sequel to the Flood-year, uplifted mountains such as the Himalayas, Alps and Rockies were formed in a few hundred years as “isostatic rebound” stabilized the continental rocks. Dr. Baumgardner suggests that a sudden and overwhelming displacement of the ocean water by the magma which emerged from the mid-ocean ridge is the eruption of the “fountains of the great deep,” that this event produced a gigantic ocean surge which inundated the land area, and that the rains were caused by the heat-driven evaporation of the ocean waters. Baumgardner’s theory does not require a “water-vapor canopy” to produce the rains recorded during the Flood.
Evidence Which Supports this Theory
There is none from scripture, nor is there any from geology or anthropology. Dr. Baumgardner’s computer model can “display” the operation of this process, provided selected changes in natural values (those changes are proposed to be the triggering miracle) are allowed.19
Problems With the Theory
1. As Dr. Baumgardner admits, his scenario is produced by running a computer program with values assigned to physical constants which have no correspondence with reality. The following comment is appropriate:
The
Terra model [Baumgardner’s computer model] will only produce results of rapid
crustal motion if one inserts completely non-physical constants into the
simulation. For example he uses properties of rock in terms of specific heat,
thermal conduction, thermal gradients, tensile strength, shear strength,
compressive failure, dynamic loading and mass density profiles that have NO
relation to the actual values for these properties of basalt and granite (the
two basic types of crustal rock). Some of the values he uses for these
constants of nature differ by more than an order of magnitude from reality.
When he uses values for these properties of nature that are correct for such
materials, his model produces exactly the type of slow motion for the
continents consistent with the rest of geological data. Furthermore, his own
model shows that if the continents were to move at such rates, the surface
destruction would be so great and so prolonged that the earth would STILL be
uninhabitable for all the massive earthquakes which would STILL be happening if
runaway subduction happened only a few thousand years back.”20
No one can prove that God did not change these values miraculously, but it is certainly not possible to prove that God did so either, and not any reason to suppose that He did since the Bible does not make any such claim, and good reason to deny that He did in the absence of any scriptural warrant. There is no way to get these Flood-era effects unless a miracle operated for the entire Flood-year, and then was terminated at the end of that time. In other words, these are not “natural Flood-era effects,” and therefore “Flood geology” cannot use Dr. Baumgardner’s hypothesis. Advocates of runaway subduction would be justified in claiming such a miracle if scripture said it happened, but scripture makes no such claim.
2. We have the same (except much worse) problem as with the premise of massive vulcanism: heat. Dr. Baumgardner is proposing several mechanisms which would generate unimaginable amounts of heat—many times enough to vaporize the oceans—and I have not been able to find any attempt to deal with this problem, except this statement: “Indeed I do believe that a significant fraction of the volume of the oceans was boiled away during the catastrophe. But since the atmosphere can hold so little moisture, the water quickly returned as cool fresh water to the ocean surface.”21 Dr. Baumgardner grossly understates the heating problem. Subduction alone would raise the mean temperature of the earth by 2,500 degrees F22, to which must be added the problem of cooling 128 million cubic miles of ocean floor in a year. Even if a “water cycle” of vaporizing and condensing worked continuously to dissipate heat into space, the inhabitants of the ark, caught in the ablation zone of a surface-less sea in a state of continuous boiling, would have been cooked like lobsters!
3. Dr. Baumgardner proposes that a massive upwelling of magma burst through the mid-ocean ridge, displacing the sea water and producing an oceanic surge which overwhelmed all the continents. How did the ark, which was sitting on dry land at the time the “fountains of the great deep burst forth,” survive such a tidal wave?
4. While the ark was floating placidly on the surface of a relatively tranquil sea, the crust of the earth a couple of kilometers below was supposedly undergoing a terrific upheaval, as tectonic and seismic forces created the ocean basins and uplifted whole continents. Such tremendous displacements would have generated ocean waves hundreds of feet high, quickly swamping the ark and then battering it to splinters.
5. Continuous boiling of all the sea-water for an entire year would have killed all aquatic life by sterilizing all the water on the earth, and would have destroyed all floating plants, including the seeds which are supposed to be the source of re-introduction of post-diluvial plant life.
6. The ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat two and one-half months before the tops of the mountains were visible, according to the Genesis account. Dr. Baumgardner says that the displacements of the land surface caused the waters to rush from the inundated land to the sea basins at over a hundred miles per hour, which he claims could account for the creation of features like the Grand Canyon. Did a wooden ark sit undisturbed and undamaged on a mountainside for two and one-half months while the receding water flowed past at a hundred miles per hour carving canyons through solid rock? Even two and one-half minutes of water rushing past the ark’s hull at one hundred miles per hour would have been too much to withstand!
7. Once the Flood was over, according to Dr. Baumgardner, all the mountains were built in a few hundred years. How could such sweeping topographical changes happen without civilizations constantly being shaken to rubble?
Is “Runaway Subduction” a Viable Explanation for the Flood?
No; in fact, this theory addresses the flood only tangentially. It requires, for the entire Flood year, a continuous series of miracles to produce the effects imagined, and another continuous series of miracles to keep the inhabitants of the ark alive. It is not required or supported by scripture, and all findings of geology contradict it. It has nothing going for it at all except that it is a potential explanation for sea-floor spreading in a short time. A person can believe it if he wants, but one has to want to believe it pretty badly, because it’s a pretty bad theory.
The last subject in this section is proposed changes to “cosmic constants.”
These proposed changes obviously
have nothing to do with the Flood. Why,
then, are they proposed in this connection?
Because the Flood event is the one event in scripture which seems to
provide a demarcation between “the world of that time” and “the present heavens
and earth.”
There are two types of changes proposed, which I will describe briefly.
Radioactive Decay
It is proposed that in antediluvian times the rate of radioactive decay was millions of times today’s rate, and that this rate was slowed abruptly or dramatically changed during the Flood-era. It is evidence from radioactive decay of very long-lived isotopes which indicates an age for the earth in the billions of years.
What are the problems with
this suggestion?
1. Scripture does not require it or support it.
2. The rate of radioactive decay can be measured far back into the past—well over ten thousand years—by analyzing light from distant stars and galaxies, and the rates of decay derived from these analyses are very consistent with current rates.
3. If the rate of radioactive decay from creation to the Flood were millions of times today’s rate, the heat produced by decay of radioactive elements, which are ubiquitous in the earth’s crust, would be millions of times what we experience—enough to melt the crust and kill every living thing.
The Speed of Light.
It has been proposed—most notably by Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman—that the speed of light immediately after creation was about eleven million times what it is today, and that it has slowly declined over the (short) history of the cosmos, particularly during the Flood-era.23 It is starlight arriving from galaxies which are ten billion or more light-years away which gives an age for the universe of more than ten billion years.
What are the problems with
this suggestion?
1. The scriptures do not either support or require this theory.
2. There is some question about the accuracy of Setterfield and Norman’s presentation of the earliest figures for the measured velocity of light. Their paper reports Roemer having obtained a value of 307,600 ± 5,400 kps24, but the Encyclopedia Britannica gives Roemer’s measurement as 298,000 kps, once Roemer’s observations are corrected for errors in his figures for the radius of the earth.25
3. If light speed had been much higher in the past, relativistic effects such as “gravitational lensing” of starlight would be less than we calculate them to be today, but in fact the most distant objects show the most pronounced relativistic effects.
4. Slowing light speed would create the illusion that events billions of light-years away were happening “in slow motion,” but in fact we observe a rotational rate on some of the most distant pulsars which could not be any faster without the pulsars flying apart.
Concerning Changes in Cosmic
Constants
While the imagination and work which have gone into theories like those propounded by Setterfield, Norman and Baumgardner may be admirable, these theories themselves are very poor science. It is worth noting that scientists are finding that the cosmos and the earth are very finely tuned for the support of intelligent life, and that even the smallest deviations from the values which we observe in many of these constants would make life impossible.
There is a point which needs to be borne in mind by those who have become so attached to these theories about sweeping changes in the natural order: the Bible says there was a Flood. It does not say the continents broke apart, or that the speed of light changed, or that a water vapor canopy collapsed in rain. It says there was a Flood.
I am not suggesting that speculation about other effects is inherently illegitimate. YECs can propose all the catastrophic effects that they want, but—and this is the critical point—they cannot demonstrate those phenomena from scripture. If their theories about Flood-era effects are going to be confirmed, they must be supported from science.
Unfortunately, many (not all) YECs have been unwilling to allow their speculations to be tested as legitimate scientific hypotheses. Their preferred tactic is to lift some ambiguous statement in scripture out of context, twist it into a “description” of the phenomenon they are proposing, and work very hard within the YEC community to get an emotional commitment to their theory. Then YEC advocates of the “cosmic Flood” can be counted upon to question the faith of those who call attention to the weaknesses in these ideas. Any article written in support of any allegedly scientific theory—creationist, deist or Darwinist—which devotes a significant part of its text to sneering and contemptuous ridicule of the opposition—and many YEC writers stoop to exactly these tactics while they are attempting to paint their opponents as anti-scriptural—betrays the weakness of its position and deserves to be ignored by serious students of science and scripture.
CHAPTER SIX
PROBABLE EFFECTS OF THE
GENESIS FLOOD
All the material which has preceded this chapter has been calculated to allow a plausible answer to a single question: what might the Flood described in Genesis have done? The answer to this question is a two-sided coin. One side is what the Genesis account describes. The other side is what natural phenomena can be reasonably explained by the Flood. We have examined the record of the Flood as found in Genesis. Is it possible, or likely, that all of the natural features of the earth’s crust which are usually interpreted as indications of great antiquity features—or many of them, or some of them—were produced by the Flood within about one year and not by the passage of eons of time? That is the direction in which our inquiry now proceeds. This chapter will attempt to use the Genesis narrative to produce a more detailed description of the probable effects of the Flood, while the next chapter will compare the probable effects of the Flood to the phenomena which need to be explained.
Before we (excuse the expression) plunge into this chapter, I want to remind the reader of what I consider to be the most important point made in the discussion to this moment, and the point on which all considerations of Flood effects must ultimately turn.
A supernaturally triggered
Flood must have natural effects.
Again I will stress that there can be no examination of what the Flood might have done unless this principle is followed. If the Flood had “magical” effects, as many YECs seem to want to propose, then no one can say what the Flood did. YECs point to geological phenomena such as sedimentary rock and deep canyons, and they claim those phenomena are Flood effects solely on the grounds of the fact that they might be Flood effects. But they have no basis for making such a claim if they are immediately going to beg exemption from reasonable and scientific evaluation of their assertion on the grounds that the Flood was of miraculous provenance. For scripture tells us only that there was a Flood. It does not describe any geological effects of the Flood; therefore, no geological claims can be made matters of faith, they must be evaluated on the basis of scientific evidence and reason.
Because I urgently want to avoid being misunderstood on this point, let me repeat: I am not saying that there is anything illegitimate about attempting to explain various geological phenomena as results of the Flood. However, if a scientific and reasonable evaluation of the claim finds it lacking, it is utterly spurious for a “Flood geology” advocate to appeal to miracle. No one knows, and no one can know, what the scripturally undisclosed “miraculous effects” of a Flood might have been. The Flood might have miraculously left no effects, giving YECs no basis at all on which to make their case. We know the Flood killed people and animals, because the Bible says so. We do not know what the Flood did to the earth’s surface, because the Bible does not say.
Thus, as we go through this examination, we are searching for effects that a catastrophic flood might have produced. Here we are well-equipped, for there have been numerous great floods in recorded history, and we can see the effects of many other catastrophic floods in pre-history.26
6C. Assumptions
About The Flood
As already noted, scripture tells us so little about what the Flood did that we have to engage in some restrained speculation and make some assumptions which are both reasonable and consistent with the Genesis story. For the most part, as the reader will see, these assumptions were arrived at or driven by conclusions reached in previous sections of this paper.
The Flood Was Global
Even though there is ample justification from scripture for regarding the Flood as a local event—i.e., confined to the Tigris-Euphrates area—we cannot be sure. Furthermore, the mission of “Flood geology” is to explain the features on the entire surface of the globe in terms of a single diluvial event, and a “local” Flood has no chance to account for all the features which we are going to examine in Chapter Seven. Therefore, we proceed on the assumption that the Flood inundated the entire globe.
The Earth’s Topography Was
Similar to What It Is Today
As we have already noted, the suppositions that the current ocean basins and continental configuration were reached in a year—or even in two hundred years—and that the orogeny of the Himalayas, Rockies, Andes and other mountain chains took only a few hundred or a thousand years are currently unsupportable scientifically. I say they are “currently” unsupportable to leave open the possibility that science may one day come up with a geological theory which will allow the supposition that the catastrophe of the Flood was also a topographical catastrophe. Given the current state of science, however, the problems of supposing that the surface of the earth underwent such a dramatic deformation in such a short time, as I have shown, are both practically overwhelming and completely unsupported by anthropological, geological or scriptural evidence. Thus, no one, on the basis of either scientific or hermeneutical principles, is required to accept the assertion that the Flood time involved massive changes to the earth’s topography. We are therefore going to assume that the surface of the earth looked similar in antediluvian days to the way it looks today. This assumption does not foreclose the possibility that massive volumes of sediment might have been eroded and re-deposited during the Flood.
God Added Some Water
As noted in a previous chapter, if the earth’s topography was similar to what it is today, and the Flood covered the highest mountains of the entire earth, God must have added some water to what we see on the surface of the earth today, and removed it when the Flood ended. Enough water would have had to be added to raise the present level of the sea by about 30,000 feet (9,100 m). This assumption is an important one. If it is not allowed, I see no alternative to admitting that the Flood was local, and that Flood geology cannot account for features of the surface of the earth outside the area of Mesopotamia.
The scripture does not state, of course, that God added any water. However, this assumption is not contra-scriptural and is, I think, reasonable in light of the other facts which we know and conclusions which can easily be reached.
If water was added, did it come from beneath the sea or from the clouds? Since God stated, “I will send rain,” and since the undersea and underground water originated from “the fountains of the great deep,” it is reasonable to suppose that God “sent” additional rainwater. This supposition, too, is the most favorable one which is possible for Flood geology.
There Was Some Un-lithified
Sediment When the Flood Started
“Un-lithified” sediment includes anything except rock: loose sediment such as soils and sands, and consolidated sediment—clasts trapped in some kind of chemical or depositional matrix—in which the process of lithification has not gone very far. Flood geology champions sometimes assert that all the sedimentary rock observed today not only was deposited by the Flood, it also had first to be eroded from igneous and metamorphic rock (or, perhaps, creation-rock) into sediment by the Flood. But there is no reason for them to make the matter quite so difficult for themselves. There must have been soil on the surface of the earth when the Flood began, else there would have been no growing medium for plants. Soil is simply loose sediment—good planting soil is a mixture of clay, sand and organic matter. Classic geology regards soil as a product of the weathering of rock, and old-earth creationism has no objection to that conclusion. However, if the earth is only a few thousand years old, and if there were plants growing less than 100 hours after the creation of the earth, then God must have created some topsoil. This topsoil would have comprised part of the sediment re-deposited during the Flood.
Un-lithified sediments on the surface of the earth today are at maximum only a few meters in thickness. It would be helpful, though it is clearly impossible, to know how much un-lithified sediment was available when the Flood began. The more un-lithified sediment there was to be easily dislodged and carried by the waters, the more favorable is the potential outcome for Flood geology.
Certainly, it is theoretically possible that there was a great deal more un-lithified sediment on the earth just before the Flood than today, particularly if the Flood followed creation by only a few thousand years. Suppose, for example, that God created “basement” rock which we cannot observe today, because it has since been displaced tectonically, on top of which He placed an average of a mile of loose or consolidated-but-unlithified sediment. The pressure of overlaying sediment would begin to cause lithification in the deeper layers immediately, but it would be thousands of years before those sediments closer to the surface began to lithify. Therefore, a lot of the shallower sediments would be unconsolidated or unlithified at the time of the Flood, rendering them more easily flushed into suspension by the waters.
Attractive as this scenario might be to Flood geology advocates, however, it is extremely unlikely that all the sedimentary rock which can be observed in the earth’s crust today was un-lithified sediment at the beginning of the Flood. Loose and un-lithified consolidated sediments are gravity-driven to collapse easily, leading to instability of the overlying ground surface and making the land uninhabitable.27 For the reasons already stated, it is reasonable to assume that the general topography of non-sedimentary features was much the same in antediluvian times as today. That being the case, there must have been some lithified sediment in place when the Flood started; otherwise, all the pre-Flood sedimentary hillsides would be continually sliding into the valleys! Since we do not have any way of sustaining a different conclusion, I will assume that the amount of unconsolidated sediment compared to consolidated sediment was roughly the same in the days of Noah as it is today.
Summary
The assumptions I have stated here are as favorable as I think it is possible to make them for Flood geology without completely abandoning the findings of science and completely slipping the constraints of reason. Certainly, a Bible student might dispute any of these assumptions on the grounds that the Bible does not explicitly support them. Bible students who wish to dispute these assumptions are welcome to do so, but without the assumptions as I have presented them, Flood geology has absolutely no chance of accounting for the features we observe on and near the surface of the earth.
What happened during the Flood? In chapter four we answered that question from scripture. However, while scripture does not state what geological effects the Genesis Flood produced, Flood geology does try to do so. Therefore, to examine the claims of Flood geology we must use the Genesis Flood story in conjunction with science and reason to determine whether that particular Flood might have produced the effects required of it to vindicate YEC Flood geology. By making inferences in this chapter from what scripture says about the Flood, we will be in a position to examine in the next chapter the phenomena found on and near the surface of the earth to see if they can be explained by the Flood.
There are two phases of the Flood: rising waters, and declining waters.
From the standpoint of geology, there are three flood effects: erosion, deposition and death.
Duration of The Rising Waters
Phase
How long did the waters rise? I concluded in chapter four that they rose for forty days. For the sake of convenience, I will again demonstrate how that conclusion is reached.
Genesis 7:11 states that the Flood began on the seventeenth day of the second month.
Genesis 8:4 states that the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month.
Genesis 8:3 states that at the end of 150 days the waters had gone down. From the seventeenth day of the second month to the seventeenth day of the seventh month, when the ark landed on the mountains of Ararat, is five months: 150 days. Therefore, from the beginning of the rains until the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat was 150 days. There is no indicated break between the beginning of the rain and the time the ark came to rest except the cessation of rain after 40 days. Since no more water was being added from torrential rains, it is reasonable to conclude that the waters had reached their maximum height at the end of 40 days.
We cannot know exactly when the waters began to decline, but the most favorable assumption for Flood geology, as we shall see, is that the decline in the waters began as soon as the rains stopped. This analysis will proceed on the assumption that the rising waters phase took 40 days and that the declining waters phase began immediately afterward.
I am now going to attempt to describe the progress of the Flood as we may reasonably trace it. This is the point at which many YECs will begin to disagree seriously with my conclusions. Disagreement with these conclusions is fine, because the Bible does not state that any of the effects I am about to describe happened; other than the fact that it was covered by water, the Bible doesn’t say that anything happened to the surface of the earth. But, to the best of my ability to determine, all the propositions contained in the remainder of this section are supported by reason and science. YECs who wish to propose alternatives to these conclusions are welcome and encouraged to do so, but those alternative proposals need to be as reasonable and as scientifically sound as I have tried to make the following discussion.
Inundation During the Rising
Waters Phase
There was rainfall all during the rising waters phase, but the dominant feature of this phase was the rise in sea level. According to the assumptions made at the beginning of this chapter—which, I will remind the reader, were made for the sake of preserving the possibility that the Flood accomplished the effects proposed by YEC theories—the sea level rose 30,000 feet (9.1 km) in 40 days: 750 feet per day on average.
Consider how quickly the world as we know it today would have disappeared. In what is now the U.S., the state of Florida, along with much of the Gulf coastal plain and the Atlantic coastal plain, would have gone under within the first ten hours! Within the first 24 hours the entire Atlantic coastal plain, all of the states of Florida and Louisiana, three-quarters of the states of Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas, all but one high hill in Mississippi, the eastern half of Texas and essentially all the Mississippi River valley would have been submerged, along with the coastal areas of California, Oregon and Washington. That’s all in the first day! Within ten days—only one-fourth of the way through the rising waters phase—the entire eastern two-thirds of the U.S. would have been under water. The vast majority of the land surface of the earth, which lies at elevations less than 10,000 feet above sea level, would have been covered by the sea within the first two weeks. At the twenty-day mark, the highest peaks of the Rockies and the Sierras in what is today the U.S. would have been overwhelmed. In fact, if you had been able to look at the western hemisphere at the midpoint of the rains, only the highest mountains in the Canadian Rockies, Alaska and the Andes would have remained above the water. And in the eastern hemisphere only the Himalayas and the highest peaks in Africa and the Middle East (among them Mt. Ararat) would have remained visible.
Erosion During the Rising
Waters Phase
How much erosion of un-lithified sediment took place during the rising waters phase? Even with rain falling at the rate of thirty feet an hour over the entire earth, falling rain and rushing waters can only erode objects which are above the level of the sea. Except for the effects of certain strong currents which appear to be both transient and restricted to the areas in the immediate vicinity of the continental shelves, and which erode “troughs” in the soft silt on the ocean floor, below sea level there is very little erosion, and past a certain depth there is essentially no erosion at all, because ocean currents with a few exceptions move relatively slowly.28 Most areas of what is now North and South America would have experienced less than a week of erosion. The majority of the surface of the earth would have been covered by the seas and protected from further erosion within ten days. By the twenty-day mark, halfway through the rising waters phase, only the highest granite peaks, which erode the most slowly, would have remained exposed. On the flat coastal plains around the world there would have been only a few hours of rainwater carrying sediment toward the sea, and then the sea itself would have covered those plains, stopping the rain-driven erosion. On flat inland surfaces where several days of rain might have fallen before the protective ocean stopped the effects of the rain, there is not enough slope to cause the water to flow fast enough to produce suspension of even un-lithified sediments.
Might ocean currents have eroded features which were what is sea level today? If ocean currents were much more powerful then than they are now, might they not have been able to produce erosion which the rain, because of the rapidity with which the earth was inundated, could not?
No one can say how fast the ocean currents moved during the Flood. They might indeed have been quite different from the way they are today—after all, by the end of the 40 days of rain there were no super-marine land masses to inhibit the current flow. But any currents powerful enough to cut canyons must first have eroded away the mountains and even the hills which were protruding into the current. All mountains today, including those rising from the sea floor, would date from the Flood—less than ten thousand years ago by YEC chronologies. We have already observed the geological problems of supposing that all mountains on earth were constructed in a thousand years, and there are scriptural problems as well. The Bible says, “All the high mountains were covered.” But if the ocean currents were powerful enough to cut canyons, there would have been neither high mountains nor low mountains nor hills to be covered! Not only would the mountains not have survived these fancied ocean currents, any such currents violent enough to cut canyons would have destroyed all the coral reefs, which are composed of brittle carbonates. Therefore, I cannot think of any reason to suppose that the undersea currents during the Flood were strong enough to contribute significantly to erosion during the rising waters phase.
Would an earth without steep terrain have caused water to flow fast enough to produce significant erosion? In Chapter Five I referred to this reason to suppose that the topography of the antediluvian earth was much the same as it is today. Without considerable slope to the ground, as is a feature of a topography with high mountains like the Himalayas, water would not move fast enough to suspend significant quantities of sediment.
How would YEC assertions about abundant plant growth have affected the rate of erosion? If we maintain our assumption that antediluvian topography was much the same as it is today, the most likely form of erosion from such heavy rains (thirty feet an hour) is called “sheet erosion”: falling raindrops splash loose sediments into the air, where they are swept downhill by the onrushing waters.29 Like all forms of erosion, however, sheet erosion is inhibited by overlaying vegetation such as Flood geology advocates theorize existed in abundance over most of the surface of the earth. For sheet erosion to occur over a significant portion of the earth’s surface, the rain must first destroy the plants occupying the soil, then wash the soil violently enough to eliminate the layer in which plant roots would have remained to retard the erosive forces. Only when all plant material is gone can massive sheet erosion occur. It is certainly likely that rain in the volume we are theorizing would have produced enormous destruction of the flora on the earth’s surface. It is at least problematical to suppose, however, that the amount of erosion deemed necessary to account for all sedimentary depositions observed today could have occurred so quickly—within a few hours for many areas—especially given the heavier-than-today coverage of plants which YECs are wont to hypothesize.
What type of sedimentation might we expect from the rising waters phase? There are three classes of sediments carried in moving water: “bed-load,” “suspended-load” and “dissolved load.”30 Rocks, stones and various types of detritus which moving water does not suspend are called “bed-load sediments.” These types of sediments, pushed along by the force of the water, are not “graded” by coarseness when they are deposited as is the case with suspended-load sediments. Floods are observed to leave behind distinctive patterns of what are essentially bed-load sediments: conglomerates of unsorted clasts, boulders, plants and the buried remains of any animals unfortunate enough to be caught in their path. We could expect the rain to trigger mudslides (if the terrain had enough slope), and we would expect many if not most rivers to burst their banks catastrophically, resulting in the rapid muddy burial under such flood sediments of many plants and animals.
What factors would have determined the flow rate of the Flood waters, and therefore their capacity to suspend sediments? The rate at which moving water flows, coupled with the qualities of the ground or stream bed over which it flows, determines how much sediment can be suspended in the moving water.31 No matter how hard it was raining, the rainwater flowing down the central Mississippi River valley in Flood times would have flowed at the same stately clip at which the Mississippi River flows today: the topography that determines the flow rate today would have produced an identical flow rate then. And since the speed at which water moves is the most important factor in the determination of how much sediment the water can carry, the Mississippi would have delivered in the two days in which it operated about the same load of sediment that it delivers in two days at present—an undetectable smear when distributed over the entire course of the river from the present delta to present-day Minnesota!
Would the rain not have eroded some exposed rock? On slopes of unconsolidated sediment underlain by rock, the unlithified sediment might indeed have been stripped completely away from the underlying rock by the incredible force of the raging downpour. In that case some weathering of the solid rock would have taken place. Erosion, however, is partly dependent on the sediments carried in the water, which act like sandpaper to gouge the rock through which water is flowing. But the rain falling on solid rock in the highest mountains, where there is relatively little unconsolidated sediment, would have had an insignificant suspended load of sediment until it had gone many miles downstream to meet the oncoming ocean. There would have been a “zone of maximum erosion” for each land mass, comprising that area which is far enough from the highest mountains that the waters have had time to accumulate some sediment, but steep enough that the sediment-carrying waters would have been moving fast enough to scour the rock. But that zone would have been small even when the Flood started, and it would have been inundated completely within the first week.
What about the force of the falling rain itself? How much actual erosion of rock—sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic—would falling rain have produced? We have a way of guessing at the answer to this question. The force of the falling rain would have been roughly equivalent to the weathering produced by waterfalls such as Niagara or the Upper Yosemite Falls on exposed rock surfaces at the base of such cataracts. The amount of this type of erosion each year is measured in inches. We are discussing not a year of rainfall-erosion, but two weeks for most of the surface of the earth, and 40 days in the case of a tiny fraction of that surface.
What about beach erosion? Does storm-driven beach erosion provide a model which might imply significant erosion of unconsolidated sediments during this greatest of storms? Certainly, beach erosion gives us an idea of what the pounding waves of the Flood might have done, but keep in mind that the “seashore” was moving inland so rapidly that any waves being generated by the deluge would have pounded a particular tract of soil only once before covering it with a protective layer of water.
Would the overall effect of the rising waters have been erosive, or protective? We have seen that rather than subjecting soil and sedimentary rock to six weeks of merciless erosion, the overall effect of the rising water phase of the Flood would have been to protect the earth’s surface by covering it quickly with the sea. Whether or not one allows the YEC assumption that much of the earth’s surface was covered with lush vegetation, areas of relatively flat sedimentary cover would not have undergone much erosion at all. It is hard to see how the underlying rock would have been significantly affected.
What reasonable conclusions may be drawn? Essentially all the creation and suspension of loose sediment over the entire surface of the earth in the phase of the rising waters would have happened within the first two weeks. It is indeed possible, provided there were some steep slopes to accelerate the water (i.e., that “cosmic Flood” advocates are wrong, and that the antediluvian terraform was similar to what we observe today), that a great deal of unconsolidated sediment may have been stripped from the surface of the land. But I cannot think of a rational scenario in which all sediments we observe today, both consolidated and unconsolidated, might have been suspended as water-borne clastics during a span of only two weeks, particularly if, as YECs commonly assert, most of the surface of the globe was protected by dense plant growth.
Deposition of suspended sediments might have taken place during both the rising waters phase and the declining waters phase. What kind and extent of sedimentary deposition might have occurred during the rising waters phase?
How much sediment was available to be deposited? If, as it seems to me most logical to conclude, there was no massive erosion and suspension of sediments during the rising waters phase, then there was little suspended sediment being transported in the water to be deposited during this phase. We would, however, expect there to be significant depositions of unsorted “bed load” clasts, resulting from local catastrophic flooding.
Is there a predictable pattern of sedimentary deposition which Flood geology advocates might use to confirm their theories? If, contrary to what I have supposed, there were indeed significant quantities of suspended sediment, we can predict the resulting depositional pattern. We have already noted that the dominant feature of this phase of the Flood was the rise in sea level. Rising sea levels produce a distinctive pattern of sedimentation. As sea level moves inland, more-turbulent waters near the shore deposit coarser sediments, and then finer sediments are laid on top of the coarser clasts as deeper and more-placid waters supervene.32 This distinctive pattern, which can be followed inland as the seas gradually rise to cover lands which were once dry, ought to comprise a single layer of deposition which can be recognized in sedimentary rock throughout the earth. If, on the other hand, no significant volumes of sediment were available, we would not see any effect of the rising and declining water in the geological record.
What reasonable conclusions may be drawn? Since there was probably not a massive amount of erosion during the rising waters phase, materials required to produce a significant layer of sedimentary deposition were simply not available. The type of sedimentation pattern which would have been produced by a worldwide flood can be predicted, but given the likelihood that there was not a great deal of erosion during this phase the absence of that worldwide pattern would not disprove the Flood story.
Death During the Rising
Waters Phase
What death-related relics might the Flood have left? It is supposed by advocates of Flood geology that a significant part of the fossil record found in rocks—primarily sedimentary rocks—is a relic of the Flood. Rapid burial under catastrophically deposited sediments is indeed one way of producing large volumes of fossils such as are observed in many places, and there are fossil beds which conventional science agrees result from massive flooding.
Certainly, the Flood destroyed all terrestrial animal life, and must have destroyed a lot of plant life, in the area in which it prevailed. If it indeed covered the whole globe, then, with a few exceptions, all animal life on the land surface of the globe would have been wiped out. Thus, the effect we would generally expect of the Flood is consistent with the fact that fossils are commonly found in sedimentary rocks
How and when would Flood deaths have happened? Essentially all death produced during the Flood would have occurred during the rising waters phase by drowning, burial in mud and aqueous or detrital battery. There would be a huge number of recently deceased carcasses. It is not necessary to suppose that all this biomass was deposited in a single layer. There might be some layering of sedimentary rock during the declining waters phase (see discussion to follow), with intermittent layers of dead animals and plants.
On the other hand, most biota initially float after they are drowned. If the rising waters buried only a few creatures under mud and floated most of the recently deceased animals, most of the burial of these floating carcasses would have happened during the declining waters phase.
What reasonable conclusions may be drawn? Essentially all Flood-caused death took place during the rising waters phase, but there was probably relatively little burial of a type which might have produced fossils.
This phase was dominated by the rise in sea level, which prevented massive erosion, killed most living things by drowning or battery, and may have left many local depositions of bed-load sediments. Some fossils would have begun to be produced during this phase. There would probably have been relatively little suspended-load sediment created because of the rapidity with which the majority of the earth’s surface was covered. The rising waters phase would have ended with the earth covered by a deep layer of water, a large number of dead plants and animals left floating on top of the water.
Of course, as has been noted many times in this paper, the Bible does not say what the effects of rising waters were on the surface of the earth, nor does it provide any information on whether significant volumes of sediment were eroded and suspended by the waters, what happened to the bodies of animals, or how much clastic deposition took place. Sedimentation is such a complex phenomenon that any rational attempt to explain the deposition patterns we observe today would have to be taken seriously.33 I would therefore be genuinely happy for Flood geology advocates, using the facts about the Flood that we are given in scripture, to propose detailed and rational descriptions of the operation of Flood erosion and deposition which are different from those which I have proposed. Those explanations could then be tested against the geological data to evaluate their fidelity to observed phenomena. The explanation which I have proposed—which is that there was very little sediment available to be deposited—is, I believe, consistent with what the geological record shows, which is that there is no geological stratum indicating a worldwide rise in sea level.
The Flood began on the seventeenth day of the second month of the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life (Genesis 7:11), and the ground was dry on the first day of the first month of the six-hundred and first year of Noah’s life (Genesis 8:13). Thus, the actual duration of the Flood itself was about seven weeks short of a year: about forty-five weeks or 315 days. Forty of those days were days of rising waters. The declining waters phase, then, took about 285 days.
According to my working assumptions, sea level declined 30,000 feet in 285 days, or about 105 feet per day on average. It took 110 days for water to drop from a level about 30,000 feet above present sea level to a level about 17,000 feet above present sea level, so that the ark came to rest on Mt. Ararat (the highest peak of Mt. Ararat is 16,946 feet ASL, assuming that highest peak is meant). In the first 110 days of the decline of the waters, that is an average rate of decline of 118 feet per day. For the remaining 175 days of the decline, until the first day of the first month of Noah’s 601st year, the rate of decline would have been 98 feet per day. However, if we allow the very reasonable assumption that the present sea level was reached before the ground was dry, we could postulate a constant rate of decline of 118 feet per day. That rate would return the sea to its present level in 255 days, leaving just one month (30 days) for the ground to dry after present sea level was reached by the ocean waters. While there is no reason we have to conclude that the rate of decline was constant, for the sake of simplicity, and since some assumption has to be used to estimate effects of the declining waters phase, I am going to assume the constant rate of decline in sea level of 118 feet per day.
We have been discussing Flood effects with the assumption that God added enough water to what was on the earth then (and is presently on the earth) to raise sea level by about 30,000 feet. Recall that all the water in the present atmosphere, all underground and undersea aquifers, and all polar and glacial ice would raise sea level by about 310 feet. If we allow the assertion by Joseph Dillow of a “water vapor canopy” of the greatest thickness which would permit life on earth to continue, we can get another 40 feet of water. The largest conceivable (I do not consider Dillow’s hypothesis conceivable, but allow it for the sake of argument) rise in sea level would be about 350 feet. With or without Dillow’s “canopy,” a lot of water has to be added to cover the highest mountains on earth.
I have proposed that God added that water in the form of falling rain. When the water began to decline, then, where did it go? The text says, “ … He sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded” (Genesis 8:1). In other words, the subsidence of the waters was supernaturally caused. It is reasonable to suppose that God returned the water from the aquifers and the polar ice to its place and put the normal water cycle back into operation, but having done those things He still had over 29,000 feet of ocean water to remove. We are told “He sent a wind over the earth,” implying that the removal of the water was God’s doing, just as sending it in the first place had been His work. This “divine wind” miraculously removed the water from the domain of the earth, allowing normal life to resume.
If God had removed the water miraculously all at once, a calamity would have resulted: for one thing, the ark would have tumbled 30,000 feet from the height of the highest mountain to the present sea level. So He removed it miraculously over a span of approximately 255 days—about 118 feet per day. To the inhabitants of the ark, it would simply have looked like sea level was declining, which indeed it was! Like a bathtub draining, the waters of the ocean went down and down until they reached their present level, leaving the ark resting on Mt. Ararat.
How much erosion would have taken place during this period of about nine months? That is, how much unconsolidated sediment, and how much rock, would have been displaced and moved by the declining waters?
To answer this question we must bear in mind what is meant by “declining waters.” Mainly, this term means that sea level was sinking toward what it is today at the rate of 118 feet per day. The “seashore” must drain from the center of, for example, the Eurasian land mass, to the present shore—a distance in the most extreme case of perhaps four thousand miles—in the span of perhaps the last 40 days of declining water. In other words, the seashore would have declined over the land at the average rate of about 100 miles a day: about four miles per hour. Depending on the lay of the land there would have been stretches of ground over which the draining was faster, and others over which it was slower. But there is no reasonable hypothesis which is supported by scripture, reason or science which will allow us to suppose that water was rushing from mountains or plateaus toward the seas, moving at such a tremendous rate that it was capable of carving canyons.
Think about it: for the water to drain with catastrophic rapidity from a higher elevation to a lower one, there must be a low sea basin and some amount of water collected high above that basin, to be released suddenly and pulled by gravity down to the basin.
Here is the only way for this scenario to be played out. Scripture says that the waters covered the highest mountains on the earth. So in the rising waters phase, as we have postulated, God must have produced about six miles of additional water to inundate those mountain-tops. Then, at the end of the period of rain, God miraculously raised all that water and all the water that is currently in the seas—plus, presumably, all the aquatic life in that sea water—above the level of the highest mountains, completely emptying the sea basins, preparatory to what I have called the declining waters phase. When it was time for the waters to “decline,” He released that water to fall upon the land—in effect, a second period of “rain”—and rush across the land toward the sea basins, eroding rock and soil as it passed. The ark would have been floating on top of an eight-mile-thick layer of water (the current layer of about two miles, plus the six miles of water which God added), which in turn God had elevated another six miles above the present sea level so that it could efficiently erode all the elevations of the earth’s topography. That suspended water was released over a period of nine months (a much slower rate of “rainfall” than what was produced originally in forty days!), allowing it to rush back into the ocean basins. This fantastic explanation is the only way to get an effect which even tends in the direction of the erosive action which Flood geology demands! When I call it “fantastic,” I am not questioning God’s power. God is perfectly capable of causing six miles of rain to fall on the earth in forty days, of suspending that water plus the present ocean water six miles above present sea level, then of releasing it over a period of 255 days to allow it to refill the ocean basins, eroding soil and rock along the way. I call it fantastic because there is nothing in scripture which supports it.
Is there any conceivable scenario which would support the Flood geology model of massive erosion produced by the declining waters? Suppose we reconsider the “cosmic Flood” notion of an earth on which the highest hills were only three hundred feet above sea level, ignoring for the sake of argument the problems which rapid orogeny of the great mountain ranges would produce for life on the surface of the planet. Would that topography possibly be more favorable to the suppositions of Flood geology?
No, it would be worse! If the surface of the sea declined only 350 feet in 255 days, it would have to go down only a little more than a foot per day. If the continental configuration, except for mountains, was roughly what it is today, the distance the seashore would have to move toward the modern shore would be about the same! The water’s edge would be moving about 100 miles a day at most. But there would be less precipitous and convoluted terrain to produce some periods of more-rapid declination. Overall, a flatter earth means less erosion, not more!
Would the destruction of plant cover have made a difference? If we suppose that rain had destroyed most or all of the plant cover during the rising waters, the potential for erosion of unconsolidated sediments would be somewhat greater during the declining waters phase. But the rain had stopped! The only additional sediments suspended during the declining waters phase would have been those small amounts which could be gathered by waters moving a few miles per hour. There is no process of reason by which we can imagine how the declining waters would have added massive amounts of sediment to the amounts already suspended in the flood waters.
What about more rain? If all the plant cover on the earth’s surface was destroyed, and if the statement in scripture about the rains having ceased refers only to the torrential rains of the rising waters phase, might the re-establishment of the water cycle and the resulting “normal” rains have produced erosion of the denuded surface of the earth so that more sediments were added to the amounts already in the waters?
Certainly, normal rains must have been re-established during the nine months of declining waters. But these rains, being of the same character as the rains we observe today, would have produced only the amount of erosion in either consolidated or unconsolidated sediments which we observe today: very little in a span of about nine months. This probable effect is observed today by anyone who has lived through a rainy season in the desert, where there is little plant cover. Even where sediments are unconsolidated, “normal” rains produce little erosion within the span of a rainy season, and even if the rainy season were extended to a year would yield relatively little erosion. If we imagine an area with little or no vegetation—most vegetation having been destroyed by the rain and rising waters—the rains which fell during the declining waters phase might have produced some additional erosion, but certainly not a significant percentage of the sediment found in the lithosphere today..
Might ocean currents during the declining waters phase have caused catastrophic erosion? No one can say with absolute certainty that they did not do so, but we are faced with the same problems as we have when supposing catastrophic erosion during the rising waters phase: what happened to the mountains? Mt. Ararat is a peak composed of volcanically produced airborne sediments. If the movement of water during the declining waters phase was rapid enough to suspend vast quantities of sediment and even to cut canyons through solid rock, it would certainly have washed Mt. Ararat from the surface of the earth, leaving the ark no place to rest!
In fact, if we speculate that the declining waters phase produced massive erosion, we are creating an even more daunting problem for the recovery of life after the Flood. A large-scale erosion ferocious enough to carve canyons in rock would certainly have stripped any soil from the surface of the ground before erosion of lithified surfaces ever got started; indeed, it is only by suspension of unconsolidated sediments such as soil in the receding waters of the Flood that the water would have enough abrasive capacity to carve canyons through solid rock. But if the declining waters had removed all the soil from the surface of the earth, in what medium would plants grow? Seeds from plants destroyed by the Flood must have re-planted the earth. Where did these seeds grow, if all the soil was washing down to the seas?
We are forced to conclude, reasonably, that the phase of the declining waters would have added very little to the sediment load already accumulated into the waters of the Flood. We have already seen that the erosive capacity of the Flood waters during the rising waters phase was likewise fairly limited.
What reasonable conclusions may be drawn? I cannot in my imagination construct a scenario in which declining waters created massive erosion. The same factors which prevented massive erosion during the rising waters would operate to prevent massive erosion during the declining waters: the deep waters which covered most of the earth during the declining waters would have protected that earth from erosion. In fact, there must have been even less erosion during the declining waters than during the rising waters, because torrential rains were absent. However, I would again assure the reader that I am prepared to entertain any contrary suggestions from anyone who wishes to defend a model of declining waters erosion that is detailed, scriptural and in accord with scientific principles.
As already noted, probably essentially all the death from the Flood happened as the waters rose. What one would have observed, by the end of the forty days of rain, would have been a large number of plant and animal carcasses floating on the surface of the water. The dead plants would have contained seeds which would have replenished plant life on the earth and would have saved insects and small animals which did not get into the ark.
How much sediment would have been deposited in this phase? Well, essentially all that was suspended in the declining waters, as would also have been the case for recently deceased biomass (future fossils).
Would the declining waters have left diluvial sediments? As we have already noted, bed-load sediments are objects and clasts which are too coarse to be suspended and transported any distance by the waters, and living objects which were overwhelmed by this type of sediment commonly appear as fossils. But the declining waters, with certainly a few local exceptions, lacked the speed and ferocity to produce extensive bed-load sediments. What do we observe about water draining out of a bathtub? If the stopper is pulled before the shower is turned on, the water coming down from the shower-head will rush down the drain. If there is dirt—loose sediment—in the tub, the rushing shower water will wash most of that dirt down the drain. But if we fill the tub with water, pour some dirt into the tub, and then allow that water to drain, the water does not rush down the drain, and we will find most of the sediment still sitting in the bottom of the tub when the tub is dry.
Would the declining waters have deposited suspended sediments? It is reasonable to suppose that whatever suspended sediments were in the waters when their greatest height was reached would have been deposited during this phase, since the waters, moving so slowly, would not have been able to hold much sediment in suspension.
Is there a predictable pattern of sedimentary deposition produced by declining sea levels? As we previously observed, the rising waters, provided there was significant sediment suspended in them, would have left the distinctive pattern of sorted sedimentation of suspended-load clasts which is characteristic of rising sea levels. Declining sea levels, as one might imagine, produce exactly the opposite pattern: the deeper waters leave finer particles, and as the shoreline retreats a near-shore area susceptible to wave action deposits coarser clasts. If there was a significant amount of suspended-load sediment created during the Flood, we should see a worldwide layer of advancing-retreating sea level depositions consisting of first coarse sediments, then progressively finer ones, then progressively coarser ones again.
Here is another case in which Flood geology advocates have an opportunity to secure their theory by pointing to a geological layer which corresponds to this deposition pattern. To the best of my knowledge they have not managed to do so. On the other hand, if my supposition that very little sediment was suspended by the Flood waters is correct, the lack of such a distinctive layer does not invalidate the Flood story. Scripture and reason leave us ample reason to conclude that the amount of suspended-load sediment in the Flood waters was quite small.
Are there other types of sediments which might have been deposited? A third type of sediment associated with moving water is dissolved load. Dissolved load sediments are deposited when evaporation over confined bodies of water produces chemical changes which force dissolved minerals to precipitate out of a solution; the mere slowing of the waters will not do the job, as it will with suspended-load sediments. If waters from the Flood were trapped within inland basins, as some undoubtedly were, the slow evaporation of the water would have produced conditions conducive to dissolved load deposition.34 However, the total amount of dissolved load sediments deposited by evaporation of a particular quantity of water is limited by the amount of dissolved load the water can hold. On no account can the level of sediments left by the declining waters exceed that of the trapped water. And water which drains out of a lake or basin—water which is not trapped—will not leave dissolved load depositions at all.
Here again, Flood geology advocates have the opportunity to propose detailed mechanisms to account for the appearance of observed dissolved load depositions in accordance with the record in scripture and what we know about the formation of these sediments from observation.
Fossil Deposition
Might the Flood have created massive amounts of fossils? Certainly, creatures killed by the Flood would have, in some cases, been trapped in such a way as to constitute some of the fossil record observed today. Keep in mind that, while Flood-driven bed-load sediments would have buried some animals and plants in conditions ideal for producing fossils, these types of diluvial deposition would have been limited to local topographies and would not occur over the entire surface of the earth. Indeed, if one insists that all Flood depositions and all Flood fossils be diluvial (that is, bearing the unmistakable marks of catastrophic inundation), one must concede that the Flood was not global, since no such world-wide layer of diluvial depositions and fossils is found in the geological record.
It is reasonable to suppose, then, that most of the biota killed by the rising waters remained floating at or near the top of the waters, to be deposited during the declining waters.
There are several ways this deposition would have happened. The declining Flood waters would probably have induced instability in some newly deposited sediments, causing local topographical features to collapse on top of the declining waters and bury some of the dead animals and plants floating on top of those waters. This phenomenon would have produced some additional diluvial fossilization. It cannot, however, possibly have been a global feature.
It cannot, that is, unless God miraculously suspended a massive layer of sediment above the entire surface of the declining water and then dropped that layer of sediment on top of the water and its load of deceased biota, so that the mud and the future fossils sank to the bottom of the declining sea. In that case there would be a global “shell” of sediment, in which the entire population of animals living on the earth at the start of the Flood would be entombed and fossilized. This sarcophagus would be at the same geological “level” around the entire earth, and it would be relatively close to the surface of the earth since the Flood took place only a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, in this layer every type of creature alive on the earth at the time of the Flood would be represented. Needless (I suppose) to say, there is no such layer of fossiliferous sedimentary rock found in the geological record.
Some animal carcasses would have sunk to the bottom of the declining sea, where enough sediment would have covered them to produce fossils. Others would have come to rest on the surface of the earth, but subsequent residual water flows would have caused them to be covered with sediment and begin the fossilization process. However, most of the dead plants and animals would probably have remained floating on top of the water, to be stranded on the earth’s surface as the waters dried.
What about plants? As the waters declined, the plants would have been left on the surface of still-wet soil. Some of these plants would still have been alive and would have started growing immediately. Others would have yielded seed to the friendly soil, which the water in that soil would have caused to germinate. Plants would thus have quickly begun the process of replenishing the post-diluvian earth.
What about dead animals? Most dead animals, like plants, must have been left on the surface of the ground, where they would serve as food for carnivores and omnivores from the ark. These would simply have decayed over time, leaving no trace of their passing.
What must we conclude with regard to fossil deposition? There is no scenario supported by scripture, science and reason which I can imagine which allows me to conclude that massive numbers of dead plants and animals would have been deposited on or into the earth under conditions conducive to the formation of large volumes of fossils. Flood geology champions are, as I have stated several times in this chapter, welcome to propose a mechanism or combination of mechanisms which are consistent with what the scripture says happened during the Genesis Flood which will support their hypothesis.
It will be difficult or impossible for many people who have never thought in detail about what the Flood described in Genesis might have done to accept this fact, but there are very good reasons for a Bible student to conclude that, in terms of effects which may be seen thousands of years later, the Flood had very little impact on the surface of the earth. There is, moreover, historical precedent for such conclusions, even aside from following the most direct reasoning upon the scriptural record. Catastrophic floods in England in 1947 and in Connecticut in 1955 produced essentially no geomorphic effects.35
Taking the Flood as the greatest catastrophe in human history, and possibly the greatest catastrophe in geological history, it is easy to scoff at the suggestion that the effects of a global flood which took place a mere 5,000 to 10,000 years ago might not be discernable today. Before they start shoveling the scorn, however, these would-be gainsayers must first consider very carefully what scripture says about the Flood—as opposed to what some YECs claim scripture allows—and make sure that the scriptural, logical and scientific ground beneath their feet will support their weighty speculations about a stupendous transformation of the earth’s surface.
For reasons that I have already explained, I do not recognize appeals to the “Magic Flood.” Scripture does not state, and it is arguable whether scripture even allows, that changes in the earth or the universe or constants like the speed of light and the rate of radioactive decay took place during the time of the Flood. Scripture says nothing about earthquakes, “fire and brimstone,” mountains being raised, the continents being re-arranged, or any of the other changes about which speculations are so prevalent. Therefore, anyone who wants to claim that these changes were a part of the Flood-era is more than welcome to do so, but such claims must be supported by geological or anthropological findings. Since no such confirmatory evidence from the sciences has been to this date forthcoming, I feel confident that the presentation of likely Flood effects in this chapter, which is at least broadly consistent with the geological record, is better than anything that “cosmic Flood” advocates can produce.
In summary, here are the
claims I have made about likely Flood effects.
1. The Flood inundated the entire surface of the earth.
2. The surface of the earth was similar in Flood times to what it is today.
3. Therefore, God must have added some water to the amount of water which is currently on the earth to produce flooding of the highest mountains.
4. Sea level rose 30,000 feet in 40 days, a 750-foot-per day, or approximately 30-foot-per-hour, rise in sea level.
5. Therefore, most of the earth’s surface was covered and protected from erosion within the first two weeks of the Flood.
6. Even torrential rains of the type that must have fallen would not have produced much erosion in solid rock.
7. Since the main effect of the Flood was the sea level rising, and since the sea currents would not have produced much erosion, very little sediment was eroded during the phase of rising waters.
8. Most of the plants and animals killed during the rising waters would have floated on top of the declining waters.
9. Very little sediment was available for deposition.
10. Declining waters would have produced very little additional sediment, because the dominant effect in this phase was the decline of sea level by 30,000 feet in approximately 255 days—a rate of 118 feet per day.
11. While some dead plants and animals would have been buried in would today be recognized as diluvial sediments, most of the dead plants and animals were left on the surface of the earth by the declining waters, to be subsequently decomposed.
Therefore, compared to the total amount of sediment and the total number of fossils at or near the surface of the earth today, very little sediment and very few fossils are products of the Flood.
6H. What’s Next?
In the seventh and final chapter of this paper we shall examine some of the observed natural phenomena which Flood Geology and YEC proponents often claim are explained by the Flood, and we shall see if the Flood described in the Bible, the probable effects of which we have explored in this chapter, can explain those observed phenomena.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CAN THE FLOOD EXPLAIN WHAT
NEEDS EXPLAINING?
As noted in Chapter two, YECs propose that most or all of the features of natural history which we observe today, which old-earth theory interprets as indications of great age, were produced during or soon after the Flood year, within the last five-to-ten-thousand years. What are these features which it is proposed the Flood explains? This chapter will briefly describe them and evaluate the claims of “Flood Geology.”
Description of the Phenomenon
Most portions of the crust of the earth are covered with sedimentary rock; the average depth of sedimentary rock on the land surface of the earth is about one mile. If all the sedimentary material on the earth were arranged in a uniform layer over the earth’s surface, it is estimated this layer would be about 2 km thick. Individual pieces of sediment or “clasts” of which this rock is composed were apparently eroded from other locations and carried to the point at which they now rest by wind, water, gravity or glaciation (clasts are also deposited volcanically, but this type of deposition does not require prior erosion). These clasts became solidified into rock (“lithified”) when the transporting medium was removed and chemical reactions took place which “cemented” the clasts. Such layers can be paper-thin or nearly a mile in thickness, and the size of the clasts can range from boulders down to microscopic diameters. The clasts are held in place for the “cementing” process by some kind of “matrix,” commonly either by a chemical matrix or by a matrix of “mudstone,” consisting—as the word implies—of very tiny clasts which were apparently originally laid as mud.36
For the purpose of this presentation, two characteristics of sedimentary rock are of principal concern.
First, this rock frequently occurs in very distinct layers, and one layer will often be of a completely different type from the layer immediately above it and below it. Parts of the Appalachian mountains contain thousands of these layers. In other places each layer may be much thicker; for example, the portion of the “Grand Staircase” in the American Southwest which is cut by the Grand Canyon consists of nine-to-twelve layers of sedimentary rock which together are more than five thousand feet thick. The boundaries between layers may be poorly defined—that is, one layer may graduate into the next or there may be mixing of the layers at the boundary—or they may be very sharply defined (the layers in the Grand Staircase tend to be of this latter appearance). All the clasts in one rock layer will be homogeneous in terms of origin, composition, color and means of transport, but the size of the clasts is frequently graded from very course at the bottom of the layer to very fine at the top, or there may be several repetitions of this grading within a single sedimentary layer of uniform color, composition and (presumably) origin.
Second, sedimentary rock usually contains fossils which appear to be the remains of once-living plants or animals or of their activities (borrows, for example). The amount of biogenetic material represented by known fossils is enormous. The YEC authors Henry Morris and Gary Parker estimate that the Karoo fossil beds in Africa contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrates.37 Furthermore, we observe the process of fossilization to be the exception, not the rule. Most of the bodies of one-living creatures undergo decomposition or are eaten by survivors, so that the remains are not fossilized.
Once the sediments are laid, they must be lithified—a chemical as well as a mechanical process. Some types of lithification take place fairly quickly, allowing scientists to observe the process in progress today. But other types are very slow. Furthermore, if the sediments, once laid, are disturbed before lithification, they will not form neat strata such as are commonly observed; they will simply be re-eroded from their temporary resting-place and re-deposited further downstream or downwind. At the steady rate of formation we can watch today, even with a period of catastrophic deposition interposed from time to time, it would take millions or tens of millions of years for erosion, transportation, deposition and lithification to produce the sedimentary rock observed in the earth’s crust.38
Might the Flood Have Produced
this Phenomenon?
As we have already noted, catastrophic floods often deposit agglomerations of bed-load sediments which bear the distinctive marks of rapid production. Typically, these depositions include not only unsorted clasts in a mudstone matrix but also plants, animals and human artifacts.
One would indeed expect that some diluvial strata in the geological record are Flood remnants. These types of sediments, however, are always localized: no world-wide layer of diluvial sediments which might be the Flood layer has been identified. Furthermore, I cannot think of any mechanism by which the Genesis Flood might have produced such a worldwide stratum—as noted in the previous chapter, the only conceivable way for the Flood to account for all the fossiliferous rock would have been for God to have lifted a massive layer of sediment above the declining waters and dropped it all at once on top of the deceased animal carcasses. Bed-load sedimentation is NOT the pattern which predominates among observed sedimentary rock, most of which consists of heterogeneously layered and sorted sediments. Diluvial depositions are almost never either heterogeneously layered or sorted.
We have already noted that a rising and then declining sea level would produce a distinctive world-wide pattern of deposition in which coarse clasts were first deposited, then finer clasts as the water deepened, then coarser clasts again as the sea level subsided. For a worldwide Flood which produced extensive erosion and deposition, that signature layering ought to be found everywhere. Flood geology advocates, however, have not managed to identify any such worldwide deposition layer. But if the Flood happened as scripture indicates, and if the Flood was worldwide as most YECs propose, this layer of sediment would be present, unless …
Unless there was so little sediment suspended in the rising Flood waters that very little deposition occurred during this phase. And that supposition would accord with what we have seen it reasonable to suppose: the rising seas covered the earth so quickly that relatively little sediment was suspended.
YECs have pointed out that rapid deposition of layered sediments by volcanic operation, as a Mt. St. Helens, has been observed. It is true that volcanoes will deposit layered sediments rapidly39, but volcanic sediments are easily distinguished in the geological record, and most of the layered sediments observed in the earth’s crust are not volcanic in origin. It is also true that moving water will occasionally deposit sediments, rapidly, in numerous layers. However—and this is the crucial point—unless these sediments are allowed to lie undisturbed while lithification proceeds, the layers will not persist permanently. In particular, if a great load of sediment—say, bed-load sediment from a flood event—is dumped suddenly on top of unconsolidated layered sediments, those layers will be disrupted. This fact is simply another testament to antiquity. It must be somewhat unusual for sediments such as are observed in the form of rock to be deposited and then to lie undisturbed during the lithification process. Surely for every layer of sedimentary rock we find there are many others which were laid and then destroyed.
What about the fossils that are found within sedimentary rock? Can the Flood explain all, or even a significant portion, of the fossil record?
The outstanding feature of the fossil record—indeed, that characteristic which has posed such a challenge to “scientific” interpretations of the Bible creation story—is that past living things are found in distinctive biological layers: there are no dinosaur fossils found with trilobite fossils, and there are no human fossils found with dinosaur fossils. In fact, the lack of transitional forms between fossils of different eras is a significant challenge to classical Darwinism, as well. A flood moving a lot of bed-load sediment can cover living things, which may then form fossils. This kind of sudden flood catastrophe, however, buries in a single natural grave everything that is alive and in the path of the flow; it cannot separate trilobites from dinosaurs and dinosaurs from people. Furthermore, flood burial is easily distinguished in the geological record because the sediments deposited during floods are poorly sorted by size: boulders, trees, mud and all sorts of intermediate-sized objects are mixed together in the flood detritus. While many or most of the fossils may have resulted from rapid burial, the strata above and below give no indications of being the products of a catastrophic flood. Burial in mud during either the rising or the declining waters, therefore, cannot account for the fossil record.
Might the Flood have produced the Grand Canyon, and the Grand Staircase through which the Grand Canyon is cut? How could the Flood have deposited five thousand feet of sediment in the form of more than nine distinct layers, each overlaid with another layer which would have mixed with the underlying layer at the boundary unless the underlying layer had first lithified? How could the Flood be depositing the layers of sediment and cutting the canyon at the same time? How could the water have flowed violently enough to cut the canyon through solid rock during nine months of declining water? If the sediments were not lithified, how would the canyon have been cut without the walls—which in some places are nearly straight-up-and-down and in other places are actually undercut—collapsing in on the canyon itself? Finally, how did the Flood deposit three distinct layers containing terrestrial plant and animal fossils, the uppermost a layer of (apparently) wind-deposited desert sand40 which contains the preserved tracks of land animals—between layers which are water-deposited and which contain fossils of marine animals?41
But the sedimentary rocks create
another problem for Flood-dependent explanations. Crinoids are a sea-dwelling species which have at times grown in
such profusion as to form vast mats on the sea floor. When these beasties die, their bodies are sometimes incorporated
into great sheets of limestone, which may in turn be fractured and
reconsolidated as a type of sandstone called calcarenite. The Redwall Limestone in the Grand Staircase
is crinoid limestone.
There
is also a calcerenite stratum called the Madison formation in the Williston
Basin of North Dakota and Canada. The
Madison formation contains 10,000 cubic miles of broken crinoid limestone,
production of which would require a layer of crinoids sufficient to cover the
entire earth to a depth of three inches; yet, the Madison formation is only one
small part of the Mississippian limestone, which almost literally covers the
entire earth.42
Finally,
there are twenty-six places on the earth in which all twelve of the major
geological eras are represented in sedimentary rock, and there is no layer
which might be the Flood layer found in any of these locations, much less is
there a consistent Flood layer found in all of them.43
I cannot imagine how advocates of Flood geology can claim that the Flood produced every one of the many layers of fossiliferous sedimentary rock in the earth’s crust. In fact, I cannot imagine how they can claim that the Flood produced even a significant portion of this rock. Neither the sediments nor the fossils look like they were all produced during the Genesis Flood, or indeed during any other flood. YEC attempts to explain these facts usually rely heavily on the “Magic Flood”: “Well, there was a lot of water and a lot of plants and animals being killed, so the Flood must have done this … somehow.” Such invocations of water magic, however, are not scientific and do not explain. If YECs have a scientific and reasonable interpretation for these phenomena which explains in detail how the Genesis Flood produced fossiliferous sedimentary rock, they need to come forward with it.
Description of the Phenomenon
At the mouth or delta of most of the major rivers on earth there are piles of sediment which are much thicker than the average mile. Sediments at the mouth of the Mississippi River are about seven miles thick. These sediments are being measurably incremented by outpouring from the rivers; in the case of the Mississippi the rate of incrementation is about one inch per year. Beneath the sedimentary deposition the crust of the earth itself is sinking, presumably from the weight of the sediments, and the rate of subsidence of the crust just matches the sedimentary increment, which prevents the sediments from piling up and changing the course of the river.
Like other types of sediments, these river-mouth sediments tend to be rich in fossils. In the case of the Mississippi sediments, many of the fossils have been turned into oil and natural gas. It appears from the rate at which the sediments are being deposited and from the fact that the once-living biota have had time to decay into fossil fuels that several hundred thousand years must have passed during which these sediments have been accumulating.44
Can the Flood Explain this
Phenomenon?
During most of the Flood the “normal” operation of rivers would have been arrested, as the river banks and surrounding countryside would have been under water. As noted in the previous chapter, most of the Mississippi would have been gone within the first day. The Mississippi would have reappeared during the declining waters phase for approximately the last week. Could six miles of sediment have been dumped at the mouth of the Mississippi in a week? Could five miles, or four miles, or three miles of sediment have been dumped there in a week? Keep in mind that the “mouth” of the river, during this time, was moving “downstream” toward the present sea level. So even if the river had deposited a mile of sediment a day, it would not all have been left in the same place: we would see a massive deposition of sediment spread over the entire course of the river, not just at the river mouth. Furthermore, deposition of much more than an inch of sediment in a year would have blocked the course of the river, because the sagging of the earth’s crust would not have happened fast enough to allow the accumulation.
Conclusion
I do not see any way for the deposition of such massive amounts of sediment at the mouths of the Mississippi and other major rivers to be explained by the Flood. Furthermore, I have never seen any YEC publication attempt to explain these depositions in terms of the Flood.
Description of the Phenomenon
By sheer volume, the greatest accumulation of fossils of once-living organisms is not dinosaurs or mammoths. It is the shells of microscopic sea-dwellers: foraminifera, coccolithophores, diatoms and radiolaria. Foraminifera and coccolithophores are tiny shellfish whose shells are made of calcium carbonate, while radiolaria and diatoms are plants which leave behind structures of silicon dioxide. After the owners have died, the shells slowly sink toward the ocean floor. The calcium compounds may become compacted into chalk. The silicon may be lithified into a flinty rock called chert, or simply remain suspended above the ocean floor as ooze.45
Dover’s famous white cliffs, several hundred feet thick, are chalk composed largely of the shells of foraminifera and coccolithophores. The remains of the radiolaria and diatoms form a “siliceous ooze,” an important constituent (at least thirty percent) of the deep-ocean ooze which covers about one-third of the ocean floor to a depth of up to 1,200 feet.46
From a young-earth perspective, the problem with these fossils is that they accumulate very slowly. The volume of these biota in sea-water is self-limiting: if the concentration rises too high, they choke on their own excretia. Each year essentially an entire generation of these organisms die and their shells begin to sink toward the ocean floor, but only a few reach that promised land—most dissolve or are eaten on the way down. The observed rate of accumulation of the sea-floor ooze is about one inch per thousand years. It would take millions of years, at the fastest conceivable rate of accumulation, for the siliceous ooze to reach the thickness we see today.47
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
If the amount of water on the earth during the Flood were, say, one hundred times the current observed amount, the maximum by which the numbers of these creatures might exceed the present population of the oceans is about one hundred times. But that excess would only last for one year. The next year, with the amount of water on the earth’s surface back to normal, the population of these organisms would return to the distribution we see today. It would take thousands of years during which the populations of these plants and animals were a thousand times what they are at present to account for what we observe in a time frame which is satisfactory to young-earth science.
Conclusion
There does not appear to me to be any way for YEC theories to explain these microscopic fossils in terms of the Flood, or of any combination of the Flood and drastically different terrestrial conditions within the last few thousand years. I have never seen any attempt in YEC publications to explain the accumulation of these microscopic fossils in a few thousand years.
Description of the Phenomenon
Coral polyps are small shellfish which extract calcium carbonate from seawater and use it to build shells. The shells of a colony of polyps are attached to one another to form a brittle underwater barrier called a coral reef. When corals die they leave their shells behind, and succeeding generations use these shells as the foundation for their own shells, making the reef taller and thicker. As the reef grows upward and outward, the sea continues to work on the shells left by the long-departed corals, converting them into limestone, which is not so brittle and is structurally stronger than calcium carbonate. This limestone conversion is crucial to the growth of the reef, for unless the lower and inner layers of the coral formation are converted to limestone the reef will collapse of its own weight.
The speed with which coral reefs grow thicker is constrained by two factors. First, the rate at which the corals can build new shell is limited by the rate at which corals can extract their building materials from sea water. A coral population increase can make the reef taller (sea level permitting) or wider, but cannot allow it to thicken any faster than a new generation can make shells on top of those left by the generation just departed. Second, the formation of limestone from the calcium carbonate, without which the reef will collapse, is inherently slow because of the chemistry involved. Observed rates of growth of existing reefs vary, but are always less than an inch a year. For a reef such as the Eniwetok reef in the Marshall Islands, which is 4,600 feet thick and grows at a rate of less than 10mm per year, the derived age is not less than 140,000 years.48
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
I have seen attempts in YEC publications to do so, mainly in conjunction with claims that there was massive vulcanism in connection with the Flood and that this phenomenon heated the water adjacent to the reefs, producing conditions much more favorable to the growth of these structures than we see today. But as we have noted, the presence of temporarily more favorable conditions cannot thicken the reef any faster than unfavorable growth conditions can, because the coral polyp must build its “home” using the “home” of the previous generation of polyp as the point of attachment to the reef. One year, ten years or a hundred years of favorable conditions cannot make the reef thicken significantly faster. Furthermore, the amount of water in the ocean does not hasten the reef growing process, since the corals must work with the water and the materials dissolved in the water which is immediately at hand. Finally, the conversion of calcium carbonate into limestone is a heat-generating process; if it had happened much more quickly than the calculated rate of growth for these structures indicates that it happened, the excess heat would have killed the corals.
Conclusion
It is indeed possible that the Flood might have produced conditions more conducive to reef-building than prevail at the present (although, as we have observed in the previous chapter, if we allow YEC speculation about violent currents we must ask them to explain how these reefs escaped destruction). However, once the Flood had ended things returned to normal, to a growth rate of an inch or less a year. Even if the growth rate during the Flood year were ten times or a hundred times or a thousand times what we observe, and even if that accelerated growth rate produced an abnormally fast thickening of the reef, one year of that kind of growth could not explain how these reefs reached their present configurations in one-twentieth the time observed growth rates allow.
Description of the Phenomenon
The term “varve” is applied to any of several types of very thin lithified sediments (“laminae”) which are formed by a variety of methods (evaporates will be considered in the next major section). The term is usually used to refer to sediments which attest to periodicity. There is a type of shale composed of paper-thin layers of clay which will only precipitate out of water when it is very still. These layers are so thin they must remain undisturbed by moving water while they lithify, else the sediments would be mixed into less-well-defined layers.
A very famous formation of this type of shale, called the Green River formation, is found across the Great Basin of the intermountain west, the portion of the formation which occurs in Utah being especially well-known. The Green River laminae display alternating bands of light and dark material, the latter darkened by the presence within the shale of fossilized organic materials, particularly pollen. From studies of varve formation in progress it has been concluded that each pair of light and dark laminae is produced in one year: the spring and summer clays (which are laid in the fall and winter) are “contaminated” by pollen and other organic materials, while the fall and winter clays are purer and not so discolored. Furthermore, the thickness of the laminae varies according to the eleven-year sunspot cycle and according to the 26,000-year precession of the equinoxes. Estimates of the total number of varve couplets in the Green River formation varies between two million and ten million (the exact number cannot be known because erosion has stripped away some of the layers).49
Can the Flood Account for
This Phenomenon?
It is important to keep in mind that varve formation has been studied in progress for over a hundred years.50 YECs will of course point out—quite correctly—that thin layers of sediment can be laid very quickly by moving water under some conditions, but varves are composed of thin layers of clay sediments, which cannot be deposited by moving water, and the Green River shale is famous because of the pattern of alternating layers of pollen-contaminated and pollen-free clay.51 Shale such as is found in the Green River formation is observed to occur only under conditions such as I have described. I do not know of any way for the Flood to have produced the millions of varve couplets found in the Green River shale formation.
Conclusion
It is my judgment that explaining the appearance of millions of varve couplets, every other one of which just happens to have a significant amount of pollen contamination, and which are observed today to form at the rate of two per year with the same type of contamination, is one of the most difficult challenges faced by Flood geology. For the Flood to produce four million varves (the minimum number estimated) in a year, a layer of tiny clay particles which will settle out of only very still water must form about every eight seconds, and every other layer must be pure of pollen contamination while the layers before and after each pure layer must contain pollen! If YECs can explain this datum in terms of a one-year flood, they will have accomplished a formidable task. It does not appear that nature will give them much help.
Description of the Phenomenon
Another variety of thin sediments is called “evaporite varves.” If salt water is trapped among land areas so that circulation is limited, evaporation produces a much-observed and very predictable pattern of sedimentation. As the amount of water relative to the materials dissolved in the water drops, dissolved-load sediments of calcium carbonate, then calcium sulfate and finally calcium chloride will precipitate out of the water. This distinctive layering, called “evaporite varving,” can be studied today in shallow salt seas with limited circulation, like the Persian Gulf.52
Unlike clay varves which form when tiny clasts are dropped from suspension, evaporite varves are not laid with any regularity, because lowering levels of water in a confined area are necessary to produce them: dissolved-load sedimentation results from a chemical process, not a mechanical process. Circulation of the water, or addition of water which lowers the concentration of the salts, will stop the varve deposition. The Delaware Basin in west Texas is a buried evaporite varve formation which has been thoroughly studied because it contains a lot of oil. This formation averages 1,300 feet in thickness and includes about 200,000 varve laminae. It would require the continuous evaporation of 65,000 feet of sea water to produce. The Delaware Basin formation is under several thousand feet of fossiliferous sedimentary rock and on top of several thousand more feet of such rock. The Mediterranean Sea is underlain by over 7,000 feet of evaporite varves, generation of which would require continuous evaporation of over sixty miles of sea water!53
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
We noted in the last chapter that it is fairly likely that during the declining waters phase some collections of water were trapped in basins with no outlet to the sea. The Great Divide Basin in Wyoming is an example of such a topographical feature. We should expect evaporite varving to result in these places. I would also suppose that there might have been trapping basins in existence at the time of the Flood which have since been destroyed by the operation of geological and meteorological processes. However, the thickness of these varve formations presents insuperable difficulties to explanations which appeal to the Flood. There is no way to imagine how, even with the 30,000 feet of “extra” water that I have supposed God added to the surface of the earth, a sufficient layer of water might have been collected and subjected to constant evaporation for the thousands of years necessary to produce, in the case of the Mediterranean sea bed, 7,000 feet of evaporite varves.
Conclusion
Flood geology writers do not concede that the processes I have described are the only way to produce evaporite varves, but they have yet to demonstrate how any alternative might actually explain the observed phenomena. One suggestion is that underwater vulcanism triggered chemical reactions similar to those which we observe to be associated with evaporation. The salts produced by evaporite varving can indeed be produced in sea water near volcanoes, but the volcanic process generates irregularly shaped formations, not neat layers. Furthermore, no igneous rock is found under the varve layers in the Delaware Basin. There is no explanation for evaporite varves which does not involve the passage of long periods of time.
Description of the Phenomenon
I have already referred in this paper to the phenomenon of igneous intrusions into layers of sedimentary and metamorphic rock, so I will simply remind the reader of the nature of the geological phenomenon. Igneous intrusions take a certain amount of time to cool and solidify, that amount of time being determined by the size of the formation and the internal composition of the rock. The cooling of magma into rock can be observed in progress today, and thus the rate of cooling for intrusions of a certain volume can be known with great accuracy. Many of these intrusions appear to have required hundreds of thousands or millions of years to cool.
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
Since the Flood story contains no references to “fire and brimstone,” there is no reason from scripture to think that any significant number of igneous intrusions or volcanic activity—that is, any level of such activity beyond what is normal for a single year—happened at the time of the Flood. Even with ten times the normal amount of water on the earth, all these igneous intrusions could not be cooled in the Flood year or in the immediate aftermath of the Flood without boiling all the water on the earth.
Conclusion
YECs may wish to take another run at this phenomenon. Perhaps with more observational and theoretical work they can explain these intrusions on the basis of the large amount of “excess” water available. They have not, however, been able to come up with a credible explanation so far.
Description of the Phenomenon
Metamorphic rock is one of the three types of rock found in the earth’s crust. Metamorphic rocks were originally sedimentary rocks which had their structure changed under enormous pressures. This process can be performed experimentally in the laboratory (as in production of artificial diamonds), and the resulting artifacts look much like the rocks seen occurring naturally on the earth. Calculations show, for example, that the transformation of limestone to marble requires sustained pressure of 30 tons per square inch and temperatures of 600 degrees C.
No one can say with any confidence how long it took to produce a particular layer of metamorphic rock. The only known means by which the necessary pressures can be generated is by covering a layer of sedimentary rock under several miles of overlay. This process, of course, requires deposition of the over-layers. The only alternative progress is over-thrusting of rock already in place at fault zones, and over-thrusting itself happens generally slowly. Since there are metamorphic rocks present on the surface of the earth, the process of original deposition, overlaying by new rock, compression into metamorphic rock, and then wearing away of the overlay to expose the metamorphic rock appears to have taken a very long time.54
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
I have never seen a YEC attempt to account for metamorphic rock in terms of the Flood. Even if there were a theory which explained a great deal of or all of the sedimentary rock on the earth’s surface as a result of the Flood, somehow some of that sedimentary rock must be transformed into metamorphic rock in the brief (according to YECs) period of time since the Flood. How did that happen? YECs apparently have no explanation.
Conclusion
This fact seems to be one for which no Flood-related explanation is possible.
Description of the Phenomenon
Coal doesn’t just contain fossils; coal is a fossil: the remains of ancient plants. All YEC authors with whom I am familiar agree that coal originated with living plants. I have already referred to one YEC “explanation” for its existence.
There is a lot of coal: estimates range from 5 trillion metric tons to 15 trillion metric tons. Coal production can be approximated in the laboratory, and it takes a lot of plant to produce a little coal. Why? Because most of the fossils found in coal are not from woody plants but from plants which are by volume mostly water, and coal production involves desiccation, which removes most of the plant volume. Furthermore, coal seams occur in layers between other sedimentary rocks, and some of them are buried miles underground. The deeper the coal is, the harder and drier it always is, indicating that pressure and time have driven more moisture out of the deeper layers. Furthermore, coal never contains radioactive carbon, an element which is present in all living things but decays to undetectable levels in about 50,000 years.55
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
Many YECs think so; coal is one of the most popular targets for Flood-related explanations, and the reasons are obvious. Coal seams are found all over the earth, including places like the polar regions and deserts where the kinds of plants which produced coal do not grow today. It is tempting to suppose that the antediluvian climate was much warmer and wetter than today’s, making the entire earth a “hothouse” of jungle-like conditions. This “global greenhouse,” which is usually explained in terms of the “vapor canopy,” supposedly produced enough plant life to account for all the coal which is found in all the coal seams discovered in the crust of the earth. Then, this speculation supposes, the Flood killed all those plants and buried them under all that sediment, and a few thousand years later we have trillions of tons of coal. Unfortunately, beyond a superficial appeal, this supposition does not really explain things that have to be explained. As my analysis of Dr. Snelling’s speculation (chapter one) demonstrated, it is difficult to see how even a “greenhouse” earth could have contained enough plants to account for all known coal reserves. Furthermore, coal seams are typically found layered with hundreds or thousands of feet of fossiliferous sedimentary rock above and below. How did all those plants get placed on top of the fossil-filled sediment, and then get thousands of feet of layered and sorted sediment with lots of fossils dumped on top of them?
The most serious difficulty I can see with supposing that all the coal on earth was produced during the Flood, however, is the absence of anthropological artifacts in coal beds. There have been a few stories of lumps of coal containing pots and necklaces, and of human bones found in coal beds56, but these are either incapable of substantiation or are eventually found to be either fraudulent or the results of honest errors. But consider: if, as the scriptures indicate, human civilization was in high gear before the Flood, and if the Flood waters swept the earth clean of both vegetation and civilization, burying the plants miles underground, should we not find thousands of human artifacts in the coal beds? Shouldn’t coal miners have been digging human remains out of coal seams for 200 years? Why is it that a handful of supermarket tabloid tales are all the evidence of the human civilization thriving at the time all the carboniferous material was swept into the coal beds?
Conclusion
There is a lot that is not known about coal formation; therefore, in my inexpert opinion, no one can claim categorically that YEC explanations of coal formation are impossible. On the other hand, most YEC explanations do not provide enough credible detail about how the Flood accomplished the deposition of a sufficient volume of plant material to account for most or all observed coal. YECs need to work through the details of any proposed account of coal formation and weed all the “water magic” and “cosmic magic” out of it before they put it forward as a serious attempt to explain this datum.
Description of the Phenomenon
Near Yellowstone National Park there are between 40 and 50 layers of fossilized trees, some of them stumps which are still upright, with roots extended into the ancient soil below, encased in a kind of sedimentary rock which is produced by airborne volcanic ash. The fossil trees sit on top of thousands of feet of fossiliferous sedimentary rock. The rock had to be there, and to be covered by a layer of soil, before trees could grow. The process of volcanic eruption, death of the forest, piling more sediments on top of the ash layer, growth of a new forest, another eruption, etc., was carried out perhaps as many as 50 times! Once buried, the tree material underwent the inherently slow process of petrifaction. These layers of petrified trees thus appear to have formed over a very long time.57
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
There have been several “Flood Geology” attempts to account for these fossil forests. Most attempt to explain the location of these trees, many of which are “upright” as though they grew in the position in which they were found, as having been floated away from the place in which they were growing and washed into deposition in a root-down, trunk-up position. According to this theory, a layer of Flood-borne mud then covered the trunks, followed by deposition of another layer of trunks, then another layer of mud, etc., until 40-50 layers of these trees had been laid into place. Then the whole configuration was fossilized. There are several things wrong with this explanation. For one thing, the matrix in which most of the fossil trees are found is wind-blown volcanic ash, not mud. For another, at least some of the trees can be confirmed to have grown in place. Finally, it stretches credibility to argue that this relocation might have taken place up to 50 times during the nine months of the declining waters.
Conclusion
Trying to explain all the layers of these fossil trees in terms of the Flood seems to me a lost cause. Young-earth apologists might consider exploring the speed with which petrifaction can take place to see if they can account for these trees in terms of thousands of years of periodic volcanic eruptions.
Description of the Phenomenon
I have also referred, earlier in this paper, to the theory of plate tectonics. To revisit this matter briefly as a reminder to the reader, there is new ocean floor being produced every day at the “mid-ocean ridges,” and that ocean floor is moving away from the ridges at the rate of one-half to two inches per year. Plate tectonics is a very successful explanation for the current configuration of the surface of the earth, so successful in fact that most YECs have embraced it (though not the resulting calculations for the age of the ocean floor).
It is worth reminding the reader of the inherent violence of this process. Any explanation for sea flood spreading which requires significantly less time than the 150- to 200-million years currently accepted must explain how any life on earth survived the accelerated process.56
Can the Flood Account for
this Phenomenon?
We saw in Chapter Five that it cannot, either scientifically or biblically.
Conclusion
I cannot imagine any explanation for sea-floor spreading in terms of the Flood which would be convincing to anyone who was not determined to remain converted to a “cosmic Flood” perspective.
7M. Summary And
Conclusions
It is a perfectly acceptable procedure to begin with a hypothesis—by which in this case I mean a collection of theories and suggestions—when one is attempting to explain the natural world as we observe it. Each of the four YEC Flood hypotheses I described in Chapter Two is a collection of theories and suggestions which attempts to explain how nature reached its present state in thousands of years instead of millions or billions of years. As far as I am concerned, each of these hypotheses is legitimate, in the sense that there is nothing inherently invalid about using any one of them as a starting-point for attempting to describe the process by which we received the world we observe today.
Yet, as it is clear to see, the two most popular young-earth hypotheses—the “conservative Flood” and the “cosmic Flood”—simply cannot be made to work with the facts at hand. And the worst of it, considering that young-earth creationism exists for the avowed purpose of confirming the reliability of the scriptural record, is that the fundamental failure of these hypotheses is the failure to read scripture itself reasonably, the refusal to respect what scripture says, the tendency to insert unwarranted or dubious extrapolations and then to demand that those be accepted as “fact.” As I have tried to show in this paper, much of what is popular in “Flood science” today begins in practice not with reverence for scripture but with a departure from scripture, frequently into fanciful speculations which seek to fit themselves into the gaps in the scriptural record—and there are many such gaps, given what little scripture actually says about the Flood—and winds up in some cases even being contra-scriptural. The speculations of Dr. John Baumgardner, for example, are not only unsupported by what scripture says about the Flood, they cannot even be brought into harmony with what scripture says about the Flood.
Scripture itself leaves us plenty of room to engage in careful and restrained speculation as a means of reaching conclusions about what happened during the Flood. That exercise is what I have tried to accomplish in this paper. Since I was not present for the actual event, my speculations as expressed herein are not in themselves any better than anybody else’s. And anybody else is welcome to disagree with the conclusions I have reached, to attempt his or her own speculation, and to draw his or her own conclusions.
However …
Young-earth advocates who are going to disagree with me, to engage in speculation, and to draw conclusions should not waste their time unless they are willing to face and attempt to deal with three obstacles: one sin qua non which “Flood geology” and “Flood science” have not yet managed to achieve, and two other accomplishments to which, as I have made clear in this paper, I do not see any way for them even to aspire. As we reach the end of this paper, I raise three challenges to the champions of the young earth. These are not taunts, but honest challenges, and yet I cannot raise them with even a whisper of encouragement, for they appear to me, from what is known about the earth and about human history, to be truly insurmountable.
If the Flood described in Genesis happened—and I believe that it did—and if that Flood completely reshaped the surface of the entire globe, as young-earth advocates claim, then the record of that Flood ought to be written in the crust of the earth in language no science can misread. Even the most determined critic of the Bible should have to admit that, “here is a catastrophic event which happened all over the world at about the same time.” And yet, as even the most determined supporter of “Flood geology” will concede, no worldwide feature of the crust of the earth has been identified as the product of a single global event, let alone as the residuum of a global flood. In fact, “Flood science” cannot even point to a single candidate datum or collection of data in order to make such a claim. Identification of an alleged “Genesis Flood” stratum seems to me the sin qua non for “Flood science”; yet, this achievement has so far been beyond the capability of young-earth advocates. Here is the first of the three obstacles. Before advocates of “Flood geology” turn their attention to any other matter—in particular, before they engage in any more unrestrained speculations about what the Flood might have done—they need to identify a geological feature which they can demonstrate unambiguously to be the result of the Flood described in Genesis. If they cannot do so, every other Flood-related speculation is a total waste of time.
Instead, in place of identifying and explaining “Flood data,” which ought to be straightforward enough if those data exist, they leap straight to the claim that “everything” is a result of the Flood, that “the Flood did all of this … somehow.” But they are stopped in their tracks by the second of three obstacles, which for all the reasons given in this chapter I do not see that “Flood geology” has even the remotest chance to overcome; namely, to provide a detailed explanation of the features within the earth’s crust, which we have examined in this chapter, in terms of the Flood described in Genesis. There are indeed many phenomena which look like they are the result of catastrophe—though definitely not of a single catastrophe. But the vast majority of observations appear to be the products of steady processes of long duration, interrupted betimes by unusual events. How can a single deluge which lasted a year and a week account for all these facts? Here is the second of the three obstacles.
The final achievement which appears to me to be beyond the ability of “Flood science”—the third insuperability—is the explanation, in terms either of that single Flood event or of some limited number of catastrophes, of data which point to the passage of billions of years of earth prehistory. As I have taken pains to point out in this paper, neither nature nor nature’s God can simply trade volume for time. But the existence of that trade is precisely the claim made by most catastrophists: that an exact substitution for the effects of millions of years of continuous and uniform events can be accomplished by one year of one huge event. If, after a night of sleeping soundly, I go outside in the morning and find a saucer with an inch of rainwater in it, I may with equal validity conclude that the rain fell gently but steadily all night, or that a downpour produced the inch of rain in ten minutes. Concerning the phenomena described in this chapter: as we have seen, it is difficult or impossible to account for them in terms of the Flood; furthermore, they are equally inexplicable as the results of any other kind of rapid process or single stupendous event. Catastrophes do not produce results which appear to have been wrought by uniform processes of long duration, any more than slow-but-steady processes strung out over millions of years can produce results which appear to have taken place very quickly. The passage of hundreds of thousands of wagon wheels over rocks on the Oregon Trail wore troughs in those rocks during a span of thirty years, and nobody mistakes those troughs for the effects of a split-second blast of dynamite.
Let us, then, hear the
conclusion of the whole matter.
However stupendous or momentous the Flood was—and I am personally confident that it was as stupendous and momentous as any event in human history—a single flood cannot explain all of geology, even if that single flood was miraculously triggered, and even if it was the most sweeping event in the history of the earth. I have given the reasons that I do not think the Flood described in Genesis can be used to account for the phenomena described in this chapter. I have indicated the reasons that we might not find any signs of the Genesis Flood in the geological record. I hope that, particularly for those who disagree with me, as well as for those who agree and for those who are undecided, the consideration of the matters I have presented in this paper helps to clarify the issues which must be investigated, to provoke a more thorough study of this important subject, and above all to bring glory to the Maker and Keeper of heavens and earth.
ã November 2000
by Thomas D. Couchman
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Burdick, Clifford. L. “Discovery of Human Skeletons in Cretaceous Formation.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 10:109-110 (1973-1974). Quoted in Numbers, Ronald L. The Creationists (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1991). Page 266.
2. Snelling, Andrew. “Coal Beds and Noah’s Flood.” Answers In Genesis Ministries International, 2000. Online at www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1137.asp. Also in Creation Ex Nihilo 9(3):20-21, June 1986.
3. Whitcomb, John C. The World that Perished. Baker (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1973). Page 67.
4. Dillow, Joseph. The Waters Above—Earth’s Pre-Flood Water Vapor Canopy. Moody Press, Chicago, 1981.
5. Ross, Hugh. “A Bridge Over Troubled Waters”. Reasons to Believe. Online at www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/4264/flood.html. Also published by Sword and Spirit Ministries.
6. Unattributed. “How did all the animals fit on Noah’s Ark?” Answers in Genesis Ministries International, 2000. Online at www.answersingenesis.org/docs/2491.asp.
7. Unattributed. “How did all the animals fit on Noah’s Ark?” Answers in Genesis Ministries International, 2000. Online at www.answersingenesis.org/docs/2492.asp.
8. Woodmorappe, John. Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study. Institute for Creation Research (San Diego, 1996).
9. Custance, Arthur. “The Extent of the Flood”. From The Doorway Papers, Volume 9: The Flood, Global or Local. Online at www.custance.org/flood/ch2.html.
10. Dodson, E.O. A Textbook of Evolution. Saunders, Philadelphia, 1952. Page 316 (quoted in Custance, Ibid.).
11. “Water Masses at the Earth’s Surface”, from “Hydrosphere.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,109251+2+106293,00.html.
12. Custance, Op. Cit.
13. “Ocean.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/xref/0,5716,107949,00.html.
14. “Sedimentary Rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+1+109697,00.html.
15. “Streamflow and sediment yield,” in “River.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,117426+1,00.html.
16. “Geologic Cross Section of Colorado’s Grand Mesa.” Rocky Mountain West Electronic Publishing. Online at www.gjcolorado.com/grandmesa/gmgeol.htm.
17. Moore, Robert. “The impossible voyage of Noah’s ark”. Creation/Evolution 11 (Winter, 1983). Pages 1-43. (Cited by Hayward, Alan. Creation and Evolution. Bethany House Publishers, Minneapolis,1985).
18. “Ararat.” In Funk and Wagnalls’ New Encyclopedia. Funk and Wagnalls Corporation (1990).
19. Burr, Chandler. “The geophysics of God—a scientist embraces plate tectonics, and Noah’s Flood”. U.S. News and World Report (June 16, 1997). Online at www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/970616/16terr.htm.
20 Roberts, Hill. “The Age of the Earth”. (An online discussion of young-earth/old earth positions). Online at pub3.ezboard.com/freethinkingsbulletinboardtheageoftheearth.
21. Sarfati, Jonathan. “Problems with a Global Flood?” Answers in Genesis Ministries International, 1998. Online at www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.htm.
22. Wise, Donald U. “Creationist Geologic Time Scale”. Online at www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/wise.htm.
23. Setterfield, Barry, and Trevor Norman. “The Atomic Constants, Light and Time.” SRI International (San Diego, 1987). Online at http://ldolphin.org/setterfield/. Various references at www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/4881/).
24. Ibid.
25. “Light.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/9/0,5716,119359+18,00.html.
26. “Streamflow and sediment yield,” in “River.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,117426+1,00.html.
27. “Deformation Structures,” from “Sedimentary Rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+14+109697,00.html.
28. “Erosion.” In Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. Funk and Wagnalls Corporation (1990).
29. “Sheet Erosion.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,68972+1+67233,00.html.
30. “Sediment yield and sediment load,” from “River.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,117426+1,00.html.
31. Ibid.
32 “Sedimentary facies.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,68275+1+66554,00.html.
33 “Sedimentation.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,68277+1+66556,00.html.
34 “Nonmarine environment” from “Sedimentary rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+42+109697,00.html.
35. “Peak discharge and flooding,” from “River.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,117426+1,00.html.
36. “Sedimentary Rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+1,00.html.
37. Morris, Henry M. and Gary Parker. What Is Creation Science. Creation-Life Publishers, (San Diego, 1982). Page 138.
38. “Sedimentary Rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Op Cit.
39. Fisher, R. V. and Schmincke, H. U. “Depositional Units and Multiple Beds,” from “Volcanicalstic Sedimentation and Facies.” In K. Pye, Sediment Transport and Depositional Processes. Blackwell Scientific Publications (1994). p. 351-388.
40. “Grand Canyon Rock Layers.” Online at www.kaibab.org/geology/gc_layer.htm.
41. There is a very good non-technical discussion of the problems of accounting for the Grand Canyon using “Flood geology” online at www.erinet.com/jwoolf/gc_intro.html.This document also discusses the shortcomings of explanations from convention geology, radioisotopic dating inconsistencies, and cites Steven A. Austin’s book Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe (Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, 1994).
42. Glenn
R. Morton has written a very effective description of the Williston Basin,
including the difficulties of describing the strata found there in terms of the
Flood. This document is online at http://home.flash.net/~mortongr/geo.htm.
43. Ibid.
44. Hayword. Op. Cit. Pages 82-84.
45. “Origin of Limestones” and “Origin of Cherts.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+38+109697,00.html.
46. Wonderly, Daniel E. God’s Time-Records in Ancient Sediments. Crystal Press (Michigan, 1977); cited in Hayward, op. cit., pages 91-92.
47. Ibid. Pages 77-112.
48. Wonderly, Daniel E. “Coral reefs and related carbonate structures as indicators of great age.” Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute (Hatfield, Pennsylvania, 1981). Cited in Hayward, op. cit., pages 84-86.
49. “Geochronology: accumulational processes.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0,5716,128003+3,00.html.
50. Hayward. Op. Cit. Page 88.
51. “General properties of shales,” in “Sedimentary Rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+30+109697,00.html.
52. “Evaporites” in “Sedimentary Rock.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Online at www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,117862+40+109697,00.html.
53. Hayward. Op. cit. Pages
89-90.
54. “Metamorphic Rock.” In Funk and Wagnalls’ New Encyclopedia. Funk and Wagnall’s Corporation (1990).
55. Hayward. Op. cit. Pages 126-128.
56. Wysong,
Randy L. The Creation Evolution
Controversy (Inquiry Press, Midland, Michigan, 1976). Pages
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57. Hayward. Op. Cit.. Pages 128-130.
58. “Plate Tectonics.” In Funk and Wagnalls’ New Encyclopedia. Funk and Wagnalls Corporation (1990).