Does The Flood Add up?

These questions are a subset of the biogeography problem in the thread I started that is below. Biogeography is an unsolvable dilema for YECs but so are the questions raised in the OP of this thread. A virtually endless list of geological and other problems exists for the flood myth as well. Clearly the answer to the question in the title of this thread is that the global flood dosen't "add up".Randy

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If the ark story is true, then humanity stems from noah's family, correct? How do you explain ethnic groups? Why do people from africa have higher melanin then others? why do orientals look like they do? Why do northern europeans look like they do?
With the enourmous variety of ethnic groups, the groups must have evolved from his ancestors. In proving the flood right, youve destroyed ID. Good job.

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Lets not even talk about the genetic catastrophies that would have happened with so much in-breeding. If it were true.

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Now consider that in YEC mythology Noah is only 9 generations from Adam and Eve, His wife is a direct descendant of Adam and Eve and his Sons and Sons wives are direct descendants of Adam and Eve. All of these people can supposedly trace their ancestors back about 1,600 years to Adam and Eve and no one else. So how does any genetic diversity arise from the further inbreeding of people who are already totally inbred. I have heard YECs claim that the genetic diversity of the human species comes from the wives of Noah's sons but like virtually everything else about YEC and the global flood story, this makes no sense at all. It certainly does not "add up".Randy
Edited by Randy, : No reason given.

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What I was really wondering about was the elephants, who I was able to find out require a minimum of 300 pounds of feed a day each. So 600 pounds a day for around 365 days gives us the total weight of feed that had to be stored on the Ark for the two elephants. If we assume their feed will be of a similar density to horse feed we will be able to work out how much storage space was needed.

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Loose hay is not very dense. My guess is about 3 or 4 pounds per cubic foot. Bales can be 7-10 pounds per cf but I doubt Noah had a baler. IIRC Woodmorappe makes some absurd claim about pelleted alfalfa. I guess he never saw the nature of the machinery needed to pellet hay. I have and it is beyond absurd to think that Noah had such equipment. So you are going to need a LOT of hay, but the ark supposedly was pretty big. But elephants are far from the only large mammals you need to feed and not even the largest. In addition to the elephants you also need a pair of indricotheres which were the largest known mammals, at least twice the size of elephants and some bronotheres which were about the size of elephants, not to mention giant sloths and glyptodonts (an armadillo like animal the size of a volkswagen beetle). I don't know if mammoths and mastodons are considered seperate from the elephant "kinds" in YEC mythology, I suppose it depends on who you ask but they were pretty different from each other and I suspect they ate a lot. Not to mention all the clean animals that you have seven each. If all even toed ungalates are "clean" that is about 80 genera that you need 7 each of or about 560 animals IIRC. These animals are also going to produce a lot of waste that needs to be removed.Oone problem with taking young animals is that many animals grow significantly in a year and will eat nearly as much as adults while doing so and there is the nursing problem of taking young mammals we have already discussed. Another problem with bring young animals is that many animals need to learn behaviors from adults as they grow. How will that work if you bring them on a ark sans parents. Have you ever watched one of those nature shows on the amount of work it requires to reintroduce animals born in capativity into the wild?The problem of 8 people feeding and cleaning up after so many different "kinds" of animals with such different nutritional needs is insurmountable. You have animals like snakes that only eat live prey, obligate carnivores like cats that require fresh meat (dried meat will lose the vitamin content cats need), insectivores of various kinds that need live insects and in some cases lots of them, fruit bats that eat fresh fruit, the aforemention kolas that need fresh eucalyptus leaves, pandas that need bamboo and so on and on.
Then you have to figure out what these animals, particularly the predators ate after the flood. Lion eats ardvaark, end of the ardvark "kind" forever.The world wide flood simply does not add up by any realistic calculation.RandyEdited by Randy, : typos

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You don't have to assume great differences among the sons of Noah and their wives, though there could have been, since genetic diversity in any couple would have been much greater in those days, leading to much more variety in offspring. We assume far greater genetic potential so that all those varieties would have been expressed simply in the processes of migration and reproductive/genetic isolation of the different groups.

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The point is that there couldn't have been any significant genetic diversity in Noah's sons OR their wives. Noah's line goes back only 9 generations to Adam, his sons only 10. Their wives may have had a few more generations but in the YEC myth they also descend from the same couple, Adam and Eve, that Noah and his sons descend from. There is no diversity to start with and no possibility of "greater genetic potential". Edited by Randy, : No reason given.

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It took merely Jacob and his family of twelve sons and their families to grow to more than a million Israelites in Egypt in 400 years starting around 1850 BC or so. It is mathematically possible. So we'd assume that the Egyptians had multiplied on a similar scale after the Flood a few hundred years earlier, and that pyramid-building was what the Israelites were doing there. Yes, we just assume different dates.

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Except that there is absolutely no independant evidence that the 12 sons of Jacob fathered more than a million Israelites in Egypt. You can't use one myth to try to substantiate another.Randy

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An absence of mention does not prove they didn't exist and weren't noticed. However, why is this such a problem? It is possible they (micro)evolved from an earlier parent type that was on the ark, after locating themselves in a particular geographic environment that then split from the original unified land mass and became Australia. Or maybe both were on the ark and migrated to that portion of the land mass. It's all a guess.

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The problem is not just Kangaroos and Kolas. There are 13 families and 180 species of marsupials and 3 monotremes in Australia. Somehow they got there without placental mammals for company. This is a problem that YECs can't really deal with. I have bumped that thread.

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There is no reason to assume that insects were taken on the ark the way the animals were.

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Many insect families could not have survived the flood on or off the ark. I shamelessly bumped my thread on that topic. The little brown bat eats about half its weight in insects every night. What did they eat on the ark?

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I would suppose it likely that koalas did not exist at the time of the ark but (micro)evolved from a parent type that was on the ark, becoming reproductively isolated at some point, and specialized as noted.

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It is not the least bit likely. How do you explain their fossil record in Australia if the flood supposedly deposited the fossils and they hyperevolved after the flood?Koala InformationBTW the rapid splitting of the continents you propose would have led to rapid production of new ocean crust and lithosphere and we have already shown on other threads how that would have cooked the earth to death, not that it helps the biogeography problem anyway as I explain on that thread.Randy

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about 4,500 years ago Noah built an ark. He then collected all of the kinds that needed to go on the ark. Some of those kinds (20,000 or so is the number generally given) were dinosaurs but it was thought those were eggs

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Genesis
7:14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.7:15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.7:16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.I get this picture of cartoon dinosaur eggs with arms and legs walking up the gangplank of the ark hand in hand.Randy

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The only reason inbreeding is a problem is the accumulation of inherited diseases and according to the YEC understanding, there were no diseases at all until the Fall, and considering the long life spans of at least the God-fearing line of Adam's immediate descendants, they died of old age rather than any kind of disease for many many generations after Adam, Noah's generation included. We assume great vigor and genetic diversity even in those eight on the ark, enough to generate all human beings since, certainly diminished from the original vigor and diversity of Adam and Eve but still considerable. Compared to us, astronomically considerable. Inherited diseases to the extent we now face them are a relatively recent phenomenon.

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How could Adam and Eve have had "great diversity"? No matter how you slice it they are only two people and one of them was supposedly made from the other's rib. Does that make her a clone? In any case you have only 4 allels for each gene. Or do you think Adam and Eve had multiple copies of each genome.Of course "unclean" animals should have even less diversity than humans since you reduce them to 2 of each "knd". There should be less diversity in every "kind" of unclean animal than there is in humans but that is not at all what is seen. There are a few species of animals such as the Cheetah that show recent bottlenecks but most do not. Why not?Randy

Of course we know things about the past. We are not talking about the distant past we talking about 4,500 years ago.Nice try but we do know quite a bit about what the world was like 4,500 years ago. You are talking about the time of the 4th Eqyptian dynasty after all, not billions of years ago. I suggest you look at a map of the earth before the break up of Pangea. Here is a link to a MAPIt is a long way from the Middle East to Australia. Among the animals that somehow got there are the Koala, which only lives in Eucalyptus trees, the marsupial mole, a small nearly blind animal that only lives in sandy soil and the echidna, an awarkward marsupial(Added in editOPs the echidna is a monotreme not a marsupial) version of the porcupine. How did these animals not only make that long trip before the continents broke up, but get there ahead of all "kinds" of placenatal mammals that are much better travelers. Why did they make this long hike back to where they just happen to have a fossil record? Did they also make this long hike up to get on the ark? There are no flood deposited fossils of modern Australian marsupials or montremes anywhere in Europe or Asia. Do you think the tasmanian tiger was able to keep wolves, lions, leopards, hyena, bears and other placental predators away because of territoriality? Do you think kangaroos somehow kept out wildebeest, deer, zebra and all the other placental grazers because of territoriality. It makes no sense at all. The little brown bat appears in the Miocene. Was that before or after the flood? Oh, sorry. I forgot that YECs actually have no idea which fossils are flood deposits and which aren't. Then how did these little animals make it all the way back to Australia before the continents split up? How long after the flood was that? Maybe during the 6th Egyptian dynasty if the flood was during the 4th. We know how continents move and how they have been moving for billions of years. Sea floor is subducted in subduction zones and created at spreading centers. This necessarily produces new ocean crust and lithosphere and it is hot. Would you like to give us a geophysical model for moving the continents around that doesn't involve subduction and seafloor spreading?RandyEdited by Randy, : Echidna is a monotreme

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Yes, and the written record of the Bible trumps all the reconstructed history from archaeology you can come up with to "prove" the timing of the Egyptian dynasties. One written record that has been passed down intact for millennia is worth more than all that after-the-fact reconstruction.

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Sorry but the "written record" of the Bible was written well after the written records of the Egyptians and the Summerians. You can't use the myth of Biblical infallability to substantiate the myth of a worldwide flood.

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There are lots of different maps of Pangaea on the web. Some I've seen show it to be a lot more compact than the one you put up. But certainly those are good questions to think about. I would also think that evolution wouldn't have any easier time explaining it than a YEC.

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Here are two more maps. They vary slightly but all show a long ways from what became the Middle East to what became Australia.
Map1
Map2And evolution has a far easier time explaining biogeography than YEC. The Natural History of Marsupials

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The timing of the Egyptian dynasties is obviously off.

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You need it to be way off since there is considerable record of predynastic Egypt prior to the formation of the 1st dynasty in about 3,100 BCE. How long do you think it would take after the flood for all those people to be born and develop their culture.You also need the dates for ancient Sumeria to be way off. You have to completely distort what is known about prehistory in order to fit you myth, just as you have to distort genetics, biogeography and geology among many other things. Have you ever consider that this might be the result of trying to substantiate a Bronze Age myth?

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You know ONLY how they move NOW, not how they have been moving for any great time in the past, not even how they moved a hundred years ago for sure.

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No, that is the way it happens. It just happened faster 4500 years ago and has since slowed down.

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So first you say we don't know how they moved even a hundred years ago and then you say they moved by suduction and spreading but faster. The point is that if they moved enough faster to separate the continents in the time frame you are talking about the earth would look very different. one of those differences would be boiled oceans which would be a little hard on things don't you think?Randy

Not exactly but the depth profile of the oceans and the amount of sediments on the ocean floor are both consistent with movemment over many millions of years as we have discussed on this forum before. Fast movement might be possible but it would have left a very different geology on the ocean floors and released enough heat that either the crust and lithosphere would still be molten or the average temperature of the earth would be too high to sustain most life including us. This is quite easy to show.The problem you have is that this is indeed a science program and every aspect of science that is applied to the problem shows that the answer to the question in the title of this thread is a resounding NO. The flood does not "add up".Randy

That is what the geologists of the 19th century did. They found that their assumption was wrong. When one actually studies the science assuming that the flood occurs doesn’t really help. You can read about it on a page by Evangelical Christian Geologist Davis Young HERE Do you think the plates moved during the flood like the people at AiG or after the flood? It doesn’t really matter. Rapid plate movement would generate a huge amount of heat from the new ocean crust and lithosphere and the heat would have to go somewhere. Further Bill Birkeland has posted links on this forum showing that sea floor sediments are not consistent with rapid plate movement HERE and Joe Meert has an analysis that shows that the depth profile of the oceans is consistent with slow and not rapid plate movement HEREThe problem you have is that virtually EVERY mathematical analysis, whether of heat from rapid plate movement, or the amount of water required for a global flood or the amount of time to deposit the massive salt deposits in the geologic column or amount of time required to feed the animals on the ark effectively debunks the young earth and global flood as does paleontology, archeology, geology, astronomy, biogeography, biodiversity and any other science that has ever been applied to the problem. You don’t have the “luxury” of accepting any science at all. From a scientific standpoint the flood simply does not "add up".Randy