Is the Global Flood Feasible? Discussion Q&A

Post your questions on why you think the Flood could not have happend or could have happend and give reasons why.------------------

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[This message has been edited by TrueCreation, 12-31-2001]

Moose,
That can very much depend on how you interperate your evidence. When you consider a worldwide deluge in the form of a flood such as the catastrophic event of Noah's Flood it quite well explains just about everything of natural formation that is usually interpreted to millions of years and other smaller happenings to slowly give the effect of a worldwide catastrophe. The Flood of Noah has evidence in im sure all the areas of Geology that you could look at. Such as why the Layers are sorted as they appear in the 'geologic column'. How the fossils are arranged throughout, plate tectonics, even the Massive formations of erosion on Mars, and, the rings of Saturn. It depend simply on how your going to interperate the evidence. When you consider all of these things created by this Global Flood you can see all the pieces fit together uniformly and without many problems.
I agree with your saying that the presence of marine fossils at the summit of Everest doesn't mean that the seas must have gained a height of its peak. The Global Flood explains aspects of plate tectonics in uplift of the mountains after and during the Flood, and happening very quickly compared to today's slow uplift rates. . Coal beds, Fossils, Grand Canyon, Sedimentation experiments, hardgrounds, and continental drift are also aspects that a Global Flood has no problem in encountering.
If someone would be able to give specifics I could explain the 'problem'.

Yes the Flood Covered All the land, the whole world and its 'high' hills.

1. What time period are we talking?If you mean to imply what geologic time period like triassic, jurrasic, etc then I would have to say every time period, but If you are just asking how long ago it happend then I would have to say about 4,500 years ago.2. Where did all the water come from?
The water came from the 'windows of heaven' and the 'fountains of the deep' For some reason I think there was a 3rd source but I think it was just another reference to rain and the windows of heaven.

What is the basis of your claim that the Flood could never happen and that there is no geologic evidence of a Catastrophic Flood ever happening? What would you expect to see if it did happen?Plate Tectonics - "This mechanism of runaway subduction then appears to satisfy most of the critical requirements imposed by the observational data to successfully account for the Biblical Flood. It leads to a generally correct pattern of large scale tectonic change; it produces flooding of the continents; it causes broad uplifts and downwarpings of craton interiors with intense downwarpings at portions of craton margins to yield the types of sediment distributions observed. It also transports huge volumes of marine sediments to craton edges as ocean floor, in conveyor belt fashion, plunges into the mantle and most of the sediment is scraped off and left behind. It plausibly leads to intense global rain as hot magma erupted in zones of plate divergence, in direct contact with ocean water, creates bubbles of high pressure steam that emerge from the ocean, rise rapidly through the atmosphere, radiate their heat to space, and precipitate their water as rain. That no air-breathing life could survive such a catastrophe and that most marine life also perished is readily believable. Finally, numerical modeling appears to be the most practical means for reconstructing a comprehensive picture of such an event and for creating a conceptual framework into which the geological observational data can be correctly integrated and understood. This calculation, it is hoped, is a modest step in that direction. "The effects and cause of the Flood of Noah through runaway subduction is in depth explained here, Plate tectonics is a huge subject and It would take too much time for me to summerize it for you. If you would like to give me comments on that page that is fine with me.

These are some of the versus in the bible that indicate the 'action' events of the Flood.7:11 - In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month--on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
7:12 - And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
7:17 - For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.
7:18 - The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.
7:19 - They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.
7:20 - The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
7:24 - The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.8:1 - But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.
8:2 - Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.
8:3 - The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,
8:4 - and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

The windows of heaven seem to be some mechanism that brought about the heavy rain for the first 40 days. The mechanism for this can be explained by the Volcanic activity that would have happend as a chain reaction from the fountains of the deep breaking open. Oceans and water would be quickly and immensly evaporated and thrown into the air like clouds and pouring all over the earth as heavy rain. There also could be other mechanisms that would have happend in such a catastrophic event.
The Fountains of the Great deep could be the effects of the splitting of the earth such as to form the cracks in the earth and the ridges all along the sea bottoms in the atlantic and other areas around the world.

http://www.icr.org/research/jb/largescaletectonics.htmSorry I guess I didn't post the link for that quote, Im sure you'll find this page interesting, it is quite a bit of text but you can skim threw it for info, I thought it was very iteresting when I read it.

This is a great question that I love to answer much of the time, when you say that water would sort everything according to density with all the less dense materials toward the top and the denser toward the bottom this is right, but your missing a couple things. One is that the Flood didn't just dump on the earth all at once giving it one chance to sort everything the way it is today. It happend over a little period of time, 150 days. In this 150 days the currents would produce the layers bringing in billions of tons of sediment from all over the place, such as huge amounts of sediment that would have been up in canada before the flood and then after the flood it would have ben rushed all down toward New Mexico and Nevada. All the sediments would have been in quite a frenzy over the earth, over time the first piles of sediment brought in would deposit and settle making the first few layers and burrying the less fortunate in the ground. Then hours or days later you bring in another mass of sediments and it burries itself ontop, and does the same, while possible unsettling the top of the last deposit up a little but then it would settle down again.While all this is going on you not only have density to deal with, you have intelligence and habitat. Humans are almost never found in the fossil record except toward the very top because while the flood was going on, they are obviously much smarter than animals and would find some way to survive for as long as they can. Humans could use small boats to stay afloat for as long as possible. Animals with flight capability would be found also toward the top of all of the layers because they can fly of course, and until they just run out of gas they can stay in flight and in the midst of the commotion of the water few would be able to perch on driftwood or other plants until they were finally unable to go on and were taken by the chaos.Flowering plants would be toward the top because for one most plants very much, specially including flowering plants, would be able to simply float until they were saturated with water and buried by sediment and much of the plants would just be afloat for the whole thing, God only said that all animals that breath through nostriles died.So insects are not a problem, and sea creatures and fish aren't a problem though many many would perish. Many plants have 'waterproofing' type leaves like with little hair follicles that the water will just run off it so they would rarely be encountered in the fossil record.Many people claim that rocks and fossils are always dated to be the same age, thus it would be the correct date. But this simply isn't true, I can almost guarentee you when creationists and evolutionists go at it with this subject the evolutionists rarely like to comment on it. I have listened to many creation/evolution debates and whenever this comes up it always seems to happen.Go to a museum and when you get the tour guide to bring you to the geologic column of sediments ask him how they know the fossil is 90 million years old and they will tell you because of the rock layer they found it in is 90 million years old. Then go up to the geologist and ask him how old that rock layer is and they will tell you 90 milion years, well how do you know that? They will tell you because the fossil we found in it is 90 million years old. When you get down to it the way they really give the published date is circular reasoning. This is how they date the material that you gave them to date:When you want a rock dated you have to 'Fill out a paper that says what strata you found it in, what fossils you found near it, and what age it should be. You send it into them and they date it, they get ranges all over the place.' Not consistent at all 'And then they go look it up in the little book about the information that you've given them and then they say, ok this information says that these dates in the book are the right ones and those are the dates they give you.'Evidence that the mountains and the Alps mountain ranges were formed quickly would be judged on what your interperetation of the evidence is, one thing we have to consider is that we don't know that the mountain ranges have always uplifted constantly at the same rate. Science cannot determine that. But what we do know is that in many mountain ranges we get these folds in the sediments, huge folds, indicating that the sediments had to all still be soft and moist.Evolutionists will tell you that that is no problem because it could just be wet like it would have to be to produce these folds, but one problem is that if the rate of uplift has always been the same, these folds would have taken hundreds and possibly thousands of years to create, and it is very unlikely that the sediment has been always been wet. Another problem is Erosion this is a short rebutal to an attempt to debunk the 'The rate of erosion of mountains proves the earth is young as the mountains would have eroded completely away if the earth was as old as geologists say.'Despite the cycles of nature (specifically uplift or 'continental renewal'), Erosion : Cycle of Nature is not a balanced ratio at all.Why do the continents and mountains still exist if they are being eroded so quickly? Why do so many landforms, claimed to be old, show no sign of erosion? The simple answer is that they are not as old as claimed, but ‘young’ like the Bible shows. However, this is not philosophically acceptable to evolutionary geologists, so other explanations are sought in vain.For example, it is suggested that the mountains still exist because uplift is constantly replacing them from below. Consequently, the mountains would have been eroded and replaced many times over in 2.5 billion years. However, although uplift is occurring in mountainous areas, such a process of uplift and erosion could not go on for long without removing all the layers of sediments. We would therefore not expect to find any old sediment in mountainous areas if they had been eroded and replaced many times. Yet, surprisingly, sediments of all ages from young to old (by evolutionary dating methods) are preserved in mountainous regions. The idea of continual renewal by uplift does not solve the problem.Another idea suggested to solve the problem is that the present rates of erosion being measured are abnormally high. According to this argument, there was much less erosion taking place humans interfered. Human activity, such as land clearing and farming is said to be why we are measuring such high rates at present. However, quantitative measurements on the effect of this human activity have found that erosion rates are increased only 2 to 2.5 times. For this explanation to solve the problem, the increase would need to be several hundred times greater. Once again, the explanation does not satisfy.It has also been suggested that the climate in the past was much drier (because less water would mean less erosion). However this idea goes against the evidence. The climate was actually wetter, as deduced from the abundance of lush vegetation in the fossil record.And about the erosion marks on Mars and the rings of Saturn, this can be explained by a possible cause of the Flood, there are different theories on this and we really don't even need it but it is a way to explain many things. The theory goes something like a very large comet could have came zooming through the solar system passing up some of the planets including earth, mars, saturn, and uranus. As the comet was flying past our planets, it would be breaking apart rapidly releasing mass amounts of rock and ice, precisely what Saturn's rings are made of. Also it accounts for the problem of uneaven meteorite colisions with planets, the sides of the planets such as mars and the moon are very unevenly distributed, signifying that if the world is young and this comet came flying through our solar system breaking apart it would have thrown thousands upon thousands of clumps of ice onto the planets, and for places like Mars this would be catastrophic. Which explains why Mars has canyons 60 times bigger than our own grand canyon. And why it still has ice caps there now as was discovered a couple years ago. With how hot Mars gets in the daylight it would have been worse than here on earth. Saturns rings are results of this comet breaking up and it became its rings.[Edited to add paragraphs - Percy]

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[This message has been edited by Percipient, 12-20-2001]

Technically it isn't opposed to a vapor canopy, there verywell could have been a much lesser amount of vapor in the atmosphere than was previously thought by creationists, lessening problems. We could verywell use both theories, but the vapor canopy isn't a needed theory, if it had to be thrown out, it wouldn't be a problem. And not all of the water would of evaporated, very much though, and toward the poles there would be immense and quick freezing of ice accounting for the ice age which really happend, though not 10,000 years ago, and we believe in a single ice age.

What mechanism allows Flood waters to erode? What do you mean by 'flood waters eroding'? If you mean the mechanism which allows these masses of sediment to be piled every now and then and not at a consistant rate, it would be tides and currents. If water is standing still it isn't going to do much but when you have no land masses to stop the tides then they will be massive and move and wash away sediments from other areas and depositing them all over the place as each tide comes in to sake it up a little bit.Pterosaurs were reptiles, not mammals, their bodies were most likely much heavier than other birds, and the only reason it could of flown is very likely that it was because the atmosphere was more pressurized. The animal probley would not even be able to fly in our atmosphere today, it could glide for vast distances of possibly no more than a couple miles. pterosaurs weighing much more than mammillian birds would only be able to fly in the air for their first flight, they would not of been able to purch on driftwood and piles of vegetation and the few that could would have fought for it but would not of been able to stay for as long as the mammillian birds. The mechanisms in a flood for amphibians, reptiles, and mammals would be according to intelligence, habitate, body structure and density. Body structure would play a part because even denser animals would be able to float such as mammals, because of hair and lighter body weights as a ratio to tissue densities.
Fish would be the 'great survivors' because of course they dont' breath air so in 99.9% of the case drowning would not be much of a factor. But Fish are already in the seas when the flood started, and countless billions would have died from quick environment changes in the water located too close to erupting underwater basins during the flood. Whales would be unlikely burried to a degree where it would get the chance to fossilize before decay and scavengers. Decay would happen worse with whales in many areas because it is so huge that it would likely not get completely burried for fossilization. And being such a large animal would have been distinguishable by predators and they would continually pick at it and would not be able to be burried because the predators aren't done eating the animal. Whales also would not be as subject to environmental changes like temperature or water salinity, they breath air.
Explain what you mean by 'why were single celled organisms, the lightest, least dense, mostly easily suspendable organisms the first to be burried'?
I did a quick little experiment in some water, I picked about 10 or so different types of angiosperms 'flowering plants' and put them in the water, then I cut them up and smashed them up and they stayed suspended and some still floating in the water. Now this is the only way I found that they even did anything less than float and rush to the surface. Also a simple thing I found is that all of the flowering plants you notice when you dip them in water, it looks almost like a foil because air attaches itself to the leaf or the petal of the flower. And even in rough conditions the air stayed attached to the leaves and some of the stems and the petals especially. This though not a very precise experiment does speak volumes.
I should have included it but not only is the breathing threw nostriles the only characteristic but it was to the animals that creap on the earth. So these factors count insects, and 'mammalian' sea creatures out.
Insects survived not drowning because they have very little density, and bodyweight, so they would easilly be able to float on driftwood andlumps of vegitation.
The 'waterproofing' of the leaves and petals of flowering plants is a point because it would be a large factor in avoiding getting burrial untill they would be saturated with water or crushed up (highly unlikely anything would be 'crushed up or grinded).
The climate would be wetter and drier if you go by a uniformitarian perspective of the Geologic column, but it would be wetter if it was all deposited in a flood.
What is your reference of a comet raising all atmospheric temperatures to over 6800C? This would be no problem for other planets because it has no life to spare, and for earth, our magnetic field would direct the disturbances to the poles.
A massive comet accounts for Martian canyons because comets are made of Ice and rock. When this comet would have been flying past Mars it would of been breaking apart and there would be massive amounts of ice on Mars and Mars gets extreamly hot in sunlight and all the ice would melt and become a massive raging flood.
The other explination for saturn's rings is a large meteorite smashing into one of saturns moons and creating the rings, but it has been estimated it would take 30 billion years for it to reach its current form.
The Flood was about 4500 years ago.
Where did the water go? Well its right were it is right now, back into the oceans. Where there is uplift as there was for a flood there would be sinkage in weighed down areas such as in the oceans. If you smoothed out the land of the earth the waters could cover the earth 2 miles high.

We can only speculate on what exactly really happend to give the effect of the Flood, and what kind of catastrophic Flood that it was. We don't say that this is exactly what happend. We say this is how it could have happend. Making the feasibility of it a logical happening and explination of why things are the way they are today. Details that would be important today would not have been important years ago especially before say 500 years ago. What would they have known about plate tectonics, or uplift, or comets, or saturns rings, DNA, Radiometric dating methods. Almost all of it was based on faith, and a trust in what was written. God does say about plate tectonics that he had to make the land so that the waters would never return to flood the land, but what would they have known years ago that it was an aspect of plate tectonic activity and uplift?
Things like this are only important in this day in age when the Flood is being challenged for its feasibility and logicality, so we respond with reasons why it is a feasible event that did infact acording to the evidence as a logical explination of why things are the way they are.
Concerning the Olive leaf, What you will notice when you look at an olive leaf is that it comes from a tree. Im sure you agree. Now a catastrophic event with flood waters rapidly flooding the world would most certainly destroy all of the trees in the world, knock them from their roots and they would slowely die being saturated with water. Now few would probley be left in their roots attached to the ground but then it would likely be covered with sediment. So what we do know is that in a years time all of the leaves of trees would have died along with the tree. But what was left were seeds that would be very much able to grow after the flood. So Noah would have known that if the dove returned with an olive leaf that it would have had to be a fresh one, newly grown. Leaves floating and even still attached to driftwood would have died rotted and wilted after so much time has passed.
The seed of the plants would have floated on driftwood and in the water that would not be much of a problem for the length of time.
Now concerning the fact that the 'God of love and pure goodness dieliberately kill babies, young children, and unborn children in the womb. Being all powerful he presumably could have found some other way to deal with the problem of mans wichedness.'
This is a hard question to answer. And making it even more difficult, most un-believers will try to put themselves in Gods position and say well that sure was mean, I would have done it this way or that way. But what we don't understand is that God has a plan, and it is his will to do what he wanted to do. Lets take a look at what God said and why he did what he did:6:5The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
6:6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.
6:7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth--men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air--for I am grieved that I have made them."
6:8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
6:9 This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.In these passages we find that everyone was wicked except for Noah who was a righteous man and found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Now a question you might ask is why would God take the lives of all the babies and children like you said. Now we come back to the fact that 'everyone was wicked' And so the children born to the wicked would grow to be wicked. So if you consider the bible as true, then you would see that God wasn't sending these unborn and young children to hell, they I believe were to be with God in paridise not to be raised to hate and forget God. God has a plan, and some people think that God didn't know what was happening when he says in 6:7 ' So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth--men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air--for I am grieved that I have made them." '
But again, God has a plan, he knew this was going to happen, but he was greived to sit there and watch them as it happend forgetting their creator.
Some people might think well why couldn't God just say all the wicked people die. But this isn't what we find he did. This happend also to set the record for us to remember that God hates sin, and God is the judge over man and sin so that we might be able to look back and say well I don't want to be in that position so im going to follow him. A Flood left evidence, a miracle would not.
God didn't 'repent' that he made man. It says that he was greived and had pain in his heart because he had made man. I would feel the same way, whether I knew exactly when, where, and how it would happen. This does not limit God or produce falliblity to the bible. God is love, and made a way for us, we deserve to die, but he doesn't want it that way, he has a plan.

repent1 (r-pnt)
v. repented, repenting, repents
v. intr.
To feel remorse, contrition, or self-reproach for what one has done or failed to do; be contrite.
To feel such regret for past conduct as to change one's mind regarding it: repented of intemperate behavior.v. tr.
To cause to feel remorse or regret.
To feel pain, sorrow, or regret, for what one has done or omitted to do.
To change the mind, or the course of conductTo 'repent' in its conclusive context does not have to mean to have change of mind, or plans, it can simply mean to change direction from remorse, or regret, as did God at this point.

Let me just clear up a couple of things. Im not saying it didn't but I think it is very unlikely that any land mass moved at a speed of 45 mph, Though I don't think that it would exactly produce enough friction to destroy the whole world, thouh I do know that would create an emense tidal wave that would wipe out everything, but even if that did happen you have Noah and his boat to worry about, I don't know of any Ideas that could fix that problem. But I do know that we dont' have to have anything moving at even 1 mph. I think uplift would have been drastically high after and during the flood. It could have verywell taken 1000 years for uplift to slow down to its present rate. Mabye a couple hundred years. When tectonic plates move a couple inches and even centimeters it can be drastic, but this happens in a couple of seconds or minutes, which is very fast.
I don't think the sharp peaks are much of a factor though it does present a problem for millions of years of uplift, there certainly wouldn't be any sharp peaks at all like Everest has considering erositon rates.
I just showed you how it is entirely possible that it could happen within a couple of hundred years for uplift. Physical laws do not need to be suspended to any degree, though that is a different story for a beginning of the universe ex nihilo dismissing God into the equation.
Physical evidence that there were fountains of the deep existed? Seeing there are 'mountain ranges' all along the atlantic ocean and smaller ones all around the world, I can see that its pretty plain to me.

Ok, I can't wait to hear your response, I've seen in places on the internet (don't take this so much as to think im laying anything on the line for this) where many secular scientists see this as a very nice paper and admire it's validity to a degree as ratio to their uniformitarian belief. Its papers like this that are starting to make new theories come up that it was a global flood but that its irrelevant to the 'old earth' theories. I can just imagine what the secular theories on origins and evolution in 10 years.