THE FLOOD OF NOAH

Noah’s Flood, the Deluge, is a key issue in the Evolution-Creation debate. Although Young Earth creationists attribute all fossil-bearing rock strata to the action of Noah’s Flood, Old Earth adherents attribute most of them to a much earlier age. Confronted by the claims of evolutionary geology, the two groups draw different conclusions.

Although geology theory, for the most part, is relatively simple, its practice is made extremely difficult by the horrendous complexity of the puzzling observations it attempts to interpret. Such complexity is, perhaps, to be expected if most of the rock higher up the Geological Column was formed, as geologists suggest, by recycling and modifying materials eroded away from already existing fossil-bearing rocks lower down.

In some parts of the world, including Scotland, Pre-Cambrian formations, supposedly the most ancient rocks of all, now lie exposed on the very surface. Likewise exposed Cambrian formations cover most of North Wales, whence their name. In "Man, Time and Fossils", Ruth Moore describes how the remains of dinosaurs that supposedly died out 65 millions years ago in the Mesozoic era were found lying exposed on the surface of the western prairies by early American settlers. As creationist are quick to point out, the famous Geological Column is simply a notional sequence of rock strata, and only fragments of it exist in any one location.

The Encylcopedia Britannical traces the origins of the science of geology to the accounts of Greek writers such as Herodotus, Strabo and Eratosthenes who observed vast quantities of sea shells and salt beds at inland and mountainous locations, and wondered about their origins. Aristotle suggested that the land was always very slowly moving upwards and downwards, resulting in periodic inundations by the sea, an idea still found in encyclopedias.

In the eighteenth century, the study of geology was greatly facilitated by the extensive excavation of the earth's surface undertaken for the building of canals and in mining operations for coal, iron ore and other valuable minerals needed for industrial expansion. Engineer William "Strata" Smith, for example, found that he could trace strata from one location to another and identify them by means of their fossil content.

James Hutton (1726-97), doctor turned farmer and then geologist, was able to distinguish two families of rock strata -- older ones, such as granite, which he called Primary, and younger ones, such as sandstones, he called Secondary. In 1760 Giovanni Arduino applied the term Tertiary to the loosely consolidated formations that were commonly found at lower elevations, and which were commonly attributed to the action of Noah’s Flood.

Hutton noticed that the process of erosion is always at work, continuously degrading the land and eating away even at solid rock, carrying sediments into the rivers and down to the sea. Although he speculated that continental masses must have been submersed at some time, he totally rejected the idea of catastrophies, such as Noah’s Flood, as a possible mechanism.

Charles Lyell, born the year that Hutton died, took these ideas to their extreme and became the champion of the new theory of "uniformitarianism" -- claiming that all change had taken place very gradually over many millions of years by means of processes currently operating. Bringing together observations from people all over the world into his classic book "Principles of Geology", he established himself as the father of the modern science, and making the world aware of the immensity of geological time.

The first volume of Lyell's book was published in 1830, just in time for Charles Darwin to take a copy with him on this famous voyage. The second volume sent on later. Uniformitarianism provided the time scale Darwin needed for Natural Selection to carry out its mythical task of creating new life forms by means of endless small variations of those already existing. However, although Lyell has received good "press", he was by no means the first to realize and teach that the earth itself was very ancient indeed.

As geology blossomed into a rigorous scientific discipline in Victorian times, geologists initially recognized four groups of rock strata as representative of the important eras of the Earth’s physical history -- Primary, Transitional, Secondary and Tertiary, derived from a classification devised in the 1760’s and 1770’s by 1770's a geologist named Giovanni Arduino who was studying the rocks and minerals in Tuscany. .

Arduino classified mountains according to the type of rocks that he found in them. The unfossiliferous volcanic rocks that formed the cores of large mountains he called Primitive. Fossil rich rocks of limestone and clay that were found on the flanks of mountains over the Primitive rocks were called Secondary. Finally, the group of less consolidated fossiliferous rocks of limestones and sandstones, lying over the Secondary rocks and forming the foothills of the mountains, he named Tertiary.

In 1841, John Phillips proposed a new set of names that reflected the fossil content of the formations and also implied some kind of progression or evolution of life. The Primary rocks, which contained no fossils, were therefore renamed Azoic, meaning "no life". The Transitional, which contained bizarre sea creatures, armored fish and strange amphibians became the "Paleozoic", meaning "ancient life". The Secondary, containing many reptiles and the dinosaurs become the "Mesozoic", meaning "middle life".

Finally, the Tertiary, containing mammals, birds and a more familiar kind of fish, became the "Cenozoic", meaning "recent life". As noted, the Earth may have been much flatter in prior to the Flood, and it is interesting that a great deal of "orogeny", mountain building, is thought to have taken place during Cenozoic times – creating the Alps, the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, the Andes and the Himalayas.

Any encyclopedia will shows charts of the Geological Column, showing the supposed sequence of geological events, a compilation of strata found in various parts of the world -- created as if gathering a pack of scattered and partially overlapping playing cards back into its original, un-shuffled sequence. Nowhere in the world, however, is a complete "pack" of strata found – and in many cases the "cards" are found to be out of their required sequence and with some groups of them upside down. Nevertheless, the idealized chart if often illustrated with drawings of the creatures whose fossils predominate in the various layers, such as ancient fish, extinct amphibians, then reptiles and finally modern mammals.

Although this supposed progression of life is cited as a proof of evolution, it is interesting that the observed facts fit in very well with the Genesis Old Earth theory of special creation. For example, the Azoic, now renamed yet again as "Pre-Cambrian", may well correspond to what the Bible calls the "Foundations of the Earth" – the rocky core of the pristine Earth, as made ‘In the Beginning’, although even then it may have been replete with soil, sand and gravel, a suitable environment for plant and animal life to inhabit.

Incidentally, the existence of soil implies microbes, and biologists calculate that the total mass of microbes in the ground exceeds the combined mass of all the animals in the world. Evolutionists, of course, regard microbes as primitive life forms and the discovery of their remains in Pre-Cambrian strata would be trumpeted as rock solid evidence of early evolution. However, confirmed but honest evolutionist Gordon Rattray-Taylor, commenting on the problems of Darwinism: "a still more extraordinary example of failure to evolve is found in the bacteria. Since they reproduce themselves, in favourable conditions, every twenty minutes, they might be expected to evolve faster than any other organism -- but fossil bacteria going back three and a half billion years, to the threshold of life itself, have been recovered and are virtually identical with modern forms."

He continues: "In all the thousands of fly breeding experiments carried out all over the world for more than fifty years a distinct new species has never been seen to emerge. Only in bacteria, where drug resistance emerges rather readily -- too readily -- and where the ability to subsist without some normal dietary component can emerge, do we see anything approaching evolution in the act. In short, the case for Darwin's theory has never been conclusive."

In keeping with the expectations of the Old Earth theory of creation, geologists tell us that the bulk of world’s valuable minerals were formed in Pre-Cambrian times – gold, silver, nickel, copper, iron and chromium.

Also in keeping with the theory, the extinct plants and animals, mostly quite foreign to our present world, whose fossils are found in the strata of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras that followed on, may simply represent the complete flora and fauna of the Pre-Adamic age that perished with the dinosaurs.

Massive coal deposits, the fossilized remains of plants, are found in Paleozoic rocks, such as America’s Pennsylvanian and Mississippian periods, described in Europe because of their content as "Carboniferous". Geologist tell us that 50% of the world’s oil reserves were formed in Mesozoic times, when the Earth’s climate was much warmer with temperate conditions at the poles and with lush tropical forest conditions extending to latitude 45, north and south. Europe’s massive North Sea oil and gas deposits, however, are said to be of Paleozoic origin, having diffused and been trapped in porous Permian sandstone formations.

The final period of the Mesozoic era, the Cretaceous, has been described as the "transition between the very different earlier Earth and the Cenozoic, a world relatively similar to that of the present day".

Some at least of the Cenozoic formations, with fossils of more familiar organisms, may have resulted from the Flood of Noah and the destruction of the world created at the time of Adam and Eve. It was during the Cenozoic period, in fact, that placental mammals, such as mice, cats, dogs, sheep and cows came on the scene, leading the Encyclopedia Britannical to comment: "the Cenozoic placental mammals were poised to take over the terrestrial environment, as soon as the dinosaurs vanished". Geologists tell us that the Earth’s climate was much warmer in those times than now.

The most serious conflict between the Old Earth theory and geology seems to lie in the area of geochronology. Whereas the Bible locates the creation of Adam and the commencement of our era at about six thousand years ago, the radio-isotope dating methods used by geologists suggest a figure closer to 60 million years.

Although the radio-isotope methods used to date the Cenozoic rocks are claimed to be totally reliable, science does have a history of changing it mind in such matters. Lord Kelvin, for example, probably the leading physicist of the day, refused to accept Darwin’s ideas because his rigorous heat flow calculations proved that if the Earth was as old as evolution required, its oceans would have long since frozen over and the interior turned solid. Unfortunately, Kelvin knew nothing of the radio-active materials inside the Earth that were busily releasing nuclear energy to compensate for the energy being radiated off into space.

Modern physicists may smile at his faux pas, but just a generation ago chemistry students were being taught that the "Inert gases", such as argon and helium, were so-called because they were incapable of entering into chemical reactions – the reason being that their newly discovered electron shells were full. This scientific certainty lasted long enough for an American graduate student to mix Xenon with most reaction non-metal Fluorine and become the first person to observe the formation of Xenon tetra-fluoride. The list goes on. Currently we are assured that the half-lives of radio-active isotopes are rigidly fixed and can never under any circumstances vary. Meanwhile, other scientists are being to wonder if any of the so-called physical constants actually are constant. The seemingly solid framework of science is sometimes rocked like the foundations of a shanty in an earthquake.

One of the seemingly indisputable facts of geology is that most of the Earth’s land surface, including even mount Everest, is covered by or consists of sedimentary rock, sometimes several miles thick – materials that were, by definition, deposited out of watery conditions of some kind.

Although modern young earth creationists teach that the vast bulk of sedimentary rock strata were formed quite rapidly in a matter of months by the waters of Noah's Flood, early geologists such as Lyell believed the exact opposite, claiming instead that each one of the hundreds of strata they investigated had been formed extremely slowly, possibly over many millions of years by the gentle accumulation of sediments on ancient sea beds – despite objections by anatomist Georges Cuvier that the extinct animal forms they discovered must have been wiped out by rapid, catastrophic events.

According to Lyell, various parts of the Earth’s surface repeatedly rose and fell like a yo-yo, taking turns at being the dry land and then the sea bed, giving then receiving sediments, evolving plants and animals then being littered with their fossil remains – over and over again, hundreds of times, due to inexplicable but gentle ingressions and regressions of the sea. How that scenario accounts for deposition of vast slabs of stone thousands of feet thick over hundreds of square miles, or the incredible mass fossil graves that are now being discovered, or the polystrate fossils such as petrified trees that stand vertically through multiple seams of coal, is hard to understand.

However, modern evolutionists, confident that the battle with Creationism has been safely won, have finally come forward to save the day -- brazenly admitting that only catastrophic flooding could have done the job. Perhaps it is significant that, according to the Old Earth Theory, the Book of Genesis records not one but two such cataclysmic floods.

A second indisputable fact of geology is the incredible chaos and destruction evidenced in the Earth’s sedimentary rock strata. As geologists struggle to make sense of the muddle, Darwin’s theory of evolution is the simplistic organizing framework, or ‘black box’, on which they continuously rely for guidance.

As a result, observations that seem to support the idea of a gradual development of life from simple to complex are welcomed – but those that deviate from the theory are rejected as anomalous, or explained away in some contrived fashion. Situations where groups of strata are in the wrong order, for example, or randomly arranged or even upside down, are quietly ignored as being the exceptions that prove the rule. No wonder Paul spoke even in his day of enemies of God who actually suppressed what they knew to be true. As with some esoteric mystery religion, it seems, the peasants only hear what the priests want them to.

In the light of the above, what are we to make of Noah’s Flood, and its possible impact on the geology of the Earth’s surface? Could it, acting alone, as required by the Young Earth creationists, be responsible for situations such as those listed below?

Genesis 6:5-7, 13

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every

imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them . . .

. . . And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold I will destroy them with the earth.

According to evolutionary myth, human society originated with ape-like cave-dwellers who could barely speak, let alone read or write, backward peoples who then slowly progressed through the stone, bronze and iron ages. The reality may have been very different.

For example, the Genesis account shows that Adam and Eve had personal contact with God, as well as angelic beings who already possessed all the so-called "key inventions" of mankind -- such as the fire, sword, the saddle, the stirrup, the wheel as well as musical instruments. Consequently, I would imagine, for example, that when God assigned Adam the job of tending the Garden of Eden, he almost certainly also provided the tools for the job. If so, then it is not surprising that the Genesis account tells us that Tubal-Cain, just a few generations on from Adam, "forged all kind of tools out of bronze and iron" (4:22).

No doubt the metal technology in which they became skilled was soon used to manufacture swords and spears and other instruments of warfare and cruelty as

the pre-Flood world degenerated in the following fifteen hundred years into gross wickedness – dominated by violence, warfare and also perverted sex.

Fossilised human remains from what some archeologists regard as pre-Flood strata show evidence of cannibalism -- human bones and skulls opened up for the contents to be eaten -- and Jewish traditions speak of mass incest. So foul and revolting did the world become by the time of Noah that God decided to intervene and destroy it . . . which brings us to the Flood and the construction of the ark:

Genesis 6:14-17

Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high.

Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.

I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.

Influenced by evolutionary outlook on history, critics insist that Noah could not possibly have built the ark with the technology available at the time – as with the construction of Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, I suppose. Others suggest that wood was too weak for the job and would even have rotted away by time it was completed.

Notice, however, the detailed instructions – to use a certain kind of wood and to preserve the timbers with pitch, both inside and out. Incidentally, the reference to pitch or bitumen, a fossil product, prior to the Flood offers interesting support for the Old Earth theory that most coal and oil deposits had already been formed much earlier.

Attempts have been made to work out the numbers of animals and even insects that Noah would have had to pack into the ark, how much space they would need and how much food and of what kinds. Such calculations necessarily involve assumptions about the breadth of the term "kind", as already mentioned.

The obvious implication of the account is that if dogs, for example, are a single kind, then only one breeding pair was taken -- because they contained the genetic potential to produce all the breeds of dogs with which we are now familiar. A few years ago such a suggestion would have been scorned outright by clever critics as a scientific impossibility, but now the discovery of "redundant DNA" has opened up previously unsuspected possibilities. As has often happened in science, the impossible become possible, given enough time.

It is interesting, also, that when the waters were receding later, after the Flood, Noah sent out a raven and then a dove. The fact that both sorts of bird were on the ark, the raven being unclean and the dove clean, suggest that they at least are different "kinds", which provides us with a clue to the breadth of the term.

*     *     *     *     *

The account continues with a description of the Flood itself.

Genesis 7: 11-12, 19, 21-22

Normal rain acting alone cannot create a universal flood, since the water that is precipitated in one place has to be evaporated elsewhere, as part of the hydrological cycle. However, the account tells us that two other sources were involved – the "windows of heaven", about which we speculated earlier in the creation account, and also the "fountains of the great deep".

Although critics may scoff at the idea of water bursting from vast subterranean reservoirs, in the way lava erupts from a volcano, it is important to remember once again that our geological knowledge is quite limited – and incidentally, that lava is usually accompanied by steam. Indeed a recent National Geographic magazine article about the interior workings of the Earth pointed out that the conflict between opposing schools of thought is so fierce that some of our white-robed scientific saints are no longer on speaking terms.

As mentioned earlier, the word rendered here as "mountain" can equally well mean a hill, and the topography of the pre-Flood Earth may have been much smoother than now – and possibly just one vast continent surrounded by sea. Although critics scoff at these verses, they happily accept the fact that even Mount Everest is apparently covered with or composed of marine sediments and has at some time or other been submersed.

Although Flood was global, according to the account, and water did remain on the Earth for about a year, the key question that concerns us here is: How great was its geological impact? Was the Deluge responsible for all the sedimentary strata that geologists have studied, as Young Earth creationists insist? The following extract seems to provide an important clue:

Genesis 8:11-12

He sent forth the dove out of the ark; and the dove came back to him in the evening, and lo, in her mouth a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the water had subsided from the Earth. Then he waited another seven months, and sent forth the dove; and she did not return to him any more.

As already noted, the inspired account is meticulously worded – and we read here that the dove brought back a "freshly plucked" olive leaf. Noah and his family would have been very familiar with the olive tree and no doubt examined the leaf very carefully we see if it was dead or freshly plucked. The implication seems to be that despite the Flood, and the torrents of water that must have accompanied it as it rose and fell, trees in Noah’s locality were still in place and growing a year later.

If this is so, it is hard to imagine that the remainder of the Earth’ surface was violently ripped up and re-deposited to form strata, some of which are miles thick in some places.

A supporting point may be that the location of Eden is described with reference to four rivers (Genesis 2:10-14), two of which, the Tigris and Euphrates, still exist and apparently survived the Flood, suggesting again that it did minimal damage. Young Earth creationists insist that all four rivers would have been erased by the Deluge -- and that the present Tigris and Euphrates were simply named in their memory, in the way that settlers in America named cities after those in Europe.

Notice, however, that the ark came to rest on Mount Arrarat, well above the river valleys where the destructive effect of the much deeper waters may have been much greater. One translation of the description of the subsidence of the waters (verse 3) says that they were continually "going on and returning", which may imply some kind of ebbing and flowing action, and the existence of strong currents.

According to Archimedes’ Principle, objects appear to lose weight in water because of buoyancy, which is why massive boulders and even derailed trains have been known to be carried large distances by raging river water. The potential for the creation of sedimentary strata in lowland areas is obvious.

Genesis 8:17-20

Then God said to Noah, Go forth from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with your. Bring forth with you every living thing that is with your all flesh – birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the Earth – that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply upon the Earth.

And every beast, every creeping thing, and every gird, everything that moves upon the Earth, went forth by families out of the ark.

One atheistic critic argues that the Flood was an impossibility because there has simply not been enough time for the basic kinds of creatures released by Noah to mutate sufficiently to create the vast number of species that now exist, particularly in the case of insects. In this regard, perhaps the phrase: "that they may breed abundantly on the Earth" has some significance.

Somehow the creatures that Noah released from the ark were able to spread to the four corners of the Earth, such as Australia and South America as well as many smaller land masses that are today surrounded by water. This fact has obvious has implications regarding the disposition of the continental land-masses at that time. Whether the migration process was facilitated by means of land bridges that have since subsided, for example, joining Alaska and Russia, or by the moving and splitting of continental land masses, we are not told. However, the Earth’s surface is not static, and historical records still exist of Britain, for example, being joined to Europe.

In this regard, it is interesting to read of a man named Peleg who lived several hundred years after the Flood, in the period when God was actively scattering the nations abroad "over the face of the earth" (11:8). The name Peleg means "division", and we are told that he was so named because: "in his days the Earth was divided" (10:25). Commentators point out that for the child to be named in advance of a momentous event suggests that his father, Eber, father of the Hebrews, was a prophet who was informed by God of what was to occur.

In a similar fashion, generations earlier his ancestor Enoch, another man of God, had named his son "Methuselah", which some take to mean "when he dies, then it will be sent", as an advance warning of the coming flood. Incidentally, the fact that Methuselah lived longer than any person before or since is taken as an indication of patience of God over hundreds of years as the world was repeatedly warned by preachers such of Noah of the destruction that was come if the wickedness continued.