The Biblical Flood account is historical

Thanks Pro. I don’t know what not “using absolutes” means – I fully intend to use facts as facts and truths as truths. I won’t impose them, but I refuse to avoid facts or ideas that come off as “absolute”. You can defend your ideas and I can defend mine, armed with facts, in theory, on both sides. That is the meaning of debate. Now onto opening arguments: C1: The Green River Formation (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk...) The Green River Formation disapproves a global flood. In the walls of the formation, layer upon layer of very fine sedimentation records about six million years of the rivers existence. Each layer is composed of a dark layer, for the growing season, and a lighter inorganic layer for the dry season. The pair of these layers make up one year. With this careful, delicate record, we can see a progressive series of fossils, climate changes, volcanic activity, and mineral collections, year by year, for millions of years. Nowhere in this record does any layer show evidence for a catastrophic flood. At the very most, a zone deeper in the Green River area, called fossil lake, specifically the split fish layer, shows a series of lime muds about six feet in thickness which contain more fish fossils than other layers. The trouble is that these layers don’t add up to the proposed time of Noah. No, they add up to about 50 Million years ago. Even if they did, the fossils in the split fish layer are all collected only in the deeper lake area, which would be curious if the world was essentially one big lake. I use the Green River formation because with simple addition we can add up one year after one year. It requires no carbon or radiometric dating. I could do it with some basic geological tools and pen and paper if I wanted to. C2: Tree Rings The biblical account states that the flood happened 4,400 years ago (https://answersingenesis.org...), the problem with that timescale is that we have trees that are older than that diagnoses. Methuselah in Inyo County is 4846 years old. The Great Basin bristlecone pine in California is 5064 years old. Prometheus, in Wheeler Park, was 4844 years old when it was cut down in 1964. We know all of this with certainty because we can count each ring and calculate the exact age of each tree. C3: Scientific Problems with the flood account The biblical account states that, “In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.” Aside from the immediate absurdity around Noah’s impossible age and the obvious Iron Age misunderstanding of earth’s water reservoirs, there exists mathematical problems with this story. Some math: There are 960 hours in 40 days. 8850 metres for global flood (Everest) Thus, 8850/960 = 9.218 That means that the rain would be 96.7 times heavier than the heaviest rain we ever recorded, at La Reunion Island in 1966, which was 1.44 meters in 12 hours – and would have to be continuous, non-stop for forty days. In case you are wondering what that would look like, try to imagine 4.5 Billion cubic kilometres of water falling in 40 days. Try to imagine 120,000 times more rain than falls all year worldwide. The air would have been water. It would have been unbreathable. Thus, the flood account is made impossible – leaving the only possible outcome for a creationist to be an escape hatch, like “I trust the word of god”, or “god works miracles”…or the unmentionable hydroplate theory: a load of pseudoscientific nonsense I hope Pro doesn’t try to bring up. The weather and storms that a worldwide flood would generate would have led to the worst seas imaginable. Answers in Genesis states that the ark could have survived 30 metre waves. Well, we reach 30 meters or higher easily in a modern storm. A storm of unrestricted water could have waves as high as a kilometre. A vessel made of wood of that size probably would have warped and sunk almost immediately. The longest wooden boat we have ever made was the schooner Wyoming, still 50 feet under the proposed ark’s length. It was built only 100 years ago by expert shipbuilders; it flexed and buckled in any kind of heavy weather. It required constant water pumps and it sunk in 1924 and everybody on board drowned. If we assume that the earth is only 6000 years old; we know that five billion species that have existed on earth are now extinct – that’s 99% of all species that have existed. So Noah would have had a massive job loading all these animals on the ark. He would have had to travel to North America to pick up a Grizzly bear, then swing down to Australia to pick up a koala bear, then down to Antarctica to pick up some penguins. Let’s say that somehow, he gets all the animals. Take the million different kinds of parasitic worms, or the 500,000 kinds of nematodes. If we add up two of each unclean “kind” and the seven of each clean “kind”, we get about 3.8 Million kinds of animal. That is very conservative, just counting “kinds” not “species”. Now poor Noah has to try and fit them on a boat, and keep them from killing each other…all in seven days. We hit another impossibility. The boat isn’t big enough. Trying to fit a dinosaur on board wouldn’t have worked, much less two or more of them. The ventilation would have led to asphyxiation in the bowels of the ship, after all, the biblical commands stipulate only a single window to be made. Eight people would not have had the time to feed all the animals. If we say it takes 30 seconds to feed one animal, you’d have to, mathematically, have the eight people work 133 hours in a day. Adding watering and cleaning to the mix, we get 8 people working 239 hours of labor a day, that’s 29 hours a day per person, every day, for forty days, without sleep. C4: Scientific Dating Radiometric dating is one of several ways to calculate the age of the earth, and the universe, for that matter. It’s reliable: below is a table of the age of lunar rocks calculated using different dating methods; note that they are all very consistent (http://www.talkorigins.org...): Summary of Some Radiometric Ages of Lunar Basalts. From the Compilation by Head Location Age (billion years) Rock type Sample Method Apollo 14 – highlands 3.96 Al basalt 14053 Rb-Sr 3.95 Al basalt 14053 40Ar-39Ar 3.95 Al basalt 14321 Rb-Sr Apollo 17 – highlands 3.83 High-Ti basalt 75055 Rb-Sr 3.82 High-Ti basalt 70035 Rb-Sr 3.76 High-Ti basalt 75055 40Ar-39Ar 3.74 High-Ti basalt 75083 40Ar-39Ar Apollo 11 – mare 3.82 Low-K basalt 10062 40Ar-39Ar 3.71 Low-K basalt 10044 Rb-Sr 3.63 Low-K basalt 10058 Rb-Sr 3.68 High-K basalt 10071 Rb-Sr 3.63 High-K basalt 10057 Rb-Sr 3.61 High-K basalt 10024 Rb-Sr 3.59 High-K basalt 10017 Rb-Sr 3.56 High-K basalt 10022 40Ar-39Ar Luna 16 – highlands 3.45 Al basalt B-1 40Ar-39Ar 3.42 Al basalt B-1 Rb-Sr Apollo 15 – highlands 3.44 Quartz basalt 15682 Rb-Sr 3.40 Quartz basalt 15085 Rb-Sr 3.35 Quartz basalt 15117 Rb-Sr 3.33 Quartz basalt 15076 Rb-Sr 3.32 Olivine basalt 15555 Rb-Sr 3.31 Olivine basalt 15555 40Ar-39Ar 3.26 Quartz basalt 15065 Rb-Sr Apollo 12 – mare 3.36 Olivine basalt 12002 Rb-Sr 3.30 Olivine basalt 12063 Rb-Sr 3.30 Olivine basalt 12040 Rb-Sr 3.27 Quartz basalt 12051 40Ar-39Ar 3.26 Quartz basalt 12051 Rb-Sr 3.24 Olivine basalt 12002 40Ar-39Ar 3.24 Quartz basalt 12065 40Ar-39Ar 3.18 Quartz basalt 12064 Rb-Sr 3.16 Quartz basalt 12065 Rb-Sr Along with this kind of dating, we can calculate the age of the universe using what is called Redshift. It is what happens when light or electromagnetic radiation is increased in its wavelength. Light is stretched out when it moves away from us, turning it red: see the Doppler Effect. Cosmic microwave background or CMB is faint, far off thermal radiation left over after the big bang. We can calculate the age of this ancient light/radiation by using the redshift. We calculate the age of the universe by the CMB, which is about 13.82 Billion years old. Sources http://www.fossilmuseum.net... http://www.sciencebuzz.org... http://www.mnn.com... http://www.natcenscied.org... http://web.archive.org... http://ncse.com... http://www.biblicalnonsense.com... http://rationalwiki.org... http://adsabs.harvard.edu... http://earthguide.ucsd.edu... http://www.talkorigins.org... http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...