Creationism- Part 3: The Flood

Genesis 6- See Ben’s full presentation dedicated to the identity of the Nephilim.

Gen. 8:22- This is reassurance of the way the world will not end (global warming, etc).

Gen. 9:2- This gives a reason that animals are generally afraid of humans.

Noah’s Flood (Genesis Ch. 7 and 8)

Unlike other ancient myths, notice the specificity of the date of the Great Flood (‘in the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month’)

Water primarily came from below. The fountains of the deep burst open; there would have been large-scale volcanic and earthquake activity. Geologists have discovered that there is still enough water in the mantle of the earth to fill the oceans 20 times over, and that at some point in history, some of that water came out on the surface of the earth. Waters also came from above as rainfall (possibly the water canopy, for those who believe that theory). Most of earth was already ocean.

The worldwide flood would have happened approximately 1,656 years after creation, or 2348 BC (give or take several years). Gen. 7:11 is the start of the flood and Gen. 8:14 is the end, which means that Noah was in the ark for 1 year, 11 days.

Gen. 1:9 seems to indicate that the concept of Pangaea is true. The “fountains of the deep bursting open” could have created higher mountains (Gen. 7:19) and caused Pangaea to break apart. The entire earth was in turmoil!

Was the Flood really worldwide? (People probably only lived from the Persian Gulf up to the Caspian Sea, so would a worldwide flood have really been necessary?):

• Gen. 7:19 says that all the high hills were covered, and then the waters went higher still. Gen. 7:22 and 8:21, among other verses, clearly state that all on dry land died, and that every living thing was destroyed.
• What sort of miracle would have kept all the water constrained to a local area?
• God didn’t need the ark if it was only local; He could have moved 8 people to a new location. Also, why bring birds? They could have flown away to dry land.
• In Gen. 9:8-11, God would have been making the covenant with Noah to never again send a local flood; however, we see local floods regularly.
• Other scriptures on the flood include: Job 12:15; 22:16; Ps. 29:10; 104:6-9; Is. 54:9; Matt. 24:37-39; Luke 17:26,27; Heb. 11:7; 1 Pet. 3:20; 2 Pet. 2:5; 3:5&6. All of these imply a worldwide flood.
• A worldwide flood tradition comes from around the world, and is included in almost every ancient culture.
• Most scientists see evolution and a global flood as mutually exclusive. A global flood would have laid down the sedimentary rock layers that we see, but evolution says those were created over millions of years. If they were created over millions of years, they cannot be due to a global flood. As we will see, the worldwide flood accounts for many of the so-called evidences for evolution.

Rock Strata and the Fossil Record

Fossil (def.)- A remnant or trace of an organism of a past geologic age, such as a skeleton or leaf imprint, embedded and preserved in the earth’s crust.

Sediment (def.)- Matter that settles to the bottom of a liquid

A sedimentary layer is a layer of matter laid down by water. If there was a global flood, one would expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. This is exactly what we find in the fossil record today! We find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Fossils are found in every strata, typically from smaller to larger. The evolutionary view says that each layer represents millions of years.

Understanding how fossils are created is vital! Fossils require tremendous pressure to be formed. When an animal dies, it immediately begins to rot; scavengers eat the animal and bacteria destroys it. The bones are then either dissolved in the sea or weathered away on land. It is very difficult to find fossilization today because it doesn’t happen naturally. When it is found, there is almost always a specific event that caused it.

For fossilization to occur, two agents must be removed:

• Biological scavengers
• Weather

Thus, to create a fossil, three conditions MUST be met:

1. The organism must be buried deep enough so that scavengers and oxygen-dependent bacteria can’t get to it (no oxygen).
2. The organism must be buried immediately, or shortly after death.
3. A high amount of pressure must be applied.

The most liberal typical rate of deposition is .024 in/yr. (Evolutionists claim it was even slower in the past). This is not nearly deep or fast enough. Also, natural processes don’t provide the pressure needed to create a fossil. As an example, there are lots of fish fossils. To cover a dead fish with 2.5 inches of sediment would take 100 years. Even then, worms can get to this depth bringing bacteria and oxygen. When we start looking at current fossils (especially large ones, like dinosaurs), tremendous amounts of sediment and pressure was required to preserve them.

There are many examples of fast fossilization:

• Jellyfish, such as Mawsonites spriggi, have been found fossilized. These would quickly melt in the sun or be destroyed by crashing waves, if not fossilized quickly.
• An ichthyosaur and her baby were found fossilized while the mother giving birth. This was a very famous discovery.
• Derek Ager, a paleoecologist, found a lobster from Solenhofen Stone in Germany which was fossilized in the act of catching a small fish.
• Charles Schuchert and Carl Dunbar discovered the fossil of a starfish who died hovering over clams it was in the act of devouring. It was found at the great slab of Hamilton Stone at Mt. Marion, NY; it can be seen in the State Museum at Albany.
• In China’s Jiangxi province, an oviraptor was found fossilized with two eggs still visible in the body cavity. It died quickly as it was about to lay the eggs and fossilized before the eggs could decay.
• Animal footprints are preserved in the fossil record. As soon as footprints are made, wind, rain, waves, etc, begin to destroy them, especially on a sandy beach or sand dune. Footprints must be quickly covered by a different material until the sand or mud (in which the footprint lies) turns to stone. (Check out the Coconino footprints found in the sandstone in northern Arizona.)

A worldwide flood seems to best fit the evidence:

• A worldwide flood would provide the pressure needed to create fossils. There would be strong forces applied, along with gravity, associated with massive amounts of water coming from the sky and gushing out of the earth. The flood was necessary for fossilization; nothing else could have caused it to occur.
• The flood would cause enormous amounts of sedimentary deposition in a short time, providing the depth necessary to prevent biological scavengers and weathering. There is no other way we would have dinosaur fossils, which needs lots of sediment to cover them in a very short time in order to be preserved in a given sedimentary layer. In addition, of the 1000s of dinosaur fossils found, most don’t show any indication of being attacked or of disease, which makes paleontologists believe they died in a catastrophic event (such as a flood or asteroid impact).
• The flood accounts for the speed of burial and fossilization. One can show in a lab that fossils can form very quickly with rapid burial, ground water and minerals.
• The rock strata are mostly sedimentary. This means that each layer was laid down by water.

• • A flood better accounts for the nature of the sedimentary layers. Boundaries between strata are straight and abrupt. This would not be at all expected if each layer represented millions of years, with the continents being raised up and down hundreds of times. No evolution-based uniformitarian model can properly account for the fact that the layers are sedimentary layers with abrupt boundaries.
  • Rock layers are folded instead of fractured. I have personally seen examples of this in my travels. Rock will only bend if it is still soft and pliable (like clay or playdough). When a sedimentary layer is first laid down, it’s pliable, so it can fold and bend without breaking. This is what we see around the world in places where rock strata is exposed. Once a layer has dried out and becomes solid hard rock, it is brittle, thus bending it will break or shatter it. If these layers had been laid down over millions of years, they would fracture or break rather than bend or fold.
  • The strata is widespread; continent-wide sedimentary layers are visible, which is most consistent with a worldwide flood.
  • One of the more famous examples is the Mount St. Helens eruption in which it only took six minutes to create rock layers which scientists normally would have said took millions of years if they hadn’t known about the eruption.

• The circulating water of a worldwide flood (along with gravity) would naturally bury smaller organisms first and lower in layers, whereas more mobile organisms, with the ability to temporarily avoid the flood, would be buried closer to the top.
• A flood accounts for fish fossils found high in mountains. Interestingly, sea animal fossils are found in all rock layers all over the continents, even at high elevations and at the tops of every major mountain range (such as the Himalayas).
• Major mountain ranges are found on the continents parallel to the ocean ridges. This is exactly what we would expect had the flood caused Pangaea to break up.
• Polystrate fossils are fossils that cross two or more sedimentary layers (strata). Trees are the most common polystrate fossils. Trees could not have been fossilized through multiple sedimentary layers if each layer represents millions of years, as evolutionary timeframes dictate. Polystrate fossils are found on every continent. Eroding mountainsides have exposed thousands of these fossils together, indicating that they were clearly all buried together. In a similar vein, a single deceased whale fossil was found positioned vertically through many layers of diatoms, each of which supposed to millions of years to create.
• The Grand Canyon supposedly represents the deepest exposed strata layers in the world, and is often hailed as one of the best representations of the geologic column. It is interesting that less than half of the supposed complete set of rock layers are actually seen, and they are not in the same order laid out in science textbooks. There are also gaps where there is no strata from a presumed era. All over the earth there are strata layers missing or in a different order depending on which exposed geologic column is being studied. A clear, consistent geologic column is not evident or complete anywhere on earth, as is taught so frequently.
• Mud from the Mississippi River is dumped into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of 80,000 tons per hour. The Grand Canyon (along with other famous canyons) supposedly took millions of years to be carved out by the rivers which run through them, yet there is no evidence of the mud from the Colorado River which should have dumped at an even higher rate. The explanation is that carving out the canyons didn’t take a lot of time; it took a lot of water! There are examples of canyons being created quickly around the world. The Burlingame Canyon is 1500 ft long and 120 ft deep. It looks like it eroded over thousands of years, but was actually created in 6 days after torrential rainfall and flooding. Providence Canyon in Lumpkin, GA, is composed of 1100 acres and has canyons 15 stories deep, yet it was created in only 200 years. In the 1800s, the area which is now the canyon was full of crops and vegetation. Erosion began when developers cut down trees in the area.
• Oil, natural gas, and coal are examples of fossil fuels that we use today, and are remnants of the flood. Fossil fuel was created from the remains of vegetation and animals buried during the time of the flood. The pre-flood earth is now buried by as much as two miles of water born sediment. Laboratory tests have shown that with moderate amounts of pressure and a little bit of heat, buried plant material can create coal in weeks, not millions of years.
• Tropical remains are found frozen at the earth’s poles, including Northern Alaska and Siberia. There are no forests containing these types of trees and vegetation anywhere close to these areas. These are clearly remnants from the flood which had been frozen or buried until they were washed ashore. Additionally, palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in great amounts are found frozen in the northern regions. Scientists have found 90-foot plum trees frozen in ice 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They have ripe plums and healthy leaves, all frozen. This is further evidence that the earth was primarily composed of rain forest before Noah’s flood.

[One explanation given by evolution for the creation of fossils is that organisms slowly sank into the ocean and then covered with other sediment; since waves would have washed them away first, perhaps the organism hardened before entering the wave zone. However, waves erode solid rock; it would be even easier for waves to erode incomplete lithified sand or mud.]

The Ice Age

We have clear evidence of an Ice Age, such as in the U-shaped valleys carved by glaciers during that time. Evolutionists believe an ice age happened every 20-30 million years, though they have difficulty accounting for why they happened. Creationists believe a single Ice Age began soon after the Flood and continued for around 700 years. They also believe that ice never covered more than a third of the earth’s land surface, even at its greatest extent.

To develop an ice age (where ice accumulates on land), the oceans need to be warm at mid/high latitude, and the land masses need to be cold, especially in the summer. Warm oceans evaporate lots of water, which then moves over the land. Cold continents result in the water precipitating as snow rather than rain, and prevent snow and ice from thawing during the summer, thus accumulating quickly.

Slow and gradual evolutionary scenarios fail to properly give an explanation of the Ice Age. Long-age theories involve a slow cooling down of the Earth; however, this wouldn’t generate an ice age. If the oceans and land cooled gradually, by the time the land was cold enough for the snow not to melt during the summer, evaporation from the cooler oceans would be insufficient to produce enough snow to generate the massive ice sheets. In this case, the result would be a frozen desert, not an ice age.

A worldwide flood provides a simple mechanism to create an Ice Age. We would expect warm oceans at the end of the global Flood, due to the addition of hot subterranean water gushing up from the depths of the earth as described in the Bible, as well as heat energy released through volcanic activity. Volcanic dust and aerosols from eruptions would have reflected solar radiation back into space, causing low temperatures over land, and thus summers to be cold. Warm oceans, along with high rates of cooling at the poles, would have created an enormous polar storm system. Leaning into a standard knowledge of atmospheric circulation, the higher latitudes would be delivered vast amounts of snow which would quickly become ice sheets, and result in an Ice Age.