The flood in the Christian Religion is a global flood and not a local flood.

I look forward to a lively and interesting discussion. (1) I'm good with the KJV. (2) Your math with the begats is simple enough but you've counted forward from creation rather than backward from Christ's birth. Your date is actually 1656 AC (After Creation) not BC. If you accept Bishop Ussher's date for the creation of the world at 4004 BC [1] then you need only subtract your 1656 to arrive at 2348 BC. I doubt that doing the math with all the begats from the flood to Christ will change that greatly but let me know if you prefer a different date. (3) 370 days is longer than I'd expected but it works for me. (4) 8000 feet is less water than most consider for the flood but I can work with that. I prefer to work in metric, the math is so much simpler, so I'll discount the small change and let's call it 2400 m (7874 ft). Do you prefer to beach the ark in the mountains of Armenia rather than Mt. Ararat? Mt. Ararat will cause problems regardless as it's a stratovolcano made from about 1100 cubic km of lava [2]. You can't build it by tectonic uplift, it's eruptive. Erupting that much lava post-flood is fraught with problems including lack of geological evidence, the sort of major event that you'd expect to find mentioned in the Bible and closing the air space over Sumer and Mesopotamia. I'm sure it will come as a huge surprise to my opponent that I am not a Christian and will be arguing this debate from the perspective that the global flood, as described in the Bible, never happened. I leave it to the individual to decide for themselves if the flood myth has any basis in a local flood or not. 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. I dispute the Bible's historical accuracy, so let's move on to see what evidence there is 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 [3]. 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 [4], 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 [5]. "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" [6]. Submarine debris flows also produce characteristic structures such as flute casts and scour marks [7]. 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 [8]. 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 [9]. 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 [10, 11] 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. And now for something completely different. Two questions that I'm sure my opponent is eagerly awaiting. Where did the water come from and where did it go to? I'm hoping my opponent has something really interesting because all previous attempts that I've seen result in the destruction of all life, including Noah and the menagerie, and I don't mean by flood. Global Sediment Layers: 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). This stuff should look like the mother of all mass-wasting events [12]. 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 [13]. 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 [8]. 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...; />Greenland and Antarctica both have extensive ice caps. Ice floats and these glacial caps should have floated free by any global flood. The GRIP ice cores date back over 100,000 years [14] and the Vostok ice cores over 800,000 years [15]. Clearly these ice caps didn't float free during the flood. I feel that I have rebutted by opponents points adequately and have demonstrated that much of the evidence argues against a global flood. Nearly out of characters so more next round. Sources[1] . http://www.lhup.edu...[2] . http://www.sciencedirect.com...[3] . http://answersingenesis.org...[4] . http://answersingenesis.org...[5] . http://serc.carleton.edu...[6] . http://www.scielo.sa.cr...[7] . http://www.earthlearningidea.com...[8] . http://www.utahgeology.com...[9] . https://answersingenesis.org...[10] . http://geology.wlu.edu...[11] . http://www.ees.lehigh.edu...[12] . http://www.cliffsnotes.com...[13] . http://sed.utah.edu...[14] . http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk...[15]http://www.antarcticglaciers.org...