Does the evidence support the Flood? (attn: DwarfishSquints)

There is no need to argue about where the water came from and where it went. All you have to do to falsify the flood story is check for evidence of where that water was at the appropriate time.Biblical scholars place the flood in the close vicinity of 4,350 years ago. We can give it a thousand years latitude or more just to be on the safe side.Now, the question is -- can you find evidence of a flood in all areas of the globe at about that time, say 5,000 years ago for a nice round number. And the answer is no.The trick here is to ignore geology, and the Cambrian explosion and the other events hundreds of millions of years ago. When you are dealing with events 5,000 years ago you are looking to archaeology and sedimentology, rather than geology.Pretty much all areas of the world have examples of soil development that includes that period -- many areas of the world have tens of thousands of years of nicely stratified soils undisturbed by discontinuities (caused by rivers, floods, landslides, and the like).I do archaeology. In the area in which I work, the western US, there are a lot of archaeological sites that have evidence of continual soil buildup for thousands of years. They also have continuity of human cultures and of fauna and flora. What they lack is a clean break, with evidence of flooding somewhere around 5,000 years ago -- flooding that would create one of those discontinuities I mentioned above.Even more telling is the continuity of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). There is a cave in southern Alaska, called On Your Knees Cave, from which a partial skeleton was unearthed. It was radiocarbon dated to 10,300 years ago, and the mtDNA from that individual has been found in nearly 50 living individuals spread from California to the tip of South America. There is no evidence of a break in that mtDNA haplogroup at about 5,000 years with replacement by one of the Near Eastern haplogroups -- the same mtDNA lineage can be found along the west coasts of North and South America over 10,000 years later. I have a second example from my own research of the same exact thing, but the time span there is only 5,300 years. In either case there is no replacement of the haplogroup with Near Eastern types after a "flood." The Native American haplogroup continues unbroken from pre-flood to post-flood. mtDNA from Noah's female kin do not show up at all.Another line of evidence that is also quite telling: in southern and eastern Washington there is evidence of a series of post-glacial floods. As the ice melted from the last ice age, large lakes formed in Montana, blocked up by ice dams in the Idaho panhandle area. Periodically the water overwhelmed the ice dams, and the water was let loose, scouring southern and eastern Washington pretty thoroughly. (Google "channeled scablands") But these small floods (small compared to a global flood) can be discerned and dated. Why can't a flood less than half as old and reportedly hundreds of times larger be discerned as well?Face it, the evidence for a global flood comes from scripture -- and that evidence is not confirmed by scientific studies.To argue to the contrary you have to begin overturning one field of science and then the next. Radiocarbon dating, pollen studies, zoology, and on and on. And each problem you try to put a band-aid on will only produce more problems, and band-aiding those will produce still more problems.Example: some creationists try to claim the decay constant used in radiometric dating is not a constant, but a variable, and that all of that radioactive decay occurred in less than 6,000 or so years. Problem: that would release a huge amount of heat all at once, rather than over billions of years, and effectively parboil the earth. (Surely the Egyptians would have noticed that! And, by the way, why didn't they write about a global flood? They kept careful records of the annual flooding of the Nile, so surely they would have noticed a much larger flood.)The overall conclusion for anyone who is following science and scientific evidence is that there was no global flood at the appointed time. No amount of twisting facts and band-aiding can change that.So this is what you have to look forward to when you finish arguing about where the water came from and where it went. Where was it in between?

You are having trouble with the "water" question, and haven't even touched my long post dealing with archaeology and mtDNA in the western US.And there are dozens to hundreds of other scientific specialties out there with equally good evidence that there was no global flood ca. 4,500 years ago.On the opposite side, the evidence supporting such a flood is close to non-existent.Why do you still argue in favor of this belief in light of all the evidence to the contrary?

How often do we hear creationists complain about science and the theory of evolution that they are "just so" stories, made up to smooth over inconvenient facts.With the ridiculous things they come up with to try and rationalize the lack of evidence for a global flood about 4,500 years ago, creationists can't legitimately point any fingers at science.

Nice try.You are obviously reading more into the science than the scientists did. This is a typical creationist tactic -- grasping at straws in a futile attempt to convince yourselves that science supports your particular religious beliefs.There simply is no evidence in geology for a global flood 4,500 years ago.And you have made no attempt to address my post upthread dealing with sedimentology and genetics and how they contradict the flood myth.

Minor problem; your timing is off by 65 million years.

I don't have radiocarbon dates for all of those critters from La Brea, but I do have 12 dates obtained from 11 sabre-tooth tiger leg bones (Smilodon californicus).The range is 28,000 - 12,650 BP (before present).Pretty large range for everything happening "quickly" eh?Reference: Berger, Rainer and Willard F. Libby. UCLA Radiocarbon Dates VIII. Radiocarbon, Vol 10, No. 2, pp. 402-416.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Changed subtitle from "Re: IN or ON the Mountains" to "Things La Brea tar pits".

Pretty much everything about the flood is religious belief.This is easy to document. If you ignore the bible and work strictly from the evidence you do not come up with a global flood about 4,500 years ago. Such an idea would be preposterous, as there is no evidence supporting it.What creationists and fundamentalists do is start with the religious belief that there was such a flood and try to twist the facts around enough to make it (barely) possible. But by doing so they are forced to ignore huge amounts of established science, and contradict the rest.This thread is a good example.But my favorite is John Woodmorappe's The non-transitions in ”human evolution’-on evolutionists’ terms.He suggests that Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis can best be understood as racial variants of modern man--all descended from Adam and Eve, and most likely arising after the separation of people groups after Babel.This is particularly amusing because the change from modern man to Homo ergaster would require a rate of evolution on the order of several hundred times as rapid as scientists posit for the change from Homo ergaster to modern man--but in reverse!Talk about making it up as you go!

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

He has avoided my questions also.I have brought up the lack of evidence for a widespread flood in sediments of ca. 4,500 years of age, as well as continuities of mtDNA in the western US from pre-"flood" to post-"flood" times. That was ignored.I brought up recent studies from archaeology and genetics. One example I posted dealt with a cave in southern Alaska which produced a burial dated to 10,300 years. It had a direct mtDNA connection to 46+ living individuals along the west coasts of North and South America. In addition to being nice supporting evidence for an early coastal migration, it disproves a global flood about 4,500 years ago. I also mentioned another example from my own work with a connection from 5,300 years ago to living individuals.But just recently there has been an even nicer find--Paisley Caves. These caves in southern Oregon produced human coprolites dated to about 14,300 years, and those coprolites produced mtDNA associated with living individuals throughout North America.The conclusion is clear: there was continuity of human occupation and their mtDNA types for well over 10,000 years in the western US. There was no disruption or extinction of the early mtDNA types, with replacement by mtDNA associated with Noah's Near Eastern female kin.Any one of these cases disproves the flood story. Together they join thousands or tens of thousands of other examples from a wide range of sciences that disprove the flood story.The conclusion of science is pretty obvious -- there is no convincing evidence for a global flood about 4,500 years ago.(Incidentally, the early creationist geologists, seeking to prove the flood, gave up long ago. The last major holdout folded his tent in 1831.)

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Perhaps this thread can serve as a good example of creation "science" at work.

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I would suggest that you do research, and that you should think about what you research. I would further suggest that you ease up on the dogma end of things.What you are doing seems more to be trying to shoehorn science into a biblical timeframe, perhaps 4,500 years, instead of the few hundred million years that scientists see.But to do this you have to account for a lot of unintended consequences. You have to throw out just about all we know about geology, archaeology, and dating, the earth would be cooked from the radioactive decay of millions of years being forced into thousands, and you need to come up with some mechanism (and a date) for all of these hurried-up events to suddenly return to their normal rates. These are just a few of the problems you end up with.Science has to account for all the facts when it proposes theories. When you start arbitrarily changing things, the unintended consequences really begin to pile up.

You posited these events happening with and after the global flood, which according to a consensus of biblical scholars occurred abut 4,500 years ago.

From the normal YEC perspective you would need to cram the entire ice age (not to mention all of the earlier ones) in the approximately 1,500 years between 6,000 and 4,500 years ago (the purported dates of the creation and the flood).Is this what you are claiming?

Nice try, but you can't treat these things in isolation.This discussion about the flood brought up the last ice age. That forces you to deal with events that are known to have taken a long time--far longer than 1,500 years -- so the belief of 6,000 years for the age of the earth is automatically out the window. The timeline just doesn't work.One other minor problem you can address while you're at it: a global flood at 4,500 years ago would leave some evidence in the soils of that age, either through erosional/depositional features or discontinuities. Unfortunately for the flood belief, archaeological sites all over the world demonstrate continuity across that time period. I have excavated dozens of sites myself and established continuity of fauna and flora, soil deposition, human culture, and mitochondrial DNA across that 4,500 time period. My colleagues have done the same with many more sites. No flood.

In the fundamentalist vocabulary "assumption" means "absolutely wrong." What a joke!You do realize that it is just an assumption that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, don't you? (Advice: Don't bet the rent money that it won't.)A lot of scientific assumptions are as sound as the sun rising in the east. OK, so conveniently, all the locations in the western US I have excavated have been missed by the "global" flood. And those locations excavated by my colleagues as well, around the world.Do you know how ridiculous the "just so" stories you are making up sound? Whenever someone points out some solid evidence that argues against a global flood you just make up some story and dismiss that evidence.I guess that's a good example of creation "science" at work, eh?

You are just handwaving away any evidence you don't agree with.You still have not dealt with the evidence I posted above, concerning several decades of archaeology I personally conducted. You just handwaved it away with some useless reference to digging in the wrong place or puddles.You seem to be one of those TRVE believers who simply can't accept any evidence contrary to religious belief.You just can't seem to accept that there is no evidence for the claimed global flood about 4,500 years ago.Don't even bother replying until you are willing to address the evidence I posted above.

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.