Dating the Flood

Faith & Science Conversation
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Dating the Flood.

This is the first of a series topics about the conflicts between science and religion.
Please understand that there cannot be a conflict between science and religion, because those two are each others complements. All those so-called conflicts are the result of understandable mistakes by religious people and and an unbelievable quantity of absurd blunders by scientists.
Please keep in mind that the oldest parts of the Bible had the objective to bring religion and the basics of civilization to Stone Age people. To people who believed that the Earth was flat and that you could fall off the edge. And the Bible was successful: today there are over a billion people who use the Bible as the guide to their life. And I am one of them.
I’m a technician and I have a technical approach: if you can’t express it in mathematics, then it is not science but only an opinion. In addition to that I always make a strict distinction between physical and spiritual/theological matters. This series of topics will only concern physical matters.
I have the habit to induce thinking by asking questions. A few examples are:
Estimate how many Floods have occurred so far and write that down for later.
What are the traces left by Floods?
Look at a globe of our Earth and tell me what is clearly visible but is not noticed by you? I saw it when I saw such a globe for the first time in my life in the year of my eights birthday.

Applying mathematics on the Flood results in the following: 40 days (= 1000 hours) rain to cover the highest mountain (= Ararat, 5,400 m high) means 5.4 m/h, = 9 cm/min, = 1.5 mm/sec.
The Sun delivers not enough heat to evaporate such a quantity of water. And even if the Sun delivered enough heat, then the air would not be able to transport such a quantity of water. And finally, it is necessary that it rains that much everywhere on Earth, or else the water would run faster down the slopes of the mountains than it rained.
So it could not have been rain, it has to be an extreme, oversized, worldwide tsunami.
Because I know what caused that tsunami, I hereby assure you that its size, its height and its speed are completely and totally beyond your imagination. On North America the Pacific Ocean flushed over the Rocky Mountains and swept the surface of the whole continent clean of all traces of human existence in less than half a day.
I see no real conflict with the Bible. The intention of the Bible was to introduce religion and civilization among Stone Age people, not to give a correct description of all physical details. Those people understood rain but could not have imagined a tsunami. So it became rain as cause of the Flood. At least that is my opinion and of course I can be in error.

How to date the Flood?
The Flood can be dated by means of the data from research on the drill cores from the ice on Greenland. I have tried to get access to these data, but did only run into people who wanted to get access to what I have discovered during decades research. But I’m sure that some Biologos members have access to these data.
Look for a sudden and abrupt drop of the temperature which could be some 5 or more degrees Celsius, followed by a large quantity of volcanic dust in the next year. The temperature should have been restored to normal values after some 30 to 40 years.
Göbleki Tepe is estimated to be 13,000 years old. A man named Tom Hayden made a documentary about the extinction of the Irish elk and estimated 15,000 years. So the Flood happened somewhere say between 16 and 12 millennia ago.
The season may be estimated on basis of the plants in the stomachs of the mammoths that have been found in Siberia. The time of the day may be estimated on basis of the quantity of food in the stomachs of those mammoths.

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I do like how you think. However, I must point out that the Bible does not refer to a particular “highest mountain” (or “highest hill”; either is possible in the Hebrew original) and we have no idea where the Ararat region (I favor “hill country of Ararat” as the likely translation) was located. The mountain in Turkey is just one of many traditions and there is no good reason to assume that location.)

Moreover, the one passage which refers to a height of 15 cubits could easily be interpreted to refer to TOTAL HEIGHT and not the amount by which the flood exceeded the highest mountain/hill. Indeed, because we don’t know the EXTENT of the flood (Genesis says nothing about a “global flood”, only a flood of Noah’s ERETZ “land”), we may even be dealing with the relatively modest hills and hill country of the Fertile Crescent.

Whatever the case, we have no basis for assigning a height to the flood of the sort of magnitude of your calculations—even though I do love where you are heading with them! (“Flood geology” fans and “creation science” buffs tend to be totally oblivious to the laws of physics. Sadly, so were the authors of *The Genesis Flood", the book which kicked off the “creation science” movement and got people like me so interested.)

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Hello Tertius
I’m glad with your reaction. Thank you.
The first Bible I did read, a Dutch translation, said “higher than the highest mountain”, which implies Mount Everest. (Said our RC. teacher.) Your Bible had obviously a translator with a different interpretation of the original Greek text. And I remember no indication of an actual height in any of the various Dutch translation.
But the people living 10 millennia ago in the Middle East could not have known Mount Everest. The name Ararat means “mountain”, according to some book about it. So it could be any mountain. Except…, the Bible states that the descendants of Noah went East wards and Prof. Bryan Sykes located one of his tribes in the Tigris region.
I disagree with you that there is no basis for assigning a large height to the floods:
The genetic research by Sykes c.s. implies an almost totally extinction of humanity at 150, 60 and 15 ky ago. The geologists found “magnetic pole shifts”at the same times, but could not make the mental switch that it are crust shifts. Humanity living in Stone Age less than 10 ky ago is totally inconsistent with evolution. So it has to be total destruction and massive killing to the level that only the descendants of a single parent survived.
You might calculate the quantity of kinetic energy (KE) in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at a speed difference with Europe and North America: KE = ½ * Mass * Speed * Speed
Mass is 1000 kg/m3, Speed is 100 m/sec, so KE is 500100100 = 5 Megawattsec for each cubical meter water in those oceans, each containing several billions cubical meters.
Take a look on YouTube at the movies of the Tsunami that hit Tailand and while you see that flood, imagine that the speed increases each hour an additional 10 km/h during at least more than 24 hours and keep in mind that the oceans are more than 3 km deep. Fill a soup plate with water, give it a strong and fast pull and look how thick the water flows over the edge.
You are completely right that people should know and understand more of mathematics, physical laws, mechanics, electricity, electronics, etceteras. And even more important, should have learned to think rationnally. If you cannot express something in mathematics, than it is not science but just another opinion.

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Tell that to the Inuits of Alaska,the Aborigines of Austrailia, and the ancient people of Peru who all have genetic links.

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Hi Patric, that is right.
The sea level was at that time some 100 m lower than it is today. The “ missing”water was stored in the form of ice on Canada. Canada was positioned asymmetrically in the permafrost area of the North Pole and subjected to centrifugal forces due to the rotation of our planet. When those forces became stronger than the forces that kept the crust in place, the whole crust started moving and Canada started moving towards the equator. The equator is turning East at a speed of some 40,000/24 km/day =, 1,667 km/h. Canada moved East at a much lower speed and when it sank South, it moved to an area where the Pacific Ocean moved some 500 km/h faster East than Canada. As result the USA and Canada were flooded and wiped clean of almost all traces of human existence. Something similar occurred to all continents. According to the DNA research by Prof. Bryan Sykes C.S. the present population of our planet is descending from only 33 women who lived some 15 to 25 millennia ago. Six of them lived in Europe and I had already found where some of them had survived by analyzing where people could have survived the Flood.
The exact year can be found by means of the research on the Greenland ice: a sudden drop of temperature in that year, followed by a an abrupt increase of volcanic dust the next year.
Why? The two original ice caps were melting 3,000 km nearer to the equator and new ice caps were being formed and all volcanoes had been activated to extreme eruptions. It lasted some 40 years before the temperature returned to the usual value.

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The story of Noah and the Ark is one long list of miracles.

How do you argue with miracles?

The most effective refutation of Noah’s Ark is to argue for Old Earth Creationism with just
one simple piece of evidence:

All dinosaur bones are always found in layers UNDERNEATH bones of large mammals (like Elephants,
Giraffes and Whales) .

Case closed. :smiley:

George Brooks

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Here is how AIG sees the Mammoth Extinction fitting into the post flood Ice age. Do they just make this stuff up?

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> I’m not totally convinced by either explanation, and each have some problems — the main problem is why we don’t find dinosaurs today? (Tim - 30 days ago)

If dinosaurs are defined as extinct fossils, then obviously you won’t find them. If they are reptiles, then we still have lots. If the climate cooled significantly for a period of time, then it explains why so many of them died, and particularly the large ones. Apparently, dinosaurs did not have the type of fat deposits that mammals such as whales and elephants did. Not sure why this would be the case, though.

However, whether we know the explanation or not, this “evidence” cannot prove anything by itself. The coelacanth fish fossils for example, are also found with dinosaur fossils, but not with any of the large mammal fossils, which is why evolutionists had for some time thought they were extinct. Surprise, however, when coelecanth were found to still be alive today.

Our idea that small animals are precursors to large ones, (small mammals vs large mammals) is interesting, and probably wrong. We know that there were giants who lived long ago, but no longer do, meaning that species and types do not grow/evolve progressively larger in any predictable way.

If sediment layers were put down quickly, which some of them certainly were, then the various ability of species to react, or to get caught in dangerous situations would be relevant. How well could the large dinos swim? If they drowned, how quickly would they sink? If they got cold, how quickly could they move? If mammals moved quicker in cold conditions than dino-reptiles, and if they could swim longer, then it would be unlikely to find them together, even if they lived together. Small mammals would drown quicker than larger mammals… think of a hippo or elephant keeping its head above water.

How many crocs and alligators fossils have been found with the dino fossils?

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@johnZ

And yet the findings defy ALL Creationists attempt to develop a logic for the findings.

We find WHALES always above marine dinosaurs. Why would that be?
We find ELEPHANTS always above marine dinosaurs. Certainly Elephants are not able to tread water better than marine dinosaurs.
We find marine Dinosaurs ALWAYS below cows. Certainly Marine Dinosaurs are able to tread water BETTER than cows.

Alligators and Crocodiles are not anatomically considered dinosaurs … but biologists will tell you that these kinds of reptiles have changed very little.

George

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Here is a good link to see the timeline of gator evolution visually presnted…

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And yet, we know that just as the absence of transitional fossils has not stopped evolutionists from postulating that transitionals exist, so also the absence of fossils from certain strata does not mean the animals were not there. You did conveniently ignore the example of the coelecanth fish which was thought to be extinct, because it had not been found in many “younger” layers, yet it must have been there, since it is present today. So your reasoning seems to make sense, but yet it is quite possible that another explanation will also serve.

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I ignored it … because it’s a FISH … and doesn’t have anything to do with Dinosaurs or Large Mammals.

And since there actually WASNT a flood… the Coelecanth poses no real problem to the Evolutionary viewpoint, compared to how much Whales and Elephants cause problems for Flood theory and Young Earth Creationism.

George

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Excuse me. But who is the WE that you are referring to? I don’t think WE has found anything.

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“We” - - you know… “Members of Society”.

George

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@Patrick
Hi Patrick
No, I don’t think that they are just making things up. They have a serious problem. There are lots of facts and data, but it is like a text that is protected with a password and they don’t know the password.
My advantage was that due to war conditions I was not allowed to leave home during almost a year. There was no school, the Germans had confiscated the building. Being bored I did read all the books of my father, found lots of inconsistencies and absorbed facts. At night the Germans launched V1’s against London, many did not make it that far and some dropped in our village. If your house is hit you are dead. You can hide in the cellar, then you survive the explosion but you drown because the waterworks starts filling the cellar and the debris block your exit. So at night we stayed in a hole in the garden, to cold to sleep and I kept thinking, thinking and thinking, and found answers and new riddles.
The password is “crust shift”. The scientists found displacements of the magnetic poles and did not analyze it properly. The magnetic field is caused by ionized gas under the crust. Due to high temperature the atoms have lost electrons, which have a negative charge and that leaves the atoms with a positive charge. These atoms are, with the rest of the Earth, turning in Eastern direction. A moving electric charge is called an electric current by electricians. An electric current causes a magnetic field. That field is apparently amplified by the central core and the result is the magnetic field of our Earth. The displacements of the magnetic poles are in relation to the crust, which leaves the question: what moved, the crust, the mass under the crust or both? Keep in mind that both are free turning flywheels. The mass under the crust is over 300 times larger than the crust, so it has to be the crust that moved. So all those position changes of the magnetic poles were not caused by pole shifts but by crust shifts.
And the scientists failed to produce the mind shift to interpret that correctly.
(Lets not leave some loose ends: what happened to the lost electrons? The Sun regularly emits ionized atoms into space and many reach Earth. I presume that they absorbed the loose electrons.)
The last crust shift was caused by the weight of polar ice: Canada was situated some 3,000 km North of its present position. The sea level was over 100 m lower than today and all that missing water was stored as a 5 km thick layer on Canada, lying asymmetrically on the North pole, subjected to centrifugal forces by the turning of our Earth. A situation as stable as a card house. On a bad day the crust shift started and Canada started a three-week trip going South. At the North pole the crust just turns. At the equator the crust moves 40,000 km/day, which is over 1,600 km/h. Some spot on the West coast, that was moving at some 300 km/h East moved to a spot where the Pacific Ocean and the air above it moved some 800 km/h East. As result the Pacific Ocean flowed at 500 km/h over the West coast, drowning every living creature, except those who were on a mountain top. And the air moving East at 500 km/h blew every creature from the mountain tops into the water.
The Flood was born!
The mammoth extinction was primarily caused by the Flood: most of them drowned. A few survived somehow and had another problem: where and how to find a mating partner. Again a few succeeded, but inbreeding killed their posterity. The mammoths in Siberia had a different form of bad luck. They were not hit by the Flood because the Flood flowed parallel to the coast of Siberia. Their territory moved into the permafrost area of the North pole. They could not walk due to continuous severe earthquakes. (Have a look on Youtube.com to some recording of Tokyo people during an earthquake.) They just tried to remain standing. Once inside the permafrost area, the very cold and very strong wind froze their legs, leaving them standing and then killed them by freezing the rest. Now, some 15 millennia later, they are still there, standing.
Yes, they were killed by climate change, by being moved into permafrost area, but not by global warming. And none of all those brilliant scientists ever produced the thought that a mammoth cannot survive in permafrost: no plant food, no liquid water, no layer of fat under his skin, no thick white woolen fur on his skin. Well, lets not become sarcastic about them.
Professor Robert Coe is an expert on paleomagnetism. He has identified many shifts. I tried to contact him be e-mail, but got no reaction. Maybe you know a way to get his attention and to ask his opinion on this matter. After all we need recognized scientists to support our different opinions.
And we are now in a different position: instead of atheists ridiculing us because we believe what they call nonsense, we can in a friendly way show that we are not completely stupid.
Greetings, Jan.

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Of course you conveniently ignored it. Why would any animal be non-existant from the fossil record for millions of years, be thought extinct, and yet not be extinct. It was there for millions of years and never left any fossils? even though present with the dinosaurs? this certainly presents a problem for the theory that absence of fossils indicate absence during a particular geological layer. Which is something that could have been a problem even just at a theoretical level. But this is certainly evidence that lack of fossils does not prove absence of species.

The corollary to this is that if lack of fossils does not prove absence of species, then certainly we can demonstrate and understand that there are no fossils of actual transitional species or even attempts at species, and by the same reasoning proves that there never were transitional fossils. Now you must pick one or the other line of logic, rather than trying to have your cake and eat it too.

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Jan,
Interesting story. Thank you. Should you need any help please reach out.

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@johnZ

You misunderstand the fossil record. The C. was considered extinct because we had fossils and never found the fish ALIVE. Not because it didn’t leave fossils.

When tribes finally produced a fish WITHOUT EATING IT … we were surprised.

But this is the NORMAL pattern for discovering species. We find rare living creatures (and plants) all the time.

George

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Of course. But it was considered extinct for eons, not just in the last 1000 years. No fossils for 66 my? Yet alive. Yet present all that time in living form on the planet. but no fossils. None found. No evidence of presence. Absence assumed for 66 my. Gone. done. Not there. Wrong.

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@johnZ

I find it ironic that you are so interested in the Coelacanth - - which is considered to represent an especially close connection between Fish and land-walking Tetrapods!

The wiki article on this fish includes this:

“Its discovery 66 million years after it was believed to have gone extinct makes the coelacanth the best-known example of a Lazarus taxon, an evolutionary line that seems to have disappeared from the fossil record only to reappear much later. Since 1938, Latimeria chalumnae have been found in the Comoros, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, and in iSimangaliso Wetland Park, Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa.”

“The second extant species, L. menadoensis, was described from Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1999 by Pouyaud et al. based on a specimen discovered by Mark V. Erdmann in 1998[16] and deposited at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). Only a photograph of the first specimen of this species was made at a local market by Erdmann and his wife Arnaz Mehta before it was bought by a shopper.”

“The coelacanth has no real commercial value apart from being coveted by museums and private collectors. As a food fish it is almost worthless, as its tissues exude oils that give the flesh a foul flavor. The coelacanth’s continued survival may be threatened by commercial deep-sea trawling, in which coelacanths are caught as bycatch.”

This fish lives in some of the most isolated ecosystems of the world.

The “Lazarus Taxon” recognizes known exceptions. But the category itself represents a fairly rare exception to the pattern of fossil evidence. I think Creationists would have just as much difficulty explaining where this fish has been since the time of Noah … as biologists might have in explaining why we haven’t seen fossils for this admittedly rare fish above the KT layer - - demarking the layer immediately above the final dinosaur fossils.

George