Duties of the Global Flood

[jereth]

Of course, that solution is a complete speculation, has no Biblical basis (other than the demands of a particular hermeneutic that a global flood must have happened somehow or other for the Bible to be true), and makes the "duties" of the Flood even worse

Why don't we create a summary of the Flood's "duties"? Everyone is welcome to contribute, YECs, TEs, OECs, etc. After we've made a comprehensive list, we'll be in a better position to formulate a Grand Unified Theory of how the Flood happened.

(The first few duties are from shernren.)

Duties of the Flood:
1. To exhibit multiple varieties of sedimentation at different sites
2. To fossilize layered animal prints and burrows
3. To cause a few km of mountain uplift
4. To split a single supercontinent (Pangaea) and shift the fragments to their current positions.
5. To flip the Earth's magnetic field multiple times.
6. To sort out animal fossils such that dinosaurs are down the bottom and mammals are only at the top
7. To create coal beds and oil fields
8. To produce craters on the moon (and other planets)
9. To generate a flood on the planet Mars

 

[Mallon]

10. To deposit sequenced fossil forests in situ, as though they had been growing there for ages.
11. To deposit a layer of iridium, such as that seen at the K-T boundary.
12. To allow for the floodwaters to disappear entirely, without giving any indication as to where they went.

 

[shernren]

I would clarify that these are duties not of the Flood per se, but of the Flood and whatever causative mechanism is proposed for it. Important duty:

13. To sort organic matter into a fossilization order generally resembling one supporting evolution:
13 a. to prevent any "Cambrian" plants or animals from being deposited in "Cenozoic" strata, etc.
13 b. to prevent organisms from being deposited anywhere too far from plausible evolutionary descendants or ancestors.

 

[FreezBee]

13. To start the ice age.

 

[gluadys]

13. To start the ice age.

14a. To allow for evaporation sufficient to create salt to occur in many parts of the geological record.
14b. To keep many parts of the globe temporarily free from water in order to allow the soil to develop cracks from the mud drying out, and preserve them in the geologic record (see "The Dry Flood" in the C&E Quiet Thread)

15. Allow for the preservation of river beds through the flood, including river beds carved through older river beds.

16. To destroy most of the population of terrestrial species without creating a genetic bottleneck.

17. To completely destroy several civilizations without interrupting the production of written records which show no notice that the civilization has disappeared.
17a. To rapidly regenerate the human population such that there are enough people available world wide for significant building projects such as the pyramids within less than a century.

 

[Mallon]

18. To drastically change the surface of the earth, except rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates, which remained the same before and after the flood.
19. To destroy all life, except a single olive tree from which Noah's dove fetched a branch.
20. To keep the salt- and fresh-waters unmixed in the turbulence of the Flood, so as to maintain all aquatic life, irrespective of their native water salinities.

 

[stumpjumper]

21. To test the buoyancy of Gopher wood

 

[chaoschristian]

22. To not release so much heat through whatever mechanism(s) was/were responsible for the appearance of the flood water so as not to completely sterilize the planet, burn off the atmosphere, and not kill all the occupants of the ark.

 

[muaxiong]

Or how about this, the only true duty of a global flood, as it is written in Genesis 6:13 - “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”

23. To show that God has absolute sovereignty over His creation and therefore can and will judge every living creature.
24. To provide evidence that a judgment on mankind has been passed – a miraculous killing would not have left any evidence of a judgment, neither would fire and brimstone leave much evidence (besides that’s reserved for the end times).
25. To affirm the divinity and purpose of Jesus for it was He who said: “For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” Matthew 24:38,39.
26. To fulfill prophecy that in the last days many will deny that such a deluge occurred as shown in 2 Peter 3:6.
27. To show the ignorance of the Bible believing masses in rejecting mainstream evolutionary science which is “very sound” even though the ones who are making the loudest noise are the theists.
28. To show that only those who believe do so for no other reason than that it is what God’s word says so plainly.

 

[Mallon]

I think those are all important lessons we can learn from the flood story, muaxiong. And I would be happy to leave it at that -- a matter of faith. Now if only we could just stop hearing about "catastrophic plate tectonics", "flood geology" and "vapour canopies".

 

[Jadis40]

I used to be solidly in the global flood camp, until I actually started reading the opposing viewpoints, and I was slowly brought over to the local flood side.

Two simple words:

Grand Canyon

I've been doing a lot of reading over the past year or so, and nothing the YEC/global flood camp has presented has done a compelling job of explaining the stratigraphy of the canyon.

Here's why - The Coconino Sandstone

I believe, and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, that YEC/global flood proponents say is that all the layers were laid down during the flood. Well, there's a major problem with that.

The general concensus is that the coconino sandstone was formed approximately 265 million years ago when that part of the US was a huge sand-dune field, similiar to the Sahara. You're not going to have wind-blown sand dunes in the middle of a global flood.

http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=131328

Not to mention that the canyon itself has fossils which attest that at various times the rock layers which now make up certain layers show that at some point millions of years ago that area was a seashore.

The fact that the part of the US that now makes up Indiana was also under a shallow sea millions of years ago is proven by the limestone deposits in southern Indiana around the Bedford and Bloomington areas. Limestone only forms by the deposit and fossilization of marine life.

 

[stumpjumper]

Or how about this, the only true duty of a global flood, as it is written in Genesis 6:13 - “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”

<snip>

Do you need a flood to make any of those statements true?

Jesus' reference to scripture can most certainly be true even it didn't actually happen and the rest of them do not really need a global flood from what I can tell...

 

[shernren]

Next duty:

To make one mass extinction event with practically no survivors look like five events with lots of survivors each.

It's estimated that in the course of earth history that there's been at least 5 mass extinction events that have been extremely severe in the percentage of animal/floral species eliminated -

Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction about 65 million years ago, which concides with the extinction of the last dinosaurs.

End Triassic extinction - about 199 million to 214 million years ago

Permian-Triassic extinction - about 251 million years ago.

Late Devonian extinction - about 364 million years ago.

Ordovician-Silurian extinction - about 439 million years ago.

from http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=25135657&postcount=256

 

[GenemZ]

Why don't we create a summary of the Flood's "duties"? Everyone is welcome to contribute, YECs, TEs, OECs, etc. After we've made a comprehensive list, we'll be in a better position to formulate a Grand Unified Theory of how the Flood happened.

(The first few duties are from shernren.)

Duties of the Flood:
1. To exhibit multiple varieties of sedimentation at different sites
2. To fossilize layered animal prints and burrows
3. To cause a few km of mountain uplift
4. To split a single supercontinent (Pangaea) and shift the fragments to their current positions.
5. To flip the Earth's magnetic field multiple times.
6. To sort out animal fossils such that dinosaurs are down the bottom and mammals are only at the top
7. To create coal beds and oil fields
8. To produce craters on the moon (and other planets)
9. To generate a flood on the planet Mars

Which global flood? There was only one. Not Noah's.

Noah's flood was local and covered a relatively small area of the earth. The Global flood was what we find in Genesis 1:2, before the creation of man.

The problem is this. There were mutliple creations and their destructions before the global flood. This flood was to end all prehistoric life and to move into the next era of what we now live in. Noah's flood had only one objective. To kill off all mankind. Mankind was in its infancy. Maybe only a half a million people. The flood for Noah's day had one objective. To kill off the *known world* to man. Not to drown out the entire creation where man did not live.

5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth&#8212;men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air&#8212;for I am grieved that I have made them." 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

​

God was not out to destroy the entire earth, but the world. The "world" is where man lived.

The Kangaroo never got to see the flood of Noah. Only animals indigenous to the likes of man were caught up.


God had to catch the animals off guard and had only those needed in man's known eco system preserved on the Ark.

The reason I believe animals had to be caught off guard is because many of them have a built in warning system and would have alerted man to there being something wrong as many animals would have moved on and scattered before the flood. I have witnessed to this phenomena first hand.

In a nutshell, GeneZ

 

[shernren]

Silly me. I've just realized that in any YEC theory imaginable

each and every existing fossil stratum, whether ante- or post-diluvean, ought to contain flower pollen.

 

[laptoppop]

Silly me. I've just realized that in any YEC theory imaginable

each and every existing fossil stratum, whether ante- or post-diluvean, ought to contain flower pollen.

Funny you should mention that. Detecting pollen in strata is not easy. Pollen "fossils" are easy to destroy in the process of cleaning and preparing samples. Most YEC research is done using quite limited budgets by few researchers, so it is not surprising that most researchers would not even try to find pollen in "early" strata.

However, modern pollen has been detected in precambrian strata in the grand canyon. They also detected fungal structures, plant stems and lycopods. This, of course, has been challenged by various people, and is an ongoing issue. Please see http://www.rae.org/pollen.html for a good article regarding the issue.

I do not have the data, but apparently workers in India, Australia, and the (then)USSR have reported similar findings.

 

[notto]

To quickly turn mud to rock in the absense of pressure and heat.

 

[Mallon]

Funny you should mention that. Detecting pollen in strata is not easy.

Actually, it is quite easy. Fossil pollen is abundant in most post-Devonian strata. And given the hardened nature of the exterior of most palynomorphs, they are quite durable.

However, modern pollen has been detected in precambrian strata in the grand canyon. They also detected fungal structures, plant stems and lycopods. This, of course, has been challenged by various people, and is an ongoing issue. Please see http://www.rae.org/pollen.html for a good article regarding the issue.

It's hardly an ongoing issue. Maybe for creationists it is, because they can't seem to decide for themselves. But among palynologists, it's obviously contamination. See:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/evolut/sorfos.htm
There's a history behind the claim, in fact. Read about it here:
http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/hangar/2437/discrim.htm
To summarize:

The final straw came in 1966, when Burdick, who was working with a University of Arizona team at the Grand Canyon, announced he had found modern conifer pollens in pre-Cambrian sediments, a discovery which, Burdick gushed, would "bury evolutionary geology forever" (Numbers 1992, p. 261). Lammerts, who was already suspicious of Burdick because of the "doctors degree stuff", began to wonder if Burdick was "academically honest" (Numbers, 1992, p. 262) His suspicions rose when he attended a creation seminar in Arkansas with Burdick. "I was appalled at the slowness of Burdick mentally when at the Creation seminar," Lammerts wrote to fellow CRS member Henry Morris, "and hope he is not misleading us." Lammerts reported that Burdick "had evidently never heard of the series of horse-like animals found and was at a complete loss to explain them. Evidently he has not kept up with his reading very much." (Numbers, 1992, p. 264)
Alarmed by the possibility of a hoax, the CRS in 1969 asked two independent scientists from Loma Linda University to accompany Burdick back to the Grand Canyon to double-check his research. Although shortly afterwards Burdick triumphantly reported to CRS that his original discovery of pre-Cambrian pollen had been confirmed, both scientists concluded that Burdick was simply too incompetent to take an uncontaminated soil sample. No pre-Cambrian pollen grains were found. (In 1981, creationist biologist Arthur Chadwick, who had once been Burdick's assistant at the Grand Canyon, reported that he could not find a trace of pollen of any sort in any of the fifty samples taken from the same strata studied by Burdick.) The CRS concluded that Burdick's "pollen" was the result of sloppy and incompetent research methods, not a deliberate fraud.