The Great Flood Was an Actual Historical Event

IntroductionWe will be using the Biblical text's stories, meaning we won't just assume that it was a small flood (i. e. like a hurricane or tsunami or something (no tsunami is 17000 feet high)). I. Where Did All the Water Come From and Where Did It All Go? Let's look at the math. As the story goes, God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights and created a great flood that covered the entire earth. Our tallest mountains are 27,000 feet tall, so if you're going to flood everything, that's 27,000 feet of water. For round numbers, let's just say 24,000 is enough. If you divide 24,000 feet by 40 days, that's 600 feet of rain a day, over the entire planet. There's 24 hours in a day so that would be 25 feet of rain per hour, or 300 inches per hour, 7200 inches per day, 5 inches of rain a minute. That's a lot of rain. This is also hundreds of times as much water as what's in the oceans and the atmosphere. Where did all this water come from? Where did all this water go to? It can't evaporate because the air would be totally saturated once just a few feet evaporated. That much water isn't going to sink into the ground; there isn't that much ground. And there's no geological evidence that the entire planet was ever covered with water. [1]I'm going to assume my opponent uses the Hydroplate Theory, crafted by Walt Brown, which states that the Flood waters came from a layer of water about ten miles underground, which was released by a catastrophic rupture of the earth's crust, shot above the atmosphere, and fell as rain. If my opponent would like to propose another theory, I will be glad to accomdate him. Here are some questions I would like for him to answer: How was the water contained? Rock, at least the rock which makes up the earth's crust, doesn't float. The water would have been forced to the surface long before Noah's time, or Adam's time for that matter. Even a mile deep, the earth is boiling hot, and thus the reservoir of water would be superheated. Further heat would be added by the energy of the water falling from above the atmosphere. As with the vapor canopy model, Noah would have been poached. Where is the evidence? The escaping waters would have eroded the sides of the fissures, producing poorly sorted basaltic erosional deposits. These would be concentrated mainly near the fissures, but some would be shot thousands of miles along with the water. (Noah would have had to worry about falling rocks along with the rain. ) Such deposits would be quite noticeable but have never been seen. [2] II. The Implications of a FloodThis further dismantles the idea of a Biblical global flood. I will break it down into two subtopics for better organization. II. i. PopulationEven assuming that Noah's Ark was real (which if my opponent brings up, I will be happy to refute), there is still the question of how the population grew from 2 animals per species and 10 humans to its current size today. In addition to this, there is the question of how humans got to the racial diversity we experience today in 5000 years. Noah and his family were all Hebrew. Why are there Africans? Asians? Pacific Islanders? Arabs? "How did the human population rebound so fast? Genealogies in Genesis put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19]. How did the world population regrow so fast to make its construction (and the city around it) possible? Similarly, there would have been very few people around to build Stonehenge and the Pyramids, rebuild the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc. "How did people get to America? The land bridge was cut off. How about the islands? "After the floodwaters subsided, the animals would have had severe trouble finding fresh water and would have died of dehydration. The flood would have salinated the soil, so all water runoff would have had high concentrations of salt. Most animals, unless they are specially adapted, cannot and will not drink salt water. [3] The survivors of the ark would also have faced extreme difficulties breeding. The flood would have destroyed the structures necessary for reproduction. Avian species like the eagle require high trees to make their nests in. These would not exist for many years after the flood, by which time the reproductive fitness of the birds would have deteriorated, leading to the extinction of that kind. [4][5]How did living things overcome all this? II. ii. Geology"How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood? Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up? How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions. Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up? Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. [Becker & Kromer, 1993; Becker et al, 1991; Stuiver et al, 1986]"[2]In addition, "The global flood, had it occurred, would have destroyed many geological formations. If you look at pictures of the ocean floor, you will notice there are very few rocks piled up in columns. A study done by several creation "scientists" puts the ocean speed at varying between 40 and 80 meters a second. Rock pillars are unable to survive currents this fast. Even oceanic currents of normal speeds would have destroyed some of the more fragile specimens that are in existence today. "[6][5]There would be sizable evidence in the geologic record, but there isn't. The global flood, as told in the Bible, never happened. Sources:[1]: . http://www.churchofreality.org...[2]: . http://www.talkorigins.org...[3]: . http://www.onr.navy.mil...[4]: See the Wikipedia article on eagles[5]: . http://rationalwiki.org...[6]: . http://www.icr.org...