How would the event of Noah's Ark be an argument for Earth's age?

Hi there,

Just a question revolving around the idea of Noah’s Ark and comparing it to the scientific age of Earth:

Supposedly the event with Noah’s Ark changed the earth’s layout to how it is today with the Young Earth Creationist belief. However, scientists argue that the earth changed over the span of 4.5 billion years. How would the event of Noah’s Ark be a plausible cause? For me, some things don’t add up in this, like where all the water went.

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There is indeed a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t add up for “flood geology” that tries to cast a global Noah’s flood as the prime mover for all the big geological features we see. That’s why so many geologists from a two or three centuries ago (who would largely have started with presumptions of a young earth - and a big flood) were forced by their observations to consider that their presumptions were almost certainly wrong. There are a lot of other fronts since, for which that has proven true and consistent.

Welcome to the forum - I hope you get some useful interaction here.

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Where do you find the changed layout mentioned in the Bible? Hint, you don’t. It is one of the many fictions added by the YEC folks trying to explain what is seen in the geologic record.

It isn’t. It creates an endless stream of problems that have to be explained away with an equally endless stream of miracles that aren’t mentioned in the Bible.

For me the biggest problem is actually a simple question, what did the animals eat when they left the ark? After a year under water there would be no plant life and it takes time for plants to sprout and grow.

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As others have explained, that goes over and above what the Bible says. YECs claim to be presenting us with a “plain reading” of Scripture, but they do nothing of the sort. What they are doing is presenting us with a cartoon caricature of Scripture with a thick layer of science fiction slathered on top of it.

  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that the Flood reshaped the continents.
  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that the Flood created the fossil record.
  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that the Flood wiped out the dinosaurs.
  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that the Flood was accompanied by billion-fold accelerated nuclear decay.
  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that Noah had power tools.
  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that the Flood was followed by an ice age.
  • There is nowhere in Scripture that tells us that giants fought T-Rexes in colosseums before the Flood.

Basically:

aig-cartoon-fixed

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There are many takes on Noah’s Ark that are diverse and allow for both an old and young earth. One is the that it was regional, that is it was the “world” of the Israelites, not the globe. Another take is that it was more figurative and the story communicates theological truths like “God is displeased with sin” and “God provides salvation” and “the rainbow is a sign that God loves us even though we mess up”.
One thing that is difficult to support with observations in nature is that a global flood happened 5000 or so years ago. There is simply too much history in the rocks and erosion patterns as well as multiple other findings in nature that could not have happened in that short of a time period.

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There are a few irrational things with the flood from a YEC perspective.

  1. They don’t believe in evolution and they believe all animals in the fossil record was alive 6k years ago. That means they believe they were all alive at the same time. If they were all alive at the same time then why don’t we find them all mixed together in the geological layers. Why don’t we find T. rex I’m the Jurassic era contrary to the films? We do we see different species in different geological layers of all sizes. It’s not just the largest ones at top or on the bottom. We find small and large animals of various species in all the layers. Additionally these species show lineages and morphological differences caused by divergent traits. Such as we don’t see bipedal primates earlier than primates walking around on all four. We don’t see birds earlier than the first dinosaurs. We don’t see winged mammals before we see four legged mammals. We don’t see modern aquatic mammals ( dolphins and whales ) before we see four legged mammals on land. So a global flood could not have wiped out all life on earth in a short time span preventing evolution because of the superimposition of the geological layers and placement of fossils following clear speciation as basal forms grew more and more diverse.

  2. Where did all the water come from? We could not have even 200 feet of solid water in our atmosphere without superheating earth. We could not have even 1 mile high worth of global water exploding from within the earth without the water coming from so deep that it spewed out as boiling water and steam blowing everything apart while cooking all life alive.

There are dozens of other issues as well. But these two alone disprove the entire concept of a global flood 6000 years ago killing all life except for what was on a ark.

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Nowhere in the Bible is there the concept of the earth as a planet, and the descriptions of the earth as a table sound far more like a small portion of the planet. Therefore we have no reason to think this is a story of a planet-wide flood let alone the completely impossible notion of collecting pairs of all the animals of the planet into any kind of boat. So are these people adding such things to the Bible in order change it into some kind of comical parody?

Neptunism was on its way out through the late 1600s to 1700s, and was pretty much gone (among geologists) by 1800. Mind you, people before 1650 were frequently skeptical that the fossils could be old enough to be from the flood, given how well-preserved they were, as compared to ancient buildings.

The Flood consisting of a series of megatsunamis caused by giant asteroid impacts is directly contradicted by scripture, as scripture rules out the ark getting repeatedly flipped by tsunamis in a boiling opaque slurry (formerly known as the oceans), and the animals inside getting cooked by said slurry. Also, if one is trying to have the megatsunamis deposit fossils, one runs into all the tiny, fragile shells in numerous different layers, each layer with its own set of tiny, fragile shells. Many of said shells are fragile enough to break if I were to set a 10 gram weight on them, let alone place them in a violently churning slurry ocean. Also, a violently churning slurry cannot deposit mud (or, given the violence invoked, anything smaller than boulders).

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