The Great Flood Was an Actual Historical Event

I. Paleontology I. A. The Opisthotonic Pose My opponent starts with two contradicting studies. He does not prove anything. I ask him to clarify his argument here. He doesn't make much sense here. I will refute my opponent's new argument here in R4. I. B. Soft-Bodied Fossils My opponent makes another unconvincing argument. Aren't jellyfish supposed to be covered in water? And is there proof that it was the flood? Even so: Where were all the fossilized animals when they were alive? Schadewald [1982] writes: "Scientific creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the remains of animals that perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in 'fossil graveyards' as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals. As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood. "Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate [land] fossils on earth. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded. " A thousand kilometers' length of arctic coastal plain, according to experts in Leningrad, contains about 500,000 tons of tusks. Even assuming that the entire population was preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia had wall-to-wall mammoths before this "event. " Even if there was room physically for all the large animals which now exist only as fossils, how could they have all coexisted in a stable ecology before the Flood? Montana alone would have had to support a diversity of herbivores orders of magnitude larger than anything now observed. Where did all the organic material in the fossil record come from? There are 1.16 x 1013 metric tons of coal reserves, and at least 100 times that much unrecoverable organic matter in sediments. A typical forest, even if it covered the entire earth, would supply only 1.9 x 1013 metric tons. How do you explain the relative commonness of aquatic fossils? A flood would have washed over everything equally, so terrestrial organisms should be roughly as abundant as aquatic ones (or more abundant, since Creationists hypothesize greater land area before the Flood) in the fossil record. Yet shallow marine environments account for by far the most fossils. "[1][2][3] Also, as a note to my opponent, please provide accessible stories (i. e. sources I don't have to buy and post direct quotes from them too). I. C. Marine Fossils at High Elevations and Deserts Regarding the Atacama fossils: One, "Pyenson said the spot was once a "lagoon-like environment" and that the whales probably died between two million and seven million years ago. Experts said it will be hard to distinguish dates precisely enough to determine whether the whales all died simultaneously. He said it's possible "these fossilized remains may have accumulated over a relatively long period of time". "[4] This was before the flood. Two, Hans Thewissen, an expert on early whales, said another scenario is that the whales might have gathered in a lagoon and then an earthquake or storm could have closed off the outlet to the ocean. "Subsequently the lagoon dries up and the whales die," said Thewissen, a professor of anatomy at Northeast Ohio Medical University. "[4] Not the result of a flood. Finally, "'On the other hand, if a giant wave or storm flung the whales onto shore, it would also have pushed the ocean floor around, and you would see scour marks in the rocks. '"[4] No evidence here. As for the Everest fossils: "The top of Mount Everest is composed of fossil-bearing marine limestone (Mount Qomolangma Formation, the ancient seafloor of the Paleozoic Tethys Ocean) that is believed to be lower to middle Ordovician in age. "[5] "The Ordovician is a geologic period and system, the second of six of the Paleozoic Era, and covers the time between 485.4 " 1.9 to 443.4 " 1.5 million years ago. "[6][8] That was way before the flood. Why are marine fossils there then? Because Everest was once under the sea. II. Flood Legends "Was Noah's Flood just a re-telling of the Gilgamesh Epic? This Babylonian story contains many of the same elements of Noah's story (A giant flood, a single man singled out by the gods to saved from the flood, a giant boat, saving his family and animals by riding out the flood on the boat, boat resting on a mountain side, and releasing a dove. The Gilgamesh Epic dates to 2000 B. C. , several hundred years before Noah's Flood supposedly took place according to the Bible. "[7] Also, "Why is there no mention of the Flood in the records of Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations which existed at the time? Biblical dates (I Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation lengths given in Genesis) place the Flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first temple. We can construct reliable chronologies for near Eastern history, particularly for Egypt, from many kinds of records from the literate cultures in the near East. These records are independent of, but supported by, dating methods such as dendrochronology and carbon-14. The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B. C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood around 2250 B. C. Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have written records dating well back before 2250 B. C. (the Great Pyramid, for example dates to the 26th century B. C. , 300 years before the Biblical date for the Flood). No sign in Egyptian inscriptions of this global flood around 2250 B. C. "[1] Speaking of the Egyptians, that raises a great point: The Great Pyramid of Cheops was built about 2589-2566 BC, about 230 years before the flood, yet it has no water marks on it. The Djoser Step Pyramid at Saqqara, Egypt, built about 2630 BC doesn't show any signs of having been under water. Likewise for many other ancient structures. [7] Why is that? NOTE: My opponent doesn't seem to realize that the flood, according to the Bible, was around 2250 BC, so fossils from millions of years ago are irrelevant. The flood was around 4360 years ago, meaning fossils can't be used from before that. [9] I look forward to my opponent's expansion and argument A. I. and his refutations to my arguments. Sources: [1]: . http://www.talkorigins.org... [2]: Whitcomb, J. C. Jr. & H. M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co. , Philadelphia PA. [3]: Ricklefs, Robert, 1993. The Economy of Nature, W. H. Freeman, New York. [4]: . http://www.dailymail.co.uk... [5]: . http://www.montana.edu... [6]: Gradstein, Felix M. ; Ogg, J. G. ; Smith, A. G. (2004). A Geologic Time Scale 2004. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [7]: . http://www.epicidiot.com... [8]: . http://en.wikipedia.org... [9]: . http://www.answersingenesis.org...