The Global Flood in the Christian Religion occurred.

I'm sorry to hear that my opponent's computer and busy schedule have been giving him grief. Here's hoping that things are looking up.Tiny DifferencesLast round I neglected to address the following quote that my opponent provided:"The hypsographic (Gk. hypsos=height) chart shows the amount of the earth’s surface at (or higher than) various elevations.1 It illustrates that if the ocean basins were pushed up 5 km and the mountains shaved off, water would cover the entire earth. Such tectonic movements seem huge to us, but compared with the radius of the earth, (6,378 km), the movement is tiny, less than 0.1%."[My Opponent's Round 2, Source 11]It sounds so simple. Just shave off the mountain tops and push up the ocean floor by five km or so. The comparison in the final sentence is particularly beguiling and not terribly useful. Compared with the radius of the Earth, most things seem pretty insignificant. It attempts to gloss over the fact that you have to go from a pre-flood difference of about 6400 meters (21,000 ft) from ocean bottom to tallest peak, level that off to a mere 2400 m (8000 ft) during the flood and then increase that to present day values of nearly 20,000 meters (65,000 ft) from the bottom of the Marianas trench to Everest's peak. That has to be accomplished on a global scale in a little under a year, then stop suddenly.More importantly, it completely disregards the fact that in order to "push up" the ocean basins we effectively have to resurface the world's oceans, roughly 70% of the surface of the globe, approximately 360 million square kilometers [28]. That requires moving tectonic plates laterally by several thousand km or roughly 100% of the radius of the Earth. Such movements seem unimaginably colossal to us because they are.Non-Tectonic Problems for Catastrophic TectonicsCatastrophic plate tectonics runs up against more problems in that it can't account for a variety of features that aren't formed by tectonic uplift. These include: - Stratovolcanoes: These are largely piles of volcanic ash and lava hundreds to thousands of cubic km in volume [29]. A few thousand of them dot the face of the Earth. The volcanic activity required to produce all these peaks in just a few thousand years would yield both a historical and geological record. It's the sort of thing that ought to have been mentioned in the Bible, given that there are a few right in their back yard (e.g.: Mt. Ararat). http://www.visionlearning.com...; /> - Ocean Islands: Having resurfaced the oceans, we now need to furnish them with the island archipelagoes that decorate them. These include Hawaii, Iceland and Easter Island. Erupting these will be as devastating as making the stratovolcanoes. - Chicxulub: Widely accepted as the event the ushered the dinosaurs off the world stage, the Chicxulub crater resides within limestone and gypsum off of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Its ejecta contains charcoal from plants luckless enough to have been near the impact site [30]. The impact had a variety of immediate consequences including tsunamis and global firestorms. The environmental aftermath likely took several thousand years for the Earth to recover from [31]. If it had happened any time in the last few thousand years we'd have noticed. http://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...; />The Armenian Death MarchHaving beached the ark and waited for the flood waters to recede, Noah now opens the doors. The sight that greets him is much like what you would expect if you removed all the water from a great ocean basin. Lifeless muck stretches for as far as the eye can see. No plant grows and the only water is befouled by salt. He now disembarks the animals, of which there are either two or seven of each. Most are not native to Armenia and have a bit of a walk ahead of them, over mountains, rivers and oceans without food or water. Speaking of food, amongst the animals released are the lion, the tiger, the wolverine and the honey badger. You don't need to be an ecologist to see that this situation is going to be very bloody and very brief.Population BottlenecksIf a global flood had occurred, species recovering from just two (or seven) ancestors should show profound signs of a population bottleneck and horrible inbreeding occurring about 4400 years ago. Bottlenecks of this sort are observed in a few rare species that have tiptoed along the edge of extinction [32]. They are not seen in the overwhelming majority of land mammals.Damned ForeignersDuring the 17th century BC: - The various Mesopotamian civilizations invented the wheel (3500 BC), the chariot (3200 BC) [33], and had a brewing industry (3000 BC) [34]. They promptly invented drinking songs (2 to 3 hours after 3000 BC) and a goddess of beer (the very next morning) [35]. The world's oldest bar tab dates to 2050 BC [36]. Hammurabi codified his famous laws a hundred years earlier and his descendants ruled the first Babylonian dynasty [37]. - The Sphinx and the Great Pyramids at Giza were built nearly a millennium earlier and pyramid building in Egypt had already ended [38]. The Old and Middle Kingdoms had come and gone and the Pharaohs were in a bloody struggle with the Hyksos for control of the Nile [39]. - On Crete, the labyrinthine palaces that gave rise to the minotaur legends had been established and Minoan culture was at its peak [40]. - The Longshan and Erlitou cultures in China had established the beginnings of the silk road, exporting lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise and silk as far away as Persia, Egypt and India as long ago as 3000 BC[41]. The Shan Dynasty may have already been ruling what would later become China [42]. - The Indus Valley Civilization had established numerous cities on the border between what is now India and Pakistan. They had advanced trade and agriculture and had invented metallurgy in a society that rivaled the Mesopotamians [43]. - In what would eventually become Mexico, the Olmec were raising the first of a long line of Mesoamerican civilizations [44]. Every one of these civilizations failed to be extinguished by a global flood at this time.Summary: - Biblical evidence is equivocal and should not be used as historical reference by itself. - Sediments are neither global in distribution nor of the type expected of a flood. - Fossil succession is not the random assortment you would get in a flood. - There is no plausible source or sink for the flood waters. - Tectonics at the speeds used to try to explain the flood are impossible for numerous reasons. - Greenland and Antarctica have ice caps. Ice floats. - The flood kills everything not on the ark. The post-flood world is inhospitable to what few seeds and spores survive no matter which version you accept. - The animals on the ark die of thirst/starvation/predation shortly after release. - Population bottlenecks that the flood should have produced are not observed. - Civilizations existing at the same time as the biblical flood were not extinguished and make no mention of a global flood.And with that I turn the floor over to my opponent for the final round.Sources[28] http://www.noaa.gov...[29] http://volcano.oregonstate.edu...[30] http://www.sciencedirect.com...[31] http://www.ela-iet.com...[32] http://evolution.berkeley.edu...[33] http://www.ducksters.com...[34] http://www.beeracademy.co.uk...[35] http://ancientstandard.com...[36] http://www.thefreelibrary.com...[37] http://www.ancient.eu...[38] http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk...[39] http://www.timemaps.com...[40] http://ancient-greece.org...[41] http://books.google.ca...[42] http://www.ushistory.org...[43] http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu...[44] http://www.sciencemag.org...