I'm wondering - how many here take the story of the Noachian global flood as literal historical fact? I'm trying to get a feel for the prevalence of belief in this aspect of Genesis.

Good morning!

I personally believe that the flood was a world-wide event...

My major in college (back in the Jurassic period :P) was Anthropology. Many, many cultures have a tradition or legend of a "flood story"...when one has diverse cultures across the world with a common legendary tradition...without evidence of cross cultural "contamination"...normally it points to a fact in antiquity.

So yeah, even before I was a Christian it believed in a global flood...

Me too. The Hawaii peoples have a legend of earth being populated from a big boat led by a man named "NOE" (or some similar spelling, Close to Noah but not spelled exactly the same as the Biblical name.)

The scientific community doesn't seem to have a strong answer to this either. One thing I have noticed though. The prospect of "Bishops in the Laboratory" scared the pants off of them. As a result I think they have a knee jerk disposition against anything that could support the existence of God. (But perhaps I am wrong).

Agreed, I acknowledged the flood before I was a Christian. I've read that the number of cultures that have those stories is nearly 200... I've seen it broken down somewhere but I can't remember where. It might have been answersingenesis.org or icr.org but it very well could have been in a book.

Either way, if you've got questions regarding Genesis those are two excellent resources!

What do you believe about the flood, and more importantly, what brings you to this belief?

Chris

I believe it really happened, there is the arc on Arat. Also ive seen chinese pics of a flood they date around that time.Ill see if i can find them somewhere.

Give this a read, it's pretty interesting:

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/HydroplateOverview2.html

I absolutely believe it was a global flood. As others have said, many, many cultures have flood stories, accounts, myths, etc. Babylon, China, Sumaria, India, Persia (which has a 'horrible snowstorm' version, which suggests ice or frozen water/snow), Andaman, Greece, Norse German, several North American/South American Indigenous/First Nations tribes, Inca, Mayan and Aztec.... ALL of them have global flood stories. The exact DETAILS are varying, but the essential features are pretty much the same.

1. Huge flood sweeps across land, killing almost everything in its path.
2. Only a handful of people survive, as well as a handful of animals.
3. Life as humans know it has to be rebuilt all over again.

As someone else here said..... several cultures sharing myths and stories that are closely related TENDS to suggest that something historical happened.

(Just as an aside, consider how many cultures speak of 'dragons'. Is EACH culture mistaken? Nope. Have we found dinosaur fossils and bones? We sure have. That's one example of how myth is a possible tie to history. In this case, not a SURE one like I'd say the Flood, but a possible tie. )

I guess I'll differ from most in that I believe there was a flood but was more likely localized or regional, if you will. I know there has been a hypothesis of glacial dam bursts as being a possible source of enormous flooding. This has some merit as these type of floods would have been common as the earth came out of the last ice age. This could also explain why multiple cultures record similar events as these would have occured on all land masses where the great icesheets were.

I don't deny the possibility of a global flood as God can do whatever he pleases, but if I were to look at for any physical evidence, it is just not there.

I flip-flop all the time on this issue. For one, there is a plethora of evidence that a huge flood did occur in the Ancient Near East, from the Baltic Sea to the Red Sea - from the Mediterranean to Persia. If it happened early enough in human history, this would explain why all the cultures have these stories.

HOWEVER, just because there is a lack of scientific evidence for a world wide flood it doesn't necessarily mean it didn't occur. If memory serves me correctly, there are cultures that pre-date the known flood in the ANE that still have a flood story, and would have lived in isolation from any cultures affected by this flood.

Yep, I'm convinced by the Bible that it was global.:hug:

I flip-flop all the time on this issue. For one, there is a plethora of evidence that a huge flood did occur in the Ancient Near East, from the Baltic Sea to the Red Sea - from the Mediterranean to Persia. If it happened early enough in human history, this would explain why all the cultures have these stories.

HOWEVER, just because there is a lack of scientific evidence for a world wide flood it doesn't necessarily mean it didn't occur. If memory serves me correctly, there are cultures that pre-date the known flood in the ANE that still have a flood story, and would have lived in isolation from any cultures affected by this flood.

I ask this question because, in my experience, there is a severe lack of healthy understanding of the science surrounding such a proposition.

The commonality of myths is not indicative of the veracity of those myths. Essentially every single ancient culture has stories of pantheons of gods representative of aspects of nature interacting with humans. There is almost always a god of fertility, or a god of harvest, or a god of war, but this doesn't actually mean there are many gods that directly interface with humanity. Likewise, the commonality of flood myths can be more simply attributed to the commonality of floods. Floods happen everywhere, and to the ancient peoples the world was very small; localized floods could appear global. Over time these myths become bigger and grander, transferring from culture to culture. It is also worth noting that flood myths vary greatly in composition. Jumping to the conclusion that the wide distribution of flood myths indicates a global flood ignores a far simpler explanation.

(You mention the possibility of a massive localized flood in Mesopotamia, which I haven't heard about and will certainly research. It would indeed insure the wide dissemination of flood myths in Eurasia.)

If you consider the Flood story then you must also consider the accompanying science. The historicity of a global flood is a testable hypothesis and should be readily apparent and many areas of science. My next question is how many of you would consider yourself scientifically informed on the subject, and how does this impact your belief?

I would also strongly urge you to refrain from incorporating Answers In Genesis into any of your arguments, as their standard and understanding of science is grossly lacking. It appeals to laziness by omitting any form of verified scientific literature or publication.

Hi Rhettender,

This article from ICR makes the case for the global flood from both a Biblical and a scientific perspective, and also discusses the idea that the deluge was a local flood. It's not AIG. http://www.icr.org/article/842/

If you want something more detailed, please see http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/HydroplateOverview2.html

Please take the time to read the rules of this forum, located in a sticky at the top.

I ask this question because, in my experience, there is a severe lack of healthy understanding of the science surrounding such a proposition.

The commonality of myths is not indicative of the veracity of those myths. Essentially every single ancient culture has stories of pantheons of gods representative of aspects of nature interacting with humans. There is almost always a god of fertility, or a god of harvest, or a god of war, but this doesn't actually mean there are many gods that directly interface with humanity. Likewise, the commonality of flood myths can be more simply attributed to the commonality of floods. Floods happen everywhere, and to the ancient peoples the world was very small; localized floods could appear global. Over time these myths become bigger and grander, transferring from culture to culture. It is also worth noting that flood myths vary greatly in composition. Jumping to the conclusion that the wide distribution of flood myths indicates a global flood ignores a far simpler explanation.

(You mention the possibility of a massive localized flood in Mesopotamia, which I haven't heard about and will certainly research. It would indeed insure the wide dissemination of flood myths in Eurasia.)

I sort of touched on this in my post too. There was a hypothesis of a glacial dam burst through the Bosporus from the Black Sea to the Med arising from the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers. I thought I heard of a refutation to this, but it still remains intriguing. These dam bursts would have been common over the years especially in the Ice Age period of history.


If you consider the Flood story then you must also consider the accompanying science. The historicity of a global flood is a testable hypothesis and should be readily apparent and many areas of science. My next question is how many of you would consider yourself scientifically informed on the subject, and how does this impact your belief?

Well, I am geologist. I have not done any serious investigation into the historical veracity of the flood account but my understanding of geological and geomorphological processes tells me the evidence for a truly global flood is lacking. Ultimately it does not impact my belief as I view the Bible as a book containing God's truth as revealed in various ways-historic, poetic, allegorical, etc.


I would also strongly urge you to refrain from incorporating Answers In Genesis into any of your arguments, as their standard and understanding of science is grossly lacking. It appeals to laziness by omitting any form of verified scientific literature or publication.

Personally, I avoid these sites.

Well, I am geologist. I have not done any serious investigation into the historical veracity of the flood account but my understanding of geological and geomorphological processes tells me the evidence for a truly global flood is lacking. Ultimately it does not impact my belief as I view the Bible as a book containing God's truth as revealed in various ways-historic, poetic, allegorical, etc.

I find this highly encouraging and notable.

Please take the time to read the rules of this forum, located in a sticky at the top.

I suppose I am slightly guilty of baiting, for I always enjoy a healthy debate. I shall refrain from such action, per the forum rules.

My interest in the topic stems from my own religious background: I was raised in an evangelical church which taught that the only legitimate way to approach the Bible was literally. Naturally I believed what I was told, including the young-earth creationist position.

It was this position that led me away from the faith. Because I love debate and always sought to prove "darwinists" and those who believed in a 14 billion-year-old universe wrong, I delved into the opposing material to better understand what I was working against. Yet the more I read, the more I learned that the science did not, in any way, support my position. I had known all the talking points (every culture has a similar flood myth! the moon's recession from the Earth proves it's young! mutation only results in a loss of information!) and there was page after page of scientific writing, experimentation, and documentation obliterating everything I had been told.

As you can imagine, this shook me. Since then I have moved away from my original faith because it is linked (at least in my mind) with beliefs that are demonstrably incorrect. I now dwell on the philosophical and logical problems of my faith that have come to light since this intellectual renewal. I am seeking a faith that is not wrong, or evil, or illogical.

I am still seeking.

Hi rhettender,

Thanks for reading and agreeing to comply with the rules. :)

Your testimony is not unusual by any means, yet by the same token there are others who have the opposite testimony -- atheist evolutionists who became YEC. From what I have observed, people who left "evangelical Christianity" usually turn out to have had a background (upbringing) in it rather than a personal, living faith that resulted in a true spiritual conversion -- the New Birth. Would you say that is the case with you?

No, I certainly was born again. I was raised in the church, but was merely religious out of obligation. Then, in high school, I went through some very rough times. I turned to Christ for help, and found it. I know full well what members of this board mean when they say they "felt the power and love of Christ envelop them, and so they knew" (something many non-Christians have a very hard time understanding).

Which leads to another conundrum: can one who has been born again...die again? From my studies and the teachings of my pastor, I'd have to say no.

Interesting.

No, I certainly was born again. I was raised in the church, but was merely religious out of obligation. Then, in high school, I went through some very rough times. I turned to Christ for help, and found it. I know full well what members of this board mean when they say they "felt the power and love of Christ envelop them, and so they knew" (something many non-Christians have a very hard time understanding).

Well this is very troubling then. If you knew Christ and you were born again, and you received grace and help from Him in your time of need, why would you turn against him just because someone convinced you that science disproves Scripture?


Which leads to another conundrum: can one who has been born again...die again? From my studies and the teachings of my pastor, I'd have to say no.

Interesting.

There are different views on this to be sure. But if you do not believe the gospel now, then you are not saved now, even if you were truly born again at some time in the past. This is a dreadful position to be in.

No, I certainly was born again. I was raised in the church, but was merely religious out of obligation. Then, in high school, I went through some very rough times. I turned to Christ for help, and found it. I know full well what members of this board mean when they say they "felt the power and love of Christ envelop them, and so they knew" (something many non-Christians have a very hard time understanding).

Which leads to another conundrum: can one who has been born again...die again? From my studies and the teachings of my pastor, I'd have to say no.

Interesting.

Let me ask you this question then...and I want you to really think about it:

"Have you renounced Christ, heart and soul...or is it that you are struggling mightily to reconcile those things that you see as either contradictions or conundrums?"

Well this is very troubling then. If you knew Christ and you were born again, and you received grace and help from Him in your time of need, why would you turn against him just because someone convinced you that science disproves Scripture?

It wasn't science that drove me away. Indeed, the science at first made me more sure of the existence of God (what an incredible God to create a universe so finely tuned for a process as elegant as evolution).

My bout with science gave me a moment to finally formulate the metaphysical problems I was increasingly having with scripture. Many of those thoughts are covered in another thread on this forum.

"Have you renounced Christ, heart and soul...or is it that you are struggling mightily to reconcile those things that you see as either contradictions or conundrums?"

I haven't renounced him, but I cannot say I believe in him. I hope you understand my meaning, for it is precisely these shades of grey that leave me stuck in the middle of a crossroad.

I haven't renounced him, but I cannot say I believe in him. I hope you understand my meaning, for it is precisely these shades of grey that leave me stuck in the middle of a crossroad.

Every Christian has his or her faith tested, and that time of testing can be extremely trying. I know that I went through one very difficult time of testing where I barely clung to the basic gospel. It was very hard. This time of testing will prove whether you have (had) a genuine faith.

You know that there were many when Christ ministered in Israel who benefited from what Jesus did for them, yet they did not all believe. They ate the miraculous food, they were healed, they were delivered from unclean spirits. It does sound like you know He heard your prayer and helped you. But think about whether you put your faith in Him as a result of that, or whether you enjoyed the benefits without repenting and receiving salvation (I don't need you to tell me about it, just think about it yourself).

Let me move this back to a question (and this is for everyone):

Do you think it is necessary to believe all of the Bible literally? In other words, do you think either you believe all of it, or none of it?

Let me move this back to a question (and this is for everyone):

Do you think it is necessary to believe all of the Bible literally? In other words, do you think either you believe all of it, or none of it?

If it's not all true then it's not God's Word. I'm not saying that certain things cannot just have symbolic meaning, but there can be nothing untrue in it and still be God breathed.

Let me move this back to a question (and this is for everyone):

Do you think it is necessary to believe all of the Bible literally? In other words, do you think either you believe all of it, or none of it?

The passage determines how to take it. Some parts are clearly written to be taken literally, and some are written to be taken figuratively. I don't take this literally for example:

Ps 61:3-4
For You have been a shelter for me,
A strong tower from the enemy.
4 I will abide in Your tabernacle forever;
I will trust in the shelter of Your wings.
NKJV

This is poetic language, speaking of God metaphorically. But this is not meant metaphorically:

Gen 7:17-24
Now the flood was on the earth forty days. The waters increased and lifted up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. 18 The waters prevailed and greatly increased on the earth, and the ark moved about on the surface of the waters. 19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered. 20 The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the mountains were covered. 21 And all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man. 22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land, died. 23 So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive. 24 And the waters prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days.
NKJV

So can one believe in the saving power of Christ but not in the Great Flood? Can one believe in both the love of God and the theory of evolution and common descent?

The simple truth of the matter when it comes to things like the flood is that folks are going to have to decide whether or not they are going to focus on what they feel is logical by a human standard or focus on the fact that you are talking about a Person (God) that does not conform and adhere to laws and standards of the human intellect.

Christians are not ignorant to the fact that many truths of the Word of God really stretch the mind or understanding of the natural man. People need to realize, however, that those who God used to pen His Word were not stupid people either. They were, in fact, highly educated in many occasions, and many were considered cream of the crop, so to speak, in scholastic circles. The Apostle Paul, for instance, was considered to be the best of the best when it came to educational accomplishment and so forth. A lot of times folks speak of these men who lived in those days like they were completely lacking intelligence and were nothing but a bunch of gullible idiots that would fall for anything. This could not be further from the truth. These were very intelligent people by the standards of men. So, the words penned were just as difficult to believe for the natural man then as they are today.

What we need to know here is that we are not talking about a natural God. We are talking about the One who created the heavens and the earth. We are talking about the One who placed the stars in the sky how He chose to do it. This work in and of itself is miraculous and all-powerful. A simple flood should be childs play for One with this power.

Many folks simply let their own intelligence and their flawed reasoning to determine what is true of God rather than allowing the One who is without flaw tell them what He is all about . . .

The Word of God is difficult for the natural mind to comprehend on purpose . . .

Proverbs 3:5-7
Trust in the LORD with all your heart,
And lean not on your own understanding;
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He shall direct your paths.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
Fear the LORD and depart from evil.

The simple truth of the matter when it comes to things like the flood

...is that it is a testable hypothesis. This is not metaphysics or philosophy, it's a historical claim that can be compared to the historical and scientific evidence.

So can one believe in the saving power of Christ but not in the Great Flood? Can one believe in both the love of God and the theory of evolution and common descent?

Of course it's possible to believe in the love of God while rejecting the global flood and accepting Evolution. The problem is not a generic and all encompassing idea of "the love of God." Lots of people believe in a loving God but are not Christian. To be a Christian, one must believe the gospel which boils down to Christ's death for our sins and His bodily resurrection. Evolution knows nothing of sin and the need for salvation. Death is an integral part of the evolution of life, so much so that without death life would not evolve. But the Biblical Christian faith holds that death came by sin and is an enemy which will be swallowed up by life.

...is that it is a testable hypothesis. This is not metaphysics or philosophy, it's a historical claim that can be compared to the historical and scientific evidence.

Tons of evidence, both of historic and scientific discovery, that support a global flood.

Of course it's possible to believe in the love of God while rejecting the global flood and accepting Evolution. The problem is not a generic and all encompassing idea of "the love of God." Lots of people believe in a loving God but are not Christian. To be a Christian, one must believe the gospel which boils down to Christ's death for our sins and His bodily resurrection. Evolution knows nothing of sin and the need for salvation. Death is an integral part of the evolution of life, so much so that without death life would not evolve. But the Biblical Christian faith holds that death came by sin and is an enemy which will be swallowed up by life.

Can one believe (as has been positited an another thread) that God designed the world around free will, necessitating that it be imperfect; and then also believe in the gospel (which boils down to Christ dying for our sins and redemption through belief in him)?

Tons of evidence, both of historic and scientific discovery, that support a global flood.

There absolutely is not, but I wont get into a debate on this thread. If you know of another place where we may discuss I would gladly oblige.

There absolutely is not, but I wont get into a debate on this thread. If you know of another place where we may discuss I would gladly oblige.

There's no need for me to debate with you. I know what I know, and I've seen the evidence myself.

Can one believe (as has been positited an another thread) that God designed the world around free will, necessitating that it be imperfect; and then also believe in the gospel (which boils down to Christ dying for our sins and redemption through belief in him)?

God created the earth with the plan of redemption already in mind, because Christ was foreordained from before the foundation of the world (1 Pet 1:20). But the world wasn't created imperfect. It was "subjected to futility" until the time of the redemption when the earth itself will be redeemed from the bondage of corruption (Romans 8). Death, decay, corruption, all these are part of the curse, not the method God used to create.

Your syllogism apparently is a way to fit Evolution into creation as a necessity for the supposed 'imperfect' creation. But when God made what He made, it was "good" and it was "very good." But death is not "good" it is an enemy (1 Cor 15:26). Death came by sin, by Adam's sin. Adam was the first man. There can be no millions of years of dead primate ancestors that came before man. That Adam's sin is what brought about death is a foundational Christian doctrine.

1 Cor 15:20-22
But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
NKJV

Who are you to say that God wouldn't consider the evolutionary model "good". But the consequence of free will is the ability to sin, and if there is the ability to sin then there cannot be a "perfect" world.

What if one takes Adam as a metaphor, demonstrating Humanity's position before God. Can one believe that and still be saved?

There's no need for me to debate with you. I know what I know, and I've seen the evidence myself.

If you know of evidence that convinces you of the veracity of the Flood, shouldn't you share it with me? Knowing that my inability to believe that story has kept me from a solid belief in Christ, isn't it your duty to debate me?

Hi rhettender!
Welcome to Bibleforums!! :hug:
It's great to have you here!!! :pp :pp :pp

Do you think it is necessary to believe all of the Bible literally? In other words, do you think either you believe all of it, or none of it?There are many evangelical Christians who have been faithful and steadfast witnesses to Jesus Christ through many decades, and who believe that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative, reliable word of God, and who nevertheless think that various parts of the Bible are written as different forms of literature, and need to be understood in light of that.

That is, many faithful, biblical Christians think that accounts such as Genesis 1, Genesis 2-4, Genesis 5-9, Genesis 10-11, Jonah, and Job, are intended to give us the reasons and context to understand God's ways and humankind's predicament, but not as chronologically organized accounts of the mechanics of Creation and of God's dealings with humankind prior to Abraham.

Thus, a majority of my non-online Christian friends suppose Genesis to be saying things which are entirely compatible with the standard scientific accounts. One fellow I know well, for instance, was from an atheist family and came to faith as a young man. When he became a Christian he believed the stories of Genesis 1-11 as God's truth; but he never supposed that these were to be read in a literalistic way which contradicted scientific understandings of earth's origins. Rather, he understood these accounts as poetic or philosophical accounts which were telling us the meaning -- not the mechanics -- of how God created, and in a very deep and precise way. Others became scientists as agnostics or atheists, and later came to hold a robust evangelical faith, without supposing that Gen 1-11 was intended as what you call a "literal" account. Such friends believe that Jesus died for our sins, that Jesus is God, that the miracles recorded in the Gospels and Acts and so on actually occurred, that Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, that Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead, and so on. But they don't think that what the Genesis 1 and 2 accounts intend is to give a chronology of God's creating which is roughly like a videotape, for instance.

My experience is that many solid evangelical college educated Christians in the US and Britain see things the way I have just described. People who do not consider standard scientific accounts incompatible with the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture are no more likely, in my experience, to fall away from, or water down, the Christian faith than those who prefer a more "literal" reading of these Scriptural texts. Also, my experience is that if young people come to see Scripture and the conclusions of science as incompatible, this prevents the non-Christians from coming to faith, and leads many Christians to give up their faith.

I don't think that there is any particular contradiction between the Genesis accounts and the standard scientific accounts, because I think that the primary intent of the Genesis 1-11 texts is to present a philosophical or theological commentary on the human situation which God revealed to us. I don't think its primary intent is to give a scientific history of events before the time of Abraham.

I myself don't find convincing arguments that such a position such as I just sketched is subordinating Scripture to human standards, or that such a position shows disbelief in the truth or reliability or authoritativeness of Scripture. Again, to argue that the Biblical revelation is compatible with standard scientific beliefs, or even to argue that many standard scientific accounts of the origins of humanity and the universe show the way that in fact God chose to create is not to argue that God could not have done otherwise. Of course God could do any miracle He decided to do.

It is entirely possible to believe in a version of the theory of evolution and also believe that Genesis 1-11 is God's inspired word teaching us. Many, many conservative evangelical Christians believe that. Of course it is possible to "believe in the saving power of Christ" and understand the account of Noah's years as intended in a "non-literal" way. Of course it is possible to accept "the theory of evolution and common descent" while believing that Christ is God, and did miracles, and died for our sins, and rose from the dead, and therefore believing in the love of God, showed us in His sending Christ Jesus for us.

These views are not so common on this board; however there certainly are many here that hold this viewpoint. That's fine with me: different Christians have the occasional differences of opinion. I'm not plunking any particular position about how God chose to create. I'm just arguing that there's no reason that someone who believes in standard scientific accounts needs to disbelieve in the historic teachings of Christianity, or disbelieve in the Bible.

Thus, a majority of my non-online Christian friends suppose Genesis to be saying things which are entirely compatible with the standard scientific accounts. One, for instance, was from an atheist family and came to faith as a young man; he believed the stories of Genesis 1-11 as God's truth; but he never supposed that these contradicted the scientific understandings of earth's origins. Rather, he understood these accounts as poetic or philosophical accounts which were telling us the meaning -- not the mechanics -- of how God created. Others became scientists as agnostics or atheists, and later came to hold a robust evangelical faith, without supposing that Gen 1-11 was intended as what you call a "literal" account. Such friends believe that Jesus died for our sins, that Jesus is God, that the miracles recorded in the Gospels and Acts and so on actually occurred, that Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, that Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead, and so on. But they don't think that what the Genesis 1 and 2 accounts intend is to give a chronology of God's creating which is roughly like a videotape, for instance.

My experience is that the substantial majority of of solid evangelical Christians in the US and Britain who are college educated see things the way I have just described. The vast majority of faculty, even at very very conservative Christian institutions, in my experience, look at things in much the way that I have described. People who do not consider standard scientific accounts incompatible with the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture are no more likely, in my experience, to fall away from, or water down, the Christian faith than those who prefer a more "literal" reading of these Scriptural texts. Also, my experience is that if young people come to see Scripture and the conclusions of science as incompatible, this prevents the non-Christians from coming to faith, and leads many Christians to give up their faith.

I don't think that there is any particular contradiction between the Genesis accounts and the standard scientific accounts, because I think that the primary intent of the Genesis 1-11 texts is to present a philosophical or theological commentary on the human situation which God revealed to us. I don't think its primary intent is to give a scientific history of events before the time of Abraham.

Thank you. I find your post refreshing.

I was raised in a church that did not suscribe to these views. My pastor (and mentor) of many years made it quite clear that you either had to take it all as literal, historical (chronological, scientific) fact, or else you couldn't trust any of it. That obviously backfired in my case.

Who are you to say that God wouldn't consider the evolutionary model "good".

Evolution requires death, but God says death came by sin. God says Death is an enemy, not His mechanism for creation. That's not my authority, it's God's.


But the consequence of free will is the ability to sin, and if there is the ability to sin then there cannot be a "perfect" world.The ability to sin isn't the imperfection, it is the sin itself.

Ezek 28:15
15 You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created,
Till iniquity was found in you.
NKJV


What if one takes Adam as a metaphor, demonstrating Humanity's position before God. Can one believe that and still be saved?Can you take Adam as a metaphor and still believe that Jesus Christ (the Last Adam) literally is God in literal human flesh who literally died for your literal sins and that He literally rose bodily from the literal dead?

Rom 10:9-10
if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
NKJV


Most people who do view Genesis metaphorically also see the gospel metaphorically.

1 Cor 15:17
17 And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!
NKJV

If you know of evidence that convinces you of the veracity of the Flood, shouldn't you share it with me? Knowing that my inability to believe that story has kept me from a solid belief in Christ, isn't it your duty to debate me?

Actually, I don't need evidence to convince me of the flood. I believed before I ever saw it. The evidence just confirmed what I already believed. Additionally, it's not my duty to debate anyone. Trying to intellectualize what God has done is fruitless, and that is all debate really is. It's just a back and forth match to see who can one up the other. If you want to see evidence that backs up the biblical account all you have to do is really look for it. It's very easy to find. There are a few websites speaking of said evidence.

What if one takes Adam as a metaphor, demonstrating Humanity's position before God. Can one believe that and still be saved?What saves us is what Jesus -- true God and true man -- did for us in taking on human flesh and dying for us on the cross and rising on the third day. Many people have believed in Christ -- for instance the dying thief Luke describes -- without any clear, detailed, or accurate theology. It is the person and work of Christ that saves us, and while it is necessary for us to put our trust in Christ this is not the same as the details of how one interprets the Bible -- even important passages such as Gen. 1-3.

The word "adam" is often used in Genesis to refer to humanity generally, and sometimes (but less frequently) to refer to a particular individual. For instance Genesis 1 says that God "created adam in His own image; male and female He created them." Thus, the overall intent seems to be that the account of the man and woman in the garden is an account that is discussing the overall situation of humanity. That is not incompatible, however, with believing that there were original human beings who were formed by God free from sin, but who sinned and thereby messed up our human nature in the process -- and I do believe that.

Thus I would not exactly say that most understandings of Genesis 2-3 which believe it is revealed truth yet also think it compatible with what we know from science and secular history about human origins "take Adam as a metaphor".

The whole character of the Genesis 2-4 narrative makes a lot of use of analogy and symbolism. God makes humanity (Hebrew "adam") out of the ground (Hebrew "adamah"). Thus the whole account -- in which, at the end, God tells Adam that "the ground is cursed because of you" and will yield its fruits only with a lot of sweat, but will naturally bring forth thorns and thistles -- does not seem to me to be focussing on why agriculture is sometimes difficult, but on how messed-up human nature, after the fall, brings forth good only with sweat and difficulty, but unpleasant things (thorns and thistles) very naturally.

That kind of reading of the text, IMO, is more literal -- pays more exact attention to the words and letters the text actually uses, and is more interested in trying to understand precisely what God is revealing to us in those words which He inspired -- and is more faithful and believing of the Biblical text than readings which call themselves "literal" but seem mainly interested in arguing (on fossil evidence, rather than from a close reading of the Biblical texts) against evolution.

I would suggest that you read some books by Owen Gingerich (an Astronomer and Astrophysicist at Harvard, and a devout Christian), or by Francis Collins (an awesome evangelical Christian -- an adult convert -- who headed up the human genome project). These are likely to be helpful to you in the things you are struggling with. Perhaps, if you have a philosophical turn of mind something by John Polkinghorn (a distinguished British scientist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and devout and orthodox Christian and theologian).

You might also want to read the chapters on Science in sociologist of religion Rodney Stark's book For the Glory of God (Princeton Press, 2002, I think) in which he shows how modern science was founded by Christians, and how anti-Christian propagandists spread various falsehoods which tried to make out that science and faith were incompatible.

Reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, or other books of his, possibly might also be helpful. Lewis, a conservative Christian, and great evangelist whose books converted many to Christian faith, says somewhere that he does not think the theory of evolution is incompatible with Christian teaching.

If anyone is serious about weighing the evidence, I recommend reading the book, The Genesis Flood, by Whitecomb & Morris. It argues for a global flood using evidence from geology and hydraulic principles.

Reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, or other books of his, possibly might also be helpful. Lewis, a conservative Christian, and great evangelist whose books converted many to Christian faith, says somewhere that he does not think the theory of evolution is incompatible with Christian teaching.

I actually have read a good bit of Mere Christianity, and find C.S. Lewis's writing to be beautifully stimulating.

And I would like to thank you, Scruffy Kid, for your consistently thoughtful, insightful, and intelligent posts.

If anyone is serious about weighing the evidence, I recommend reading the book, The Genesis Flood, by Whitecomb & Morris. It argues for a global flood using evidence from geology and hydraulic principles.

Whitcom & Morris's book has been torn to pieces and rejected by every legitimate scientific body on the planet. I will gladly provide sources and citations demonstrating such, but only via private message.

The ability to sin isn't the imperfection, it is the sin itself.

But it does make the perfect world's suggested in the bible (heaven/New Earth) impossible so long as free will exists.

Thank you. I find your post refreshing.

I was raised in a church that did not suscribe to these views. My pastor (and mentor) of many years made it quite clear that you either had to take it all as literal, historical (chronological, scientific) fact, or else you couldn't trust any of it. That obviously backfired in my case.I wouldn't exactly say it backfired. I used to have long talks about God and evolution with my dad. He told me that what it boils down to is you either believe in evolution or you believe in creation. In other words, you either believe in God and trust He did it the way He said he did, or you don't. That's what your pastor friend told you too. You made your choice which one you want to believe.


But it does make the perfect world's suggested in the bible (heaven/New Earth) impossible so long as free will exists.The previous comments above in this post, answer this question. We have the free will to choose Him in this life. We are making that choice now, why would we want to change it later? Jesus is the same yesterday today and forever (Hebrews 13:8)

Whitcom & Morris's book has been torn to pieces and rejected by every legitimate scientific body on the planet. I will gladly provide sources and citations demonstrating such, but only via private message.

This is actually untrue, but I hope you realize that basically every what you call "legitimate scientific body" already begins with the presupposition that the creation account and every other thing the Word of God details is untrue. Different starting point equals different results every time.

What's your definition of "legitimate scientific body"? It seems to me that you have already bought into the assumption that the scientific body that disagrees with biblical account is already the more intellectually proven and accurate declaration. Put aside the fact that there are very reputable scientific sources who agree with the biblical account. Do you know why they don't get the same respect? It is because all those folks in what you call the "legitimate scientific body" mock or brush aside their findings because they disagree with the secular scientific community and they are under the same presupposition that you are.

What I find interesting is that so many are so willing to put their faith in things that are as corrupt as it gets. We decide to put our faith in man and his findings instead of what God's Word declares truth when mankind is as corrupt and fallible as it gets. You can tell by looking at the world around you that mankind is bent on destroying themselves yet so many want to put their faith in this very corrupt source.

This is actually untrue, but I hope you realize that basically every what you call "legitimate scientific body" already begins with the presupposition that the creation account and every other thing the Word of God details is untrue. Different starting point equals different results every time.

What's your definition of "legitimate scientific body"? It seems to me that you have already bought into the assumption that the scientific body that disagrees with biblical account is already the more intellectually proven and accurate declaration. Put aside the fact that there are very reputable scientific sources who agree with the biblical account. Do you know why they don't get the same respect? It is because all those folks in what you call the "legitimate scientific body" mock or brush aside their findings because they disagree with the secular scientific community and they are under the same presupposition that you are.

What I find interesting is that so many are so willing to put their faith in things that are as corrupt as it gets. We decide to put our faith in man and his findings instead of what God's Word declares truth when mankind is as corrupt and fallible as it gets. You can tell by looking at the world around you that mankind is bent on destroying themselves yet so many want to put their faith in this very corrupt source.


I must, however, make this remark:

The belief that the scientific establishment presupposes that everything potentially religious is untrue is astoundingly wrong. Science is bent on finding objective truth, regardless of what that truth may imply. For example: back in Einstein's day the predominant view was that the universe had no beginning and would have no end; it was infinite. This was called the Steady State theory. Many scientists pointed this out as a direct refutation to the biblical account of creation (how could it be created if it had no beginning?). In 1931, Georges Lemaître proposed what came to be known as the Big Bang theory, based on observances of the universe's shape and movement velocities. At first this theory was derided as an attempt to square science and religion, while religious leaders hailed it as evidence for creation (as the theory necessarily implied a beginning). Debate over the two competing theories raged through WWII. However, the evidence began tipping in the Big Bang's favor, and the theory was nearly unanimously adopted with the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965.

The scientific community will support the model that the evidence fits best, regardless of its implications on religion.

And I'm done with this topic.

I think it's great to think on deep things and consider all aspects of life. This is to be alive and fulfill all we are created to be, as far as we can be in a fallen world.

Sometimes we can get down on ourselves for enjoying and even demanding scientific answers to the many questions of life. NOthing wrong with questioning...but, we also shuldn't reject things of Scripture automatically just because we can't find an immediate answer in science to uphold it at the time.

Science sometimes has to catch up with the Bible...sounds funny doesn't it!

Here's an interesting bit of discovery I sort of stumbled upon...at least worth pondering and investigating.

I was researching GREEN ALTERNATIVES to OIL to invest in...seems green is gaining popularity so, green stocks seemed positive...

Well, there have been great breakthroughs in CREATING OIL FROM ALGAE! And this can be done very simply...from LIVE ALGAE! They just grow it, heat it and press it out!

I also investigated an alternative to digging COAL DEPOSITS because we may run out and this would be a great alternative...

Well, guess what? Scientists are MAKING COAL IN A TEST TUBE...using only plant material, heat and a little water...

BUT!!!!!!!! HOW CAN THIS BE???? Evolutionists claim it takes millions of years to make either coal or oil!

Take the above facts that both COAL AND OIL IS BEING MADE today very simply with heat, organic material and water...

Well, where do we find OIL and COAL? WORLDWIDE
OIL and COAL ARE FOUND IN GREAT DEPOSITS deep in the earth as well as shallow beds and wells...

What makes more sense? organic material taking millions of years to create a material that we can create in hours or days.....or....a worldwide flood that would gather the organic material in heaps, beds and pools...heaping tons of mud upon the organic material causing heat from the deterioation (this happens in compost) combining the THERMAL HEAT FROM THE EARTH such as Old Faithful...giving the perfect laboratory to create OIL and COAL!

Organic needs to be encapsulated in order to break down into coal or oil...it will just decompose into dust if not captured.

Evolution model DOES NOTfulfill this theory...

Global Flood model DOES fulfill this theory

Do you have to believe the NOAHIC FLOOD created oil and coal? Of course not...but, ask yourself why you wouldn't believe this could happen?

Sometimes we are afraid of appearing foolish when we are just accepting the facts as they are...

EVERYWHERE UPON THE EARTH WE FIND COAL AND OIL DEPOSITS
WHY?????

I don't deny the possibility of a global flood as God can do whatever he pleases, but if I were to look at for any physical evidence, it is just not there.Hello. I've done a lot of research on this topic and have found there's a lot of evidence for a global flood.

Fossils on Mountains

During the fated George Mallory expedition geologist Noel Odell thought he found fossils about two thousand feet below the summit of Mt. Everest. Odell later stated that supposed fossils found in 1924 at 25,500 feet on Mt. Everest were not fossils but cone in cone structures. (1) But, fossil fragments in the fine-grained limestone from the summit of Mount Everest were brought back by Swiss explorers in 1956 and American explorers in 1963. Mt Everest and its neighboring peaks are capped by sedimentary limestone which is composed largely of calcite, the primary source of which is commonly marine organisms. Fossils that have been found in limestone beds around the world include brachiopods, ammonites, belemnites, foraminifera and radiolarians with the most common being brachiopods. Goniatite fossils, an extinct ammonite, have been found in limestone layers in Western Ireland indicating rapid burial and formation.
On the University of Oxford, Department of Earth Sciences (http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~davewa/research/himal/everest-lrw.html) website is an example of a fine-grained limestone from the summit of Gyachung Kang containing fossil fragments (see photo on the left). Gyachung Kang is about twenty miles from Everest and its summit is 26,089 feet above sea level. In an abstract of a paper about Geology of the summit limestone of Mount Everest it says "Newly discovered peloidal limestone from the summit of Mount Qomolangma (Mount Everest) contains skeletal fragments of trilobites, ostracods and crinoids." (2)

Crinoids are marine animals that live in both shallow water and water as deep as 6000 meters and ostracods are small crustaceans. Everest was under water at one time and the only way fossils exist on Mt. Everest is lack of oxygen which would mean rapid mountain building and high altitude. Fossilization is a result of rapid burial and removal from oxygen. Trilobites are believed by evolutionary scientists to have been extinct since the late Permian period, some 250 million years ago. Some sources say they went extinct at the late Devonian about 364 mya. At that altitude fossils may have not lasted for millions of years even with lower levels of oxygen.
In an article about Mt. Everest on earthobservatory.nasa.gov it says this:
"When this land mass came close to Asia, it started to push up the land ahead of it, forming a large shallow ocean with rich ocean life. The bones and shells of the plants and animals in this shallow ocean formed limestone and left fossils. As the land mass continued to plow north and collide with Asia, the ocean was slowly raised up and drained, eventually being lifted up to form the Himalayan Mountains." (3)

This explanation is inadequate because taphonomy requires rapid burial and removal from oxygen. Everest was not uplifted slowly over millions of years but quickly. The question is not whether the Himalayas are still rising but what effect did the rain, sleet, hail and strong winds at 29,000 feet, and lower levels, have on limestone and fossils on Mt. Everest over 45 million years? Even with reduced oxygen it still would inhibit fossilization. If Everest was raised slowly and its summit was at a few thousand feet for hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years the sea creatures wouldn't have been fossilized and there are ammonite fossils at 12,000 feet above sea level. See Visual Evidences of Himalayan Formation (http://library.thinkquest.org/10131/geology_visual.html) at library.thinkquest.org. If these were fossilized several million years ago how did they survive landslides and glacier melting, which may have triggered a powerful flood or floods?

A four year study of the interaction of climate, erosion and tectonic deformation of the north and south sides of the Himalayas was completed in 2003. Scientists from seven universities worked with the Nepalese Department of Hydrology and Meteorology on the project. One of the team members was Ann Blythe who, at that time, was an assistant reasearch professor at the University of Southern California. She used fission-track dating and estimated the amount of time rocks cooled from deep in the earth crusts to surface temperatures was about 500,000 years. From her results it was also estimated that between two to four miles of rock are eroded from the Himalaya every million years (4). It is generally accepted that the Indian plate collided with the Eurasian plate about 45 to 55 million years ago (5). Even if the Himalayas didn't emerge from tethys ocean until millions of years later, many miles of rock would have been eroded from Everest and other mountains in the Himalayas because they are being uplifted and eroded at the same time. If the trilobites in limestone on the summit of Mt. Everest were buried rapidly about 250 mya and survived the process of orogeny they still would have had to be buried under miles of rock which has been eroded. On the page about orgoney, or mountain building, on wikipedia it says erosion removes much of the mountains exposing the mountain roots which were several kilometers deep in the earth's crust (6). Yet, in our time, trilobites and limestone happen to be on Mt. Everest's summit, about 29,000 feet above sea level.

"The biases inherent in the fossil record stem from the fact that fossilization of organic material is the exception, not the rule, and very specific and relatively rare conditions must be met for an organism to become fossilized. Fossilization favors organisms with hard parts, for example, an exterior shell (exoskeleton) or internal skeleton (endoskeleton). Fossilization also favors organisms living in certain environments. Two particular environmental conditions favor fossilization: rapid burial and anoxia (lack of oxygen). Rapid burial protects organic remains from predators or scavengers and physical reworking by tides and waves. Oxygen supports bacteria and decomposition of organic material. Burial in an oxygen-free (reducing) environment insulates organic material from decay and thus favors fossilization."
(Geology, Vol. 1, edited by James A. Woodhead, Salem Press, 1999, p. 259)

See also Taphonomy: Death Is a Sure Bet, Fossilization Is a Long Shot (http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/sciences/paleontology/FossilsAndFossilisation/Taphonomy/Taphonomy.htm) by S. Aaron Spriggs of Colorado State University.

In the counter-creationism handbook Mark Isaak said "Few if any of the "anomalous" fossils are truly anomalous. It is fairly common for fossils to erode out of an old formation and be redeposited in a younger formation. Pollen, spores, and other very small fossils can also be blown or washed into tiny cracks to appear in older formations" (7). In the Handy Geology Answer Book it says "Unfortunately, there are many gaps in the fossil records, with whole eras or evolutionary stages missing. The loss of these precious fossils is most often the result of erosion. The action of water, ice, wind, and other erosional agents wears away layers of rock and the embedded fossils" (8).

So on the one hand wind and water are the reason that very small fossils such as pollen and spores are redeposited to younger strata. But when much larger fossils are removed from their strata they are destroyed by the very elements that moved small fossils which somehow survived!! If erosion can have that effect on exposed fossils why hasn't the limestone on Mt. Everest been worn away by rain, sleet, hail, and strong winds that exist at 29,000 feet and at lower altitudes as it rose over 45 million years? It is believed that mountains begin to form when pelagic sedimentation, a mix of organic and inorganic sediments, was deposited on the ocean floor. Over time the sediments build up and as plates collide the sediments are thrust upward and eventually form mountains. The limestone on mountains was originally pelagic sedimentation and most of the calcite in limestone is from marine organisms. Because of the nature of fossilization, fossils in the limestone on Mt. Everest were preserved quickly and the limestone must have been formed rapidly, perhaps through an earthquake under the ocean floor and redeposition. These fossils would have had to been preserved for 250 million years or longer in spite of mountain building and erosion.

You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them. You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth. (Psalm 104:6-9, NIV).

Genesis 7:19 says all the high mountains, or hills, under the entire heavens were covered. There are fossils and marine sediments on mountain ranges all over the world including the Himalayas, Alps, Andes, Ural, Altai, Appalachian and Rocky Mountains (9).

1. The highest fossils in the world by N.E. Odell, Geological Magazine, January 1967; v. 104; no. 1; pp. 73-74

2. Geology of the summit limestone of Mount Qomolangma (Everest) and cooling history of the Yellow Band under the Qomolangma detachment - The Island Arc, Volume 14, Issue 4, December 21, 2005, pp. 297-310

3. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=3499

4. Erosion and precipitation in the Himalayas http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1075

5. Correlation of Himalayan exhumation rates and Asian monsoon intensity
www.abdn.ac.uk/~wpg008/Cliftetal2008NatureGeosci.pdf (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~wpg008/Cliftetal2008NatureGeosci.pdf)

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orogeny

7. The counter-creationism handbook by Mark Isaak, p. 133

8. The Handy Geology Answer Book by Patricia Barnes-Svarney and Thomas E. Svarney, p. 145

9. http://koti.phnet.fi/elohim/theflood2.html

Coal

Scientists tell us coal was formed during the carboniferous period which they say was from approximately 350 to 290 million years ago. One problem is that coal is full of carbon 14 which has a half life of 5,730 years. (See Measurable 14 C in Fossilized Organic Materials (http://globalflood.org/papers/2003ICCc14.html)) Under a microscope bituminous coal reveals traces of roots, stems, and leaves. Fossils of marine creatures such as brachiopods, fish, and moluscs, have been found in coal. Fossilized specimens of the small marine Spirorbis, a tubeworm, are often found attached to plants in coal measures. Harold G. Coffin of the Geoscience Research Institute observed spirorbis fastened to the outside edges of mussels in the coal measures of Nova Scotia (1). The presence of Spirorobis tubeworms in coal is strong evidence that much of the coal is allochthonous, originally transported from a different location, and is a problem for scientists who hold to the theory that coal was formed in peat bogs. In his book Coffin also points out that marine organisms often appear in shale or sandstone directly above or below coal. Calamites, a tree like horsetail, are also found in coal, and like cordaites they preferred well drained soils and not swampy areas.

Coal balls are very well preserved masses of vegetation found in coal seams which were permineralized in sitsu by calcium and magnesium carbonates preserving plant and animal fossils (2). Coal balls are so well preserved that often minute details of plants including cellular structure can be observed with a microscope. In the early twentieth century Marie Stopes and David Watson analyzed samples from coal balls and found some of them consisted entirely of dolomite and some consisted of dolomite with some siderite (3). In "Low-Temperature Formation of Dolomite and Magnesite" J.C. Deelman gives an excellent treatment of different studies done on coal balls and how they relate to dolomite. He states "In the view of Stopes & Watson(1909) the formation of this dolomite had to be related to the influence of sea water during the deposition of the plants, that later changed into coal" (4). Deelman also says "The fossils found in the sediments above coal layers containing dolomite coal balls, were invariably of marine origin" (5). The facts that fossilization almost always requires rapid burial and removal from oxygen, sea water was necessary for the formation of dolomite coal balls and marine fossils are found above coal layers indicates the rapid deposition of plants and transportation of sea creatures took place before coal was formed.

Coal balls have been found in more than 65 coal seams in over 200 locations and are most abundant in North American and Europe. They are also found in China; those being dominated by cordaites, an extinct gymnosperm. Fossilized coprolites similar to those from mites, collembola and millipedes have been found in coal balls indicating rapid burial and removal from oxygen. A study done on coal balls in Ohio found that coal balls in Lower Freeport Coal in are composed of 89.9 % calcite and nodules from roof shale in Middle Kittanning Coal were formed by marine muds can are composed of 84.5% calcite. The roof shale contained fossils of sea creatures such as gastropods, cephalopods, ostracodes, a tiny crustacean, and brachiopods, or lamp shells, which once dominated sea floors (6). In that study it also says roof shale nodules in marine muds probably formed rapidly (7).

Perhaps the most exhaustive paper about coal balls on the internet is 'The Formation and Significance of Carboniferous Coal Balls' by Andrew Scott and Gillian Rex (8). In that paper they state "One of the main problems in the discussion of coal ball formation is the source for the vast amount of carbonate permineralizing fluid that led to the formation of the coal" (page 4). Citing a 1962 study done in Berryville, Illinois they said Sergius Mamay & Ellison Yochelson first reported on marine animal remains within coal balls from North America and proposed that "mixed coal balls had been formed by marine mud rollers containing animal remains flung by wave action into the swamp" (9). In his book Evidence of Evolution, Nicholas Hotton said it doesn't take much erosion to destroy caves, bogs and tar pits and he believes most fossils found in those locations are from the remains of animals which are recently extinct or may still exist in nearby areas (10). If he is correct then, along with what else is known about coal, there is no way that coal was formed in peat bogs over millions of years.

In the Handy Geology Answer Book carbonization is explained this way:

"Carbonization leaves traces in the rock when the temperatures and pressures of burial cause the liquid or gaseous (volatile) components to be squeezed out, leaving a film of carbon." (11)

In coal measures carbonized impressions of ancient plants or their parts are common. The plants were buried quickly and put under extreme pressure which is consistent with the creationist explanation of the formation of coal and not with the evolutionist’s explanation. There are also carbon impressions in shale and clay indicating rapid burial and pressure. Marine roof shales sometimes occur above coal seams and contain goniatites, an extinct ammonite and layers of limestones are interbedded between coal seams in the U.S.A. and in the Black Marmot Conglomerate in Western Mongolia. In the Wigan coal seam in Lancashire, England there are many well preserved fossils mostly of arthropods including arachnids, arthropleurids, crustaceans, eurypterids, euthycarcinoids, millipedes and xiphosurans. In a 1999 issue of Geological Magazine there was a paper about fossils in the roof shales of the Wigan coal seam and in an abstract of that paper it says this:

"Upright Sigillaria trees, massive bedded units and a general lack of trace fossils in the roof shales of the Wigan Four Foot coal seam suggest that deposition of the beds containing these concretions was relatively rapid. Discovery of similar faunas at the equivalent stratigraphic level some distance away point to regional rather than localized controls on exceptional preservation." (12)

There are more problems with the theory that coal beds were originally peat bogs. Methane is trapped in coal beds and if these were originally peat bogs, or marshes, why wasn't the methane released over time? Over a period of sixty million years there would have been droughts, wild fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. What effect would it have had on the coal beds especially if methane was released during a wild fire? In western Siberia there is a peat bog under permafrost which may be exposed because of increasing temperature in the region. If it's exposed, scientists believe that the methane will be released into the atmosphere contributing to the greenhouse effect far more than carbon dioxide. The peat bog covers about 360,000 square miles and the world’s coal beds cover hundreds of thousands of miles. If it took tens of millions of years for coal to be created then how much methane was released during that time? Massive amounts of methane would have catastrophic consequences and the tropical environment which evolutionists claim was necessary for coalification would not have remained.

Gregory Ryskin, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Northwestern University believes an enormous explosion of methane gas was the cause of a mass extinction 251 million years ago (13). Coal bed methane is created along with water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen, as organic matter changes into coal. Methane is highly flammable and if it caught fire a peat bog in the process of coalification could have also caught fire affecting the outcome. It makes more sense that the plant life was trapped and pressurized quickly and the methane was also created and trapped quickly. In coal, methane is absorbed into the solid coal matrix and has to be extracted from the coal seam.

1. The Spirorbis Problem; http://www.grisda.org/origins/02051.htm; also Origin by Design by Harold G. Coffin, Robert H. Brown and R. James Gibson, 1993, p. 199

2. Biomass allocation in Late Pennsylvania coal-swamp plants by R. Baker and W.A. DiMichele. 1997. Palaios 12: 127-132

3. Low-Temperature Formation of Dolomite and Magnesite by J.C. Deelman, Chapter 5 - Organic or Inorganic?, p. 6
http://www.jcdeelman.demon.nl/dolomite/files/

4. Ibid

5. Ibid

6. Early Diagenetic Calcareous Coal Balls and Roof Shale Concretions from the Pennsylvanian by Lon A. McCullough, The Ohio Journal of Science. v77, n3 (May, 1977), p. 125
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/22447/1/V077N3_125.pdf

7. Early Diagenetic Calcareous Coal Balls and Roof Shale Concretions from the Pennsylvanian by Lon A. McCullough, The Ohio Journal of Science. v77, n3 (May, 1977), p. 131

8. http://eprints.rhul.ac.uk/135/1/38ScottandRex.pdf

9. Ibid

10. Evidence of Evolution by Nicholas Hotton, 1968, p. 57

11. The Handy Geology Answer Book by Patricia Barnes-Svarney and Thomas E. Svarney, p. 144

12. Soft-bodied fossils from the roof shales of the Wigan Four Foot coal seam, Westhoughton, Lancashire, UK, Geological Magazine (1999), 136:321-329 Cambridge University Press

13. Methane: the Great Dying? http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=582

Shale

Shale is the most common sedimentary rock and is formed by compaction. Fossils, animal tracks and raindrop impact craters have been found in shale indicating that it was formed quickly under enormous pressure. The Burgess shale formation in Canada is unique because it contains many fossils of soft bodied organisms. There are fossils of sponges, various worm-like phyla (annelids and priapulids), brachiopods, echinoderms, chordates, and mollusks as well as algae. One of the algae is morania confluens which easily disintegrates over time. In an anaerobic environment marine invertebrates normally curl up when they die but those found in the Burgess Shale do not exhibit this coiling (1).

In a paper about the Burgess Shale, James W. Hagadorn, assistant professor of geology at Amherst College, states that rapid burial and low oxygenation are necessary for the preservation of a variety of soft and hard-bodied organisms representing most major marine phyla. Many of these fossils left carbon films showing marine creatures were fossilized rapidly. This has caused a problem for evolutionary scientists who have tried to explain how carbonization could have occurred over a long period of time. Since fossilization requires rapid burial and removal from oxygen and shale is formed from compaction then logically the Burgess Shale was formed rapidly.
The fossils in the Burgess Shale formation are said to be from the middle Cambrian period which brings to mind Dawkins statement that most of the major invertebrate groups found in Cambrian strata appear in an advanced state of evolution as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history (2). Evolutionists believe these fossil deposits were formed when part of a muddy ocean floor slid downward creating an anaerobic environment favorable to fossilization. The Burgess Shale is located in the Canadian Rockies and is 7,400 above sea level.

Another geological wonder consisting of shale and loaded with fossils of soft bodied organisms is in Chengjiang China. According to the Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group (http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Palaeofiles/Lagerstatten/chngjang/obitus.html) at the University of Bristol (U.K) "Excellent preservation is attributed to short transport and rapid burial in an 'undisturbed' environment." They also state there are brachiopods and priapulid worms buried in life positions at Chengjiang and the cause of death of animals there was asphyxia.

Polystrate Fossils

According to wikipedia fossil forests have been discovered in North America, Europe and Australia and were preserved by rapid deposition.
"Mainstream geologists have also found that some of the larger polystrate trees found within Carboniferous coal-bearing strata show evidence of regeneration after being partially buried by sediments. In the case of these polystrate trees, they were clearly alive when partially buried by sediments." (3)

If trees were deposited into peat bogs that were in the process of coalification then why weren’t they assimilated into the peat eventually becoming coal? In 2005 a fossilized forest covering forty square miles was found in an Illinois coal mine. Scientists believe there was an earthquake that flooded and buried the forest. Among the species of plants were the fossilized remains of mangrove-like plants. On an evolutionary time scale mangroves appear in the late Cretaceous period more than 200 million years after the Carboniferous period and one of the researchers, Howard Falcon-Lang of the University of Bristol, U.K., said "It was always assumed that mangrove plants had evolved fairly recently." In 2008 a team from the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Bristol led by Dr. Falcon-Lang found five more fossilized forests (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7604721.stm) in Illinois. They are believed to have grown a few million years apart about 300 million years ago yet, oddly, they are stacked one on top of the other.
"It appears the ancient land experienced repeated periods of subsidence and flooding which buried the forests in a vertical sequence."

They were on a fault line but it seems quite unlikely that the epicenter of those earthquakes would be in the exact same place producing the same results five different times. If the earthquake occurred at the beginning of a cataclysmic flood then rip currents and massive waves would take plants, animals and sediment to the lowest point in a valley or plain unless there were obstacles or resistance. Along with the fact that fossilization is usually associated with flooding requiring rapid burial and removal from oxygen the finds in Illinois present another problem for evolutionists. The trees were not assimilated into the peat bogs eventually becoming coal after millions of years. Instead the plants left an impression in the coal bed showing that they were buried quickly and were put under extreme pressure. This is consistent with the creationist explanation of the formation of coal and not with the evolutionary explanation. On the page about compression fossils on wikipedia it says "While it is uncommon to find animals preserved as good compression fossils it is very common to find plants preserved this way." While the statement about animals may be open for some debate, compressive stress would preserve the huge fossil forests in Illinois. There are also fossil forests in Yellowstone Park, New Zealand, Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/arctic/appb.html) in the Canadian Arctic among other places.

Randy S. Berg wrote a very good article in two parts called The "Fossil Forests" of Nova Scotia (http://www.earthage.org/polystrate/Fossil%20Trees%20of%20Nova%20Scotia.htm). The Joggins cliffs have fossils of spirorbis and naidites, a bivalve mollusk. Another good article about polystrate fossils is Polystrate Fossils Require Rapid Deposition (http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/43/43_4/polystrate_fossils.htm). There are some great photographs of fossils from the Joggins Cliffs including a fossil trackway from a horseshoe crab at ianjuby.org/jogginsc.html. One of the layers of compressed, fossil sea bed contains small leaves, fish scales and sea shells.

The following definitions are from page 144 of The Handy Geology Answer Book by Patricia Barnes-Svarney and Thomas E. Svarney.
"Dissolution/replacement – in dissolution and replacement, groundwater (especially acidic water) dissolves the part of the organism that is trapped in sediments; it might simultaneously deposit a mineral such as silica, calcite or iron in its place."
"Wood becomes petrified through the process of dissolution and replacement. This occurs when water that contains dissolved minerals such as calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and silicate permeates it."

According to Wikipedia sedimentary rocks cover 75% - 80% of the Earth's land area and include chalk, limestone, dolomite, sandstone and shale (4). Massive chalk deposits are found in the White Cliffs of Dover, the White Rocks of Ireland and in France. Aerobic environments do not allow for the preservation of the micro-organisms that make up chalk or the formation of fossils and the chalk rocks are rich in fossils.

In the September-October 1995 issue of Creation ex nihilo is an article called 'Instant Petrified Wood' by Australian geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling:

"Under the right chemical conditions wood can be rapidly petrified by silicification, even at normal temperatures and pressures.....The time frame for the formation of the petrified wood within the geological record is totally compatible with the biblical time scale of a recent creation and a subsequent devastating global Flood."

Yongsoon Shin and his colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory converted wood into a ceramic in a laboratory in a few days through silicification, a type of petrification. Shin said the lab process "is pretty much same as petrification in nature, where the products are even denser -- organic components are self-degrading -- due to the long time process" (5). Click on this link to see a picture of four phases of petrification in one piece of wood (http://www.omniology.com/PetrifiedWood.html). At the Southern Forest World Museum in Waycross, Ga. there is a dog named Stucky that was petrified in a tree stump along with the wood.

In 1995 Dr. Tim Demko of Colorado State University found about 40 fossilized bee nests within giant petrified, or mummified, logs at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. The fossil tree trunks are dated from 207 to 220 million years ago. According to David Alexander and Steven Vogel, professor of biology at Duke University, bees first appeared about 70 million years ago (6). Fossilization requires rapid burial and removal from oxygen and the fossilized bee’s nests in petrified logs show that the wood was petrified quickly rather than over thousands of years. For the sake of argument let's assume the logs were petrified for at least 137 million years before they were inhabited by bees, they survived a second flood event in which the bees nest was fossilized and both the logs and bees nest survived the forces of erosion over millions of years. That still doesn't explain how both survived the shockwave and ensuing tidal wave of the Chicxulub asteroid!

1. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/burgess.html

2. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, Penguin Science, 1991, reprint, p. 229.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystrate_fossil

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedimentary_rock

5. http://www.livescience.com/technology/050127_petrified_wood.html

6. Nature's Flyers: Birds, Insects, and the Biomechanics of Flight by David E. Alexander and Steven Vogel, 2002, p. 182

Fossil Graveyards

Vast fossil graveyards have been discovered, often with animals that normally wouldn't have been together when they died. Trying to avoid a catastrophe and survive could put them in the same location at the time of death. A fossil graveyard was discovered in Tampa, Florida that has fossilized camels, horses, mammoths, bears, wolves, large cats, sharks' teeth, turtle shells, the bones of fresh and salt water fish and a bird with an estimated 30-foot wingspan.

In Glacial and Pleistocene Geology, R. F. Flint describes the animals found in an Alaskan fossil graveyard:
"The fauna list includes two types of bears, dire wolf, wolf, fox, badger, wolverine, saber-tooth cat, jaguar, lynx, wooly mammoth, mastodon, two horses, camel, saiga antelope, four bison, caribou, moose, stag-moose, elk, two sheep, musk-ox and yak types, ground sloth, and several rodents." (1)

Other fossil graveyards (http://www.parentcompany.com/creation_explanation/cx3f.htm) include the Ashley Beds of South Carolina, the Cumberland Bone Cave in Maryland, the La Brea Tar Pits in California, the Herring fossil layers in California, the hippopotamus beds in Sicily, Agate Springs in Nebraska, love bone bed in Florida, insect fossils of Elmo Kansas, Mazon Creek formation in Illinois, the Green River formation and Florissant Fossil Bedsin Colorado, the Montceau-les-Mines in France, Scotland's Old Red Sandstone, the Egyptian desert there's a place called Zeuglodon Valley and Ukhaa Tolgod (http://www.infoquest.org/pressroom/pr19980101.htm) in the Gobi desert, Mongolia. In the Australian outback there's an area of fossilized jellyfish (trace fossils) in a sandstone bed covering more than 400 square miles. In 2002 thousands of fossilized impressions of jellyfish were discovered in a quarry in Mosinee, Wisconsin. They were in sandstone beds that were stacked horizontally in seven layers of rock about 12 feet high.

In 2001 Cuban paleontologist, Arturo Vildozola found more than 500 giant oyster fossils in the Andes mountains; about 4000 feet above sea level. When an oyster’s central muscle relaxes after death, the ligament pulls the shells open but these oysters were in the closed position which may have resulted from being rapidly buried in silt. The Burgess and Chengjiang lagerstatten and the Joggins cliffs are in fact fossil graveyards as are the Redwall Limestone in the Grand Canyon and the redbeds (Satanka shale) at Laramie Wyoming. The Wellington formation in Kansas and Medco formation in Oklahoma have many fossilized insects. Then there's the Karoo formation which evolutionists say is problematic for a global flood but the process of fossilization does not allow for dead organisms to lay around waiting to be fossilized.

Transgression and Recession

One of the questions most often asked about the global flood is where did the water go? Evolutionists say that there would be too much water while Creationists state that the oceans are deeper today than they were before the flood. But eustatic sea level change is something evolutionists have to deal with also. In the 1950's marine geologist Edwin L. Hamilton of the Navy Electronics Laboratory made a remarkable statement:

"Perhaps the ocean volume increased enough to explain most of the relative sinking of the seamounts. If the latter idea is correct, something on the order of a 30 percent increase in the volume of the oceans must have occurred during the last 100 million years" (2)

Hamilton comments came from observing flat-topped seamounts or submarine volcanoes (guyots) which were discovered in the 1940’s by Navy captain Harry Hess, one of the founding fathers of the plate tectonic theory. If this is the correct explanation it fits perfectly with a model of the global flood. In a two part book series called Geology it explains that the reason for transgression, or rise in sea level, is an increase in volcanic activity in the ocean ridge systems. As volcanic activity decreases, the mid-ocean ridge drops and the volume of the ocean basins increases resulting in regression. These "large-scale fluctuations resulting in the flooding of not only the continental shelves and the coastal plains but also the interiors of the continents" (3).

Scientists have hypothesized that seas advanced during the Pennsylvanian period to explain the deposition of marine fossils in the coal deposits of Pennsylvania and Appalachia. So most of the countries that have coal beds would have been underwater as would the plains and deltas of other countries and low lying islands. This was before the breakup of Pangaea so much of the world at that time would have been underwater.

The Carboniferous period supposedly ended about 290 million years ago and Pangaea did not begin to break up until 250 million years ago. At present the Joggins cliffs of Nova Scotia and the Appalachian coal mines are almost three thousand miles from the Pacific Ocean. If seas advanced during the Pennsylvanian period marine creatures such as the spirorbiris would have had to travel at least 3,000 miles from the west to reach these areas and this doesn't take into account erosion of the coastline, the height of what are now the Rocky Mountains or all hills or mountains at that time. The state fossil of Kentucky, and most common one found there, is the brachiopod, an ancient line of shellfish. They are found in different strata including Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, and Pennsylvanian. The marine creatures fossilized in the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang, China are said to be from the Cambrian period more than 500 million years ago on the evolutionary time scale. The nautiloids found in the Grand Canyon were mollusks and are from the Paleozoic era between 542 million years and 251 million years ago. That fossil graveyard goes across northern Arizona and into Nevada covering an area of approximately 10,500 square miles! Fossils of marine creatures are also found at the Grand Canyon in the Kaibab Limestone, Toroweap Formation, Temple Butte Limestone, Muav Limestone, Bright Angel Shale and Tapeats Sandstone.

There are many marine creatures which are state fossils (http://www.statefossils.com/) including Basilosaurus, Oligocene, the beluga whale, Tullimonstrum gregarium (Tully monster), brachipods, crinoids, ichthyosaur, Eurypterus remipes (sea scorpion), trilobites and coral. Fossils discovered in Arkansas include ammonoids, arthropods, bivalves, blastoids, brachiopods, bryozoa, cephalopods, crinoids, corals, gastropods, nautiloids, trilobites and shark teeth. There is evidence for the flood in the Grand Canyon (http://www.canyonministries.com/content/view/31/54/). Fossils of marine creatures called nautiloids are in a bed of Redwall Limestone that begins at the Grand Canyon and covers an area of approximately 5,700 square miles. Other layers of the canyon are full of fossils of marine life and there is a problem with inter-bedded layers (http://www.bible.ca/tracks/grand-canyon-interbedding.htm).

Trilobites have also been found in the Weeks formation in Utah contains many trilobite fossils including Ammagnostus laiwuensis, Tricrepicephalus texanus, and Norwoodella. In Indiana Trilobites are found the Dillsboro, Edwardsville, Whitewater, Staunton, Osgood, Big Clifty, Locust Point, Wabash and Waldron Shale formations. There are trilobite fossils in California, Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia. Two areas of Yellowstone National Park in Montana are trilobite lake and trilobite ridge. At one time All these areas were underneath the ocean. Trilobite fossils have also been found in Antarctica, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, the Czech Republic, China, Germany, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela and the United Kingdom and that’s not a complete list! See 'Proof For Continents Are Rising Upward' and 'How did dinosaurs come to India' at http://www.originofplanets.com/. In the latter article it says a 95 million year old dinosaur skull was unearthed from the narmada river bed region of India has raised hot debate because the dinosaur fossils contradict the theory of continental drift.

If one were to take into account all the marine fossils found in layers from the carboniferous period (Pennsylvanian and Mississippian) and the coal beds that supposedly formed during that time, there would have been extensive areas of the United States under water at that time, all before the breakup of Pangaea. It does not account the pressure needed for the formation of shale and coal and leaves evolutionists with questions similar to ones they may ask creationists about a global flood:

If the amount of salt in the Ocean is about the same now as it was more than 300 million years ago what effect would it have had on all plant life in the interior of the continents?

What effect would the advancing seas have on all animals on land?

If sea levels increased in one area enough to reach thousands of miles in land then what about the sea levels on all the coastlines of Pangaea?

If South America and Africa broke up about 150 million years ago and having been drifting apart very slowly since then why do the coast lines still look so similar?

With the constant pounding of the waves, wind, rain, powerful storms and flooding over millions of years the coastlines of the two continents look remarkably similar. Erosion on shorelines continues because of constant wave action, climactic events and other factors and shorelines would have changed over one hundred thousand years or millions of years. There are beach towns that have spent millions of dollars replacing sand eroded into the sea only to lose the sand again in a few years. The current theory (the Bruun Rule) is sand erodes from the coastline, fills the seabed off the coast and is moved back to the coast as sea levels rise. But the Bruun Rule is receiving more and more scrutiny from scientists. Sea-level rise and shoreline retreat: time to abandon the Bruun Rule (http://www.oceanografia.ufba.br/ftp/Sedimentologia/seminarios/Bruun_rule.pdf) (pdf format).

On page 2 of that paper is a description of the numerous factors that cause changes in the morphology of coasts. Coastal geomorphologist, Dr. Peter Cowell, of the University of Sydney says current models are outmoded and outdated. He and others are concerned that beaches could erode more than the accepted models would show if global warming raises sea levels. This brings up the question of the effect methane would have had on the earth if released during the carboniferous period.

1. R.F. Flint, Glacial and Pleistocene Geology, 1957, p. 471

2. Edwin L. Hamilton, "The Last Geographic Frontier: The Sea Floor," in Scientific Monthly, December 1957, p. 305

3. Geology Vol. 2, edited by James A. Woodhead, Salem Press, 1999, p. 649

Rapid Uplift

After the earthquake and subsequent tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, the Malacca straits separating Malaysia and Sumatra had its depth cut from 4,060 feet to 105 feet. Sonar images taken by the crew of the British navy ship HMS Scott show the massive uplift of an area 10 kilometers wide and up to 1.5 kilometers high. In another area effected by the tsunami the depth was cut from 3,855 feet to just 92 feet (1). In 1707, an island called Isola Nuova (New Island) was formed off Santorini in the Grecian Archipelago. In 1796, a new island rose to the height of 350 feet, having two miles of circumference, in the Aleutian group, east of Kamtschatka, which is permanent. In 1831 a volcanic island called Graham's Island rose from the sea off the coast of Sicily and was 180 feet high and 1 1/3 miles in circumference. The part of the island above water was composed of loose materials and disappeared in a few years leaving a deposit of rocky shoal (2).

Rapid Erosion

An example of rapid erosion caused by massive flooding is the Glacial Lake Missoula which contained more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. When an ice dam burst water shot out flooding a massive area with a force estimated at ten times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world with speeds near 65 mph (3). It cut canyons and covered cliffs reshaping the landscape and reaching to the Pacific. On PBS' website it says a now dry waterfall, periodically vanished underwater as floodwaters with sediment and debris drained off the Quincy basin into the Columbia River and the water also covered portions of the Saddle Mountains. Ironically, they say this about the Palouse River Canyon:

"Geologists have long known that the modern-day Palouse River is too modest a creek to have carved these massive canyons. Lying just north of the river's confluence with the Snake River, these basalt canyons provide further evidence that giant floods thousands of years ago did the brunt of the work." (4)

Iceland is very geologically active with a lot of volcanic activity and lava filled formations. In September of 1996 Bárdarbunga volcano erupted and a four mile long fissure opened through a 1,500 thick foot glacier. Water drained along a narrow channel under the glacier and into Lake Grímsvötn causing it to swell 200 feet higher than its usual flood risk trigger level. On November 5, 1996 the ice dam collapsed and a wall of water rushed out of Lake Grímsvötn at two million cubic feet per second; more than twenty times the rate that water flows down Niagara falls. Some of the highway that rings Iceland disappeared, a bridge over the Gígja River was swept away with the flood waters and another bridge was badly damaged (5). Over the next two days the flood dumped about 30 feet of sediment over a 500 square mile area and formed an ice canyon 6 km long, 500 m wide and up to 200 m deep at the southeastern margin of Lake Grímsvötn (6). Massive floods can not only enlarge channels but even erode bedrock (7).

Burlingame Canyon near Walla Walla, Washington is 1,500 feet long, 120 feet wide with a maximum depth of about 120 feet and was formed in less than six days. Water could not get through a constriction at Wallula Gap and backflood deposits from flooding of the Pasco Basin formed the canyon.

Genesis 7:11 says "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened."

In 1977, scientists discovered hydrothermal vents or "smokers" at a depth of 2.5 km off the coast of Ecuador. Other hydrothermal vents have since been discovered in the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic oceans. Why would a Mid-Eastern nomad say "all the fountains of the great deep burst open" thousands of years before this discovery? If there were geysers in the Mediterranean or smaller bodies of water in the area then a skeptic could surmise this became part of the story from observation. One example in the Mediterranean is the island of Pantelleria, near Sicily, about 50 miles from Africa. Wikipedia has a list of notable geysers and they are located in the United States, New Zealand, Iceland and Russia. Since the original flood story was written more than four thousand years before the discovery of ocean ridges and submarine volcanoes this would have been an incredibly lucky guess that they existed! Geologists believe that increased volcanic activity in the ocean ridge systems is one reason that transgression occurs resulting in the flooding of coastal plains and the interior of the continents.

Commenting on the theory that life may have originated from hydrothermal vents, Walter Bradley, Professor of Engineering at Baylor University and co author of 'The Mystery of Life's Origins,' said "It's now thought that all of the water in the ocean is periodically recirculated through these vents" (8). In 2006 seismologist Michael Wysession of Washington University in St. Louis and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence discovered a vast water reservoir deep beneath the earth. It's located beneath eastern Asia and has at least the volume of the Arctic ocean. The water is locked in moisture-containing rocks between 400 and 800 miles beneath the earth's surface. Wysession believes that geological hot spots, such as Yellowstone National Park, may be caused by smaller bodies of water in the mantle that weaken the rock and allow heat to escape.

Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels favor a global flood because dead organisms decay rapidly. In 1972 George R. Hill, Dean of the College of Mines and Mineral Industries said a possible mechanism for the formation of high rank coals may have been a short, rapid heating event (9). A company called Changing World Technologies has patented a method of "thermal depolymerisation process" which breaks down carbon-based matter by converting it into petroleum (10). There are fossils in the Messel Oil Shale Fossil Site near Frankfurt Germany. Precious stones can be formed in a relatively short time with tremendous pressure and the question remains how did the organic material not decay for millions of years???

1. Tsunami redrew ship channels, ocean floor http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6791600

2. Elementary Geology by Edward Hitchcock, 1860, 31st. ed., p. 178

3. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/Glaciers/IceSheets/description_lake_missoula.html
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/projects/geoweb/participants/dutch/vtrips/Scablands0.HTM

4. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/megaflood/scab-nf.html

5. http://www.wdcgc.spri.cam.ac.uk/news/jokulhlaup/

6. http://www.wdcgc.spri.cam.ac.uk/news/jokulhlaup/cany2.jpg

7. Flood Geomorphology by Victor R. Baker, R. Craig Kochel and Peter C. Patton, p. 88

8. William Bradley, interviewed by Lee Strobel in The Case For Faith, 2000, p. 106

9. Chemical Technology, May, 1972, p. 296

10.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/may/22/research.highereducation1

Whale Fossils on Mountains

In 1976 a fossilized whale was discovered by workers in Lompoc California. The Lompoc whale wasn’t standing on its tale as first reported but at a 40 degree angle and was buried rapidly in diatomic earth. More than 500 fossilized baleen whales have been found in western Peru over 20 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean. The area is called the Pisco formation and researchers believe the whales were killed by toxic blooms of diatoms then buried by the accumulation of diatom frustules on the seafloor. But that doesn’t explain what happened to the diatoms, how the whales were moved from a shallow seafloor to where they are now or if the Pisco formation was once part of the seafloor. Either way it is another example of rapid burial and preservation of marine creatures found on land.
In 1987 an article appeared in the New York Times called "Whale Fossils High in Andes Show How Mountains Rose from Sea."

"Scientists have found fossil whales and other marine animals in mountain sediments in the Andes, indicating that the South American mountain chain rose very rapidly from the sea.....Assemblages comparable to these are virtually unknown in the Andes, since geological upthrusting generally destroys fossil beds" (1)

This last statement is significant to say the least. Noel Odell said the fossil fragments brought back from expeditions to Mt. Everest in 1956 and 1963 are probably crinoid and were probably formed from the Carboniferous to lower Permian period (2). Those fossil fragments would have had to survive geological upthrusting and erosive forces on Mt. Everest as it reached an altitude of more than 29,000 feet over 40 million years. Assigning the younger age of the lower Permian to the fossil fragments on Mt. Everest would make them about 260 million years old! In the New York Times article Dr. Michael J. Novacek, chairman of the paleontology department of the American Museum of Natural History, is quoted as saying nearly all of the fossils were embedded in surface rock and easy to pick up and despite weathering, many of the smallest fossils were remarkably intact and will be relatively easy to study." According to the article the bones of whales and other marine animals were found at altitudes of more than 5,000 feet. In 1998 the fossillized jawbone of a whale was disovered in the foothills of the Himalayas (3).

In 2007 the skeleton of a whale (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17927243/) was found in Tuscany about six miles from the Mediterranean and fossils of shells and fish and shark teeth were found around the whale fossil. Shark fossils have also been discovered in Ohio and, in 1987, the fossil of a beluga whale was discovered in Norfolk, New York. Fisherman have discovered mastodon and mammoth teeth from more than 40 different sites off the Atlantic coast of the United States, some of them as far away as 75 miles from shore (4). There have also been whale fossils discovered in Cornwall, Ontario, the Jacquet River in New Brunswick and in Montreal. In 1849 railroad workers uncovered the fossil of a beluga whale in Vermont which is the inspiration for a sculpture called "Reverence" in Burlington. The whale fossil was found 150 feet above sea level along with fossilized clams, mussels and plants.

Lake Titicaca

Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake on earth at more than 12,000 feet above sea level. It is located in Peru and Bolivia covering about 3,200 square miles and the northern tip is about 1,000 miles south of the equator. It is about 120 miles long and, at its widest point, 50 miles across. The average depth is 100 meters and the deepest point is 281 meters. In 2000 divers found a temple at the bottom of Lake Titicaca after following a submerged road. More than 200 dives were made to depths of as much as 100 feet. The temple is believed to have been built 1,000 to 1,500 years ago but, if that's the case, then what are they doing at the bottom of Titicaca? One possible explanation is an earthquake. But, would an earthquake have been able to move a temple 200 meters long and 50 meters wide, a terrace for crops and an 800 meter long containing wall from the shores of Lake Titicaca to a depth of 60 feet without destroying them completely? Furthermore, divers followed a submerged road to the discovery indicating the temple and wall were originally located by that road (5). There are also ancient submerged structures in Yonaguni Japan (http://www.altarcheologie.nl/underwater_ruins/yonaguni/introduction.htm). What appears to be a sunken city off the coast of Cuba is being studied by scientists and there are other sunken cities in India, China and Peru.

Lake Titicaca is actually made up of two smaller sub-basins so another explanation is that they were originally not connected and the area where the temple and containing wall were found was dry until about 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. If Lake Titicaca was formed at the end of the last ice age as many geologists believe that raises some questions:

If it was the result of a glacier or flooding at the end of the last ice age what effect would this have had on the entire earth since the glacier would have reached 1,000 miles south of the equator?

How was it able to reach a height of more than two miles before it deposited massive amounts of water?

How was a slow moving glacier able to cross the Andes mountains south of Lake Titicaca (http://saexplorers.org/zen/images/Andes.gif) which exceed 6,000 feet in height?

If the lake was much closer to sea level about 13,000 years ago does this mean the rapid uplift of mountains is possible?

Geoglyphs found near Lake Titicaca are believed to be very old and many are built into the bedrock under flood sediments: Author David Flynn noted "The geoglyphs seem to be physical evidence that supports the Middle and South American myths of world deluge and giants" (6).

1. "Whale Fossils High in Andes Show How Mountains Rose from Sea" by Malcolm W. Browne, The New York Times, March 12, 1987, p. A 22 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEFDC143CF931A25750C0A9619482 60

2. The highest fossils in the world by N.E. Odell, Geological Magazine, January 1967; v. 104; no. 1; pp. 73-74

3. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19981222/ai_n14185701

4. Elephant Teeth from the Atlantic Continental Shelf; Science, June 1967, Volume 156, Issue 3781, pp. 1477-1481

5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/892616.stm

6. http://officialdisclosure.com/giants.htm

Dinosaurs

The belief that dinosaurs became extinct from an asteroid forming the Chicxulub crater is still being debated. Princeton University micropaleontologist Gerta Keller has studied microfossils at the Chicxulub crater and other sites around the world. Keller says "These single-celled organisms are extremely sensitive to environmental changes" and "by studying their calcium carbonate shells, it is possible to determine temperature, salinity and other barometers of the time" (1).
If the asteroid that caused the Chicxulub crater was the cause of dinosaur extinction it raises questions. The impact of the asteroid has been estimated to release energy several thousand to hundreds of millions times more than that of the Hiroshima bomb and would cause an atmospheric shock wave. In an article called Scientists Debate Dinosaur Demise (http://www.livescience.com/animals/060329_dino_crater.html) the author states "Such a large impact would also have triggered a host of natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and global firestorms that fried, starved and suffocated the beasts."

If it caused a nuclear winter then why did only certain creatures like dinosaurs become extinct? Wouldn’t it have killed off most, if not all, of the animal and plant life on earth making it necessary for the evolutionary process to begin again at an early stage? In that article it says "Markus Harting of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and a small group of scientists thinks the Chicxulub impact happened too early to have been the infamous dinosaur-killer." Harting believes the impact happened about 300,000 years before dinosaurs became extinct as does Gerta Keller. (2)

An article called Catastrophism and Mass Extinctions (http://www.pibburns.com/catastro/extinct.htm) shows the serious problems that may have been caused by a meteor including the greenhouse effect and acid rain. Conversely Keller believes that nearly all species could survive a single short-term shock to the environment. Dinosaur fossils in the Colville River in Alaska also raises questions about the asteroid theory. Roland Gangloff is earth science curator of the University of Alaska Museum and said "If dinosaurs adapted to such a variety of environments, how did one nuclear winter knock them off? Anyone who explains the whole picture of dinosaur extinction has to explain high-latitude dinosaurs" (3) For a synopsis of the Chicxulub controversy see Chicxulub and the Demise of the Dinosaurs (http://www.icr.org/article/453/) on icr.org.
In the March 2007 issue of the quarterly journal Paleobiology there’s a report called "The opisthotonic posture of vertebrate skeletons: postmortem contraction or death throes?" The authors are Kevin Padian, Professor of integrative biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cynthia Marshall Faux of the Museum of the Rockies. They believe "The peculiar pose of many fossilized dinosaurs, with wide-open mouth, head thrown back and recurved tail, likely resulted from the agonized death throes typical of brain damage and asphyxiation…" (4). Both fossilization and asphyxiation can be attributed to a flood and the Chicxulub impact still has more questions than answers. There is an abstract of Padian and Faux’s paper at paleobiol.geoscienceworld.org

In March of 1878 Jules Cre'teur of the Hainaut coal company discovered pyrite, or fool’s gold, at the bottom of a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium. In April, 1878 Monsieur de Pauw, the preparator of the museum of Natural History in Brussels, discovered a very fragile dinosaur foot at the bottom of the mine. Over the next three years six hundred blocks of embedded fossils weighing 130 tons were excavated from the mine. In that collection were 31 fossil skeletons of Iguanodon bernissartensis which were found at the bottom of the coal mine; a depth of 1056 feet (5). The Iguanodon bernissartensis was about 33 feet long and weighed about 3 and 1/2 tons and are believed to have lived during the early Cretaceous period, about 146 million years ago.

Besides coal there is also chalk, limestone, clay, layers of silex nodules and conglomerates at Bernissart. Chalk forms under relatively deep marine conditions from the accumulation of microfossils called coccoliths which come from coccolithophores; single-celled algae, protests and phytoplankton and are exclusively marine organisms. The primary source of calcite in limestone is usually marine organisms. The cran of Bernissart yielded not only fossil of iguanodons but also some small turtles, several crocodiles, 3,000 fish and several plants. In the Bernissart mines there were sinkholes, or crans, often found inside coal layers composed of sedimentary rock but the Iguanodons were found in different layers of a cran. The explanation that's been given is a ravine was formed in the coal seam from erosion. A carnivore, or carnivores, attacked a herd of Iguanodons as they were eating near the ravine and the herd fled and fell into the ravine. That theory was probably based on another fossil found at Bernissart. There are fragments of a predatory dinosaur within the bed where Iguanodon's were found. Then there's the question of what eroded solidified coal and why did it happen only in certain areas? Unfortunately, there was plenty of information available about the areas which had been mined but knowledge of the cran and the region above it was very poor (6).

In a blog called "New light on Iguanodon" the author says there's no evidence that herds of animals plunged into a ravine. There is no name given for the author but it is taken from "Dinosaurs: A Very Short Introduction" by David Norman.

The sediments in which the dinosaurs are embedded also directly contradict the ravine or river-valley interpretations. Finely stratified shales containing the fossils are normally deposited in low-energy, relatively shallow-water environments, probably equivalent to a large lake or lagoon. There is simply no evidence for catastrophic deaths caused by herds of animals plunging into a ravine. In fact, the dinosaur skeletons were found in separate layers of sediment (along with fish, crocodiles, turtles, thousands of leaf impressions, and even rare insect fragments), proving that they definitely did not all die at the same time and therefore could never have been part of a single herd of animals. Study of the orientation of the fossil skeletons within the mine suggests that dinosaur carcasses were washed into the burial area on separate occasions and from different directions. It was as if the direction of flow of the river that carried their carcasses had changed from time to time, exactly as happens in large, slow-moving river systems today. So, as early as the 1870s, it was clearly understood that there were neither ‘ravines’ nor ‘river valleys’ in which the dinosaurs at Bernissart might have perished. It is fascinating how the dramatic discovery of dinosaurs at Bernissart seems to have demanded an equally dramatic explanation for their deaths, and that such fantasies were uncritically adopted even though they flew in the face of the scientific evidence available at the time.

http://about-dinasaurs.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-light-on-iguanodon.html
Dinosaur footprints have been found in coal mines in eastern Utah, the Grand Mesa coal field near Gunnison, Colorado and Grand Cache in Alberta, Canada. In one paper about dinosaur footprints in mine roof surfaces it say they are protrusions which hang down from the roof and when dinosaurs walked in the peat on the surface of a swamp their footprints were filled by mud, silt or sand during the flooding of a local river (7). Fossil leaves, ferns, dicot leaves, petrified tree stumps, pelecypods, gastropods horizontal logs and trees in growth position are also on the roof of the Price River mine. According to the evolutionary timeline, the Carboniferous period ended about 290 million years ago and dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic period about 225 million years ago. Some evolutionists on another board told me they don't believe all coal was formed during the carboniferous era and the Blackhawk formation was formed much later, during the Cretaceous period. Reptilian impressions of footsteps were discovered in coal measures in Pennsylvania indicating rapid formation (8).

In 1997 researchers discovered fossils in a dinosaur nesting ground (http://www.infoquest.org/discoveries/patagonia97/journal.htm) in the Patagonian badlands of Argentina. They found several eggs that contained the tiny bones of embryonic dinosaurs as well as an egg with the fossilized skin of an embryonic dinosaur:

"How could such delicate skin have been petrified quickly enough after the animal died to survive for more than 70 million years?"

Good question! Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University discovered dinosaur bones with translucent blood vessels and soft tissue (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/). There are some great photos on the New York Times website (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/science/25dino.html?ex=1269406800&en=b273d4463ac5bade&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland). On talk origins they explain the discovery by interviewing Schweitzer's colleague who said "No cells have been found in any dinosaurs, but the remnants of red blood cells have been hypothesized on the basis of heme, a kind of iron produced biologically." Besides iron heme contains oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Perhaps they can carbon date the heme.

The hip bone of a T-Rex that was excavated more than 100 years ago was found to have "intact, mummified microscopic collagen fibers and other ultrastructural features within compact bone" (9). In 2000 a duckbill dinosaur named Leonardo was found on a cattle ranch north of Malta, Montana. It had almost 90 percent of its skin intact and its last meal in its stomach. Robert Bakker, curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science said ""Inside the rib cage you can see his intestines and stomach and see what he was eating in the weeks before he died." In 2007 a mummified dinosaur named Dakota was found with its entire skin envelope remaining largely intact. Paleontologist Phil Manning of the University of Manchester (U.K.) said "The skin has been mineralized. It is an actual three-dimensional structure, backfilled with sediment" (10)

In 1993 Paleontological investigator Mike Hammer discovered the fossil of dinosaur with a fossilized heart in the Hell Creek formation in northwestern South Dakota. Some people claim it is a concretion but it is a heart-like structure in the right part of the body and ribs and plates attached to the ribs were also well preserved. In 2002 a Dinosaur Fossil Was Found in a Mammal's Stomach (http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/belly_beast_050112.html) in China's Liaoning province. In Southern Mongolia an embryo of a neoceratopsian dinosaur was found enclosed within an egg and completely preserved.

The Morrison formation covers an area of 600,000 square miles, is centered in Wyoming and Colorado but has outcrops in eleven other states. The Morrison formation has a wide variety of dinosaur fossils including the Supersaurus, Apatosaurus (formerly known as Brontosaurus) and Diplodocus. The Supersaurus was over 100 feet in length and weighed between 35 to 40 tons. The Diplodocus weighed from 15 to 20 tons and was "the most graceful and delicately built sauropod dinosaur" (11). The asteroid theory is wanting and one has to wonder what force overcame these incredibly strong animals and was able to bury them so they were fossilized. There is evidence that the fossils of dinosaurs at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah were transported from other areas (12). The fossils at Dinosaur National Monument are enclosed in sandstone and a conglomerate bed of alluvial origin (13). In a location near Grand Junction, Colorado, there are fossils of many bivalves which were buried alive by rapid sedimentation (14).

1. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/03/02/coolsc.dinosaurs.extinction/

2. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0000D7BD-7720-1264-B1DB83414B7F0000

3. Polar Dinosaurs Tougher than Nuclear Winter? http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF15/1581.html

4. http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/06/06_deaththroes.shtml

5. Dinosaur Impressions by Philippe Taquet, Kevin Padian, pp. 23, 37; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iguanodon

6. Engineering Geology for Infrastructure Planning in Europe by Henri Robert George, 2004, p. 359

7. Dinosaur Footprints From a Coal Mine in East-Central Utah by Lee. R. Parker and Robert L. Rowley Jr. - http://www.stadiumweb.com/reprints/parkerr.html

8. Statistics of Coal by Richard Cowling Taylor, 1848, introduction, cxvii

9. http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/38/38_2/Trex.htm

10. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dino_mummy

11. Seismosaurus by David D. Gillette and Mark Hallett, Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 175

12. http://www.icr.org/article/106/

13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_National_Monument

14. The Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation: An Interdisciplinary Study : Denver Museum of Natural History, Denver, USA: May 26-28, 1994 by Kenneth Carpenter, Dan Chure, James Ian Kirkland, p. 446

Flood Legends

In civilizations around the world there are flood stories (http://www.teachinghearts.org/dre04legends.html) similar to the one in the bible. I've seem figures ranging from 212 to more than 300 different flood stories with similarities to the account in Genesis. A figure which seems to be the result of extensive research is 270 different flood stories. From the Ark on Ararat by Tim Lahaye and John Morris, page 237:

"Although these traditions have been modified through the ages and some have taken on fantastic elements, most of them have certain basic elements in common:

88% of them single out a favored individual or family.
70% point to survival due to a boat.
66% see the Flood coming as a result of human wickedness.
67% speak of animals saved along with human beings.
57 % record that the survivors end up on a mountain.
66% indicate that the hero receives warning of the coming catastrophe."

In the Hawaiian story Nu'u built a large canoe with a roof and took on it his wife, three sons, and males and females of all creatures that breathed. In the Chinese story Nuwa cut off the legs of a giant turtle to hold up the sky after a great flood. Plato referred to an Egyptian flood legend in Timaeus. He wrote that the gods purified the earth by a great flood and only a few shepherds escaped by climbing a mountain. The account in the Egyptian documents say that Ra exterminated almost all of mankind by a deluge of blood because of their rebellion but relented and swore never to do it again.

One of the arguments against the historicity of the flood is that it was taken from the Sumerian account by way of the Babylonians. The Sumerian account of the flood and the Gilgamesh epic were written on cuneiform tablets and have withstood time and the elements. The Old Testament was copied on papyrus scrolls which wouldn’t have been able to withstand the elements unless preserved and kept safe and the oldest of the Dead Sea scrolls date to about 225 B.C.

"It is obvious that the differences are too great to encourage belief in direct connection between "Atra-Hasis" and Genesis, but just as obviously there is some kind of involvement in the historical traditions generally of the two peoples."
(Atra-Hasis by W. G. Lambert, A. R. Millard with The Sumerian Flood Story by Miguel Civil, 1999, p. 24)

The Babylonian account is similar to that in Genesis because the kings are listed as living very long lives but there are a few problems with this theory. If the Hebrews took the flood story from the Babylonians they would have had to insert several chapters into Genesis without objection from any scribe or Rabbi and those who read from the Torah on the Sabbath would have been fully aware of the addition. But, there’s no record of either until the school of nineteenth century higher criticism. Also, this means they would have kept a record of the kings who reigned in Edom (1 Chro. 1:43-54, Gen. 36:41-43) and a record of the descendants of Esau (Gen 36:1-29) but not have kept a record of their own ancestors and those who descended from them. But, there is the table of nations in Genesis 10 which records the descendants of Ham, Shem and Japheth.

Secular historians often use Egyptian Chronology and the Sothic dating method as a standard but on the page about Egyptian Chronology at wikipedia it says "The creation of a reliable Chronology of Ancient Egypt is a task fraught with problems."

"In the course of a single century’s research, the earliest date in Egyptian history—that of Egypt’s unification under King Menes—has plummeted from 5876 to 2900 B.C., and not even the latter year has been established beyond doubt. Do we, in fact, have any firm dates at all?" (1)

In a more recent book it says Egyptian Chronology has been revised more than twenty times and the span of thirty-one dynasties decreased by about three thousand years. (2)

Roger Henry wrote a book called Synchronized Chronology: Rethinking Middle East Antiquity. He believes the flood was mythical but calls the Hebrew historical account "rigid history" and asks some good questions:
"What happens when there is a complete rigid history paralleling Egyptian history? Which history will be trusted? Will the Old Testament Chronicles, with sequentially dated reigns of kings and judges for over 1500 years, be accepted? Or will it be assumed that disagreements with Egyptian archaeology disqualify scripture?" (3)

Writing in the first century A.D. Josephus described the migration and descendants of Noah’s sons in Antiquities of the Jews, 1:6 - How Every Nation was Denominated from their First Inhabitants. http://www.studylight.org/his/bc/wfj/antiquities/view.cgi?book=1&chapter=6

David lived about 1,000 B.C. and wrote much of the book of Psalms including Psalm 29. In that chapter he said "The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD is enthroned as King forever." (Psalm 29:10, NIV) There is a footnote in the NIV which says "or sat" and many translations say the LORD, or Jehovah, sat as King over the flood. He wrote this more than 400 years before the Jews were taken captive to Babylon. Psalm 104:6-9 says "You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them. You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth." Though the author is unknown it clearly refers to the global flood.

"To me this is like the days of Noah, when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth. So now I have sworn not to be angry with you, never to rebuke you again" (Isaiah 54:9, NIV).

Isaiah wrote this about 700 B.C., long before the deportation to Babylon. Some skeptics believe that some of Isaiah was written centuries later because of the prophecy of Cyrus and the difference styles of the first 39 chapters and the last 27 chapters. In chapters 1-39 of Isaiah there is an emphasis on God's judgment and in chapters 40-66 an emphasis on his forgiveness and redemption. This parallels the bible with 39 books in the O.T. and 27 books in the N.T. Isaiah 40:3, a prophecy about John the baptist is quoted early in all four accounts of the gospel. Again, if the Israelites inserted the last 27 chapters of Isaiah at a later date they would have done it without objection from any scribe or Rabbi and those who read from the Torah on the Sabbath would have been fully aware of the addition. It's not until the nineteenth century school of higher criticism until this idea received any support.

Many scholars believe the book of Job is one of the oldest books in the bible. In Job 22 it says "Will you keep to the old path that evil men have trod? They were carried off before their time, their foundations washed away by a flood." (Job 22:15-16, NIV). Some scholars believe that Job is the same person as Jobab, son of Joktan, in Genesis 10:26 the seventh generation from Noah. This is possible but I believe it is unlikely he is Jobab. Job's friend Eliphaz was a Temanite (Job 2:11, 42:7, 9) and may be the same Eliphaz born to Esau (Gen. 36:4) which would make Job a contemporary of Jacob. Eliphaz's firstborn son was Teman from where the term Temanite originated and Teman was identified as a chief. Esau was also called Edom (Gen. 36:1) and Teman and Edom are closely related; the terms being used synonymously in the O.T. (Jer. 49:7, 20, Oba. 1:8-9, Eze. 25:13). Regardless of the question of Jobab and Eliphaz in Genesis, Job lived to be 140 years old and wouldn't have lived many generations after the flood (Job 42:16).

The Ebla tablets are from the 23rd century BC and are older than the Babylonian cuneiform tablets. I have read that the flood is mentioned in the Ebla tablets but have not been able to find a specific reference. As a result of the discovery of the Ebla tablets, an archaeologist commented "It is now my belief that the story in Genesis 14 not only corresponds in content to the Ebla Tablet, but that the Genesis account derives from the same period. Briefly put, the account in Genesis 14, and also in Chapters 18-19, does not belong to the second millennium BC, still less to the first millennium BC, but rather to the third millennium BC." (4)

Some who don't believe there was a global flood say that many of the flood legends were brought by missionaries to tribes and island dwelling people but, so far, I've seen no evidence offered for this. If there is reason to believe this is true then there are some questions. Why of all the stories in the bible, did other cultures choose to incorporate the flood story from the bible overwhelmingly over all other stories except for creation? Reverend William Ellis visited Hawaii from 1822 to 1823 and learned of different flood legends in the Hawaiian islands. He spoke with the governor of Hawaii and said "The longevity of mankind in the days of Noah, also surprised him. Comparing it with the period of human life at the present time, he said, "By and by, men will not live more than forty years." (5)

Genesis 6:3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."

Obviously this doesn’t mean every person from that point on would live to be 120 years old and life spans decreased over time. Jacob lived several centuries after the flood and died at 147 years old (Genesis 47:28). The oldest people in modern times whose ages have been documented are Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan, who lived to 120, and Jeanne Louise Calment of France who lived to 122. Some of those who’ve claimed to be the oldest living person have had their claims questioned but on the wikipedia page about Ms. Calment it says "Her lifespan has been thoroughly documented by scientific study; more records have been produced to verify her age than for any other."

The Ark

In 2003 nine members of the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Engineering published a paper called Safety Investigation of Noah’s Ark in a Seaway. Their conclusion was that the ark could have navigated seas with waves higher than 30 meters. As for the belief that no tar type sealant would work to prevent leakage and eventual sinking within a few days I doubt that is true. People have used things found in nature for building and manufacturing long before the industrial revolution and people still use natural today in different medicines.

1. The Hittites by Johannes Lehmann, 1977, p. 204

2. Riddle of the Exodus: Sartling Parallels Between Ancienct Jewish Sources and the Egyptian Archaeological Record by James Long, 2006, p. 8

3. Synchronized Chronology: Rethinking Middle East Antiquity by Roger Henry, p. 2

4. D. N. Freedman, in lecture "Archaeology and Biblical Religion," 1978. Quoted by C. Wilson in "Ebla Tablets Secrets of a Forgotten City," Master Books, 1979, pp. 126-127

5. A Journal of a Tour Around Hawaii, the Largest of the Sandwich Islands by William Ellis, p. 227

These are some wonderful resources, so I'll leave them in place as reference.

However, since the intent of the forum is to answer non-Christian's questions...and we haven't seen the OP since October last year...in order to comply with the rules of the forum we're going to lock the thread.

If the OP returns, it will be re-opened.

Thanks to all who've participated!