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Newsgroups: talk.origins From: isaak@aurora.com (Mark Isaak) Subject: Re: Voyagers on the Ark of Noah Message-ID: <1993Jan28.211342.5858@aurora.com> Summary: Flood FAQ: The adventure continues Organization: The Aurora Group Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 21:13:42 GMT Lines: 351

I've made quite a few changes to the Flood FAQ since the version which Brett Vickers just posted (mostly in the "Aftermath" and beginning of the "Geological effects" sections). Here, then, is the most recent version.

Problems With a Global Flood vers. 1.6, last modified 1/14/93 Mark Isaak isaak@aurora.com

[Email comments and contributions to this collection are welcome. I would especially like to add more references.]

Creationist models are often criticized for being too vague to have any predictive value. A literal interpretation of the Flood story in Genesis, however, does imply certain physical consequences which can be tested against what we actually observe. Most, if not all, observations, discredit the flood hypothesis, as you can see from what follows. Can any Creationists address even half of the points in this list?

The ark: How did the ark even get _built_ before its frame decays? Tim LaHaye and Henry Morris assure us that Noah and his three sons could have easily constructed the ark in only 81 years. Builders of wooden ships whose work took only four or five years often faced the problem of earlier phases of their work rotting away. And does the 81 year figure include harvesting and shaping lumber, building workshops, scaffolds, cages, etc., and gathering animals and provisions? How was the ark made seaworthy? The longest wooden ships in modern seas are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped. How were animals collected from all over the world?

Life on the ark: How did all the different species fit on the ark? 10 million species is a reasonable estimate [May, 1992]. If you hypothesize significantly fewer than that on the ark, you must explain evolution rates faster than any evolutionists propose to account for all the present species. How did Noah supply food and water for all the animals for a year? What did the carnivorous animals eat, especially those which require fresh meat? How did creatures needing special environments survive on the ark? How do you explain how all host-specific parasites/diseases made do with only one pair of hosts (and if they did OK, how the hosts survived!) How well ventilated was the ark? The body heat from millions of closely packed animals must have been very intense.

The flood: Where did the water come from? (It would take 4.4 billion cubic kilometers to cover Mt. Everest.) Where did it go? If you accept the vapor canopy model of some Creationists, you must answer some equally difficult questions, such as: What kept the water up before the Flood? What happened to the heat of condensation of all that water?

Geological effects of the flood: How were mountains formed? Many very tall mountains are composed of sedimentary rocks. If these were laid down during the flood, how did they reach their present height, and when were the valleys between them eroded away? Keep in mind that many valleys were clearly carved by glacial erosion, which is a slow process. How does a global flood explain angular unconformities, where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted) and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top? They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed. When did granite batholiths form? Some of these are intruded into older sediments and have younger sediments on their eroded top surfaces. It takes a long time for magma to cool into granite, nor does granite erode very quickly. [For example, see Donohoe & Grantham, 1989, for locations of contact between the South Mountain Batholith and the Meugma Group of sediments, as well as some angular unconformities.] How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for evolution? Ecological zonation fails to explain: (1) the extremely good sorting observed. Why didn't at least one dinosaur make it to the high ground with the elephants? (2) the relative positions of plants and other non-motile life. (Yun, 1989, describes beautifully preserved algae from Late Precambrian sediments. Why don't any modern-looking plants appear that low in the geological column?) (3) why some groups of organisms, such as mollusks, are found in many geologic strata. (4) why extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present animals didn't survive as well. Why did no pterodons make it to high ground? How can a single flood be responsible for such extensively detailed layering? One formation is six kilometers thick. If we grant 400 days for this to settle, and ignore possible compaction since the flood, we still have 15 meters of sediment settling *per day*. And yet despite this, the chemical properties of the rock are neatly layered, with great changes (e.g.) in percent carbonate occurring within a few centimeters in the vertical direction. How does such a neat sorting process occur in the violent context of a universal flood dropping 15 meters of sediment per day? How can you explain a thin layer of high carbonate sediment being deposited over an area of ten thousand square kilometers for some thirty minutes, followed by thirty minutes of low carbonate deposition, followed by thirty minutes more of .... well, I think you get the picture. [From: Bill Hyde; see also Kent & Olsen, 1992] How do you explain the formation of varves? The Green River formation in Wyoming contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves, identical to those being laid down today in certain lakes. [From: bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys)] How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras and several different (independent) radiometric dating methods? Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have originated only on the surface, such as footprints, rain drops, river channels, wind-blown dunes, beaches, and glacial deposits. [Gore, 1993, has a photograph (p. 16-17) showing dinosaur footprints in one layer with water ripples in layers above and below it.] How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic flood? How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? Why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalacians during the flood? How do you explain Fossil remineralization - the replacement of the original material with a different mineral? * Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly remineralized, including some that biblical archaeology says are quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the earth in this diluvian geology. For example, remains of Egyptian commoners buried near the time of Moses aren't extensively remineralized. * Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite variable remineralization. * Dinosaur remains are often extensively remineralized. * Trilobite remains are usually remineralized - and in different sites, fossils of the same species are composed of different materials. How are these observations explained by a sorted deposition of remains in a single episode of global flooding? [From: jjh00@outs.ccc.amdahl.com (Joel J. Hanes)] How could the flood deposit layers of solid salt, sometimes meters in width, interbedded with sediments containing marine fossils? This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and have characteristic fossils on either side. Therefore, if the fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there are, it seems, only two choices: (1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at the same time, during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or (2) the salt is a later intrusion. I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils. [From: marlowe@paul.rutgers.edu (Thomas Marlowe)] How were hematite layers laid down? Standard theory is that they were laid down before Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen. In an oxygen-rich regime, they would almost certainly be impossible. How are the polar ice caps possible? Such a mass of water as the flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds. No way to drop them _exactly_ back onto their original location, _or_ to regrow them. (In fact, the Greenland ice cap would _not_ regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.) [From: Bob Grumbine rmg3@psuvm.psu.edu] Finally, remember that the geological column and the relative dates therein were laid out by _creationists_ before Darwin even formulated his theory.

Biological effects of the flood: How do you explain the survival of any sensitive marine life (e.g., coral)? Since most coral are found in shallow water, the turbidity created by the runoff from the land would effectively cut them off from the sun. The silt would cover the reef after the rains were over, and the coral would ALL DIE. By the way, the rates at which coral deposits calcium are well known, and some highly mature reefs (such a the great barrier) have been around for MILLIONS of years to be deposited to their observed thickness. [From: bmb@bluemoon.rn.com] How did _all_ the fish survive? Some require cool clear water, some need brackish water, some need ocean water, some need water even saltier. A flood would have destroyed at least some of these habitats. How did all the modern plant species survive? Many plants (seeds and all) would be killed by being submerged for a few months. Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? How does the flood explain the geological sorting of pollen? Fossil pollen is one of the more important indicators of different levels of strata. Each plant has different and distinct pollen, and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the pollen hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the climatic evidence is different for each layer? How could a one-year flood deposit the following: "In Yellowstone Park there is a stratigraphic section of 2000 feet exposed which shows 18 successive petrified forests. Each forest grew to maturity before it was wiped out with a lava flow." [J. Laurence Kulp, quoted in Strahler, _Science and Earth History_, pp 221-224.] How does a flood explain the accuracy of "coral clocks"? The moon is slowly sapping the earth's rotational energy. The earth should have rotated more quickly in the distant past, meaning that a day would have been less than 24 hours, and there would have been more days per year. Corals can be dated by the number of "daily" growth layers per "annual" growth layer. Devonian corals, for example, show nearly 400 days per year. There is an exceedingly strong correlation between the "supposed age" of a wide range of fossils (corals, stromatolites, and a few others -- collected from geologic formations throughout the column and from locations all over the world) and the number of days per year that their growth pattern shows. The agreement between these clocks, and radiometric dating, and the theory of superposition... is a little hard to explain away as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in a 300-day-long flood. [From: stassen@alc.com (Chris Stassen)] If a single flood is responsible for all fossils, where were all those animals when they were alive? From "Six 'Flood' Arguments Creationists Can't Answer" by Robert Schadewald, _Creation/Evolution_ IV (Summer 1982), pp. 12-13: "Scientific creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the remains of animals that perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in "fossil graveyards" as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood. "Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate fossils on earth [land fossils only--whj]. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded." A thousand kilometers' length of arctic coastal plain, according to experts in Leningrad [N. Newell, _Creation and Evolution_; 1982, Columbia U. Press, p. 62], contains about 500,000 *tons* of tusks. Even assuming that the entire population was preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia had wall-to-wall mammoths before this "event."

Historical effects of the flood: Why is there no mention of the flood in the records of Egyptian or Chinese civilizations which existed at the time? Biblical dates (I Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation lengths given in Genesis) place the flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first temple. We can construct reliable chronologies for near Eastern history, particularly for Egypt, from many kinds of records from the literate cultures in the near East. These records are independent of, but supported by, dating methods such as dendrochronology and carbon-14. The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B.C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood around 2250 B.C. Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have written records dating well back before 2250 B.C. (the Great Pyramid, for example dates to the 26th century B.C., 300 years before the Biblical date for the Flood). No sign in Egyptian inscriptions of this global flood around 2250 B.C.

Aftermath of the flood: How did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the Arctic, etc., when the kinds of environment they require to live doesn't exist between the two points. Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in Indonesia? The same argument applies to any number of groups of plants and animals. How could more than a handful of species survive in a devastated habitat? How could more than a handful of the predator species on the ark have survived, with only two individuals of their prey to eat? All of the predators at the top of the food pyramid require larger numbers of food animals beneath them on the pyramid, which in turn require large numbers of the animals they prey on, and so on, down to the primary producers (plants...etc.) at the bottom. And if the predators survived, how did the other animals survive being preyed on? How could more than a handful of species survive random influences that affect populations? Isolated populations with fewer than 20 members are usually doomed even when extraordinary measures are taken to protect them. [Simberloff, 1988] How could more than a handful of species survive the inbreeding depression that comes with establishing a population from a single mating pair? How do you explain the genetic variation in all populations today?

Is the flood model consistent with the Bible? The model seems to say that large numbers of kinds of land animals became extinct because of the flood, while Genesis repeatedly says that Noah was ordered to take a representative sample of all kinds of land animals on the Ark to save them from extinction, and that Noah did as ordered. Which is right? How could Noah have gathered male and female of each kind when some species are asexual, others are parthenogenic and have only females, and others (such as earthworms) are hermaphrodites? And what about social animals like ants and termites which need the whole nest to survive? What was used to waterproof the ark? We are told that God instructed Noah to coat the ark with pitch inside and out with the naturally- occurring hydrocarbon pitch, which causes a bit of a problem since, according to Whitcomb and Morris, all oil, tar and coal deposits were formed when organic matter was buried DURING the flood. Does the flood story make the whole Bible less credible? Davis Young is a working geologist who also is an Evangelical Christian. He has personal doubts about some aspects of evolution, but he makes a devastating case against "Flood Geology." He writes (_Christianity and the Age of the Earth_, p. 163): "The maintenance of modern creationism and Flood geology not only is useless apologetically with unbelieving scientists, it is harmful. Although many who have no scientific training have been swayed by creationist arguments, the unbelieving scientist will reason that a Christianity that believes in such nonsense must be a religion not worthy of his interest...Modern creationism in this sense is apologetically and evangelistically ineffective. It could even be a hindrance to the gospel. "Another possible danger is that in presenting the gospel to the lost and in defending God's truth we ourselves will seem to be false. It is time for Christian people to recognize that the defense of this modern, young-Earth, Flood-geology creationism is simply not truthful. It is simply not in accord with the facts that God has given. Creationism must be abandoned by Christians before harm is done...." [From: bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys) See also Young, 19??] If God is omnipotent, why not kill what He wanted killed directly? And the whole idea was to rid the wicked people from the world. Did it work?

References:

Donohoe, H.V. Jr. and Grantham, R.G. (eds.), 1989. Geological Highway Map of Nova Scotia, 2nd edition. Atlantic Geoscience Society, Halifax, Nova Scotia. AGS Special Publication no. 1, 1:640 000. Gore, Rick. "Dinosaurs" National Geographic, 183:1 (Jan. 1993), 2-54. Kent and Olsen (Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory) Discover, Jan. 1992 May, Robert M. "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?" Scientific American, 267:4 (Oct. 1992), 42-49. Moore, Robert A. "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark" Creation/Evolution, #11 (Winter 1983), 1-43. The entire issue is about the ark. Moore lists over one hundred references. Simberloff, David. "The Contribution of Population and Community Biology to Conservation Science" Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, #19 (1988), 473-511. Young, Davis: _Christianity and the Age of the Earth_. Now published by Artisan Sales, POB 2497, Thousand Oaks CA 91360. Single copies (at last report) were $8.50 postpaid, and in lots of 10 or more, $4.50/copy. Yun, Zhang. "Multicellular thallophytes with differentiated tissues from Late Proterozoic phosphate rocks of South China" Lethaia, #22 (1989), 113-132.

Re frozen mammoths as evidence of a catastrophy: Farrand, Wm. R.;_Science_, 133:729-735, March 17, 1961

Re an independent method of dating the Green River formation: Short, D. A., J. G. Mengel, T. J. Crowley, W. T. Hyde and G. R. North 1991: Filtering of Milankovitch Cycles by Earth's Geography. Quaternary Research. 35, 157-173. -- Mark Isaak "Every generation thinks it has the answers, and every isaak@aurora.com generation is humbled by nature." - Philip Lubin