DaninGraniteCity

Hello neorask. Have you ever seen this page? http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

hagiograph

Hey Neorask, welcome to IIDB.

First: the amount of information that is available in geology is vast. It really is a very complex and well-thought-out science. The rock record and relative and absolute dating techniques are far far far more complex than what you have written here.

The information out of the rock record indicates that no such earth-wide flood happened. The oil and coal and organics in the ground occur in a number of layers all over the place, not always in the same "level" or age. This organic carbon is also usually far too old to date with carbon-14, but many rocks around them can be dated using other radioactive isotopes of other elements.

The evidence is simply not in the geologic record for the Noachian Flood.

There are a number of great intro books to geology that cover this sort of topic in quite approachable terms. If you are in college or near one, take an intro geology class, it's fun and doesn't always mean a lot of really hard homework, and you'll see that geology, sedimentology, stratigraphy etc are all very neat and real sciences.

-h.

Sven

Igoring the other crap and going directly to the age of the Earth:

No they don't. That you claim something like this only shows your ignorance of the topic. Carbon has an half-life of about 5500 years, which makes it entirely useless for dating geological timescales. Please visit a Christian who explains radioactive dating.

If it's very possible, why is there no theory of creationists out there how exactly climate changes affect radioactive dating? Hint: Wild guesses are the exact opposite of science.

An excerpt from Changing Views of the History of the Earth:

newtype_alpha

Other than the general mountain of geological evidence that indicates the contrary, there's also the fact that there isn't enough water on the entire planet to cover the full surface of the Earth, even if you melted all of the polar ice in the north and south. The low-lying regions of currently dry land would be flooded, that's about it. A cataclysmic event such as a massive asteroid impact in one of the oceans would have a similar effect, creating a tidal wave that could cause a temporary flood fairly far inland, but even then it would hardly be a "global flood" and the waters would recede back into the ocean after only a couple of days, if that long. (Ironically, in either event, the Biblical lands of the middle east and moder-day Israel would not be affected at all. :thumbs: )

There is alot of evidence for a series of small-scale local floods during intense rainy seasons pre-ice age, but that's about it.

Daggah

Then maybe you'd like to explain how several civilizations' written histories continue uninterrupted during the timeframe that the global flood is dated to according to the Bible.

SSGKantorUSA

To be fair to these creationist whackos, the Earth wasn't nearly as big then as it is now. Before you freak at that statement; I mean that the known or known to be populated world was only located in regional pockets throughout the middle east, africa and asia. So a global flood could concievably effect only a small region of the world and the scholars at the time would have seen, by their perception of the facts, a global flood.

Now I am an atheist and think nothing more of creationism than an easy means of explaining a vastly complex and complicated series of events... I am just trying to be fair. A regional flood in the area inhabited by the Isrealites some 5000 years ago would seem like a global flood to them.

Now for those of you who want some Christians and Jews to explain the bible and torah, ask them how the hell someone could fit 2 of every species of animal aloft on one vessel. By my limited calculations, you would need a craft approximately the size of Utah and able to support the combined weight of about 200,000,000 animals and organisms. And what about the vegitation and insects? The birds? I don't understand how anyone can take any of this crap literally.

RBH

The topic of this particular thread is "Ice ages, geology and the flood." Let's try to keep it on that, please.

Thanks!

And welcome to II, SSGKantorUSA!

RBH
E/C Moderator

Coragyps

Nope, it couldn't, generally speaking. There's 200-foot-thick ancient reef 6500 feet below my chair that's full of oil - nearly two billion barrels have been pulled out of it in the last 50 years. This reef required hundreds of thousands of years to grow, and had to have grown in shallow, fairly calm seawater. The 6500 feet between it and my butt includes a couple thousand feet of shales, made of hardened clays that could only have been formed by settling of very fine sediments in calm waters - not a flood. It includes multiple, separate layers of salt and gypsum - minerals that are only deposited when salty waters dry up - not some one-shot flood. It includes limestones formed from the skeletons of microorganisms that grew in clear seawater - not mud soup from a one-year flood. It includes dolomites that were formed by the slow, slow trickle of rainwater containing magnesium through other limestones - a multi-million year process.

There wasn't any global flood.

DeepWaters

Tell me, Neorask . . .

How could the animals survive AFTER they left the ark if there was a global flood?

The salt water that covered the earth would have prevented most plants from growing (so we wouldn't see all the plants we see today, most of the plants we see today would have been extinct from the flood), the soil would have been stripped of its nutrients. Most of the seeds from plants that got killed in the flood would be under many deep layers of sediment (in many places MILES of sediment!) and would not even be able to sprout (the seeds would die/be choked out). Many thousands of different species freshwater fish would have gone extinct (unless they went onto the ark) because they are not adapted for saltwater and would simply die.

The herbivores would have nothing to eat (it would take too long for the vegetation to grow back anyway, even IF it COULD grow back and many herbivorous animals require special diets -- such as koalas), the carnivores would eat the herbivores until there was nothing left -- then they'd probably die before they even got a chance to reproduce. And IF the animals tried to reproduce, most of them only had one mate and their offspring would have to imbreed with each other until severe bottlenecking and genetic defects quickly made the species extinct in only a few generations!

Even IF Noah brought seeds of evey kind with him, he'd have no way to plant them ALL OVER THE WORLD! (Nor, like I said, would they even grow in the salty/nutrient-leeched soil.) The whole idea of Noah's global flood is preposterous! It doesn't take a genius to see that the chances of all those animals that were on the ark surviving until the present time is, I think it is quite safe to say, nil!

g-21-lto

This is a true quote, but so is the one you were rebutting.
Actually, the event wasn't necessarily "catastrophic" in the sense that it was a once-only, unusual event. We have evidence that the Earth has had many long-term, gradual, yet extreme changes of climate throughout geologic time.

Or could it be that they formed due to the changes in climate, tectonics, and speciation over hundreds of millions of years? The varying climate would have little to do with dating methods. There are methods that measure climate moisture through certain isotope analyses, but these are highly specialized and regular K/Ar, Rb/Sr, U/Th/Pb etc. dating is not affected by climate.