From: isaak@aurora.com (Mark Isaak)
Subject: Re: noah's ark
Reply-To: isaak@aurora.com (Mark Isaak)
Organization: The Aurora Group
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 01:30:16 GMT

In article <1992Oct26.101019.1@woods.ulowell.edu> cotera@woods.ulowell.edu writes:
>> the whole ark idea is ludicrous.
>
>Why?

Well, since you asked. . .

		Problems With a Global Flood
		version 1.4, last modified 9/30/92

Creationist models are often criticized for being too vague to have any
predictive value.  A literal interpretation of the Flood story in Genesis,
however, does imply certain physical consequences which can be tested
against what we actually observe.  Most, if not all, observations, discredit
the flood hypothesis, as you can see from what follows.  Can any
Creationists address even half of the points in this list?

The ark:
  How did the ark even get _built_ before its frame decays?  Tim LaHaye and
	Henry Morris assure us that Noah and his three sons could have
	easily constructed the ark in only 81 years.  Builders of wooden
	ships whose work took only four or five years often faced the
	problem of earlier phases of their work rotting away.  And does the
	81 year figure include harvesting and shaping lumber, building
	workshops, scaffolds, cages, etc., and gathering animals and
	provisions?
  How was the ark made seaworthy?  The longest wooden ships in modern seas
	are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps
	and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped.
  How were animals collected from all over the world?

Life on the ark:
  How did all the different species fit on the ark?  10 million species is a
	reasonable estimate [May, 1992].  If you hypothesize significantly
	fewer than that on the ark, you must explain evolution rates faster
	than any evolutionists propose to account for all the present
	species.
  How did Noah supply food and water for all the animals for a year?
  What did the carnivorous animals eat, especially those which require fresh
	meat?
  How did creatures needing special environments survive on the ark?
  How do you explain how all host-specific parasites/diseases made do with
	only one pair of hosts (and if they did OK, how the hosts survived!)
  How well ventilated was the ark?  The body heat from millions of closely
	packed animals must have been very intense.

The flood:
  Where did the water come from?  (It would take 4.4 billion cubic
	kilometers to cover Mt. Everest.)
  Where did it go?

Geological effects of the flood:
  How were mountains formed?  Many very tall mountains are composed of
	sedimentary rocks.  If these were laid down during the flood, how
	did they reach their present height, and when were the valleys
	between them eroded away?
  How does a global flood explain angular unconformities, where one set of
	layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted)
	and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top?
	They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more,
	where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time
	in between.
  How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for evolution?
	Ecological zonation fails to explain:
	  (1) the extremely good sorting observed.  Why didn't at least one
	dinosaur make it to the high ground with the elephants?
	  (2) the relative positions of plants and other non-motile life.
	  (3) why some groups of organisms, such as mollusks, are found in
	many geologic strata.
	  (4) why extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present
	animals didn't survive as well.  Why did no pterodons make it to high
	ground?
  How can a single flood be responsible for such extensively detailed
	layering?  One formation is six kilometers thick.  If we grant 400
	days for this to settle, and ignore possible compaction since the
	flood, we still have 15 meters of sediment settling *per day*.  And
	yet despite this, the chemical properties of the rock are neatly
	layered, with great changes (e.g.) in percent carbonate occurring
	within a few centimeters in the vertical direction.  How does such a
	neat sorting process occur in the violent context of a universal
	flood dropping 15 meters of sediment per day?  How can you explain a
	thin layer of high carbonate sediment being deposited over an area
	of ten thousand square kilometers for some thirty minutes, followed
	by thirty minutes of low carbonate deposition, followed by thirty
	minutes more of .... well, I think you get the picture. [From: Bill
	Hyde; see also Kent & Olsen, 1992]
  How do you explain the formation of varves?  The Green River formation
	in Wyoming contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves,
	identical to those being laid down today in certain lakes.
	[From: bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys); see also
	Short et. al, 1991]
  How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras
	and radiometric dating methods?
  Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series?
  Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have
	originated only on the surface, such as footprints, rain drops,
	river channels, wind-blown dunes, beaches, and glacial deposits.
	How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic flood?
  How do you explain the relative ages of mountains?  Why weren't the Sierra
	Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalacians during the flood?
  How do you explain Fossil remineralization - the replacement of the
	original material with a different mineral?
	* Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly
	  remineralized, including some that biblical archaeology says are
	  quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the earth in this
	  diluvian geology.  For example, remains of Egyptian commoners
	  buried near the time of Moses aren't extensively remineralized.
	* Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite
	  variable remineralization.
	* Dinosaur remains are often extensively remineralized.
	* Trilobite remains are usually remineralized - and in different
	  sites, fossils of the same species are composed of different
	  materials.
	How are these observations explained by a sorted deposition of
	remains in a single episode of global flooding?
	[From: jjh00@outs.ccc.amdahl.com (Joel J. Hanes)]
  How could the flood deposit layers of solid salt --- sometimes meters in
	width.  This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its
	fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates.  These layers can
	occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and
	have characteristic fossils on either side.  Therefore, if the
	fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there
	are, it seems, only two choices:
	(1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at the same time,
	during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or
	(2) the salt is a later intrusion.
	I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory
	of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils.
	[From: marlowe@paul.rutgers.edu (Thomas Marlowe)]
  How were hematite layers laid down?  Standard theory is that they were
	laid down before Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen.  In an
	oxygen-rich regime, they would almost certainly be impossible.
  How are the polar ice caps possible?  Such a mass of water as the flood
	would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off
	their beds.  No way to drop them _exactly_ back onto their original
	location, _or_ to regrow them.  (In fact, the Greenland ice cap
	would _not_ regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.)
	[From: Bob Grumbine rmg3@psuvm.psu.edu]
  Finally, remember that the geological column and the relative dates
	therein were laid out by _creationists_ before Darwin even
	formulated his theory.

Biological effects of the flood:
  How do you explain the survival of any sensitive marine life (e.g.,
	coral)?  Since most coral are found in shallow water, the turbidity
	created by the runoff from the land would effectively cut them off
	from the sun.  The silt would cover the reef after the rains were
	over, and the coral would ALL DIE.  By the way, the rates at which
	coral deposits calcium are well known, and some highly mature reefs
	(such a the great barrier) have been around for MILLIONS of years to
	be deposited to their observed thickness.  [From: bmb@bluemoon.rn.com]
  How did _all_ the fish survive?  Some require cool clear water, some need
	brackish water, some need ocean water, some need water even saltier.
	A flood would have destroyed at least some of these habitats.
  How did all the modern plant species survive?  Many plants (seeds and all)
	would be killed by being submerged for a few months.
  Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating?
  How does the flood explain the geological sorting of pollen?  Fossil
	pollen is one of the more important indicators of different levels
	of strata.  Each plant has different and distinct pollen, and, by
	telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to see
	what the climate was like in different strata.  Was the pollen
	hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the climatic evidence
	is different for each layer?
  How could a one-year flood deposit the following: "In Yellowstone Park
	there is a stratigraphic section of 2000 feet exposed which shows 18
	successive petrified forests.  Each forest grew to maturity before
	it was wiped out with a lava flow." [J. Laurence Kulp, quoted in
	Strahler, _Science and Earth History_, pp 221-224.]
  How does a flood explain the accuracy of "coral clocks"?  The moon is
	slowly sapping the earth's rotational energy.  The earth should have
	rotated more quickly in the distant past, meaning that a day would
	have been less than 24 hours, and there would have been more days
	per year.  Corals can be dated by the number of "daily" growth
	layers per "annual" growth layer.  Devonian corals, for example,
	show nearly 400 days per year.  There is an exceedingly strong
	correlation between the "supposed age" of a wide range of fossils
	(corals, stromatolites, and a few others -- collected from geologic
	formations throughout the column and from locations all over the
	world) and the number of days per year that their growth pattern
	shows.  The agreement between these clocks, and radiometric dating,
	and the theory of superposition... is a little hard to explain away
	as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in a 300-day-long
	flood.  [From: stassen@alc.com (Chris Stassen)]
  If a single flood is responsible for all fossils, where were all those
	animals when they were alive?  From "Six 'Flood' Arguments
	Creationists Can't Answer" by Robert Schadewald,
	_Creation/Evolution_ IV (Summer 1982), pp. 12-13:
	  "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 (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). 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 fossils on earth [land fossils
	only--whj]. 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 [N. Newell, _Creation and Evolution_; 1982,
	Columbia U. Press, p. 62], 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."

Historical effects of the flood:
  Why is there no mention of the flood in the records of Egyptian or Chinese
	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.

Aftermath of the flood:
  How did marsupials get back to Australia?  And why are so many marsupials
	limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in Indonesia?  The
	same argument applies to any number of groups of animals.
  How do you explain the genetic variation in all populations today?
  How did all of the animals survive after being unloaded from the Ark?  All
	of the predators at the top of the food pyramid require larger
	numbers of food animals beneath them on the pyramid, which in turn
	require large numbers of the animals they prey on, and so on, down
	to the primary producers (plants...etc.) at the bottom.  How would
	"pairs" of animals get enough food from what must have been a
	limited supply of plants and animals?

Is the flood model consistent with the Bible?
  The model seems to say that large numbers of kinds of land animals
	became extinct because of the flood, while Genesis repeatedly says
	that Noah was ordered to take a representative sample of all kinds of
	land animals on the Ark to save them from extinction, and that Noah
	did as ordered.  Which is right?
  How could Noah have gathered male and female of each kind when some
	species are asexual, others are parthenogenic and have only females,
	and others (such as earthworms) are hermaphrodites?  And what about
	social animals like ants and termites which need the whole nest to
	survive?
  Other civilizations have flood legends, too.  This is often given as
	evidence for the flood, but doesn't it mean that more people than
	Noah's family survived?
  What was used to waterproof the ark?  We are told that God instructed Noah
	to coat the ark with pitch inside and out with the naturally-
	occurring hydrocarbon pitch, which causes a bit of a problem since,
	according to Whitcomb and Morris, all oil, tar and coal deposits
	were formed when organic matter was buried DURING the flood.
  Does the flood story make the whole Bible less credible?
	Davis Young is a working geologist who also is an Evangelical
	Christian. He has personal doubts about some aspects of evolution,
	but he makes a devastating case against "Flood Geology." He writes
	(_Christianity and the Age of the Earth_, p. 163):
	  "The maintenance of modern creationism and Flood geology not only is
	useless apologetically with unbelieving scientists, it is harmful.
	Although many who have no scientific training have been swayed by
	creationist arguments, the unbelieving scientist will reason that a
	Christianity that believes in such nonsense must be a religion not
	worthy of his interest...Modern creationism in this sense is
	apologetically and evangelistically ineffective. It could even be a
	hindrance to the gospel.
	  "Another possible danger is that in presenting the gospel to the
	lost and in defending God's truth we ourselves will seem to be
	false. It is time for Christian people to recognize that the defense
	of this modern, young-Earth, Flood-geology creationism is simply not
	truthful. It is simply not in accord with the facts that God has
	given.  Creationism must be abandoned by Christians before harm is
	done...."
	[From: bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys)  See also
	Young, 19??]
  If God is omnipotent, why not kill what He wanted killed directly?
  And the whole idea was to rid the wicked people from the world.  Did it work?

Notes:

Kent and Olsen (Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory)
	Discover, Jan. 1992

May, Robert M. "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?" Scientific American,
	267:4 (Oct. 1992), 42-49.

"Creation/Evolution" Issue #11, Winter 1983, "The Impossible Voyage of
	Noah's Ark" by Robert A.  Moore, pp.  1-43.  The entire issue is
	about the ark.  Moore lists over one hundred references.

Short, D. A., J. G. Mengel, T. J. Crowley, W. T. Hyde and G. R. North 1991:
	Filtering of Milankovitch Cycles by Earth's Geography.  Quaternary
	Research. 35, 157-173.

Davis Young: _Christianity and the Age of the Earth_.  Now published by
	Artisan Sales, POB 2497, Thousand Oaks CA 91360. Single copies (at
	last report) were $8.50 postpaid, and in lots of 10 or more,
	$4.50/copy.

Re frozen mammoths as evidence of a catastrophy:
Farrand, Wm. R.;_Science_, 133:729-735, March 17, 1961
-- 
Mark Isaak           "Every generation thinks it has the answers, and every
isaak@aurora.com      generation is humbled by nature." - Philip Lubin


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