Is the Global Flood Feasible? Discussion Q&A

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.

Thanks again. For clarification, were saying ALL water was magmatic in origin, & that it entered the atmosphere, gave up its heat & precipitated as rain? As opposed to a "vapour canopy"

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-19-2001]

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-19-2001]

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
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'.

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Wouldn't water sort according to density, with the densest things all jumbled up on the bottom layers and light things all mixed up on the top? We actually find all kinds of organisms in each of the different geologic layers, regardless of density. Can you propose an experiment which would show how water could sort things not by density?Why do flowering plants appear so late in the fossil record. Did they run for high land when the rains began?When one dates a layer of rock using many different methods, the results all show the same age for the rock. Likewise, when one tests the fossils found in that rock, they are found to be the same age. Why is that?Where is your evidence that the Alps and other mountain ranges formed "very quickly"?Oh, and what is all of this about erosion on Mars and the rings of Saturn being caused by Noah's flood?? I can't wait to hear the explanation of this.Allison

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.

TrueCreation, sorry for the wait & the previous posts, I needed to understand your pov before I could argue it. Also, I'm not used to "real" reasearch. ie books & not links Here goes.......

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
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.

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This just describes mainstream sciences view.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
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.

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Magma contains a small amount of water by volume, its true. However, if the water covered Everest by 20 feet it had to be in excess of 6 miles in depth. Everest, along with the rest of the Himalayas was formed by the Indian sub-continent colliding with southern Asia. Continental movements are MEASURED to be between 1-10 cm/ year. There is no evidence that they ever moved significantly faster. (Australia is fastest, 7 cm/year. In 4000 years it would have moved 280m.) Even 280 m horizontal movement in the flood scenarios timeline does not allow everest to be much lower 4,000 years ago.The most pronounced conclusion that can be drawn from the analysis of laser measurements taken on LAGEOS FROM 1979 TO 1982 is that movement between the plates was measured & therefore confirmed. The motions we are measuring, albeit preliminary, agree overall in magnitude & direction with those found in the geological record.which reflect plate movements over millions of years. (Christodoulidis et al., 1985, p9261)Also, magnetic anomalies, translated into a symmetrical, mirror image set of stripes of alternating magnetic polarity either side of the mid ocean ridges show a general cyclical reversal of polarities. The basalt, as it solidified, aligned itself in accordance with field strength & polarity as existed at the time of solidification. As polarity changed, newly formed basalt (pushing the older rock outward, away from the ridge) was aligned magnetically opposite to the previous band. As time goes by & more & more basalt is deposited, polarity bands emerge. The width of the bands are indicative of the speed of continental drift as intervals between magnetic polarity reversals are corroborated. There IS small variation, but nothing that would send India hurtling into the Asian mainland, that would cause the uplift of the Himalayas inside 4,000 years.Staying on magnetism. The horizontal sedimentation on the seabed corroborates the ages of the basalt anomalies, as different sedimentary ages (layer upon layer) are also aligned by magnetic polarity, providing evidence that sedimentation was laid down slowly over millions of years, & not in a single year. If the one year flood were true, no magnetic anomalies would appear in the deposits.Corroborative evidences are;1/Radiometric ages of basalts at the ridge, & expected increased ages the further basalts are from those ridges. There is no sudden increase in basalts of 4,000 years age at the ridge that would indicate increased continental drift, or catacysm for that matter, at the alleged time of the flood.2/ Radiometric ages of sediments, younger upon older. As expected, greater depth of sediment, & greater age of base sediment the further samples are taken from the ridge. That is to say, base sediments, sitting upon basalt of similar to younger age. This is true of any part of the ridge system. A flood scenario would have no age differentiation in sediments.3/ Basalts & sediments magnetic orientations match, given their ages.4/ Sea bed sediments elsewhere corroborate magnetic polarity timeline.Everest is in excess of 6 miles above sea level now, & there is no evidence to suggest there was significant difference 4,000 years ago, quite the opposite. The biblical flood scenario will have to account for extra water to that depth.Now, the water.To raise the water level to Mt. Everests height requires 4.4 bn. cubic kilometres of the wet stuff. For this to exist as gas would require the atmosphere to have a pressure 840 times higher than today, & it would be 99.9% water. Unbreathable. Even adding the water in 40, single increments results in an oxygen content dropping from 20.95% to under 1%. Unbreathable.Latent heat of vaporisation during a 40 day period would raise the atmospheric temperature of the entire earth to over 3,500 deg C. (6,400 F) (Heat cannot be dissipated into space as fast as it is being created on a daily basis). This would boil the oceans & cremate the Ark & everyone/thing on it. For comparison the surface of the sun is 6,000 C.For such a volume to move through the crust in 40 days, porosity must be 50% (the crust would be half open spaces). (Soroka & Nelson 1983 p.136).There is no mechanism or evidence for these purported occurrences. Even if there were, no organism could survive it, whether they breath through their nostrils or not.Even if some water existed (ICR says 12m) in the atmosphere to account for the "deluge", the rest (still 6 miles) would still have to be made up by subterranean sources.Incidentally 12m of liquid water alone translates to 40% increase in atmospheric pressure, also a corresponding drop in oxygen globally, if the 12m of water existed as a gas. & the latent heat of the 12m of water, representing 40% of atmospheric mass, would still need to be added.Given temperatures that lie beneath the crust (1,200 C is hottest recorded magma), & if vast reservoirs of water did exist, & spurt out of the springs of the great deep the temperature of the water, & heating of the atmosphere as a result would still cook the Ark.Now, the flood scenario has taken a 4.4 bn. cubic kilometre volume of water (not to mention magma), equating to a depth 6 miles from beneath the crust. That’s all the crust, all around the world. This would result in a vacuum of 4.4 bn. cubic kilometres under the the crust. This would result in a marble (core/remaining mantle) rattling around a ping pong ball (crust). The crust would collapse to a depth of said 6 miles. There is no evidence of this collapse.Given the crustal collapse, there's nowhere for the water to recede to, so where did it go?What mechanism caused it to spurt forth for forty days & stop? Globally, every where at once?------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-20-2001]

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
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, .

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What mechanism allows the Flood waters to erode, then stop for a couple of hours or days?

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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.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 accept 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 ofcourse, and untill they just run out of gas they can stay in flight and in the midst of the comossion of the water few would be able to purch on driftwood or other plants untill they were finally unable to go on and were taken by the chaos. .

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Why aren’t pterosaurs found in recent deposits with birds? In fact, the flood scenario does nothing to explain why reptiles stop appearing at a certain point, why amphibians, & mammals do the same. What mechanism in the flood would separate a 1kg Amphibian, a 1kg Reptile, or a 1kg mammal to such a degree that repiles are not found pre permian, mammals not found pre-triassic , & amphibians not found pre devonian? Not a single terrestrial organism is found pre- Silurian.& Fishes, the should-be great survivors were the first vertebrates to be buried! The whales managed to escape, & they live in exactly the same depth band as fishes.Why were single celled organisms, the lightest, least dense, most easily suspendable organisms the first to be buried?

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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Flowering plants would be toward the top because for one most plants verymuch specially including flowering plants would be able to simply float untill they were saturated with water and burried by sediment and much of the plants would just be afloat for the whole thing.

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Why aren’t angiosperms & gymnosperms found together in pre-cretaceous rocks? Given your arguments, they should.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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God only said that all animals that breath through nostriles died.

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Whales survived, they breath exclusively through their nostrils.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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So insects are not a problem,

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How on earth are insects not a problem? How did they survive drowning if they weren’t on the Ark?

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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and sea creatures and fish arent 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.

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Not sure of the point you make on plants.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
/B]

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The fossil record shows it to have been both wetter& drier.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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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 saturns 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 uneavenly 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.

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(Soroka & Nelson 1983, pp136-7)A comet of water ice, sufficiently large to supply necessary water, would on impact release so great an amount of heat as to raise the atmospheric temperature to over 6,800 C. the same is true if the comet is in pieces.How does a comet account for Martian canyons?Saturns rings require a very specific distribution of angular momentum for the planet/ring system. These are not explained by a comet.Give me the precise date of the Flood & I’ll check planetary positions, but don’t get too hopeful.The question remains. Where did all the water go?------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-20-2001]

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-20-2001]

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-20-2001]

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 12-20-2001]

If I may:mark24, Mount Everest did not exist as such in world before the Flood in the Flood scenario. Therefor covering it with water was not a problem. How did Mt. Everest form in the Flood scenario? Land masses colliding at about 45 mph, perhaps. Or do you think that the slow process we observe today could cause the sharp peaks we now observe in high mountain ranges?Where did the water go? Back into the oceans where the basins had dropped, filling in the area vacated by the out-pouring of the fountains of the deep.------------------
John Paul

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Originally posted by John Paul:
If I may:

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mark24, Mount Everest did not exist as such in world before the Flood in the Flood scenario. Therefor covering it with water was not a problem. How did Mt. Everest form in the Flood scenario? Land masses colliding at about 45 mph, perhaps. Or do you think that the slow process we observe today could cause the sharp peaks we now observe in high mountain ranges?

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Where did the water go? Back into the oceans where the basins had dropped, filling in the area vacated by the out-pouring of the fountains of the deep.

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I've gone to some lengths to show that there is no reason to believe tectonic activity proceeded at a very different rate from today, consequently the himalayas were that height 4,000 years ago. You need to argue evidence.What evidence is there that the ocean basins rose, & give evidence of mechanisms.

mark24:
I've gone to some lengths to show that there is no reason to believe tectonic activity proceeded at a very different rate from today, consequently the himalayas were that height 4,000 years ago. You need to argue evidence.John Paul:
You also said that Everest was in excess of 6 miles above sea level. However it it less than 30,000 feet above sea level, which is less than 6 miles. And as I also stated if the rate of plate tectonics was the same throughout world history we wouldn't see 'peaks' on mountains. The peaks scream of a faster process than we now observe.mark24:
What evidence is there that the ocean basins rose, & give evidence of mechanisms.John Paul:
Actually they sank. It is the same affect that caused the WTC to 'pancake'- something called gravity. After all the water from the fountains of the deep were on top of the earth, that added pressure caused the ocean basins to drop into the void left by those waters.------------------
John Paul

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.

Well TureCreation this is all very detailed and fascinating stuff. We've got comets and floating flowers and selective fossilization and all sorts of ingenious answers.Strangely, none of them are in the Bible. We are told about the gopher wood, and day of the month on which the flood started, and how big the window was, and how old Noah was, and which birds he sent out to find land. I wonder why these details are important?The disposition of the earth after the flood, the massive changes in the landscape, the tectonic shifts,BTW, when the dove returned with the olive leaf, how did Noah know it was because "the waters were abated" and that she hadn't picked one up from one of those pieces of driftwood you're so keen on?Of course, one could ask how the olivetree or any other vegetation survived, never mind how it was able to put forth leaf after 150 days underwater?But its all good clean fun and do keep on answering.Of course all these geological and biological issues are petty compared to the really big questions about the flood.How could a God of love and pure goodness deliberately kill babies, young children, unborn children in the womb? Being all-powerful he presumably could have found some other way to deal with the problem of mans wickedness.If he was eternal and unchanging how could he "repent" that he had made man? Changing your mind over what you have created is hardly a benchmark test of infallibility, omniscience or unchanging eternal nature.

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.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
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.

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Quick reply - sorry I am pressed for time. I'll come back to the point about the Bible being written for its time etc later, if I may.Meanwhile ...Genesis 6:6New International Version
The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with painKing James Version
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.Revised Standard Version (my personal favourite OT)
And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.Young's Literal Translation
and Jehovah repenteth that He hath made man in the earth, and He grieveth Himself -- unto His heart.Louis Segond
L'ternel se repentit d'avoir fait l'homme sur la terre, et il fut afflig en son coeurThe Vulgate
paenituit eum quod hominem fecisset in terra et tactus dolore cordis intrinsecusThe implication of all of these is plain - the eternal unchanging God changed his mind.

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.