Creationist models are often criticized for being too vague to have any predictive
value. A literal interpretation of the Flood story in Genesis, however, does imply certain
physical consequences which can be tested against what we actually observe. Most, if not
all, observations, discredit the flood hypothesis, as you can see from what follows. (Most
the the arguments below are based only on a literal reading of Genesis, but some
specifically refer to the flood model of Whitcomb & Morris .) Can any
Creationists address even half of the points in this list?
Before the flood:
How did animals travel from all over the world?
Some, like the sloths, can't travel overland very well at all.
Some, like koalas, require a special diet. How did they bring it along?
Some, like the dodo, must have lived on islands. (If they didn't, they would have been
easy prey for other animals.)
If animals all lived fairly close to Noah before the
flood (as Whitcomb & Morris suggest), how were they all able to survive the predation
and competition pressures from all the others, and why doesn't evidence of their living
together show up in fossil distributions?
How was the ark loaded? The Bible says all the animals were all loaded in seven days
[Gen. 7:4]. Even if there were only 9 million species to be loaded, there would have to be
an average of 30 animals per second going through the ark's one door.
How was the ark made seaworthy? The longest wooden ships in modern seas are about 300
feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps and leak so badly they must be
constantly pumped. The ark was 450 feet long [Gen. 6:15].
Life on the ark:
How did all the different species fit on the ark? 10 million species is a reasonable
estimate of species presently alive (though estimates vary widely; see May, 1992). They
all would have had to fit in about 100,000 square feet of deck space [Gen. 6:15-16]. Since
most animals are small, they probably could have all fit, but only if you allow very
little room around them. Caged animals probably wouldn't all fit, nor would the animals
have any room to exercise. The dinosaurs, mastodons, and other now-extinct animals would
have been aboard the ark as well [Gen. 7:15; Morris, 1993], and they would take up a lot
of room. Bracings, corridors, bilges, etc. would have taken up a lot of room, too. If you
hypothesize significantly fewer species on the ark than now exist, you must explain
evolution rates faster than any evolutionists propose to account for all the present
How did Noah supply food and water for all the animals for a year? [Gen. 6:21] Food for
a year would have taken up many times the space of the animals themselves. (I know of no
animals, except some desert amphibians, that hibernate for anywhere close to a year.)
How was the food kept fresh for a year? (Aphids, e.g., can't eat wilted plants.)
What did the carnivorous animals eat, especially those which require fresh meat?
How did creatures needing special environments survive on the ark?
How do you explain how all host-specific parasites/diseases made do with only one pair
of hosts (and if they did OK, how the hosts survived!)
How was the ark kept livable? Shoveling the manure of the ungulates alone must have been
a full time job for eight people.
How well ventilated was the ark? The body heat from millions of closely packed animals
must have been very intense.
Where did the water come from? (It would take 4.4 billion cubic kilometers to cover Mt.
Where did it go?
If you accept the vapor canopy model of some Creationists, you must answer some equally
difficult questions, such as: What kept the water up before the Flood? What happened to
the heat of condensation of all that water? Why didn't ultraviolet light from the sun
break all the water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms and blow them away?
Geological effects of the flood:
How were mountains formed? Many very tall mountains are composed of sedimentary rocks.
(The summit of Everest is composed of deep-marine limestone, with fossils of ocean-bottom
dwelling crinoids [Gansser, 1964].) If these were laid down during the flood, how did they
reach their present height, and when were the valleys between them eroded away? Keep in
mind that many valleys were clearly carved by glacial erosion, which is a slow process.
How does a global flood explain angular unconformities, where one set of layers of
sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted) and eroded before a second set of
layers were deposited on top? They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition
(more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to
account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed.
When did granite batholiths form? Some of these are intruded into older sediments and
have younger sediments on their eroded top surfaces. It takes a long time for magma to
cool into granite, nor does granite erode very quickly. [For example, see Donohoe &
Grantham, 1989, for locations of contact between the South Mountain Batholith and the
Meugma Group of sediments, as well as some angular unconformities.]
How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for evolution? Ecological
zonation and hydrodynamic sorting fail to explain:
the extremely good sorting observed. Why didn't at least one dinosaur make it to the
high ground with the elephants?
the relative positions of plants and other non-motile life. (Yun, 1989, describes
beautifully preserved algae from Late Precambrian sediments. Why don't any modern-looking
plants appear that low in the geological column?)
why some groups of organisms, such as mollusks, are found in many geologic strata.
why organisms (such as brachiopods) which are very similar hydrodynamically (all nearly
the same size, shape, and weight) are still perfectly sorted.
why extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present animals didn't survive as
well. Why did no pterodons make it to high ground?
how coral reefs hundreds of feet thick and miles long were preserved intact with other
fossils below them.
why small organisms dominate the lower strata, whereas fluid mechanics says they would
sink slower and thus end up in upper strata.
How can a single flood be responsible for such extensively detailed layering? One
formation is six kilometers thick. If we grant 400 days for this to settle, and ignore
possible compaction since the flood, we still have 15 meters of sediment settling *per
day*. And yet despite this, the chemical properties of the rock are neatly layered, with
great changes (e.g.) in percent carbonate occurring within a few centimeters in the
vertical direction. How does such a neat sorting process occur in the violent context of a
universal flood dropping 15 meters of sediment per day? How can you explain a thin layer
of high carbonate sediment being deposited over an area of ten thousand square kilometers
for some thirty minutes, followed by thirty minutes of low carbonate deposition, followed
by thirty minutes more of .... well, I think you get the picture. [From: Bill Hyde; see
also Kent & Olsen, 1992]
How do you explain the formation of varves? The Green River formation in Wyoming
contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves, identical to those being laid down today in
certain lakes. The sediments are so fine that each layer would have required over a month
to settle. [From: firstname.lastname@example.org (William H. Jefferys)]
How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras and
several different (independent) radiometric and nonradiometric dating methods? [Short et.
Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? A worldwide flood would be
expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope
ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and
probably other evidence. All such evidence is lacking in annual layers dating back 40,000
How were limestone deposits formed? Limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of
microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those
animals alive when the flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence
of fossils in the deposits?
How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of
planktonic animals 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter [Bignot, 1985]. Objects this small
settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. [Twenhofel, 1961] In a year of the flood, they could
have settled about half a meter. [From email@example.com (glenn r morton)]
Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have originated only on the
surface, such as:
footprints. [Gore, 1993, has a photograph (p. 16-17) showing dinosaur footprints in one
layer with water ripples in layers above and below it. Gilette & Lockley, 1989, have
several more examples, including dinosaur footprints on top of a coal seam (p. 361-366).]
How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic flood?
How could a one-year flood deposit explain stratigraphic sections showing a dozen or
more mature forests layered atop each other, all with upright trunks, in-place roots, and
well-developed soil? Such layers of forests appear in many locations. One example, the
Joggins section along the Bay of Fundy, shows a continuous section 2750 meters thick
(along a 48-km sea cliff) with multiple in-place forests, some separated by hundreds of
feet of strata, some even showing evidence of forest fires [Ferguson, 1988]. For other
examples, see Dawson, 1868; Cristie & McMillan, 1991; Gastaldo, 1990; Yuretich, 1994.]
Creationists point to logs sinking in a lake below Mt. St. Helens as an example of how a
flood can deposit vertical trunks, but deposition by flood fails to explain the roots, the
soil, the layering, and other features found in such places.
How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? Why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded
as much as the Appalacians during the flood?
How do you explain fossil mineralization - the replacement of the original material with
a different mineral?
Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly mineralized, including some that
biblical archaeology says are quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the earth
in this diluvian geology. For example, remains of Egyptian commoners buried near the time
of Moses aren't extensively mineralized.
Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite variable mineralization.
Dinosaur remains are often extensively mineralized.
Trilobite remains are usually mineralized - and in different sites, fossils of the same
species are composed of different materials.
How are these observations explained by a sorted deposition of remains in a single
episode of global flooding? [From: firstname.lastname@example.org (Joel J. Hanes)]
How could the flood deposit layers of solid salt, sometimes meters in width, interbedded
with sediments containing marine fossils? This apparently occurs when a body of salt water
has its fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can occur more or
less at random times in the geological history, and have characteristic fossils on either
side. Therefore, if the fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood,
there are, it seems, only two choices: (1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at
the same time, during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or (2) the salt is a later
intrusion. I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory of flood
deposition of the geologic column and its fossils. [From: email@example.com (Thomas
Marlowe). See also Jackson et al., 1990]
How were sedimentary deposits recrystalized and plastically deformed in the short time
since the flood? The stretched pebble conglomerate in Death Valley National Monument
(Wildrose Canyon Rd., 15 mi. south of Hwy. 190), for example, contains streambed pebbles
metamorphosed to quartzite and stretched to 3 or more times their original length.
Plastically deformed stone is also common around salt diapirs [Jackson et. al., 1990].
How were hematite layers laid down? Standard theory is that they were laid down before
Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen. In an oxygen-rich regime, they would almost
certainly be impossible.
How are the polar ice caps possible? Such a mass of water as the flood would have
provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds. No way to drop them exactly
back onto their original location, or to regrow them. (In fact, the Greenland ice
cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.) [From: Bob
A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic
amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment,
(3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from
seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show
When did impact craters on the earth occur? Geological evidence indicates that they
would have formed in sediments early enough for erosion and crustal movements to partially
erase them. Creationists Whitcomb and DeYoung suggest they occurred during the year of
Noah's flood. But the heat from all those impacts concentrated in one year would have
vaporized the flood waters. [Fezer, pp 45-46]
And before you argue that fossil evidence was dated and interpreted to meet evolutionary
assumptions, remember that the geological column and the relative dates therein were laid
out by creationists before Darwin even formulated his theory. (See, for example,
Moore , or the closing pages of Dawson , who was cited above.)
Biological effects of the flood:
How did all the fish survive? Some require cool clear water, some need brackish
water, some need ocean water, some need water even saltier. A flood would have destroyed
at least some of these habitats.
How did short-lived species survive? Adult mayflies on the ark would have died in a few
days, and the larvae of many mayflies require shallow fresh running water. Many other
insects would face similar problems.
How did all the modern plant species survive? Many plants (seeds and all) would be
killed by being submerged for a few months. Most plants require established soils to
grow--soils which would have been stripped by the Flood. Some plants germinate only after
being exposed to fire or after being ingested by animals; these conditions would be rare
(to put it mildly) after the Flood.
How do you explain the survival of any sensitive marine life (e.g., coral)? Since most
coral are found in shallow water, the turbidity created by the runoff from the land would
effectively cut them off from the sun. The silt would cover the reef after the rains were
over, and the coral would ALL DIE. By the way, the rates at which coral deposits calcium
are well known, and some highly mature reefs (such a the great barrier) have been around
for MILLIONS of years to be deposited to their observed thickness. [From:
Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating?
How does the flood explain the geological sorting of pollen? Fossil pollen is one of the
more important indicators of different levels of strata. Each plant has different and
distinct pollen, and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to
see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the pollen hydraulically sorted by
the flood water so that the climatic evidence is different for each layer? Furthermore,
pollen and spores are found in association with the trunks, leaves, branches, and roots
produced by the same plants [Stewart, 1983]. How could a flood sort all of them together
How does a flood explain the accuracy of "coral clocks"? The moon is slowly
sapping the earth's rotational energy. The earth should have rotated more quickly in the
distant past, meaning that a day would have been less than 24 hours, and there would have
been more days per year. Corals can be dated by the number of "daily" growth
layers per "annual" growth layer. Devonian corals, for example, show nearly 400
days per year. There is an exceedingly strong correlation between the "supposed
age" of a wide range of fossils (corals, stromatolites, and a few others -- collected
from geologic formations throughout the column and from locations all over the world) and
the number of days per year that their growth pattern shows. The agreement between these
clocks, and radiometric dating, and the theory of superposition... is a little hard to
explain away as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in a 300-day-long flood.
[From: firstname.lastname@example.org (Chris Stassen)]
If a single flood is responsible for all fossils, where were all those animals when they
were alive? From "Six 'Flood' Arguments Creationists Can't Answer" by Robert
Schadewald, Creation/Evolution IV (Summer 1982), pp. 12-13: "Scientific
creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the remains of animals
that perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of
fossils in "fossil graveyards" as evidence for the Flood. In particular,
creationists seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to
contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160;
Gish, p. 61). As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that
all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood. "Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist
at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the
animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with
the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows
that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would
be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively,
I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate fossils on earth
[land fossils only--whj]. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100
living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a
noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded." A thousand kilometers' length of
arctic coastal plain, according to experts in Leningrad [N. Newell, Creation and
Evolution; 1982, Columbia U. Press, p. 62], contains about 500,000 *tons* of tusks.
Even assuming that the entire population was preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia
had wall-to-wall mammoths before this "event."
How do you explain the relative commonness of aquatic fossils? A flood would have washed
over everything equally, so terrestrial organisms should be roughly as abundant as aquatic
ones (or more abundant, since Creationists hypothesize greater land area before the Flood)
in the fossil record. Yet shallow marine environments account for by far the most fossils.
Even if there room physically for all the large animals which now exist only as fossils,
how could they have all coexisted in a stable ecology before the flood? Montana alone
would have had to support a diversity of herbivores orders of magnitude larger than
anything now observed.
Historical effects of the flood:
Why is there no mention of the flood in the records of Egyptian or Chinese civilizations
which existed at the time? Biblical dates (I Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation
lengths given in Genesis) place the flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first
temple. We can construct reliable chronologies for near Eastern history, particularly for
Egypt, from many kinds of records from the literate cultures in the near East. These
records are independent of, but supported by, dating methods such as dendrochronology and
carbon-14. The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B.C. +/- some small delta,
placing the Flood around 2250 B.C. Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have
written records dating well back before 2250 B.C. (the Great Pyramid, for example dates to
the 26th century B.C., 300 years before the Biblical date for the Flood). No sign in
Egyptian inscriptions of this global flood around 2250 B.C.
Why are no human artifacts found except in the very uppermost strata? If, at the time of
the flood, the earth was overpopulated by people with technology for shipbuilding, why
were none of their tools or buildings mixed with with trilobite or dinosaur fossils?
How did the human population rebound so fast? Geneologies in Genesis put the Tower of
Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19]. How did the world
population regrow so fast to make its construction (and the city around it) possible?
Similarly, there would have been very few people around to build Stonehenge and the
Pyramids, found the Sumarian and Indus Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc.
Aftermath of the flood:
How did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the Arctic, etc., when the
kinds of environment they require to live doesn't exist between the two points.
How were ecological interdependencies preserved as animals migrated from Ararat? Did the
yucca an the yucca moth migrate together across the Atlantic? Were there, a few thousand
years ago, unbroken giant sequoia forests between Ararat and California to allow
indigenous bark and cone beetles to migrate?
Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in
Indonesia? The same argument applies to any number of groups of plants and animals.
How could more than a handful of species survive in a devastated habitat?
How could more than a handful of the predator species on the ark have survived, with
only two individuals of their prey to eat? All of the predators at the top of the food
pyramid require larger numbers of food animals beneath them on the pyramid, which in turn
require large numbers of the animals they prey on, and so on, down to the primary
producers (plants...etc.) at the bottom. And if the predators survived, how did the other
animals survive being preyed on?
How could more than a handful of species survive random influences that affect
populations? Isolated populations with fewer than 20 members are usually doomed even when
extraordinary measures are taken to protect them. [Simberloff, 1988]
How could more than a handful of species survive the inbreeding depression that comes
with establishing a population from a single mating pair?
How do you explain the genetic variation in all populations today?
The Bible states that seven pairs of all "clean" animals, but only one pair
each of other animals, were taken aboard the ark. Thus, after the flood, clean animals
should have started with seven times the genetic variation. (Clean animals could have had
up to 28 alleles of any gene, while non-clean animals would have been limited to 4
alleles.) Why do we not observe a correlation between genetic variation and Hebrew dietary
Is the flood model consistent with the Bible?
The model seems to say that large numbers of kinds of land animals became extinct
because of the flood [e.g., Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, p. 69n], while Genesis repeatedly
says that Noah was ordered to take a representative sample of all kinds of land animals on
the Ark to save them from extinction, and that Noah did as ordered. Which is right?
Genesis 6:20 and 7:14-15 say there were two of each kind of fowl and clean beasts, yet
Genesis 7:2-3,5 says they came in sevens. How can a literal interpretation be appropriate
if the text is self-contradictory?
How could Noah have gathered male and female of each kind [Gen. 7:15-16] when some
species are asexual, others are parthenogenic and have only females, and others (such as
earthworms) are hermaphrodites? And what about social animals like ants and termites which
need the whole nest to survive?
What was used to waterproof the ark? We are told that God instructed Noah to coat the
ark inside and out with the naturally- occurring hydrocarbon pitch, which causes a bit of
a problem since, according to Whitcomb and Morris, all oil, tar and coal deposits were
formed when organic matter was buried DURING the flood.
If your style of Biblical interpretation makes you take the flood literally, then
shouldn't you also believe in a flat and stationary earth? [Dan. 4:10-11, Matt. 4:8, 1
Chron. 16:30, Psalms 93:1, ...]
In fact, is there any reason at all why the flood story should be taken literally? Jesus
used parables; why wouldn't God do so, too?
Does the flood story make the whole Bible less credible? Davis Young is a working
geologist who also is an Evangelical Christian. He has personal doubts about some aspects
of evolution, but he makes a devastating case against "Flood Geology." He writes
(Christianity and the Age of the Earth, p. 163): "The maintenance of modern
creationism and Flood geology not only is useless apologetically with unbelieving
scientists, it is harmful. Although many who have no scientific training have been swayed
by creationist arguments, the unbelieving scientist will reason that a Christianity that
believes in such nonsense must be a religion not worthy of his interest...Modern
creationism in this sense is apologetically and evangelistically ineffective. It could
even be a hindrance to the gospel. "Another possible danger is that in presenting the
gospel to the lost and in defending God's truth we ourselves will seem to be false. It is
time for Christian people to recognize that the defense of this modern, young-Earth,
Flood-geology creationism is simply not truthful. It is simply not in accord with the
facts that God has given. Creationism must be abandoned by Christians before harm is
done...." [From: email@example.com (William H. Jefferys) See also Young,
If God is omnipotent, why not kill what He wanted killed directly? Why resort to a
roundabout method that requires innumerable additional miracles?
The whole idea was to rid the wicked people from the world. Did it work?
Finally, even if the flood model weren't riddled by all these problems, why should we
accept it? What it does attempt to explain is already explained more accurately,
consistently, and thoroughly by conventional geology and biology, and the flood model
leaves many other things unexplained, even unexplainable. How is flood geology useful?
(My thanks to R. Andrew MacRae for supplying most of these references.)
Bignot, G., 1985. Micropaleontology Boston: IHRDC, p. 75
Clemmenson, L.B. and Abrahamsen, K., 1983. Aeolian stratification in desert sediments,
Arran basin (Permian), Scotland. Sedimentology, v.30, p.311-339.
Cristie, R.L., and McMillan, N.J. (eds.), 1991. Tertiary fossil forests of the Geodetic
Hills, Axel Heiberg Island, Arctic Archipelago, Geological Survey of Canada, Bulletin
Dawson, J.W., 1868. Acadian Geology. The Geological Structure, Organic Remains, and
Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, 2nd edition.
MacMillan and Co.: London, 694pp.
Donohoe, H.V. Jr. and Grantham, R.G. (eds.), 1989. Geological Highway Map of Nova
Scotia, 2nd edition. Atlantic Geoscience Society, Halifax, Nova Scotia. AGS Special
Publication no. 1, 1:640 000.
Dundes, Alan (ed.), 1988. The Flood Myth, University of California Press,
Berkeley and London.
Eyles, N. and Miall, A.D., 1984, Glacial Facies IN: Walker, R.G., Facies Models, Second
Edition. Geoscience Canada, Reprint Series 1, p.15-38.
Fezer, Karl D., 1993. "Creationism: Please Don't Call It Science"
Creation/Evolution, 13:1 (Summer 1993), 45-49.
Ferguson, Laing, 1988. The Fossil Cliffs of Joggins. Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, Nova
Gansser, A., 1964. Geology of the Himalayas, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., New York,
Gastaldo, R. A., 1990, Early Pennsylvanian swamp forests in the Mary Lee coal zone,
Warrior Basin, Alabama. in R. A. Gastaldo et. al., Carboniferous Coastal Environments and
Paleocommunities of the Mary Lee Coal Zone, Marion and Walker Counties, Alabama. Guidebook
for the Field Trip VI, Alabama Geological Survey, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. pp. 41-54.
Gilette, D.D. and Lockley, M.G. (eds.), 1989. Dinosaur Tracks and Traces,
Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 454pp.
Gore, Rick, 1993. "Dinosaurs" National Geographic, 183:1 (Jan. 1993), 2-54.
Hubert, J.F., and Mertz, K.A., Jr., 1984. Eolian sandstones in Upper Triassic-Lower
Jurassic red beds of the Fundy Basin, Nova Scotia. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, v.54,
Jackson, M.P.A., et al., 1990. Salt diapirs of the Great Kavir, Central Iran.
Geological Society of America, Memoir 177, 139pp.
Kent and Olsen, 1992. (Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory)
Discover, Jan. 1992
Kocurek, G., and Dott, R.H., 1981. Distinctions and uses of stratification types in the
interpretation of eolian sand. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, v.51, no.2, p.579-595.
May, Robert M., 1992. "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?" Scientific
American, 267:4 (Oct. 1992), 42-49.
Moore, Robert A., 1983. "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark"
Creation/Evolution, #11 (Winter 1983), 1-43. The entire issue is about the ark. Moore
lists over one hundred references.
Moore, James R., 1973. "Charles Lyell and the Noachian Deluge", in Dundes, The
Flood Myth, 1988.
Morris, John D., 1993. "Did dinosaurs survive the flood?" Back to Genesis,
#53 (May 1993), d.
Reinhardt, J., and Sigleo, W.R. (eds.), 1989. Paleosols and weathering through geologic
time: principles and applications. Geological Society of America Special Paper 216, 181pp.
Short, D. A., J. G. Mengel, T. J. Crowley, W. T. Hyde and G. R. North, 1991. Filtering
of Milankovitch Cycles by Earth's Geography. Quaternary Research. 35, 157-173. (Re an
independent method of dating the Green River formation)
Simberloff, David, 1988. The Contribution of Population and Community Biology to
Conservation Science. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 19, 473-511.
Stewart, W.N., 1983. Paleontology and the Evolution of Plants. Cambridge Univ.
Press, Cambridge, 405pp.
Tarnocai, C. and Smith, C.A.S., 1991. Paleosols of the Fossil Forest area, Axel Heiberg
Island. IN: Cristie & McMillan [see above], p.171-187.
Twenhofel, William H., 1961. Treatise on Sedimentation, Dover, p. 50-52.
Whitcomb, John C. and Morris, Henry M., 1961. The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia.
Wright, V. P., 1994. Paleosols in shallow marine sequences. Earth-Science Reviews, 37,
367-395. See also pp. 135-137.
Young, Davis, 1988. Christianity and the Age of the Earth. Artisan Sales,
Thousand Oaks, CA.
Yun, Zhang, 1989. "Multicellular thallophytes with differentiated tissues from
Late Proterozoic phosphate rocks of South China" Lethaia, #22, 113-132.
Yuretich, Richard F., 1984. Yellowstone fossil forests: New evidence for burial in
place, Geology 12, 159-162. See also Fritz, W.J. & Yuretich, R.F., Comment and
reply, Geology 20, 638-639.
SYDNEY, Australia (Reuter) - An archeological site believed by some Christians to
contain Noah's Ark was being used as Turkey's equivalent of the Loch Ness monster to raise
research funds, a Sydney court was told Thursday.
Australian geology professor Ian Plimer said the site on Mount Ararat, which he
believes is nothing more than a large mound of mud, was being used as an
``income-generating mechanism'' by the Turkish geologist in charge of the site.
``I am sympathetic to the financial position he is in, but I am certainly not
sympathetic to the scientific fraud,'' Plimer told the Federal Court of Australia.
After visiting the Turkish site in 1994, Plimer said he challenged the site project
leader about its authenticity. According to the Bible, Noah built the Ark to rescue his
family and animals from a 40-day flood called down by a wrathful God.
``He said he was using this site to raise funds from Christian fundamentalists. He said
he doesn't believe in Noah's Ark and that this is his equivalent of Loch Ness,'' Plimer
said referring to the mythical Scottish lake monster.
``He has supported the views of various Christian fundamentalists that yes, this is the
site of Noah's Ark. As scientist to scientist, in essence he apologized and said to me,
'Sorry, this is the only way I can fund my research'.''
Plimer and U.S. marine salvage expert David Fasold are suing creationist Allen Roberts
for ``misleading and deceptive conduct'' in Australian lectures on his explorations of the
Creationists believe the world was created over six days, as in the Book of Genesis,
some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
The protagonists say the trial is not about the Biblical story of creation, but fair
trading laws -- although many in the court including the judge see a battle between
science and creationism just below the surface.
Roberts, held hostage for three weeks by Kurdish separatists in 1991 after visiting the
Turkish site, does not say he believes the Turkish site is Noah's Ark.
``If this is not Noah's Ark, then what is it?'' Roberts would ask in concluding his
Plimer said he had found a golf tee and bits of plastic at the Turkish site, adding:
``If Noah's Ark was 4,000 years old, the ancient game from St Andrews would not yet have
By Dean -- I couldn't resist adding this:
I have a humorous verse in the Bible. I don't know whether it is on your web page or
problem I see with the Global Flood is that with Mt. Everest being 29,035 feet
(8,850 m) above sea level, it would have to rain on the entire globe an average
of about 6 inches (15.2 cm) per
minute for 40 days and 40 nights. The recorded world record for rainfall
in one minute is 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) - -and
it occurred at one remote location, not globally, and only for that one
minute, not at a constant rate for an extended period of time. According
to Genesis 7:20, all the earth was covered by 15 cubits which would equate to
about 25 feet (7.6 m). So, with Mt. Everest being the highest point in the
world, that would equate to 29,060 feet (8,860 m) of water above sea level.
Anyone familiar with SCUBA diving knows that ocean water pressure at 33 feet (10
m) equals one atmosphere of air on earth. Fresh water is 34 feet per
atmosphere, so we're not talking about a big difference either way. At 33
feet of water per atmosphere, if we are under 29,060 feet (8,860 m) of water in
the form of vapor in the air before the rain began, this would equate to air
pressure at the earth's surface of approximately 12,775 psi as compared to the
actual earth surface air pressure of a mere 14.5 psi. (29,060 divided by
33 equals about 881. 14.5 psi times 881 equals about 12,775 psi.) It
would be impossible for anything to live under these conditions in that not only
would the air pressure be too great, but as a result of such intense pressure,
the ambient temperature at the earth's surface would be unbearably hot.
And we're not talking triple digits hot; we're probably talking quintuple digits
hot. Anyone with an elementary level of knowledge in physics knows that as
a gas expands under reduced pressure, its temperature decreases, and as a gas
contracts under increased pressure, its temperature increases. This is the
primary reason why air at the earth's surface at higher elevations is generally
cooler than that of lower elevations at the same latitude. Therefore, in
order believe that such a flood actually happened, you would have to believe in
an awful lot of magic. It never ceases to amaze me the things that grown
people will believe!