Hi Helen,
from what I've been able to reference -
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html#implications
6. Implications of a Flood
A global flood would have produce evidence contrary to the evidence we see.
How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?
Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] 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. Why doesn't such evidence show up?
How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.
Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? 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 up?
Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. [Becker & Kromer, 1993; Becker et al, 1991; Stuiver et al, 1986]
References
Alley, R. B., D. A. Meese, C. A. Shuman, A. J. Gow, K.C. Taylor, P. M. Grootes, J. W. C. White, M. Ram, E. W. Waddington, P. A. Mayewski, & G. A. Zielinski, 1993. Abrupt increase in Greenland snow accumulation at the end of the Younger Dryas event. Nature 362: 527-529.
Becker, B. & Kromer, B., 1993. The continental tree-ring record - absolute chronology, C-14 calibration and climatic-change at 11 KA. Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, 103 (1-2): 67-71.
Becker, B., Kromer, B. & Trimborn, P., 1991. A stable-isotope tree-ring timescale of the late glacial Holocene boundary. Nature 353 (6345): 647-649.
Johnsen, S. J., H. B. Clausen, W. Dansgaard, K. Fuhrer, N. Gundestrap, C. U. Hammer, P. Iversen, J. Jouzel, B. Stauffer, & J. P. Steffensen, 1992. Irregular glacial interstadials recorded in a new Greenland ice core. Nature 359: 311-313.
Stuiver, Minze, et al, 1986. Radiocarbon age calibration back to 13,300 years BP and the 14 C age matching of the German Oak and US bristlecone pine chronologies. IN: Calibration issue / Stuiver, Minze, et al., Radiocarbon 28(2B): 969-979.
7. Producing the Geological Record
Most people who believe in a global flood also believe that the flood was responsible for creating all fossil-bearing strata. (The alternative, that the strata were laid down slowly and thus represent a time sequence of several generations at least, would prove that some kind of evolutionary process occurred.) However, there is a great deal of contrary evidence.
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 people who believed divine creation, before Darwin even formulated his theory. (See, for example, Moore [1973], or the closing pages of Dawson [1868].)
Why are geological eras consistent worldwide? How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras and several different (independent) radiometric and nonradiometric dating methods? [e.g., Short et al, 1991]
How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for evolution? Ecological zonation, hydrodynamic sorting, and differential escape 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.
why artifacts such as footprints and burrows are also sorted. [Crimes & Droser, 1992]
why no human artifacts are 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 trilobite or dinosaur fossils?
why different parts of the same organisms are sorted together. Pollen and spores are found in association with the trunks, leaves, branches, and roots produced by the same plants [Stewart, 1983].
why ecological information is consistent within but not between layers. Fossil pollen is one of the more important indicators of different levels of strata. Each plant has different and distinct pollen, and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the pollen hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the climatic evidence is different for each layer?
How do surface features appear far from the surface? Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have originated only on the surface, such as:
Rain drops. [Robb, 1992]
River channels. [Miall, 1996, especially chpt. 6]
Wind-blown dunes. [Kocurek & Dott, 1981; Clemmenson & Abrahamsen, 1983; Hubert & Mertz, 1984]
Beaches.
Glacial deposits. [Eyles & Miall, 1984]
Burrows. [Crimes & Droser, 1992; Thackray, 1994]
In-place trees. [Cristie & McMillan, 1991]
Soil. [Reinhardt & Sigleo, 1989; Wright, 1986, 1994]
Desiccation cracks. [Andrews, 1988; Robb, 1992]
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).]
Meteorites and meteor craters. [Grieve, 1997; Schmitz et al, 1997]
Coral reefs. [Wilson, 1975]
Cave systems. [James & Choquette, 1988]
How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic flood?
How does a global flood explain angular unconformities? These are 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.
How were mountains and valleys 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 formed 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.
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 can a single flood be responsible for such extensively detailed layering? One formation in New Jersey 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, etc.? [Zimmer, 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.
How could a flood deposit layered fossil forests? Stratigraphic sections showing a dozen or more mature forests layered atop each other--all with upright trunks, in-place roots, and well-developed soil--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.
Where did all the heat go? If the geologic record was deposited in a year, then the events it records must also have occurred within a year. Some of these events release significant amounts of heat.
Magma. The geologic record includes roughly 8 x 1024 grams of lava flows and igneous intrusions. Assuming (conservatively) a specific heat of 0.15, this magma would release 5.4 x 1027 joules while cooling 1100 degrees C. In addition, the heat of crystallization as the magma solidifies would release a great deal more heat.
Limestone formation. There are roughly 5 x 1023 grams of limestone in the earth's sediments [Poldervaart, 1955], and the formation of calcite releases about 11,290 joules/gram [Weast, 1974, p. D63]. If only 10% of the limestone were formed during the Flood, the 5.6 x 1026 joules of heat released would be enough to boil the flood waters.
Meteorite impacts. Erosion and crustal movements have erased an unknown number of impact craters on earth, but Creationists Whitcomb and DeYoung suggest that cratering to the extent seen on the Moon and Mercury occurred on earth during the year of Noah's Flood. The heat from just one of the largest lunar impacts released an estimated 3 x 1026 joules; the same sized object falling to earth would release even more energy. [Fezer, pp. 45-46]
Other. Other possibly significant heat sources are radioactive decay (some Creationists claim that radioactive decay rates were much higher during the Flood to account for consistently old radiometric dates); biological decay (think of the heat released in compost piles); and compression of sediments.
5.6 x 1026 joules is enough to heat the oceans to boiling. 3.7 x 1027 joules will vaporize them completely. Since steam and air have a lower heat capacity than water, the steam released will quickly raise the temperature of the atmosphere over 1000 C. At these temperatures, much of the atmosphere would boil off the Earth.
Aside from losing its atmosphere, Earth can only get rid of heat by radiating it to space, and it can't radiate significantly more heat than it gets from the sun unless it is a great deal hotter than it is now. (It is very nearly at thermal equilibrium now.) If there weren't many millions of years to radiate the heat from the above processes, the earth would still be unlivably hot.
As shown in section 5, all the mechanisms proposed for causing the Flood already provide more than enough energy to vaporize it as well. These additional factors only make the heat problem worse.
How were limestone deposits formed? Much 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? Roughly 1.5 x 1015 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. [Poldervaart, 1955] A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits.
How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 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.
How could the Flood deposit layers of solid salt? Such layers are 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. [Jackson et al, 1990]
How were sedimentary deposits recrystallized 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 do you explain fossil mineralization? Mineralization is 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?
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. [Rosenberg & Runcorn, 1975; Scrutton, 1965; Wells, 1963]
Where were all the fossilized animals when they were alive? Schadewald [1982] writes:
"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 [land] fossils on earth. 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, 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."
Even if there was 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.
Where did all the organic material in the fossil record come from? There are 1.16 x 1013 metric tons of coal reserves, and at least 100 times that much unrecoverable organic matter in sediments. A typical forest, even if it covered the entire earth, would supply only 1.9 x 1013 metric tons. [Ricklefs, 1993, p. 149]
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.
References
Andrews, J. E., 1988. Soil-zone microfabrics in calcrete and in desiccation cracks from the Upper Jurassic Purbeck Formation of Dorset. Geological Journal 23(3): 261-270.
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 30: 311-339.
Crimes, Peter, and Mary L Droser, 1992. Trace fossils and bioturbation: the other fossil record. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 23: 339-360.
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 403., 227pp.
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.
Eyles, N. and Miall, A.D., 1984, Glacial Facies. IN: Walker, R.G., Facies Models, 2nd edition. Geoscience Canada, Reprint Series 1: 15-38.
Ferguson, Laing, 1988. The fossil cliffs of Joggins. Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Fezer, Karl D., 1993. "Creationism: Please Don't Call It Science" Creation/Evolution, 13:1 (Summer 1993), 45-49.
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.
Grieve, R. A. F., 1997. Extraterrestrial impact events: the record in the rocks and the stratigraphic record. Palaeogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology 132: 5-23.
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, 54: 798-810.
Jackson, M.P.A., et al., 1990. Salt diapirs of the Great Kavir, Central Iran. Geological Society of America, Memoir 177, 139pp.
James, N. P. & P. W. Choquette (eds.), 1988. Paleokarst, Springer-Verlag, New York.
Kocurek, G., and Dott, R.H., 1981. Distinctions and uses of stratification types in the interpretation of eolian sand. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, 51(2): 579-595.
Miall, A. D., 1996. The Geology of Fluvial Deposits, Springer-Verlag, New York.
Moore, James R., 1973. "Charles Lyell and the Noachian Deluge", in Dundes, 1988, The Flood Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Newell, N., 1982. Creation and Evolution, Columbia U. Press, p. 62.
Poldervaart, Arie, 1955. Chemistry of the earth's crust. pp. 119-144 In: Poldervaart, A., ed., Crust of the Earth, Geological Society of America Special Paper 62, Waverly Press, MD.
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.
Ricklefs, Robert, 1993. The Economy of Nature, W. H. Freeman, New York.
Robb, A. J. III, 1992. Rain-impact microtopography (RIM); an experimental analogue for fossil examples from the Maroon Formation, Colorado. Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 62(3): 530-535.
Rosenberg, G. D. & Runcorn, S. K. (Eds), 1975. Growth rhythms and the history of the earth's rotation. Willey Interscience, New York.
Schadewald, Robert, 1982. Six 'Flood' arguments Creationists can't answer. Creation/Evolution 9: 12-17.
Schmitz, B., B. Peucker-Ehrenbrink, M. Lindstrom, & M. Tassinari, 1997. Accretion rates of meteorites and cosmic dust in the Early Ordovician. Science 278: 88-90.
Scrutton, C. T., ( 1964 ) 1965. Periodicity in Devonian coral growth. Palaeontology, 7(4): 552-558, Plates 86-87.
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)
Stewart, W.N., 1983. Paleontology and the Evolution of Plants. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 405pp.
Thackray, G. D., 1994. Fossil nest of sweat bees (Halictinae) from a Miocene paleosol, Rusinga Island, western Kenya. Journal of Paleontology 68(4): 795-800.
Twenhofel, William H., 1961. Treatise on Sedimentation, Dover, p. 50-52.
Weast, Robert C., 1974. Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 55th edition, CRC Press, Cleveland, OH.
Wells, J. W., 1963. Coral growth and geochronometry. Nature 197: 948-950.
Whitcomb, J.C. Jr. & H.M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia PA.
Wilson, J. L., 1975. Carbonate Facies in Geologic History. Springer-Verlag, New York.
Wright, V. P. (ed.), 1986. Paleosols: Their Recognition and Interpretation, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
Wright, V. P., 1994. Paleosols in shallow marine sequences. Earth-Science Reviews, 37: 367-395. See also pp. 135-137.
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.
Zimmer, Carl, 1992. Peeling the big blue banana. Discover 13(1): 46-47.
8. Species Survival and Post-Flood Ecology
"He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground," the Bible says (Gen 7:23). If the Flood was as described, that must have been an understatement.
How did all the modern plant species survive?
Many plants (seeds and all) would be killed by being submerged for a few months. This is especially true if they were soaked in salt water. Some mangroves, coconuts, and other coastal species have seed which could be expected to survive the Flood itself, but what of the rest?
Most seeds would have been buried under many feet (even miles) of sediment. This is deep enough to prevent spouting.
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.
Noah could not have gathered seeds for all plants because not all plants produce seeds, and a variety of plant seeds can't survive a year before germinating. [Garwood, 1989; Benzing, 1990; Densmore & Zasada, 1983] Also, how did he distribute them all over the world?
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 sensitive marine life such as coral survive? 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 covering the reef after the rains were over would kill all the coral. 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.
How did diseases survive? Many diseases can't survive in hosts other than humans. Many others can only survive in humans and in short-lived arthropod vectors. The list includes typhus, measles, smallpox, polio, gonorrhea, syphilis. For these diseases to have survived the Flood, they must all have infected one or more of the eight people aboard the Ark.
Other animals aboard the ark must have suffered from multiple diseases, too, since there are other diseases specific to other animals, and the nonspecific diseases must have been somewhere.
Host-specific diseases which don't kill their host generally can't survive long, since the host's immune system eliminates them. (This doesn't apply to diseases such as HIV and malaria which can hide from the immune system.) For example, measles can't last for more than a few weeks in a community of less than 250,000 [Keeling & Grenfell, 1997] because it needs nonresistant hosts to infect. Since the human population aboard the ark was somewhat less than 250,000, measles and many other infectious diseases would have gone extinct during the Flood.
Some diseases that can affect a wide range of species would have found conditions on the Ark ideal for a plague. Avian viruses, for example, would have spread through the many birds on the ark. Other plagues would have affected the mammals and reptiles. Even these plague pathogens, though, would have died out after all their prospective hosts were either dead or resistant.
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 could more than a handful of species survive in a devastated habitat? The Flood would have destroyed the food and shelter which most species need to survive.
How did predators survive? 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]
References
Benzing, D. H., 1990. Vascular Epiphytes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Densmore, R. and J. Zasada, 1983. Seed dispersal and dormancy patterns in northern willows: ecological and evolutionary significance. Canadian Journal of Botany 61: 3207-3216.
Garwood, N. C., 1989. Tropical soil seed banks: a review. pp. 149-209 In: Leck, M. A., V. T. Parker, and R. L. Simpson (eds.), Ecology of Soil Seed Banks, Academic Press, San Diego
Keeling, M.J. & B.T. Grenfell, 1997. Disease extinction and community size: modeling the persistence of measles. Science 275: 65-67.
Simberloff, Daniel, 1988. The contribution of population and community biology to conservation science. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 19: 473-511.
9. Species Distribution and Diversity
How did animals get to their present ranges? 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 did so many unique species get to remote islands?
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 animals found only in limited ranges? Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in western Indonesia? Why are lemurs limited to Madagascar? The same argument applies to any number of groups of plants and animals.
Why is inbreeding depression not a problem in most species? Harmful recessive alleles occur in significant numbers in most species. (Humans have, on average, 3 to 4 lethal recessive alleles each.) When close relatives breed, the offspring are more likely to be homozygous for these harmful alleles, to the detriment of the offspring. Such inbreeding depression still shows up in cheetahs; they have about 1/6th the number of motile spermatozoa as domestic cats, and of those, almost 80% show morphological abnormalities. [O'Brien et al, 1987] How could more than a handful of species survive the inbreeding depression that comes with establishing a population from a single mating pair?
Reference
O'Brien, S. J., D. E. Wildt, M. Bush, T. M. Caro, C. FitzGibbon, I. Aggundey & R. E. Leakey, 1987. East African cheetahs: Evidence for two population bottlenecks? Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84: 508-511.
10. Historical Aspects
Why is there no mention of the Flood in the records of Egyptian or Mesopotamian 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.
How did the human population rebound so fast? Genealogies 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, rebuild the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc.
Why do other flood myths vary so greatly from the Genesis account? Flood myths are fairly common worldwide, and if they came from a common source, we should expect similarities in most of them. Instead, the myths show great diversity. [Bailey, 1989, pp. 5-10; Isaak, 1997] For example, people survive on high land or trees in the myths about as often as on boats or rafts, and no other flood myth includes a covenant not to destroy all life again.
Why should we expect Genesis to be accurate? We know that other people's sacred stories change over time [Baaren, 1972] and that changes to the Genesis Flood story have occurred in later traditions [Ginzberg, 1909; Utley, 1961]. Is it not reasonable to assume that changes occurred between the story's origin and its being written down in its present form?
References
Baaren, Th. P., 1972. The flexibility of myth. Studies in the History of Religions, 22: 199-206. Reprinted in Dundes, A. (ed), 1984, Sacred Narrative, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Bailey, Lloyd R., 1989. Noah: the person and the story in history and tradition. University of South Carolina Press, SC.
Ginzberg, Louis, 1909. The Legends of the Jews, vol. 1, pp. 145-169, Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia. Reprinted as "Noah and the Flood in Jewish legend" in: Dundes, Alan (ed.), 1988. The Flood Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, pp. 319-336.
Isaak, Mark, 1997. Flood stories from around the world.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faq/flood-myths.html.
Utley, Francis Lee, 1961. Internationaler Kongress der Volkserzä in Kiel und Kopenhagen, pp. 446-463, Walter De Gruyter, Berlin. Reprinted as "The Devil in the Ark (AaTh 825)" in: Dundes, Alan (ed.), 1988. The Flood Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, pp. 337-356.
11. Logical, Philosophical, and Theological Points
Are flood models consistent with the Bible? Creationists who write about the Flood often contradict the very story they're trying to support. For example, Whitcomb & Morris [1961, p. 69n] suggest that large numbers of kinds of land animals became extinct because of the Flood, while Genesis repeatedly says that Noah was ordered to take a representative sample of all kinds of land animals on the Ark to save them from extinction, and that Noah did as ordered. Woodmorappe [1996, p. 3] wants to leave invertebrates (i.e., just about "every creeping thing on the ground") off the ark. Why should we give credence to a story whose most ardent supporters abandon when it's inconvenient?
Genesis 6-8 speaks only of rain, fountains, and a flood; it makes no mention of other catastrophies which many Creationists associate with the Flood. Their proposed Flood models not only contradict geology, they have no Biblical support, either.
How can a literal interpretation be appropriate if the text is self-contradictory? 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 consistent with reality? 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?
Why stop with the Flood story? 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 a global flood make the whole Bible less credible? Davis Young, an Evangelical and geologist, wrote [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. . . ."
Another Christian scientist said, "Creationism is an incredible pain in the neck, neither honest nor useful, and the people who advocate it have no idea how much damage they are doing to the credibility of belief." [quoted in Easterbrook, 1997, p. 891]
Does the Flood story indicate an omnipotent God?
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 far 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?
References
Easterbrook, Gregg, 1997. Science and God: a warming trend? Science 277: 890-893.
Whitcomb, J.C. Jr. & H.M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Philadelphia PA.
Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's ark: A feasibility study. Institute for Creation Research, Santee, California.
Young, Davis, 1988. Christianity and the Age of the Earth. Artisan Sales, Thousand Oaks, CA.
