The Books of Moses
Fact or Fiction?
Session 6
The Great Flood
in Noah’s Day
Part 2
Bruce Armstrong
The Great Flood in Noah’s Day, Part 2
“Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again will all flesh be cut off by the waters of a Great Flood; never again will there be a Great Flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11
In our last session we looked at some of the basics of the Biblical Account of the Great Flood. We concluded with Noah and all his passengers leaving the Ark and standing on the new face of the Earth after a full year on the Ark.
Today, we will dig deeper into various aspects of the Flood, its consequences and possible evidence for and problems with the Biblical Great Flood. We will start by looking at what happened on their first day off the Ark.
Then Noah built an altar to Jehovah, and took of every clean animal and of every clean flying creature, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And Jehovah smelled a soothing aroma. Then Jehovah said in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and winter and summer, and day and night will not cease.” Genesis 8:20 to 22
There are many things to discuss in these verses. Noah’s first act, after carefully nurturing these animals for a full year, is to sacrifice one of every kind of clean animal and burn them on an altar. Though it may seem surprising to us, this was both prepared for and expected. This was part of why Noah was sent seven pairs of each kind. And it was an act that reflected Noah’s gratitude for being spared, his commitment to obey Jehovah and his admission that he too was a sinner, as was each member of his family, and that they needed to have their sins covered by these sacrifices. As such, these animal sacrifices pointed towards the ultimate sacrifice of Jehovah’s own Son (Hebrews 10:1-12). The sacrifices also served as offerings which rejoiced in the fact that God had saved them all from an otherwise certain death.
Next we see Jehovah’s reaction. Curiously, it seems that He likes the smell of a good BBQ. But the reality is that He relished the obedience that this showed on the part of Noah and his family. As a result, Jehovah decided to not curse the ground again as He had done at the Fall. Though we still have to deal with thorns, thistles, sin and death, at least the ground was again productive for us. Our lives would be somewhat easier than the lives of those living before the Great Flood.
God also gives us a unique promise here: He will not destroy every living thing again as He did during the Great Flood. This promise is not limited to only no other Great Floods as we see later. Nor is God expecting that most of Noah’s descendants will do what is right. This is all related to the Great Reset that the world has just gone through. Every breathing creature on land since the Flood is descended from animals, or humans, that God has personally selected and kept alive. Each creature on the Ark was fully aware of what God had done for them. It is almost certain that a similar thing happened to the aquatic creatures: they were called into areas of the ocean that were protected from the polluted rains and volcanism of the Great Flood, while all the others died. It may well be that the Ark was taken to one of these areas and kept over it until it was time to land the Ark.
The Bible says that there will be another mass extinction in the future, this time by fire, but there are Scriptures that make clear that about ten percent of mankind will survive, and likely similar percentages of animals. This indicates that the Great Reset has been largely successful, as this is an enormously larger survival rate than the Great Flood.
Jehovah also promises that He will ensure that Earth continues to have its normal daily and seasonal cycles.
Then God gives some Instructions to Noah and his family:
So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.
And the fear of you and the dread of you will be on every animal of the earth, on every flying creature of heaven, on all that moves on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives will be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.
“But you will not eat flesh with its soul, that is, its blood. Surely the blood of your soul I will seek. From the hand of every animal I will seek it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will seek the soul of man. Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood will be shed; for man is made in the image of God.
“And as for you, be fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply in it.” Genesis 9:1 to 7
As with Adam and Chavvah, we are to multiply and fill the earth. Though we are not necessarily to rule over the animals this time, they will fear us and we will have power over them. But here is a major difference: Now they are to become food for us. This may reflect the fact that our genes are slowly deteriorating, and we can not make our own vitamin B12, and now need to get it from milk, eggs and animal tissues.
But Jehovah places restrictions on eating animals: We cannot consume their blood, for their soul is in it. The blood must be drained out of the animal when it is killed.
Jehovah also puts a protection over the humans: Whoever kills a human, man or animal, will be dealt with by God. But He also gives us a role in this provision: We humans are held responsible to find the manslayer and kill them. This will stop them from killing another person, and will usually make others think twice before killing someone.
God then expands on His Instructions:
Then God spoke to Noah and to his sons with him, saying: “And as for Me, behold, I establish My covenant with you and with your descendants after you, and with every living soul that is with you: the flying creatures, the cattle, and every animal of the earth with you, of all that go out of the ark, every animal of the earth.
“Thus I establish My covenant with you: Never again will all flesh be cut off by the waters of a Great Flood; never again will there be a Great Flood to destroy the earth.”
And God said: “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it will be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. It will be, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow will be seen in the cloud; and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and every living soul of all flesh; the waters will never again become a Great Flood to destroy all flesh.
“The rainbow will be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living soul of all flesh that is on the earth.”
And God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth.” Genesis 9:8 to 17
This covenant is made not just with Noah and his then existing family, but also with everyone on earth today, as we are all their descendants. And not only with us, but also with all of the animals that were on the Ark and all their descendants.
Jehovah God promises that He will never send another Great Flood, and gives us the rainbow as a reminder that there will never be another Great Flood. The fact that God chose the rainbow as the sign of this covenant suggests that in the world prior to the Flood, rainbows were virtually unknown. This could only be likely if the pre-Flood world was not watered by rainfall, or at least not during the daytime (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Jehovah Confirms His Covenant With a Rainbow. (From rainbowtoken.com)
Now, how would the Great Flood affect our World and what are possible evidences for and against such a World-wide Flood?
First, is it possible that a local flood, perhaps one in the Black Sea, is all that happened? Let us look at the extent of that flood and compare it with the Flood account in the Bible we looked at in the last session.
Though this would have been a great setback for those who lost their homes and farms, how does even a local eighty meter deep flood compare to the Great Flood of the Bible? The Black Sea flood would not even cover the local hills, let alone submerge the highest mountains. Indeed, at the lower amount of 5 meters, it would not even be deep enough to float the Ark. Would it kill every air-breathing land animal throughout the world? At a maximum rise of 150 mm per day, it is unlikely to have done much more than drown some earthworms. And forty days of torrential non-stop rain? This flood did not require even a single rainstorm. Also, the Biblical Flood then drained away to reveal new land. This Black Sea flood did not drain away, so Noah’s Ark remained afloat. To suggest that such a modest and very local flood could have inspired the story of the world-wide Biblical Great Flood is clearly absurd, though it did sell some books.
As a creationist, I have no difficulty believing this Black Sea flood did happen, but it occurred at the end of the huge Ice Age that the Great Flood triggered (see below). So it happened centuries after the Great Flood, and thus long after those global events were well known. And other local flood stories, such as the Missoula scabland flood are no more convincing than this Black Sea flood as ‘origins’ of the global Flood stories.
If the Great Flood truly was global, where would we find enough water to cover all the mountains, and where did it all go?
As we saw in Part 1, the flood water was a mix of what was already in the oceans and a roughly equal amount of water that was released from beneath the crust through the fractured Fountains of the Great Deep. The seas were shallower then and the mountains lower, and as the supporting subterranean water gushed out, the continents sank. These effects combined to overflow all the mountains.
The Floodwaters receded as the continents were pushed up and the ocean basins sank. So the water is all still here, and if the earth’s surface was perfectly smooth, the ocean would be a bit over 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) deep everywhere.
Which of course leads us to the ‘problem’ of global flood stories from around the world. The existence of such stories makes sense if all people on the world today are descendants of Noah’s family, and thus carried memories of this event with them as they dispersed around the world. And as the Great Flood was about 4,370 years ago, it is certain that many of these stories will have some distortions. Yet many of the Flood stories contain most elements of the Bible account.
A good summary of some of these Flood stories is shown in The Reality of Noah’s Flood, by WVBS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccHOdfzSsaw
It has a good section on many Flood stories from around the world, from 21:15 to 31:30 minutes.
Two common questions are 1: where did the Ark land, and 2: does it still exist?
Today, many people believe that Noah’s Ark landed near the top of Greater Mount Ararat, in eastern Turkey and that some of it, perhaps most of it, is still there buried in the mountain’s ice cap.
This claim has been taught since the thirteenth century, but there are many serious problems with the idea.
The first problems are geological. Mount Ararat is a volcanic mountain which last erupted in 1840. The eruption and its associated earthquake killed about 10,000 people, including 1900 people in the village of Akhuri when a landslide came down from Mount Ararat. This event, just one of many, shows how dangerous and unstable Mount Ararat is. It is also 5,137 meters (16,854 ft) high and quite steep-sided, making a journey down the mountain perilous. Most creation geologists believe Mount Ararat is post-flood, so it probably did not even exist when Noah needed a resting place. And even if the Ark had landed there, the numerous eruptions since then would have incinerated the Ark long ago.
Mount Ararat’s popularity seems to ride on three things: its name, which is similar to the mountains of Ararat, its impressive height and prominence in that region, and the tantalising glacier that “just maybe” could be covering and protecting the Ark.
However, each of these items actually work against it. First its name: It is only called Mount Ararat in Western countries. In Turkey it is called Agri Dagi, which means Mountain of Sorrow. In Biblical times, the mountains of Ararat referred to the mountain range at the north-eastern edge of the Mesopotamian plains, which are about 300 kilometers (185 miles) to the south-west of Mount Ararat.
Next, it’s prominence is also a problem. In Genesis 8:5 we were told that “the tops of the mountains were seen”. Only one other large mountain is close to Ararat, which is Lesser Mount Ararat, and even it is about 1200 metres (3,940 ft) lower. There would have been no other nearby mountains for them to see until the water dropped far more, so only one, not multiple mountain tops would have become visible on that one day.
Finally, even the glacier is a problem. Glaciers move steadily downhill, smashing and grinding off the underlying rock as they go. In over four thousand years, the Ark would have been ground to powder and carried down the mountain long ago.
Another ark site at Mount Tendurek, 30 km (19 mi) south-east of Mount Ararat, was popularised by Ron Wyatt in the 1980s, and even has a museum there dedicated to Noah’s Ark. The claim is that the Ark eventually slid down Mt Tendurek to its present location during a massive mudslide, which converted the wood into fossilised wood. The outline of what is claimed to be the ark is still visible there (at 39.4406N 44.2348E). However, the rock outline has been confirmed as actual rock, not fossilised wood, and the formation has been shown to be a large segment of rock which was dislodged during the mudslide, slid to its current location and became lodged there. Then the rest of the mudslide eroded the up-slope sides of the block, giving it a ship-like pointed ‘prow’ facing uphill.
There is also a reasonably easy descent from Mount Judi to an arable valley west of the possible Ark resting site, which is at an elevation of 600 metres (1,970 ft), as shown in Figure 4. This valley is the northeast corner of Mesopotamia. It is a journey of only about thirteen kilometers (8 mi), or eight kilometers as the crow flies, allowing Noah and his family to make numerous trips to the Ark and back, bringing down valuable domestic animals, tools, plants, seeds, and documents. The location of this possible village is at 37.3675N 42.3623E (Figures 5 and 6). Even today, many locals make an annual pilgrimage to Mount Judi as they still believe it was the resting place of Noah’s Ark. They also believe that Noah’s altar is still there, and that his grave is nearby.
Figure 2: Mount Judi (Cudi Dagi) as seen from the northern part of the Shinar (Mesopotamian) Plain. Mount Judi is the flat-topped mountain in the background.
Figure 3: Possible Landing Site of Noah’s Ark on Top of Mount Judi.
Figure 4: Proposed Route From Noah’s Ark to Noah’s Farm.
Figure 5: Proposed Location of Noah’s Farm and Village
Figure 6: Present Day Conditions at “Noah’s Village” site. The deepest levels of this village could be our oldest post-flood constructions and the farm would be the source of many of our main food crops, brought down from the Ark.
And only another fifteen kilometers farther west of ‘Noah’s’ arable valley one comes to the Tigris River, near the modern city of Cizre, Turkey (Figure 7). At an elevation of only 370 meters (1214 ft) and on a plain, it would have taken longer before it emerged from the floodwaters and was dry and desalinated enough to become arable land.
Figure 7: The Likely Site of the Shinar Plain, also showing Mount Judi.
The Bible, in Genesis 11:2, says Noah’s family approached this plain from the east, so this configuration is consistent with its account. As we will see in the Babel segment, this area is likely at the north-east corner of the plain of Shinar, and not all that far from where the Tower of Babel was built.
Why would the animals migrate from the Middle East to where they are today, and even if they wanted to, how could they get there?
The why is explained in the loading of the Ark. God selected the animals to be on it, and sent them to the Ark. As God was able to feed, protect and guide them to the Ark, it is just as reasonable that God would feed, protect and guide them to where He wanted them to become established after the Great Flood. This was just another stage in His plan.
Most areas were connected to the Middle East by land, but how would they get to isolated areas like Australia, New Zealand and the Americas? As we will see below, one important factor is the post-Flood Ice Age, which would create land and ice bridges.
Creationists believe that there has only been one massive Ice Age, and that it was a direct result of the Great Flood. The explanation is not all that complex. To have a massive build-up of ice, one first needs a massive amount of snow. The Great Flood is uniquely able to produce a massive amount of snow. This happens because there were several sources of heat during the Great Flood, both in the superheated water that came up through the Fountains of the Great Deep and as a result of the massive volcanism that occurred during the Flood and in the following few years. Much of this volcanism happened beneath water. The hot water and lava both heated the earth’s surface water. This warm water, perhaps up to 40 degrees Celsius in many places, would produce a lot of water vapour, which would then cool to form clouds and precipitation. As the continents were pushed up during the receding stage of the Great Flood, many areas became elevated enough to have that precipitation come down as snow, especially in the Arctic regions. The dust and ash in the atmosphere from the volcanism would also reflect sunlight, making the land surfaces even colder. Soon, conditions were such that the snow was not melting over summer, and runaway ice buildup began. This triggered the Ice Age.
At its peak, likely several centuries after the Flood, the huge ice masses on the continents had caused a large drop in the ocean water levels, allowing many land bridges to be exposed between what are today isolated land masses. In arctic and sub-arctic areas, as the water temperatures finally began to fall, frozen ice on the oceans also provided ‘bridges’ for animals and humans to cross during the warmer summer months.
As the atmosphere cleared and the oceans cooled to today’s temperatures, the cloud cover and the supply of snow decreased. The gigantic glaciers began to melt. This simultaneously liberated new land as the glaciers retreated and submerged many human settlements that had been built near the now rising seas. This melting process is still continuing today, although it is nearly complete now. It was near the end of the rapid melting that events such as the Black Sea Flood occurred.
The Great Flood thus supplies both the origin of the snow and the reason why the Ice Age eventually reversed and melted. Classical geology has difficulty explaining both what caused the Ice Age and why it receded. More on this in Michael Oard’s video The Great Ice Age.
Did the longevity of people change and when?
Yes. As discussed last session, God decided to shorten people’s lives to about 120 years before the Flood, and for those born during the thousand years after this, their lifespans steadily decreased from over 900 years to a maximum of 120 years (Genesis 6:3).
The primary Biblical Chronology is based on one family line, son to son, running all the way from Creation to Jeshua the Messiah, a period of four thousand years (Matthew 1:1 to 17). Graph 1 shows most of this line from Adam to Moses.
Graph 1: Lifespan Decline Post-Flood
Graph 2 also displays this data, but this graph takes into account when they lived as well.
Note some of the overlaps:
Lamech, Noah’s father, knew both Adam and Shem, thus linking all of the pre-Flood generations.
Noah and Shem were pre-Flood people who lived long into the Post-Flood era.
Noah could tell Abram (Abraham) his father’s stories, which Lamech had been told directly by Adam, while Shem was able to pass on Lamech’s stories to Jacob.
It is likely that Noah and Shem’s written records were preserved and used by Moses to write Genesis.
Graph 2: Overlaps in Lifespans of Various Patriarchs
It is also possible that the animals also had similar reductions in their lifespans over the same period. If so, this could explain how many of the fossils of pre-flood animals were extremely large by modern standards, as some animals continue to grow all their lives.
The Bible does not tell us this, but it is possible to make estimates based on what the Bible does tell us about reproduction rates in its ‘holy line’ leading to Noah.
This is a Pre-flood estimate I have made, using these Genesis compatible assumptions:
Assumes: an average of 20 children per woman, each born six years apart. The first child is born when the mother is 123 and the middle child is born when the mother is 183 years old. I also assume the average person lives 900 years.
Graph 3 shows that by the time of the Great Flood, these assumptions would give us a pre-Flood population of about 4.5 billion people.
Graph 3: Possible Population at the Time of the Flood
If the average woman had fewer children, and many people did not live to be 900, there would be fewer people when the Flood began. Circumstances that make these last scenarios likely are that the Bible records that in the time leading up to the Great Flood, everyone was evil, so murders, abortions and sexual perversions were perhaps common by then.
Jack Cuozzo, in his book Buried Alive, provides reasons to believe that the Neanderthals were in fact long-lived humans, and were actually the direct ancestors of modern man. His book documents how they took much longer than us to mature, largely based on studies of how the skulls of Neanderthals slowly ‘unwound’.
Our earlier section looking at the reduction in lifespans after the Flood showed how the first few generations after the Flood still lived several centuries. It seems likely that these Neanderthals, who were evidently stronger, faster and smarter than us, were actually these ancestors, whose offspring degenerated into Cro-Magnon and then modern humans in only a few generations per change.
As time has passed, the evolutionists’ ape-like representations of the Neanderthals have been replaced with more honest images, which make them look quite similar to us, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Model of a Neanderthal Child, based on her DNA and skeletal remains. By the University of Zürich
The Cavemen were the early settlers moving into new areas as the glaciers of the Ice Age receded. The winters were still quite cold, and the caves made easy, and somewhat weatherproof, shelters. As the weather stabilised, they established farms and built villages, abandoning their caves to move down into these communities.
The Ice Age began receding several hundred years after the Great Flood, so the cave dwellers were a mix of older Neanderthals and their younger Cro-Magnon descendants.
Is there any Genetic Evidence that we are all descended from three brothers and their three wives?
If this is true, all men in the world would have almost identical Y chromosomes, as they all came from Noah only about 4,400 years ago. This is exactly what is found. Evolutionists have difficulty explaining why there is so little variation in human Y chromosomes.
X-chromosomes should show more variability, as they came originally from Adam and Chavvah about 6,000 years ago. The Flood reduced some of the variability, but we had both Noah and his wife pass on their X-chromosomes through their three sons, plus we have X-chromosomes from the three wives of their sons. And indeed geneticists find that there is more variability in the X-chromosomes, at a level similar to the other chromosomes. As these chromosomes would also have been passed on in a similar manner, this is as one would expect if we are all descended from these Flood survivors.
We have a similar situation with the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which everyone inherits only from their mother. This should mean that everyone alive today will have inherited their mtDNa from one of the wives of Noah’s three sons. If there had been significant variation in their mtDNA, we should be able to determine which woman each of us are descended from. And it turns out that there are indeed three basic versions of mtDNA.
So in each case, our genetics match with what one would expect to find if we are all descended from Noah’s family. These topics are expanded in geneticist Dr. Robert Carter’s videos The High-Tech Cell and Mitochondrial Eve and the 3 Daughters of Noah.
Where did radioactivity come from, and why does it make the world seem to be very old?
First, we need to distinguish between heavy metals and carbon radioactivity, as they have different origins, decay rates and uses.
The heavy metal radioactive materials are things like uranium, plutonium and thorium. Some creationists, such as Walt Brown, suggest that the initial created earth did not have any radioactive elements, as they damage DNA and harm living things. A ‘very good’ world would not do that.
In Brown’s online book, at http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Radioactivity.html he explains how he believes these radioactive materials were formed by Z-pinch currents due to crustal fluttering during the Great Flood, how they almost instantly decayed into their various daughter products, and why much of this material is trapped in the earth’s granite crust where it formed (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Plasma Z-pinch Demonstration at the Sandia National Laboratory.
He also makes the point that if these dense radioactive materials were part of an initially molten earth, they should have sunk down into the core.
If this is correct, the standard calculations used to radiometrically date rocks are totally invalid, as they apply present day decay rates of millions of years to decays that actually happened almost instantaneously, and only a few thousand years ago.
Other evidence that supports his conclusions are the huge amounts of radiogenic helium still trapped in zircons which should have almost completely diffused out of them if they are truly millions to billions of years old.
Radiocarbon dating works on the ratio of Carbon 12 (normal carbon) to radioactive Carbon 14. The C14 is formed in the upper atmosphere when a neutron collides with a nitrogen atom, knocks out a proton and replaces it. This converts the nitrogen into Carbon 14, which now has too many neutrons and is unstable. Every 5,730 years, half of these extra neutrons emit an electron, converting the atom back into normal nitrogen. Some of the radioactive carbon comes down to the earth’s surface, where plants incorporate it into their carbon-based products, and we incorporate the radioactive carbon into our bodies when we eat the plants.
The amount of C14 is initially tiny, and our most sensitive instruments can only date carbon containing objects back as far as about 70,000 years, assuming nothing else has altered these ratios. However, at least three things have dramatically altered the ratios of normal and radioactive carbon. The first one is the earth’s magnetic field. The evidence is that it is rapidly weakening, and that it was far stronger in the past. This field deflects the cosmic rays that form the neutrons and carbon 14 from our atmosphere, thus reducing the amount of C14 made in the past. This means that older objects will date progressively older than they are the farther back in time we go.
Another effect is due to the Great Flood burying a huge percentage of the pre-flood carbon. As nearly all of this carbon was normal C12, it means that any pre-flood organic objects would have a lower percentage of C14 merely by dilution from the extra C12. Again, this would make old objects appear to be older than they are.
The third effect is the assumption in carbon dating is that the earth is very old, so it has a stable ratio of C12 to C14. But a young earth, as the Bible teaches, wouldn’t have produced enough C14 yet to have reached a stable ratio. And again, the farther back in time we go, the lower the initial amount of C14, similar to the magnetic field effect.
Over the last 40 years pre-flood (ie fossil) material has been carbon dated, and it often give results in this 50-60,000 year old range. The shocking thing about this is not that they seem to be that old. It is that these ‘dated’ objects include coal, dinosaur bones, oil and diamonds with supposed ages of 10 to 100 million years using other “accurate” radiometric dating methods. Clearly, radiometric dating is not reliable.
Last session, I presented an alternative explanation of the origin and time line of the sedimentary rocks, and therefore the fossils they contain. The world-wide Flood origin for these layers can account for many of these sedimentary layers being incredibly extensive, often covering many thousands of square kilometers. Conventional uniformitarian geology cannot explain the massive distribution of these layers, as there is nowhere in the world today where anything even remotely like these layers are forming.
Today I would like to present some supporting observations. First are some examples illustrating that these massive sedimentary layers were compressed, buckled and folded while they were still plastic. Which is another way of saying that the layers were created and modified very rapidly. The Bible indicates how this happened:
You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled; at the voice of Your thunder they hastened away. The mountains rose; the valleys sank to the place which You established for them. Psalm 104:6-8
Figures 10 to 14 show folding, tilting, shearing and dewatering of the sedimentary layers which are consistent with the idea that these layers were all laid down very rapidly during the Great Flood and then reshaped by massive forces while the sediments were still soft, wet and pliable. Many of these images are from http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Liquefaction7.html and far more detail can be found there.
Figure 10: Massive uplifting and folding. The smooth folding indicates that the sedimentary layers were still soft when bent and forced up. (Switzerland)
Figure 11: More buckling on an enormous scale (Canada)
Figure 12: Sediment layers tilted, planed flat and more deposition of similar sediments on top.
Figure 13: Block transported and rapidly buried, requiring enormous flows of fast-moving waters with heavy sediment loads.
Figure 14: Dewatering: Water in saturated soft sedimentary layers has oozed out, leaving these holes when the rock set. Some of these holes in Uluru, which is a massive liquefaction dome, are car sized.
These are tree trunks which in many cases pass through multiple coal seams. They also make one sceptical about the claimed hundreds of thousands of years taken for these seams to form. These polystrate fossils are found all over the world and in most coal deposits, leaving few places where it is possible to claim the extremely slow deposition which is required by the “hundreds of millions of years” timelines. They are also almost always without any roots or branches, a condition one would expect if they were hammered around in a violent flood before becoming waterlogged, sinking and being buried by sediment-laden waters. Figure 15 is from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6b/78/0b/6b780ba68b8aaf7b36b1d71219f469ea.png More images are at https://creationresearch.net/stalactite-experiment-results/polystrate-files/
Figure 15: Polystrate tree trunk passing through hundreds of rock layers, supposedly laid down over hundreds of years. But as the fossilised log shows no sign of rotting, it was buried and fossilised rapidly. This is just one of many thousands worldwide.
Mixed fossils from marine, land and bird life in a single graveyard also casts doubt on the uniformitarian paradigm. Instead, this ‘animal salad’ seems like what one would expect from an unsorted deposit of a huge array of animals that all died at once during the global flood (Figure 16). More at https://creation.com/fossil-graveyard-points-to-catastrophic-demise.
Figure 16: Jumbled Fossils–Marine, Land and Many Bird Fossils
How can the soft tissues of animals survive non-fossilised for tens of millions of years, when actual research shows that it will be destroyed in only thousands of years, even under perfect conditions? Figure 17 is from https://creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue.
Figure 17: Dinosaur Soft Tissue: Stretchable Blood Vessel and Cells that are supposedly 65 million years old. More impossible old-earth claims.
Conventional geologists and evolutionists deny there was ever a world-wide Flood like that recorded in Genesis. As an example, Lorence Collins has written Twenty-one Reasons Noah’s Worldwide Flood Never Happened. His 21 reasons make it clear that he has an extremely naive understanding of both the forces and the complexity of what was happening during and after the Flood, as land masses were intermittently protruding from the water, resubmerging, sliding and colliding plus massive volcanism. He also has little knowledge of Creationist research (or ignores it), as most of his ‘reasons’ have been debunked by creationists prior to his book. He makes several references to a tsunami being a critical part of the Flood, but the forces released in the Great Flood are many orders of magnitude greater and far more sustained than any imaginable tsunami. The stupendous mass of organic material he claims is buried in the sedimentary layers is merely speculation, and far exceeds what is actually found. The reality is that rich fossil beds are rare, and are therefore protected from unauthorised digging in most countries. On the other hand, the pre-flood earth had a benign climate, few high mountains and shallower oceans, supporting a much more diverse and dense biosphere than we have today. That entire biosphere was, with almost no exceptions, killed and most of it was entombed in these sedimentary layers. So we would expect to find a substantially higher density of fossilised organisms than if the Flood happened today, but it is still much less than Collins claims. And his 21 reasons carefully avoid most of the topics listed above.
As we have shown, our world is full of evidence that supports a global Flood, and that same evidence makes a mockery of the idea that ‘slow and steady’ events could ever produce the world we see around us.
The take-away alternatives are these:
1: God Did It! – An awesomely intelligent being of immense power designed, created and then destroyed many of these plants and animals, leaving a record of the Great Flood in our Bible, in our rocks and even in our genes as a reminder to us that He decides what is right and wrong, and punishes those who insist on practising evil.
2: Evolution Did It! – Random, non-directed events just happened to break all known biochemical laws to create superbly designed plants and animals which just happened to be rapidly drowned, buried and preserved in chemical-rich sediments in millions of highly improbable sequential disasters all over the world which just happen to look like they are all parts of one massive flood. How many amazing coincidences (miracles) are you comfortable with?
More topics for another time?? Sadly, we did not have time for these ones:
Did the Great Flood cause the Pacific Ocean ring of fire, and if so, how?
Could the rupture of the Fountains of the Great Deep have initially been powerful enough to propel some water and rock beyond Earth’s gravitational field, thereby creating some of the comets and meteorites?
Could the catastrophic events of the Great Flood explain the frozen mammoths of Siberia and Alaska?
The above topics all have sections in the http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/
In it, Walt Brown provides a complex, but plausible, explanation for the “ring of fire”.
Though I doubt that all of the comets and meteorites are a result of the Great Flood, it seems possible that some could be, and were ejected when the Fountains of the Great Deep shattered.
Although Walt Brown presents a strong case for the mammoths being frozen during the Flood, I think that Michael Oard, in Frozen in Time, provides a better case when proposing they were entombed by frigid dusk storms at the end of the post-Flood Ice Age. His case is summarised in this article: https://creation.com/the-extinction-of-the-woolly-mammoth-was-it-a-quick-freeze
Next Session: The Plain of Shinar, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Or it could be called the origin of our languages, nations, religions and military dictatorships.
Bruce Armstrong
M App Sci
Copyright © 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022
Revised 6 October
Published by
CENTRAL HIGHLANDS CHRISTIAN PUBLICATIONS
PO Box 236, Creswick, Vic 3363 Australia
Email info@chcpublications.net
Web Page https://chcpublications.net/
Permission is given to copy and distribute this document provided it is not altered and is copied in full. Copies must be given away. We ask only that you notify us if you are making numerous copies.
Scripture quotes are from our CHCoG translation.
Some Other Resources Available at https://chcpublications.net/
Books of Moses: Fact or Fiction Series
Origin of the Universe and Our Earth—How did Earth and our Universe Originate? Both the Biblical and Big Bang Models are presented. Evidence for and against the models is also presented.
Origin of Life—How did Life Originate on Earth? Both the Biblical Special Creation and Evolutionary Neo-Darwinian Models are presented. The Biblical Model covers the creation of plants and aquatic and flying organisms, while the Evolutionary model investigates the Origin of the First Cell. Evidence for and against the models is also presented.
Mankind and Evolution of Life—How did complex life, including humans, originate on Earth? Both the Biblical and Evolutionary Models are presented. The Biblical Model covers the creation of land animals and the first man and woman, while the Evolutionary model investigates what is required for their First Cell to evolve into complex organisms. Evidence for and against the models is presented.
The Fall of Creation—What is the Fall of Creation on Earth, and what was its Impact? The Biblical Account is presented, including sin, death and the banishing of Adam and Chavvah (Eve) from the Garden of Eden. Evidence for and against this account is presented.
The Great Flood, Part 1—Was there a Great Flood during Noah’s life? The Biblical Account explains why there was a Great Flood, Noah’s role in it and the extent of the Flood. This session ends with Noah and the animals leaving the Ark after the Flood.
The Great Flood, Part 2—What events followed the Great Flood during Noah’s life? Where did the Ark land? It also looks at many of the objections to the Great Flood and shows evidence that it was a real event which shaped the world we live in.
Shinar, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel—What did mankind do after the Flood? Where is the Plain of Shinar and where was Nimrod’s first Kingdom, including the location of the Tower of Babel? Why did God intervene and create a myriad of new Languages?
The Exodus from Egypt—Historical and Scientific information relating to the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt is presented, analysing several proposed pathways to Midian, including crossing the Soph (Red) Sea.
To Mount Sinai and God’s Instructions—After crossing the Soph Sea, where did the Israelites go until their arrival at Mount Sinai, and where is this mountain? This article includes Jehovah God giving them His Instructions there. Historical and Geographical information is presented, some of it new and previously unpublished.
The Holy Bible CHCoG Translation—From the original Hebrew and Aramaic. It is accurate and readable, giving you a clear understanding of God’s message.
Endnotes
1 From Noah’s Not-so-Big Flood, in Oceanus Magazine, Sept, 2009
2 As pointed out by Anne Habermehl, 2008. In A Review of the Search for Noah’s Ark from www.harpanddragon.com/ICC6-41.pdf
3 Gertrude Bell explored this area in 1909 and concluded that Mount Judi was likely where Noah’s Ark rested (Amurath to Amurath, 1911 ed, pgs 292 to 295). Timo Roller (http://www.cudi.info/html/02-noahs-ark-1a.html) thinks it is all at another peak of Mt Judi 4 km ESE of this one, at 37.3662N 42.4955E. Timo also believes Noah settled in a valley several kms east of the one I suggest.
4 Frederick Bender, who explored this area in 1953, found decayed wood and pitch about 800 mm below the surface, which carbon dated to 6,625 and 55,000 years old, consistent with contaminated and intact Pre-Flood items.
5 The Jewish historian Josephus of the first century A.D. claims that Adam and Chavvah (Eve) had 56 children: 33 sons and 23 daughters. (Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 1, Chapter 2, Paragraph 2, Endnote 8). Footnote from BibleScienceGuy.wordpress.com
6 There is now evidence that our ‘broken B12 gene’ is actually a gene that is only similar to the B12 gene in some animals, and has different functions in humans. If this is the case, perhaps there were good pre-Flood plant sources of B12 which are now extinct.
7 You can read more about this in our article at https://chcpublications.net/Radiocarbon_Dating.html
