The whole silly Flood story

2002, Oct 1st | Emner: Creationism, Pseudohistory, Religion

by Bob Riggins

Creationists are probably more defensive about the Flood than any other part of their mythology. One indication of that is the fact that the seminal work of modern creationism (oxymoron) was called The Genesis Flood. The Flood story apparently required lots of explanation and justification if anyone were to take creationism seriously. An instantaneous supernatural creation by an omnipotent God is somehow easier to swallow than the cobbled-up mish-mash of legends that became the biblical Flood story. Consider a few minor difficulties and childish questions:

Were pairs of every species living on Earth taken aboard the Ark? All living and extinct species? All 50 billion or so species that have ever lived on Earth? Or only land animals and birds that couldn’t survive by swimming for several months? We’re still talking many millions of species. And while we’re at it, why does my Bible state clearly and unambiguously that two of each kind of animal were taken aboard, then immediately afterwards it seems to correct itself by informing us that seven of each “clean” animal were boarded, and then immediately after THAT it insists that two of every kind were loaded? How did Noah know which species were clean several thousand years before God imparted those laws to Moses? And if Noah knew about “clean” animals, why wasn’t that knowledge passed down through the generations? Is it possible that the whole business about “clean” animals necessary for sacrifices was tacked on later by a bungling editor who forgot to check the context for obvious contradictions?

I have compiled a list of “Things Creationists Hate” which might also be of interest.

The List of Flood Problems

Kinds? The Brutality and Atrocities
Somewhere Over That Non-Existent Rainbow Whatta Deluge!
Noah’s Ark Size of the Earth
The Slow Rate of Evolution The Number of Species in the World
Elephants Deep-sea Fish
The Land Down Under Koalas
Gonorrhea Noah and His Ancestors
Sloths Cute Little Bunny Rabbits
Real Flood Evidence Egyptians
Plants Fruit Flies
Commandments Against Incest The Gilgamesh Epic
Population Centers Asexual Animals
The Improbable Ice Caps The Garden of Eden

OK, how about “kinds”: Two of the dog “kind,” two of the antelope “kind,” two of the elephant “kind,” two of the diplodocus “kind,”ad finitum? That certainly cuts down on the crowd, but then we need a definition of what a “kind” is. Creationists can’t seem to manage a consistent definition of “kind”, even among themselves. Some, after thinking about it long and hard, arrive at a definition of “kind” that is indistinguishable from “species.” But that doesn’t solve the problem of way too many animals on the boat. Others want to define “kind” as inclusively as possible to solve the space problem. But then incredibly supercharged evolution is required after the Flood to expand each “kind” into the thousands (in some cases) of species belonging to that “kind.” Whatever the solution, 99+% of all species of animals became extinct, either between the time of creation and the Flood, or during the Flood, or immediately thereafter.

One must then wonder about an incredibly inept or wasteful creation in which virtually all animal species were doomed to extinction within a couple thousand years. Having dared to broach the subject of a God who seems less than omniscient (didn’t He know all this was going to happen ahead of time?), consider also limited omnipotence. Why would God need a lengthy Flood to destroy miscreant humans? Why destroy billions upon billions of other living things? Why not simply snap His fingers and make all the bad people disappear? (Note to creationists who are seriously bent out of shape by these “sacrilegious” questions: this is not an attack upon the qualifications or abilities of the Almighty, but upon your risible notion of Him and what He has done.)

The Brutality and Atrocities
Did ALL those people deserve brutal and terrifying deaths? The children? The two-year-old little girls? The newborn infants? The unborn fetuses? Why don’t creationists get all exercised about the murder of those unborn? And of course there’s Noah and his kin, who, of all the human race, deserved to survive. That would be the same Noah whose first crop after the Flood was wine grapes. In celebration of all the blessings bestowed upon him, he got drunk as a skunk and lay around naked. Then when his thoughtful son Ham tried to help him out by getting help to cover his bare butt, Noah cursed him and his descendants forever (and God, apparently, backed up that curse [and biblical literalists have used that as a justification for slavery and segregation of blacks {whom they imagine to be "Hamites"}, among other atrocities]). Was that mean drunk the best of the human race that God could come up with?

Somewhere Over That Non-Existent Rainbow
Then there’s the rainbow. If you want to hear some really creative additions to Genesis, ask a young-Earther how there could be no rainbows for a couple thousand years, until after the Flood. You may get some truly bizarre planetary climate models, involving such things as water soaking up through the ground to keep plants alive (let’s see–if there is so much water underground that it soaks UP to the surface, isn’t that what we call a bog? Some paradise!), or a “vapor canopy” that watered the Earth with a kind of fog, then fell as the Flood rains. If you think conditions on Venus are hellish, try modelling the atmospheric conditions on an Earth with all the gigatons of ocean water added to the atmosphere! If Adam’s descendants were protected from such incredible temperatures and pressures (the natural physical result of such super-greenhouse conditions) by some sort of miraculous intervention, then again this is not creation science, just creation magic. (I’ve heard creationists attribute the mythical long life spans of Old Testament notables to such atmospheric conditions. I invite them to try it for themselves to see if it promotes longevity.) But the purpose of the rainbow is what really puzzles me. God states (and repeats–Noah must have been a slow learner [or chronically drunk?]) that the rainbow signifies a promise by God that He will never flood out the whole Earth again. Most creationists I know are dead certain that God WILL destroy the Earth (and soon!), but just not with water next time (most seem to favor fire, but personally I expect it to be peanut butter [extra chunky]). But wait–if God reserves the right to destroy all mankind, then what’s the point of promising not to use water again? We won’t be drowned again, but burnt to cinders? Thanks a lot.

And yet more rainbow nonsense: God states multiple times that it will be in a cloud, He will “set [His] bow in the cloud.” Rainbows aren’t formed or seen “in clouds.” They appear when the sun shines on raindrops and is refracted back at the proper angle to the viewer. They are often seen against a backdrop of clouds, but they are not in the clouds. As a matter of fact, the rainbow doesn’t even exist where it appears to be! It’s an optical illusion that’s “in” the light reaching viewers at the proper angle from sun and rain. You can fly a plane through the exact spot where a ground viewer reports seeing a rainbow. You won’t see anything around you but air and water. You can also make your own rainbows with a garden hose in full sunlight–no clouds required at all. One more: God states unequivocally that the rainbow is to remind Him of the no-Flood clause. If God has such a faulty memory that He needs such cosmic Post-it Notes, we’re in big trouble.

Whatta Deluge!
And from Barrie: 40 days and 40 nights of rain raised the ocean levels by 29,000 feet to cover the Earth. How could anyone survive a 30 foot an hour deluge? Approximately 6 in. a minute! Maybe God provided Noah and his family with snorkels ?

Noah’s Ark
…just refuses to be found. Or it’s been found too many times, in completely different locations. A dozen different people claiming to have found the Ark in a dozen different places is even more embarrassing than not finding it at all. For some reason that escapes creationists, it just won’t be found and stay found. (More than one creationist has claimed to have “found” the Ark. Such a claim is always followed by a book, a paid lecture tour, and maybe a film–all designed to relieve the gullible of the burden of extra cash. Then a few years later another “explorer” “finds” a whole other Ark somewhere else, and runs the whole con again with a fresh crop of easy marks.) [Suggested research project!]

Kathleen Kirkland points out that “God specifically says to coat the entire inside and outside of the Ark with pitch. I wonder… Do fundies/creationists know where pitch comes from? Do they know that it’s a naturally-occurring derivative of tar, which according to their “flood geology” didn’t yet exist at the time the Ark was built? One must wonder why God would give Noah an instruction that he couldn’t possibly carry out, eh?

Size of the Earth
…has obviously expanded greatly since Noah’s day, when he could, in a short period, collect pairs of all animals and birds from all over the world, without the benefit of modern air transport. Then after the Flood, the critters all had to migrate, at the double-quick, to their present habitats in Tasmania, the Galapagos, the coasts of Antarctica, Patagonia, the American Southwest, or wherever. It’s clear the Earth was no more than a few hundred miles across, probably flat, and with no inconvenient oceans like, say, the Pacific.

The Slow Rate of Evolution
Having some time ago abandoned the completely silly proposition that Noah could actually have accommodated pairs–let alone sevens–of every animal species on Earth aboard the Ark, creationists have fallen back upon the rationalization that he collected not species but “kinds.” They never, of course, clearly define “kind,” because any such definition would create more problems in biological classification than it solved (and reveal how little they know about species diversity). Be that as it may, if a pair of the bovine “kind” walked off the Ark a few thousand years ago, they have had to evolve into all 24 present species and uncounted varieties and breeds of wild and domestic cattle since then. (Creationists: you really don’t want to know how many species of the bat “kind” there are. And don’t even think about beetles .) Creationists, then, are in the awkward position of believing in a much faster rate of evolution than is possible in nature, while detesting the term itself, and generally refusing to call diversification-since-the-Ark evolution (Lord, how they hate that word)!

The Number of Species in the World
There are just way too many of them! There are so many that we still don’t even have a solid estimate of exactly how many–but five million is at least the right order of magnitude (counting only living species–throw in the extinct guys and you’re way into the billions ). That’s so many that creationists have given up trying to stuff them all into theArk (see above). A vanishingly tiny percent are even mentioned in the “scientifically accurate” Bible. Whole orders and phyla are left out. Of the few mentioned, there seems to be some slight confusion over such seemingly simple things as whether a bat is a bird or mammal, how many legs a grasshopper has, and who chews cuds and who doesn’t (see the parts about the dietary laws handed down to Moses). There’s even embarrassing mention of creatures unknown to science, such as unicorns.

My humbly-offered solution: Since the Bible is “scientifically accurate,” then when it was written there were just a few hundred species! They could all fit onto the Ark. After the Flood (take your pick):

  • They speed-evolved into the millions we have now.
  • God made a whole bunch more, just to test our faith in Holy Scripture.
  • Satan made a whole bunch more, just to ruin our faith in Holy Scripture. (I vote for this one, since I’ve been told recently by several good creationists that Satan invented evolution! [Then it would, in fact, be real, wouldn't it, regardless of who invented it?])

In the Sunday School stories, most of us imagined one pair, or at most two African and two Asian pachyderms, on the Ark; and we assumed those few were Noah’s biggest problem. But he could probably have wedged them in somewhere, among the handful of other large mammals always shown in the picture books. Somehow the elephants were always waving their trunks over the side, and the giraffes poking their heads up over the deckhouse. Then we grew up (most of us) and found out that there used to be things like mastodons and woolly mammoths. As a matter of fact, if we did just a little research, we could have found out that there are some 160 species of probiscideans, living and extinct, many of them wildly, grotesquely different from modern Jumbos. Then the problem arises of whether or not all those guys were on the Ark. All 160 species, with their months of fodder, obviously could not have been aboard, especially if we realize that other large mammal “kinds” also have myriad extinct species, some of which were larger than any elephant ever was. As I see it, there are several explanations. Choose your favorite from the list below:

  • 158 of God’s perfectly-created elephant species had already died out before the Flood.
  • Only one pair of the elephant “kind” (are they “clean” or “unclean”?) were aboard, and immediately afterward evolved into 160 different species, 158 of which immediately became extinct.
  • 158 species were simply left off the Ark, and got killed and fossilized by the Flood–and Genesis is just exaggerating about all beasts being aboard.
  • There never were more than two species of elephants–all those fossils of extinct ones, including whole, frozen mammoths that modern people have excavated complete–are merely a trick of Satan.
  • All animals were on the Ark, just like Genesis says. Shut up and don’t ask.

Thanks to Oren Grossman for informing me that there are actually three species of living elephants, including the smaller African bush elephant.Thus creationists only need to account for 157 instant extinctions… but have to accommodate at least six pachyderms on the Ark!

Deep-sea Fish
One of the ways that creationists try to weasel out of the volume of water needed for Noah`s Flood is to say that the Earth was much flatter then–the oceans were shallow, and the mountains were more like low hills. Therefore, much less water was required to flood the entire planet. All the mountains were raised after the Flood (or towards the end of it), and the oceans became deeper, allowing the water to drain off (creating the Grand Canyon in the process). By the way, none of this nonsense is in the Bible; I’m constantly amazed by the additions creationists insist on adding to the Genesis myth in attempts to make it more believable–while never ceasing to parrot the mantra “the Bible is perfect.” This particular Genesis “improvement” raises two embarrassing questions:

  • How did Noah`s Ark land on top of Mt. Ararat (about 9000 feet high) if the water was never that deep?
  • Where did the deep-ocean fish come from–those hideous monstrosities that are all mouth, teeth and luminous lure and can only live at incredible depths and pressures? Super-fast evolution again?

-(suggested by Adrian Barnett) …to which I would add a corollary question: How, during a worldwide flood, when seawater and freshwater would be pretty much thoroughly mixed, would ANY fish survive? I’ve had enough experience with aquaria to know that darn few freshwater fish species can tolerate saltwater, and vice versa. A flood of the whole Earth consequently would kill off all but a few brackish water species, capable of surviving rapid changes in salinity. Since the oceans and lakes are jam-packed with species exquisitely sensitive to even slight changes in salinity (they DIE), today’s fish have to have evolved since the one-world-ocean of the Flood. Sorry, I just don’t believe in evolution–not the lightning variety that creationism demands!

The Land Down Under
Ed Vinson asks just how far it is from Mt. Ararat to Sydney, and which of Noah’s sons got stuck with herding all those numbats, wombats, platypi, and wallabies down there without mixing any rats in. G’day, Mate!

They live only in Australia. Their diet is so restricted–to a few subspecies of eucalyptus–that they’re threatened now by destruction of the only kinds of trees they will eat. It’s also hard to imagine them migrating. Over many generations they might slowly spread through an area–but travelers, they ain’t.

And when they did migrate over 9,000 miles, in a tiny herd from Ararat to New South Wales, eating a convenient trail of long-disappeared eucalyptus (which took how many years after the Flood to grow?), they left no trail of koala fossils behind.

A suggestion for creation “researchers”: instead of wasting endless hours combing through the writings of real scientists to find phrases to yank out of context that make them seem to doubt evolution–instead of that, put together a real research expedition! Find us that bee-line trail from northern Turkey to Australia. Find us those fossilized eucalyptus leaves, koala footprints, and koala bones. While you’re at it, it would be lovely if you turned up a few kangaroos, giant moas, marsupial lions, Tasmanian wolves, and platypuses along that superhighway to the South Pacific.

It is a strictly human disease. Did the Good Lord bestow the gift of gonorrhea on Adam, or was it Eve? Who carried it onto the Ark? Why would God instruct Noah to carry any disease organisms or parasites onto the Ark? One of Noah’s family had to have been infected, but they were the only people worthy enough to be saved on the whole Earth. Which one had the clap? Why would He create anything so nasty anyway? -suggested by Noah Riggins

Noah and His Ancestors
John Hoppner points out that creationists must be a bit miffed at Noah and his ancestors for cremating their dead, because that destroyed all of their evidence of having human remains intermixed in the [paleontological] fossil record.

… reside in the tropics of Central and South America, which is quite a distance from western Asia, where Noah assembled the animal passengers for the Ark. Sloths generally move while hanging upside down from tree limbs. They can’t travel very fast. And just how did they cross all of those treeless deserts on the way (to say nothing of the ocean)?

A corollary: How did any South American animal make it from the Ark? Certainly not via the Atlantic — there is no island chain that could have constituted a land bridge. The first land mammals to cross the Atlantic were Vikings.

It is possible to move across the Pacific, and there is fossil evidence that indicates that such migrations did occur (but not, sadly, of modern sloths). So, obviously, after the Flood subsided, the llamas, vicunas, nutrias, etc. (and yes, sloths), trotted along what is now known as the Silk Route until they reached the east coast of Asia, skirted around the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, continued northward to the agreeable climate of 65 degrees north latitude, crossed the Bering Strait to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska, clambered through the Canadian Rockies, continued southward along the coast of California, the rain forests of Mexico and Central America, and the Panama isthmus, until they reached their destination. The journey, at the most moderate calculation, was at least 16,000 miles and covered an incredible variety of terrains and climates. It is rather curious that to date no vicuna remains have been found in Alaska or Siberia; but those areas are pretty big, after all, and they have lots of unexplored territory — maybe some dedicated creationist will undertake a mission there to dig something up. [More on this project]

Come to think of it, there is a continent more remote even than South America. Will someone explain how Noah was able to obtain a pair of penguins? Well, actually, more than one pair, because at the last count the number of penguin species was — oh well, you get the point. –Josh Silverman

Cute Little Bunny Rabbits
… because they give the lie to the creationist “proof” that there are just the number of people alive today that there would be if we had started repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Check out the full story here, but the short answer is, if you hold to the creationist logic, the whole visible universe would be one squirming mass of rabbit flesh by now.

Ted Krapkat has improved upon my argument by applying the creationist logic directly to the human population: If we create a simple formula using today’s population of ~6 billion, and figure in the starting population (8 individuals), and the starting time (4360 YBP), we get an annual growth rate of about 0.0047. Since that IS what happened, according to creationists, and it IS the only possible explanation for today’s human population then…

  1. At Christ’s death there were only about half a million people in the whole world!
  2. At the time the Israelites entered Canaan, (about 1180 BCE) we get a world population of 2024! By the time you divide that up between Egypt, Canaan, the rest of the world, and Israel, that leaves maybe 6 or 7 people for the Israelite army!
  3. If we go back to the time that the Jews were expelled from Egypt, in 1560 BCE, we get a world population of only 340 people!
  4. In 2300 BCE there were only about 10 people on Earth! How did fewer than a dozen people build the pyramids?

(and from another contributor) Those silly Chinese, just building and building, oblivious to the Flood and all its implications. Around 200 BCE, the Chinese built two great monuments: the first section of the Great Wall and a tomb for their first emperor. The equation from creationists says there were only around 170,000 people in the world, while the historians are quite certain the Emperor dedicated 300,000 soldiers immediately to the task of the Great Wall. Man, that’s pretty rough, right? Now the tomb…700,000 citizens at the very least cooperated to build this massive monument to their leader. That’s a minimum of 1 million in this part of the world at this time. Err…wait, my Bible says…

Real Flood Evidence
Yes, I’ll admit it, there is evidence of the biblical Flood. It just doesn’t turn out to be quite as reported in Genesis. First, all the genuine evidence of a worldwide inundation a few thousand years ago could, with $2.39, get you a cup of Starbuck’s. There are seashell fossils on Mt. Everest, but plate tectonics has a little something to do with that. Mysteriously, there aren’t any shells on plenty of much lower mountain ranges, which happen to be igneous or metamorphic rocks, unlike the former marine sediments that became the Himalaya.

Now for more local floods: There is genuine archaeological evidence of one or more real, catastrophic floods in the valleys of the Fertile Crescent (where the myth originated). To tribes who thought Sumeria was pretty much the whole world–or all of it that mattered–it would have seemed that their whole world was indeed flooded.

Recently, another possible source of the legend has been recognized. Thousands of years ago a sort of natural dam at the Bosporus gave way, allowing seawater to rapidly pour into a huge basin and lake north of Turkey (the region near Ararat! hmm…), flooding out thousands of square miles of fertile land, villages, and cities. The result is the Black Sea, where even now marine archaeologists are finding the drowned communities on the former lake shore.

Take some legends of the day their world ended, brought by Black Sea refugees, add to them a horrific flood or two from the Tigris-Euphrates region, conflate it with some exaggerated tales of the guy who saved some of his goats on a raft–and you’ve got the “Genesis Flood.” Many myths have those ingredients: some probable but untraceable basis in fact, exaggeration, combination with other tales, adoption and adaptation by other tribes with other gods. In that sense, Noah is in the same boat as Odysseus.

…who continued building their civilization and constructing monuments, and didn’t bother to take notice of the worldwide flood that was supposed to be drowning them all. (Creationists estimate that the flood took place about 4000-5000 ybp [years before present], which was the height of the Egyptian civilization.) -Adam Levenstein

To which Keith Harwood adds: The prehistory of Egypt stretches from about 8000 BCE. The history, that is, what was written down at the time, stretches from ~3500 BCE through invasions by Hyksos, Hittites, Romans, through floods, famines, insurrections, twenty-odd ruling dynasties, massive building projects, and the mind-boggling minutiae of royal bureaucracy. During this period the whole world was engulfed in a flood which scoured the land clean. And in Egypt, nobody noticed. (They didn’t notice when they lost a Pharaoh under the Red Sea, either, but that was later.)

Robin Randolph, who knows her plants, sent this gem: Plants were not noted to have been taken on the ark. Less than 1% of flowering plants are aquatic, and those which are not cannot tolerate “wet feet” or inundation by flood waters. Of those few species that are submersed (grow totally underwater), these are not often found at a depth below 10 m. Yet, when the waters receded, there were plants there that were fully grown (in spite of lack of available sunlight underwater and other things necessary for their growth). In fact, the dove came back to the ark with an olive branch in his mouth.

Fruit Flies
And Robin strikes again: Many species, including fruit flies, have very short lives, and the original pair would not have survived the trip, making it necessary for reproduction while on the ark in order for the species to survive. If you have ever bred fruit flies (as I have for genetics class) you will know that a fruit fly is sexually active within 5 hours of hatching. Their generation times are very short. By the end of the 40 days and 40 nights (not to mention the time waiting for the waters to recede), the ark would have been filled from one end to the other with annoying fruit flies. Therefore, either they routinely sprayed insecticide around the ark to keep these, and other similar species, in control; put up fly paper; or else these species evolved quickly after departure from the ark.

Robin, I’ve often suspected that fruit flies are sent by the devil. Why else would they have proven so useful to evil-utionists in their dark, satanic laboratories where they make up lies about DNA, mutations, and other absurd stuff?

Along the same line, another contributor wonders about the fig wasp, which is only capable of laying its eggs in a fig fruit, which grows on a fig tree, [and therefore] would not have survived the trip. The males mate with the larvae of the female then die. The females live for about 3 days, bearing eggs to lay. Because there were no fig trees on the Ark, it would have been impossible for the fig wasps to reproduce, as they require fig fruits for reproduction. And, assuming that the fig wasps died, any surviving fig trees (there probably wouldn’t have been any) would have also perished, as the fig tree requires the fig wasp for pollenation.

If, by some miracle, the fig wasp HAD survived, it would have quickly gone extinct, as fig trees would have been quickly killed by the salt water floods (and again, the fig tree is required for reproduction). This contradiction probably occurred in the Bible because at the time of the writing of the Bible, the fig tree’s [co-evolutionary] relationship with the wasp was unknown. That’s unfortunate.

Commandments Against Incest
No, this isn’t a joke about the folks back in the hills marrying close relatives. After the Ark, there were either 7 animals of each type (oops, scratch a bunch that were immediately sacrificed) or a pair. That would produce such a genetic bottleneck and limited gene pool that their descendants would face severe inbreeding problems (if you want to learn about a real-world example of this, look into the breeding difficulties of cheetahs). The people on board were only Noah and his family. That means, at the very least, matings between first cousins. But then of course Adam’s children were either copulating with each other, or with their parents (unless God created some unrelated mates for them–which would mean the original couple were NOT the parents of all mankind. Genesis seems to assume that of course there were other people living elsewhere (in “Nod,” for instance), who could supply a Mrs. Cain. (Suggested by Keith Kinney)

The Gilgamesh Epic
It’s older than Genesis. It comes from the part of the world where the Israelites originated (according to Genesis). It contains a Flood legend that has remarkable similarities to the one in Genesis (even with a Noah-like character), but some obvious differences. And to any objective scholar or even casual reader, that legend is obviously the source for much of the Noah story. The Hebrews apparently adopted it into their mythology, brought it to Israel, retained it through their time in Egypt (if that’s a genuine historical episode), brought it back to the Promised Land, and carried it with them into captivity in Babylon (where Genesis was actually written in its present form). They modified it considerably along the way, but not to the extent that its original source can’t be easily recognized.

Population Centers
John Guzik has noted a disturbing fact about the distribution of the human population: Assuming the Chinese decided to keep the Great Flood a secret, we must concede it actually happened. This means that humans, and all animals, were killed off and had to start over. They started over in the Ararat region of northern Turkey. Why are the countries with the greatest populations (China and India, both with one billion+) so far away from where humanity had to start over? Since people are generally territorial, that would mean that the further away from the Ararat mountains you got, the thinner the population would be. This is not the case. Almost as far away from the Ararat mountains as you can get on the same landmass, there are more than one billion Chinese. By the way, if everyone descended from Noah and his family, why bother migrating “back” to a country (China) that you have never been a part of? Or would China even be known about to Noah and his family or descendants?

Asexual Animals
David Evans wonders why Noah had to board pairs of ALL animals, when there are a few which reproduce asexually and therefore only one would be needed?

The Improbable Ice Caps
(From a contributor) Vast, colossal, great sheets of ice inhabiting the poles of our planet. The southern of the pair, the Antarctic, slides slowly off in all directions, like runny icing on an oversized cake. Things start to go south (no wait, north) when, with the aid of those pesky oxygen isotopes, the ice cap constantly fools scientist into believing that it is 25 million years old. Not only that, but during the Genesis flood it had only a limited number of options:

In its absolute contempt for the laws of physics and its own density, it remained in place, sitting obediently on the (now submerged) Antarctic continent. Undoubtedly this allowed the 6 families of Notothenioid fish to live in their optimal -1.8 degree Celsius water temperature (they die in water above 5 degrees C), oblivious to the pressure of all that extra water.


Like any sensible piece of ice, given that all the Earth’s surface was covered by water, it bobbed to the surface, broke up, and floated off in all directions and melted. Not only that, but all those billions of tonnes of ice never once crossed paths with Noah. (Maybe they did and he hauled some onboard to keep the polar bears from squabbling with the penguins.) Then, they miraculously reformed in the time since, while Satan grabbed a generous supply of isotopes and busied himself making them look much older than they actually are.

Unless of course, the ice sheets (and related habitats) didn’t appear until after the Genesis flood, and the ice, the ice fish, and the consistently un-biblical radiometric dating results are put there to test our faith in the scriptures, or give God somewhere to put all those snowflakes he spends so much time on.

The Garden of Eden
…presents the same series of problems as Noah’s Ark. How big was the Garden? Were ALL the plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc. on Earth present in the Garden? Genesis 2:19 seems to indicate so, .”..brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.” How many climates did the garden have? I can picture a lion lying down with a lamb, but I simply can’t picture a polar bear sharing the same climate as a rattlesnake. And if all the sea creatures were there too, the garden must have had two big ponds, one freshwater and a saltwater one. Come to think of it, the saltwater one must have been really deep, and must have had thermal vents at the bottom…… well, you get the idea. (from Stephen Reese)



  1. [...] story from a different angle and talk about how Noah and his family populated the entire earth. The whole silly Flood story – SkepticReport If we create a simple formula using today’s population of ~6 billion, and figure in the [...]