The Global Flood in the Christian Religion occurred.

He fought through some of the finest glitches that DDO could produce to bring us this debate. I will be arguing from a secular perspective that the flood narrative as described in the Bible was not a global flood. I take no stance on whether the flood narrative was inspired by a smaller, more local flood or was invented entirely. My Opponent's Arguments:(1) Biblical Support: I concede that the description of the flood in the Bible, wherein " the mountains were covered" by water certainly sounds like a global flood if taken literally. On the other hand, other passages paint a different story. "And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. " Genesis 8:11Where did this olive leaf come from? The surface of the Earth had been covered in semi-saline flood water for nearly a year at a depth roughly equivalent to that at the mid-Atlantic ridge. Any tree would have been crushed, drowned, deprived of sunlight and buried by the global sediment layer. Any olive seed attempting to sprout would be doing so in salted sea-floor muck. Thus, we are forced to conclude that either the Bible is wrong or that the flood was a not global. This is in stark contrast to the passages that my opponent has cited. We can only conclude that the Bible does not serve well as a historical document and look to other evidence to support or contradict the flood story. (2) Global Spread of Fossils: If there had been a global flood then we would expect to find all manner of animals and plants all jumbled together in death. We would expect to find trilobites, plesiosaurs and dolphins all in the same strata. Labyrinthodonts, velociraptors and horses should all sharing a common grave. Forests of fallen oak and maple should be intermixed with giant Lepidodendron and Lycopods. The fossil record shows us the opposite of this. Trilobites, labyrinthodonts and the giant club mosses and scale trees are exclusively found in the Paleozoic. Dinosaurs are never found much outside of the Mesozoic. Horses, dolphins, oaks and maples are all found only in the Cenozoic. That you never find these different creatures jumbled together in the fossil record is evidence against a global flood. Answers in Genesis: Answers in Genesis (AiG) is self-described as an apologetics ministry [1]. As such, they should not be relied upon for scientific information any more than you would go to Goddard Space Flight Center for spiritual advice. Their attempts at science are entirely contrary to the scientific method as they begin with a conclusion, which is clearly spelled out in their statement of faith [2], and work backward from there. Let's examine that first quote from AiG:"Often the fine details of the creatures are exquisitely preserved. "Preservation of fine details is rare. Usually only the hard parts such as shells or bones are preserved. Finding fine details preserved is exceptional [3]. "To form such a vast fossil graveyard required 24 cubic miles (100 km) of lime sand and silt, flowing in a thick, soup-like slurry at more than 16 feet (5 m) per second (more than 11 mph [18 km/h]) to catastrophically overwhelm and bury this huge, living population of nautiloids. "What is described above is essentially 100 cubic km of concrete flowing at a fast run. As you might well imagine, no fine details will be preserved. Submarine turbidite flows are similar to this, though smaller scale and the few fossils that they produce are "disarticulated" and "fragmented" [4]. Submarine debris flows also produce characteristic structures such as flute casts and scour marks [5]. These are not observed in the Redwall Limestone, nor are they observed in the majority of sedimentary rocks. The Redwall Limestone is the result of thousands of years of coral reef growth in shallow, undisturbed waters resulting in many exceptionally well-preserved fossils [6]. A stark contrast to AiG's debris flow. Sea Creatures at Sky Level: The finding of marine fossils at high altitude merely demonstrates tectonic uplift of the fossils from seabed to mountain top. It indicates that the Andes rose from the ocean floor, but does not indicate that it did so rapidly. To operate plate tectonics over a few thousand years rather than hundreds of millions of years is as inadvisable as driving your car at a large fraction of the speed of light and likely to produce similar results. Global Spread of Sedimentary Layers: A fine example of why you shouldn't trust AiG's science. On the one hand AiG decries radiometric dating as inaccurate and incorrect [7]. On the other hand, they're eager to use radiometric ages from zircons to establish sedimentary provenance that they say proves a global flood. This is more than just a little disingenuous of them. AiG completely omits the fact that the two papers they cite [8, 9] date the zircons between 250 Ma and 3015 Ma. Even if we allow AiG to use tools that it claims are broken they prove nothing more than large drainage basins can accumulate sediments from wide areas. If we were to go to New Orleans today, dredge up some sediment and check the detrital zircon ages to determine provenance we'd find exactly the same results. No flood was needed, we all know that the Mississippi's drainage basin is huge. And that's exactly what the authors of the original papers were saying of the drainage basins that fed the rivers that produced the Navajo Sandstone. As my opponent has suggested, a global flood should produce a global sediment layer. The sediments produced by a global flood should be distinctive though. We're talking about an extremely high-energy erosional environment but a relatively short-term event (geologically speaking). The sediment should be extremely poorly sorted (grain-sizes will include everything swept downhill by the flood waters from clay to boulders) and highly immature (lots of rock fragments, no chance for chemical weathering to degrade lithic fragments or chemically susceptible minerals). The flood sediment should look like the mother of all mass-wasting events [10]. This is not what we observe. Sedimentary rocks range from poorly sorted to well-sorted and immature to very mature. The Navajo Sandstone that AiG speaks of is made of an very well sorted, highly mature sediment, utterly unlike what we would expect of a catastrophic flood. More importantly, it is an eolian (windblown) sand formed in a desert [11]. Likewise, the Redwall Limestone is nearly pure limestone (99%) and was formed in a sheltered environment that allowed a high degree of preservation of fossils [6]. More importantly, this sedimentary layer isn't global. Welcome to the Canadian shield. Rocks and trees for as far as the eye can see but precious little of it sedimentary. Largely igneous and metamorphic rock. What happened? Canadians couldn't afford flood sediment? The same is true on all continents as shown below in blue. . http://decarboni.se...; />This problem becomes worse when we consider the oceans. Flood sediments should be preserved best here, protected from reworking by weather. We find continental sediments of any sort only very close to the continents. The rest is fine clays and oozes, utterly unlike what we expect from a global flood. . http://www.iupui.edu...; />Origin and Fate of the WatersThis is a pivotal question that any debate on a global flood must address. A local flood does not have this problem but for a global flood 8000 ft deep it becomes an impossibility. All models that I have ever seen kill all life on Earth. Dropping the water from space releases energies that dwarf the global thermonuclear arsenals by several orders of magnitude and is likely capable of vaporizing the Earth's crust and a decent portion of the mantle. Dropping it from orbital ice rings is only half as bad but still sufficient to resurface the planet. Holding the water in the atmosphere as a "vapor canopy" produces atmospheric pressures and temperatures more suitable to Venus than Earth. Storing the water underground in an appeal to the 'fountains of the deep' is mechanically unstable. Rock is notoriously bad at floating on water. Storing the water as in magma underground is even worse since you have to erupt more magma than water, producing a lava ocean, and all the water exits as superheated steam at about 700 C. Getting rid of the water is even worse. There is simply nowhere for an extra 8000 ft of water to go and no mechanism of disposing of it. Summary:- Biblical support for a global flood is equivocal, with some passages providing evidence against a global flood. - The ordered nature of the fossil succession cannot be produced by a global flood. - Marine fossils found at high altitudes demonstrate tectonic uplift, not flooding. - Sediments and sedimentary rocks found around the globe do not have the characteristics of flood sediments. - Sediments and sedimentary rocks do not form a global layer. - There is no plausible source or sink for the flood waters. Sources[1] . http://answersingenesis.org...[2] . http://answersingenesis.org...[3] . http://serc.carleton.edu...[4] . http://www.scielo.sa.cr...[5] . http://www.earthlearningidea.com...[6] . http://www.utahgeology.com...[7] . http://answersingenesis.org...[8] . http://geology.wlu.edu...[9] . http://www.ees.lehigh.edu...[10] . http://www.cliffsnotes.com...[11] . http://sed.utah.edu...