It has to do with Jesus’ credibility since He affirmed the historicity of the Flood (Matthew 24; 2 Peter 3)
Close I am sure, judging by the deposits, but not at the same time. Sort of like all my clothes have been washed, but never in one big tub. And multiple times, but not at the same time for either the landforms or my clothes.
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It’s the rare person who washes all their clothes at once. Not the time to have guests over.
I appreciate that you desire to be faithful to the Scripture. If that is your central issue, you could always adopt the position of Young Earth Creationist and Ph.D. scientist Todd Wood:
Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.
I say these things not because I’m crazy or because I’ve “converted” to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I’m motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)
…It is my own faith choice to reject evolution, because I believe the Bible reveals true information about the history of the earth that is fundamentally incompatible with evolution.
Secondly, you seem to think these passages exegete themselves, but they do not.
For well over a millenium, Bible scholars were convinced that geocentrism was the only possible configuration of the universe because of passages like Psalm 104, which states “the earth does not move.” Even Luther and Calvin thought Psalm 104 was 100% obviously a scientific statement, and no alternative exegesis was possible.
A century later, the vast majority of Bible scholars had suddenly adopted a non-literalistic exegesis of Psalm 104. Was it because of newfound discoveries about Ancient Near East culture? Was it the result of new research on Hebrew grammar?
Nope. It was because of Galileo and the heliocentric revolution in astronomy. With the invention of the telescope came enormous amounts of data that strongly supported heliocentrism. This scientific revolution in turn prompted a re-thinking by Bible scholars.
In my opinion, it is time to give careful thought as to how there might be a better exegesis of Matthew 24 and II Peter 3. If you’re interested, just ask, and I’m sure many folks here–including me–would be happy to oblige with our take.
Blessings,
Chris
A massive regional flood works just fine in both of your references, so it has nothing to do with Jesus’ credibility.
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I don’t have any problem with the idea of earth being a water world early on, not unlike what they are saying about exoplanets. That would fit Psalm 104 just fine, too. Is there contrary evidence?
Jesus’ fully human ignorance is a crucial part of of His credibility. But He isn’t demonstrating that in Matthew 24 in which He uses the Flood as a literary allusion and 2 Peter 3 in which He doesn’t but Peter does; whether either of them believed it or not is irrelevant. I’m a Christian and I know, as in know, that there was no Flood or - 6 day YEC - except in the minds of Jewish writers using an ancient Babylonian myth - and cosmology - because of Jesus’ credibility. As to whether they or Jesus and Peter believed any of the nonsense, I wouldn’t be surprised, but also that Jesus in particular didn’t. Nor some of the C6th BCE political genius Exilic writers. The OT abrogates itself on the trajectory of the humanist humanization of God after all. Jesus continued most subtly in that.
You know, as in know, that there was no Noahic flood, not even a massive regional one?
The Zuni (Cretaceous) megasequence saw the highest ocean level and greatest sediment deposition–on all continents. So, the continents were simultaneously covered completely at least in this megasequence
First, surely you acknowledge that marine fossils cover all continents. Right? Which clearly means the earth was, at least once, covered by ocean water.
On the other hand, carousel-like continental subsidence/uplift…subsidence/uplift… subsidence/uplift, etc. etc. would be enough to make any earth-dweller seasick! But…you say you have the “math”–the geophysics–to support such a scenario. So, please fill me in. Give me a link to check out, o.k.? All I have ever read are assertions and suppositions about this.
You must be joking, as the rise and fall of landforms takes place over 100s of millions of years. And while it seems like a lot to us little people, as you see from pictures of the ISS, mountains on the earth are little more change in the surface than the skim of cream in your cup of coffee, and can move and change about as much as the swirl of cream does.
First, Chris, I apologize for the Jesus’ credibility comment I mistakenly attached to your comment–it was meant for someone else.
But, what’s all this talk about a “miracle”? I wasn’t talking about miracles when I said that you can’t project a present-day velocity onto the continental “drift” velocity which resulted from splitting up of Pangea (but pointed out that such an error is completely in keeping with uniformitarianism). As the article I linked pointed out, present-day scientists are realizing that this velocity was significantly higher than they had thought.
So, I was discussing the natural, not the supernatural.
Phil, the question here is, so where is the scientific support for all this purported-to-be repeated subsidence/uplift. Just saying that there is lots of time–millions and millions of years–that it could have happened (“with time…all things are possible!”), is not providing scientific evidence it did happen.
While the older movements are highly speculative, this is a somewhat mesmerizing animation of continental drift:
Continental Drift: 3.3 Billion Years - YouTube text**
As to scientific evidence, most of the ancient rocks have long been subducted and buried or remelted, but we can measure current movement accurately, and make observations as to relative positions of various geologic formations consistent with reconstructions of past movement. The example of Hawaiian island formation over a hot spot is perhaps the one most often given, but others, including the slippage of plates in the Rift Valley forming the Dead Sea are interesting to read about. Google can find you many more examples and documentation, but you will have to do your own research if you wish to follow up on that.
You are confusing the lateral sequence of facies, which is Walther’s Law, with the rate of deposition, which obeys Stokes’ Law (to be precise, Stokes’ law is for the simple case of spherical shapes, but the considerations apply to other things). Walther’s law is that the vertical sequence of facies in a depositional sequence typically follows the horizontal sequence of those facies at any one point in time. For example, if sea level were gradually rising (such as in the Cambrian sequence in the Grand Canyon), you would first get sand as beach to shallow water deposits. The waves and wind wash away the smaller mud pieces, so it’s sandy. As the water continues to rise, you gradually get deep enough that most of the waves are entirely above the seafloor. Thus, you would see a transition from sand (fairly pure sandstone) to somewhat muddy sand (greywacke) to sandy mud (perhaps a siltstone) to mud (probably becoming shale as a rock). Along the coast of a continent, there is typically quite a lot of sand and mud eroding from the rock and washing down to the coast, so this sand and mud is typically made of stuff from the land - quartz generally dominating the sand and clay minerals from chemical weathering of more complex silicate minerals dominate the mud. As you get deeper still, more and more of the stuff washing off the land has already settled to the bottom, and the sediment becomes dominated by the old shells and skeletons from living things. By far the most popular mineral for making skeletons is calcium carbonate (either aragonite or calcite). So the sediment will transition to more and more carbonate-rich, becoming limestone as it turns to rock. As the sea retreats again, the facies will occur again in the reverse sequence. You can get much more detailed, and there can be local patterns or different settings. For example, in tropical areas not too near big river mouths, there may be a lagoon, then a reef, then the reef front, then the pile of pieces broken off the reef. And if you look closely, the reef has different parts. But all that takes time - lots of time. Tsunami deposits are characterized by a jumble of all sorts of sized pieces, big and small. They can be recognized in the geologic record - some are found associated with asteroid impacts, for example.
Stokes’ law describes how particles settle through a fluid. Due to friction, smaller pieces tend to settle more slowly than larger ones. Flatter pieces have more surface area for their mass and so tend to settle more slowly. Clay minerals are tiny flat flakes, so they settle slowly (as can easily be seen if you mix some dirt well with water and then let it sit for a while.) Stokes’ law tells us that clay settles too slowly to be compatible with being deposited in a flood geology model, particularly one that has water violently rushing around. (Though in fact, global flood claims tend to switch abruptly from extreme violent water flow to extreme calm, depending on which feature of the geologic record is to be explained away at the moment.)
I have seen one flood geology video that claimed that the facies were actually the time layers and the time layers were actually facies. Given that it was illustrated with animation of a hill of water going back and forth, there are some basic problems of ignoring the laws of gravity. But also, there are a huge number of facies changes; such a switch would not make young-earth explanations any easier.
A biblical flood would not be the flood of creation science. Genesis 2 indicates that Eden was located in a recognizable place relative to the modern geography of Mesopotamia. That would be impossible if the flood totally rearranged the globe and deposited most of the rock record.
The geologic column is based on observing actual geological data. Layers found underneath other layers were assigned to the bottom; layers above were put higher up. Ironically, one of the key players in the early recognition of the geologic column, William Smith, was so focused on recognizing layers that he didn’t think about how they formed. Some minister friends of his had to point out to him that this implied that the earth was old. Both young-earthers and atheists have falsely claimed that Smith was challenging the church. Much of Smith’s work was first published as part of a book titled “The Character of Moses as an Historian, Recording Events from the Creation to the Deluge”, which makes it obvious that it was no challenge to the church.
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Marine fossils do not cover all areas of all continents. They occur on parts of all continents, which shows that all continents include areas that have been under the ocean. But there are land deposits, evaporites, and other layers that could not be deposited out of a global flood. The continents were not entirely covered during the Zuni megasequence. Land deposits are found throughout that time as well as ocean ones.
The rate of continent movement is not perfectly constant - it varies from about 2 cm per year to over 10 cm per year today. That’s about as fast as your fingernail growth. In the past, with higher levels of heat from the earth’s interior, somewhat faster rates would not be surprising. But the rock record shows a history of plate movement long before the breakup of Pangea. To have a significant amount of plate motion take place within a single year would require plates moving at highway speeds. The energy to power that would quickly vaporize the earth. But in fact, the layers of sediment on the seafloor show a long, slow history of movement. Wind and current patterns lead to upwelling near the equator. This zone of cooler, more nutrient-rich water has different plankton living in it than in the warm, nutrient-poor areas to either side, and thus different skeletons piling up to make the seafloor sediment. That band of equatorial sediment can be traced along the northward movement of the Pacific plate. It requires ordinary ocean conditions over long periods of time to form and could not possibly be formed during a one-year global flood.
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I really enjoy the contextual analysis aspect of the flood story. I refer to the flood all the time and I believe in the story of Noah. I just don’t believe it’s without mythology and hyperbolic statements. It also has to deal with the shortcomings of modern western world views and translations that could have been worded better.
For example the word used in genesis for world, is actually the lands and the lands was subjective to what Noah knew about. Now days in this modern world we understand the lands as being the globe. The whole earth. We see maps as kids showing nations we will never go to and we have so much technology that we can instantly message and send videos of another nation to another nation from another nation. I can forward images from Japan to my friends in Russia from alabama.
But what did Noah think of when we said the whole world? Was Noah thinking of native Americans , Russians and indigenous people in Brazil? Was he even thinking of people
20 hours away by horse? It’s hard to be certain what he was thinking but luckily we can look to how Paul made similar statements.
Colossians 1:5-6
New American Standard Bible
5 because of the hope reserved for you in heaven, of which you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel 6 which has come to you, just as in all the world also it is bearing fruit and increasing, even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth;
Here Paul writes that gospel has came to the whole world and is bearing fruit.
Colossians 1:23
New American Standard Bible
23 if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister.
Here Paul says all of creation has heard it proclaimed to them.
Romans 16:25-26
New American Standard Bible
25 Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, 26 but now has been disclosed, and through the Scriptures of the prophets, in accordance with the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith;
Here the author says that ,” the scriptures of the prophets have been made known to all the nations”.
So in the first century did the gospel get heard by people in south USA? No. Yet that claim is made. So that must mean that the phrase, whole world, meant something to Noah and Paul that it did not mean to us. In that case, we can look to real geology and use good science skills to adjust the lenses being used to understand a ancient cultural worldview.
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Where do you begin when almost the whole of geology and physics, and libraries of research, all are interlocked in support of geological time? Geomagnetic analysis, erosion patterns of islands over hot spots, isotope dating, hydrocarbons exploration based on the duration and temperature of “cooking”, micro fossil distribution, the constraints of physical law, it goes on and on. It would be little exaggeration to say that if the geologists are wrong about geological time, they are wrong about everything, and their entire careers have been spent lost in a deluded fog of fantasy. All the oil ever discovered has been random dumb luck. We have no clue as to how mineralization occurs, or where to look for it.
If you wish to learn why megasequences fit with accepted geology, you can start by carefully considering the link Flood Geology article from the National Center for Science Education publication @Dale pointed out above.
For a further response from a respected field geologist, I also recommend…
https://www.amazon.com/Rocks-Dont-Lie-Geologist-Investigates/dp/0393346242
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What land deposits and evaporites, specifically, are you referring to? Can you be more specific–what and where are they, on the North American continent?
Thanks!
Too true. And repeating myself,