Part 9: The Science of Noah's Flood

From God’s Word

From God’s word, we can easily see how you would get the evidence that we find today. Some of the greatest arguments over the creation story stem from what the creationists call “flood geology” and the interpretation that the fossils, canyons, caves, ice, and the diversity of life can all be explained by the Noah’s flood. They do their darnedest in the next room to make sure you understand where they are getting their ideas from.

THE PRESENT IS NOT THE KEY TO THE PAST

I could tell you many a geologist who would have to disagree with this statement. Actually, most geologists since Lyell’s first explanation of uniformitarianism (which is the idea that it makes more sense that the process acting on today’s world are the same as those that were acting in the past). It is true that most of geology is based on this idea, and that is partially where you get the idea of “billions and billions of years.” Presented here is a catastrophic viewpoint, where changes only occur because of big, bad things that happen. It tells us that we can see some catastrophes now, and that we gain insight into the time of the flood from there.

Mount St. Helens

It seems that though the past is not the key to the present, it can provide clues, at least. We are presented with several ideas. First, there was an ash cloud that cooled the earth. Alright, but I am not sure what that has to do with the flood. Next, the lava dome dated at 350,000 years old when it was actually only 11 years old. The problem with this is that the scientist who did this experiment should not have been dating these rocks with potassium-argon dating anyway! Those are used to date very old rocks, and cannot be assumed accurate for anything younger than 2 million years old. It has also been shown that the scientist who got these dates was performing the test wrong anyway. Too bad the creationists only have half of the story. Canyons that were formed in a matter of years and a matter of hours are the next thoughts. However, they are really shooting themselves in the foot here. If the mudflows cut out of hard rock in years, than it could be assumed that a mudflow from a worldwide flood would also have taken years, and not the forty days required by the Bible. Next you are given the fact that ash was deposited as a layer of sediment. Of course, you are looking and ash that came down onto the ground, and there was little water involved there. In a global flood, especially with the storms that seemed to be associated with it, the water would have been churned up all the time, preventing sediment from depositing onto the floor, therefore preventing the creation of the strata we see today. The delta is another example of how mudflows did their work, and I have described what I think of their mudflow hypothesis above. The ecosystem around the mountain did recover, but the populations came in from outside the area, whereas in a flood there would be no outside area for populations to move in from. Logs floating in the bottom would not become petrified. These logs would be eaten and decomposed by everything in that water and would not be there long enough to petrify. Similar would happen to the bark of the trees, they would not stick around long enough to become coal. Basically, Mount St. Helens has told us nothing about how the flood could have created the geology of the earth.

The Flood Drowns the Earth

Yup, the flood was really big. So big, in fact, that we have to infer it for a scale larger than county-wide. And it was because we were all just so bad beforehand. Of course, we do not want to explain to God that it didn’t work and that people are just as nasty as ever now…

Evidences of the Flood in Grand Canyon

If you have seen any picture from the museum, this was probably it.

Sea Animals Far Above Sea Level

Yes, there are many fossils in the Grand Canyon (and areas surrounding) that are from sea animals. However, this does not mean there was a flood, really. There were times when these areas were part of the sea. The grand canyon is actually a beautiful example of uplift in tectonics plates. The Colorado river did not move down, but the land moved UP around it. That means that what may have been the sea floor once has actually moved upwards. Both of these explanations have nothing to do with a global flood.

Sand Carried Across Continents

The Appalachian sand actually shows us that there used to be rivers that ran from that side of the continent to the Colorado. This is actually a fascinating discovery!

Deep and Wide Erosion

The wide flat surface on top is due to wind erosion of the desert. The Great Unconformity is present across the world and shows the division between Precambrian and Cambrian fossils. Also, they use the idea of sheet erosion twice, how could this have happened twice in 40 days and not taken out more sediment?

Layers Over Continents

These large layers of sediment are due to the fact that in several times over the history of the world the continent has been almost or completely covered in water. When these seas were in place, there are continental-wide layers. This is useful for geologists and paleontologists to examine timing in the strata.

Rapid, Thick Deposition

How is it that thick layers AND thin layers both point to rapid deposition? It does have something to do with time. Thick layers are when the environment does not change for long periods of time (and when the Nautiloids were all living in peace) whereas thin layers are from differing environments. Some deformation of the rocks is not bending but is the cutting of old layers and then the depositing of new ones on top. Others can be made from pressure on top or uplifting from below.

The Flood Recorded in the Fossils

The Flood Buries Life

This explains why you see some of the fossil record going from ocean to land (called regression, when the water moves out of an area), but what about all the transgressions (when the water moves in, and the fossils go from land to oceanic)?

A Really Nice Painting

Dunkleosteus

Oh… one of the really awesome fossils from Cleveland is in this…

Models Of Flood Geology

Catastrophic Plate Tectonics…Hydrothermal Biome

Ecological Zonation

Floating Biome

Coastal Permo-Triassic Sands

K/T Boundary

Waters Recede

I cannot really describe to you why these are wrong, because there is simply no scientific justification for any of the information here. Catastrophe as a mechanism will always lead to unsatisfied questioners.

Animals Come Back

This claims that animals got bigger- which does not explain all the larger species that have existed and are found in the fossil record. We also have lots of species that still eat leaves, and ones that are slow-moving. God gave these animals the ability to vary quickly, why are they still not varying at this increased rate?

Again, God put the variety into the “kinds” so that there could possibly be as much variety on the earth today as there is.

It turns out that hybridization is how we get so much plant variety. Of course, we didn’t really see the plants on the ark, so I am not sure how they even survived the flood…

Life Refills the Earth

This is a nice picture of how animals repopulated the earth by land.

And how animals repopulated over water. This is interesting because rafting is often used as an explanation for interchange between some of the continents. It is thought that monkeys got from Africa to South America by these means.

Marsupials are the earliest mammals in the fossil record because they could move better with their babies in pouches… And how does this explain how the non-mammals were there before? What about the monotremes? Does no one care about the monotremes??

The World Chills

Though this has never been explained fully to me (and this board does not either) as to why the Ice Age happened directly after the flood. So there was an ice age, it was just right after the flood, and probably did not extend the times that we know to be true.

The Land Recovers

The basic point here is that the flood was not the only catastrophe. Because the flood left the earth’s crust in turmoil, there were volcanoes and earthquakes. This is how we get rapid burial and fossilization of the sudden wide variety of animals. For some reason, this still does not explain how these rapid fossilizations happen. It seems that they can wave their arms and say “catastrophe” and hope that no one will ever call them out on it.

And if we look at everything through the kaleidoscope of the bible, we can see how everything will go along with it.