Did Noah's Flood Occur as Depicted in Genesis

For starters, I am taking the position that Noah's story involved a worldwide flood, but not a global flood. There is a difference. A worldwide flood model claims to destroy all of human life (except Noah and his family), which covered only a local area at that time in history. A Global flood model claims to destroy all of life in general except Noah and his family, which would cover the entire planet. Here is the source that proves it was a worldwide flood and disproves a global flood [1]. I have noticed that most of Con'sarguments are scientific objections that refute a Global flood model, which puts him at a disadvantage. He is going to have to explain why he feelsthat the Bible depicts aGlobal flood rather than a worldwide flood in order for his arguments to stand. According to studies, all humans were still located in Africa beyond some 50,000 years past during which a population bottleneck occurred: The number of humans plummeted, and the shrinking remnant became more genetically similar. Back then, mutations that were only slightly damaging had a greater probability of being carried from one generation to the next. As a result, harmful mutations or genetic disorders within humans started to arose and eventually become what it is today [3]. In fact, a research paper published in Current Anthropology provides scientific evidence for such a lost ancient civilization, evidence that confirms much of Genesis 1"11"s historical account of humanity"s early days. University of Birmingham archeologist Jeffrey Rose reports on the discovery, conducted over the past six years, of over sixty new archeological sites along the shoreline of the Persian Gulf. Rose states that "these settlements boast well-built permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world." [4] Finally, In almost every culture and religion of the world lies a story of a lost civilization. The ubiquitous nature of these stories, accounts, and legends lends additional credence to the idea that in the early days of humanity"s history a relatively advanced civilization was indeed lost by a flood[4]. This is because the culture that Noah was supposedly apart of was the originator of all the other cultures that mention a flood story. For example, Quentin Atkinson at the University of Auckland wondered if phonemes could be used to study humanity"s origin. What further motivated his idea is the phenomenon in genetics known as the serial founder effect. When a subpopulation breaks off of the main population, that smaller group displays much more limited genetic variability than the parent population. If the subpopulation, in turn, spawns another subpopulation, that resulting group of "break-a-ways" will display an even more reduced genetic variability [5]. When people began to migrate around the world, a small group left the point of humanity"s genesis. Serial fracturing of the migrating population took place, consequently generating the serial founder effect. According to Atkinson"s hypothesis, this phenomenon should be evident in the phonemes of the world"s languages. Atkinson analyzed 504 languages and discovered that African languages displayed the greatest number of phonemes. (African populations are the most genetically diverse and thought to be the oldest people groups.) He also determined that languages of people groups in South America and Oceania possessed the fewest number of phonemes. (These people groups are believed to be the youngest.) Atkinson also noticed a gradual decrease in phoneme numbers as the languages moved away from Africa and into Europe and Asia. The phoneme patterns Atkinson discovered closely match the genetic diversity data, and independently support the Out-of-Africa model. Con's Objection: "Any modern day engineer will tell you it is impossible to make a vessel of that size made strictly out of wood; without any steel reinforcements and still float. " The obvious problem with this objection is that it either presupposes that the wood Noah used still exists today or that the term "gopher" , which was used to describe what wood Noah used, is referring to modern day wood. Let's start with the latter assumption. The fact is the Hebrew word "gopher" is used only once in the Bible, in Genesis 6:14 when God told Noah to "make yourself an ark of gopher wood." Since no one knows for certain what "gopher" means in this context nor is there a consensus on what it means among scholars , the King James Version and the New King James Version simply leave the word untranslated and say "gopher" wood. Most modern English versions of the Bible do translate it as "cypress", but this is just a filler or a guess to fill in gap of knowledge. In regards to the former assumption, we have reason to believe that the plant species that produces "gopher" wood no longer exist today. This is because science tells us that 99.9% of species that have ever lived are extinct, and the bible tells us that the area where he lived was devastated by the Flood, which explains why most of Africa is a desert now. The only sort of basis you can claim that this gopher wood still exists is if you assume a global flood model since it claims that every species around the planet back then was preserved on the ark. This would be less speculative but still somewhat speculative given the amount of species that exists today, as mentioned above. However, we not only have reasons to believe that these assumptions are speculative but we have reasons to believe they are FALSE. For instance, If you read part of Noah's story carefully, you will notice that God gave Noah very specific instructions on how to build the ark he wanted built, which includes a specific type of wood called "gopher" wood. This suggest that this specialty wood, which God ultimately made, was strong enough to build a sustainable ark for Noah's journey. The Adam and Eve story is another instance where God created a special type of fruit, which obviously no longer exists today, that potentially allowed a human to live forever. Therefore, we have good reason to assume that the wood Noah used back then was viable enough. [1] http://www.godandscience.org... [3] https://www.sciencedaily.com... [4] https://www.livescience.com... [5] Quentin D. Atkinson, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa," Science 332 (April 15, 2011): 346-49.