In a previous post (written before I dropped off planet earth for a while), I had brought up the frequently asked question about “How did Noah collect animals from the different continents?”
Some ask this as a genuine question; some skeptics ask it to place a stumbling block before others, claiming that Noah would have had to have traveled to places like Australia because that is the only place we find marsupials today. It is a fair question however.
First, it should be noted that God brought the animals to Noah:
Genesis 6:20 “Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.” (King James Version, emphasis mine)
Furthermore, Creationary thinkers would claim that the continents had not yet divided at the time of Noah’s flood. In fact, did you know that the idea of continental drift originally came from the Bible?
Antonio Snider-Pellegrini was reading his Bible one day, and noted in Genesis where God had separated the waters of earth “into one place.” (Genesis 1:9) Pellegrini then deduced that if the waters were gathered into one place, then logically the land must also have been in one place. However, the lands were not in “one place” now, therefore the lands must have divided into continents. The most logical time for this, Biblically speaking, would have been the time of the great flood of Noah.
And so Pellegrini toyed with fitting the continents together, and even published this in his 1858 book, La Création et ses mystères dévoilés (“Creation and its Mysteries Unveiled”).
Decades later, evolutionary scientists came along, hijacked Pellegrini’s continental drift model, claiming continental drift took millions of years. Thus continental drift, while actually a Biblical idea in its roots, is used as an alleged evidence against the Biblical timeline!
Interestingly, pretty much all Creationists and Evolutionists will agree that all of the continents were connected at one point. Most Creationary thinkers would say that this division happened during the world-wide flood. Therefore prior to the flood, all the animals were right there on Noah’s continent.
Pretty much all Creationists and Evolutionists also agree that even after continental division, there were still land bridges connecting the continents for many years. You could literally walk to Australia and Antarctica from Canada. And thus the dispersion of animals and people after the flood is also explained. One skeptic going through the Big Valley Creation Science Museum challenged me, asking why the marsupials were isolated to Australia. He claimed that they evolved there. I pointed out that according to his timescale, there were land bridges connecting all the continents for millions of years, and thus the marsupials could have migrated out of Australia. They did not. The fact that marsupials seem isolated to Australia neither affirms evolution, nor causes Creation any problems.
- Ian Juby