This is exemplary of a common YEC tactic, where a legitimate phenomena, in this case the stratification of water which can occur in quiescent conditions, is applied to a completely contrary situation. When one does not have legitimate and consistent evidence, this is the kind of thing one must resort to.
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Dear Roy,
I do not know whether my experience is applicable to an event that happened nearly five thousand years ago, but I do know that fresh water floats on top of saltwater, and in deep ocean areas where halocline stratification would have more saline water sinking below less saline water, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that some areas of the flood surface were less hostile than you seem to imagine. In other areas the geologic and tectonic upheaval and mass sediment transport would have been devastating perhaps for several months, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that every square inch of the ocean surface was a boiling cauldron, if it was the ark probably would not have survived.
If you really believe that the flood that the Bible reliably informs us covered ALL the Earth, or if you prefer ALL the land, (it amounts to the same thing), was merely a LOCAL FLOOD, then you are insulting God, as is not it a fact written in the Holy Scriptures that God promised Noah:
8 And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying,
9 And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you;
10 And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.
11 And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
12 And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:
13 I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
15 And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
16 And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.
17 And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.
18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
We still see LOCAL FLOODS occurring today all over the Earth!
I’m very sorry to say this, but it must be said so that you realise the error.
You are questioning God Himself by claiming the GLOBAL FLOOD was merely a LOCAL FLOOD.
The Bible is clear that the FLOOD COVERED ALL THE LAND.
We know the Earth is a near perfect spherical planet, thus when the floodwaters covered ALL THE LAND, we can deduce from that clear fact that the WHOLE GLOBE was covered by water.
The Bible even tells us that ALL the High Mountains were covered to at least 15 cubits (i.e., probably about 22 feet or 7 metres).
Although you rail against faithful, fellow Christians that believe in faith that the Bible is trustworthy and true, and you continue to accuse them of dishonesty, telling lies, and being deceptive, it is indeed your own beliefs you need to look at, regarding the utterly clear fact that the flood of Noah was absolute, it covered ALL the Earth, it extinguished life in ALL FLESH in whose nostrils was the breathe of life that were outside the ark.
God does NOT tell lies!
He is Truth!
He is Love!
He Loves You!
God bless,
jon
Dear Ron,
again, more self righteous grandstanding that sadly denigrates those with whom you disagree.
I could say exactly the same thing about evolution.
God bless,
jon
The Bible does in fact reflect the flat earth and associated domed firmament cosmology of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Scholars would agree. The only reason that you argue otherwise is that the Greeks have established that the earth is spherical for two millennia and half a millennia ago Galileo successfully argued against the then prevailing geocentric theology, and established that the earth revolves around the sun.
So over that past hundreds of years, theology has made its peace with the counterintuitive but scientifically established fact of heliocentrism. You do not feel the ground move, yet it does rotate and revolve. You can thank science for that understanding.
Biologos article by Biblical Studies Professor Pete Enns…
The Firmament of Genesis 1 is Solid but That’s Not the Point
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Dear Ron,
did it ever occur to you that faithful Christians who believe in faith that the Bible is faithful and trustworthy are in fact correct and old earth evolution is a false paradigm?
God bless,
jon
Dear Ron,
Obviously!
God bless,
jon
No further questions.
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I can only assume that you believe an inconsistency exists here.
Make no mistake, the Global Flood of Noah was a violent catastrophic event of unprecedented severity such as has not been seen since the creation nor shall be again until the end of the age.
However, the Earth is a very Big place in terms of individual living creatures and the Bible reliably tells us that those onboard the ark were safely delivered through the catastrophic event of the flood, without being swamped, capsizing or sinking, thus it is reasonable that at least some of the doubtless many large thick log rafts perhaps with interlocked branches and roots similarly made it through to the calmer receding of the waters at the end of the flood.
That’s all.
God bless,
jon
Well, here are some petrified stumps all rooted, having grown in place 180 mya. There are several grown in place fossil forests around the world, from Antarctica to the Arctic, found in what YEC considers flood deposits. They were not transported by the flood as claimed.
From Kentucky Geological Survey, here are a dozen ways standing stumps form in standard geology
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The whole belief in ‘deep time’ is fraught with problems, not the least of which, (despite what some here have and will no doubt continue to claim), are the unknown assumptions implicitly embedded in the interpretation of the very accurately measured parent and daughter isotope data.
It is interesting though that you would rather not give an answer to the important question I raised in more detail with Roy at post 523.
Thus ultimately Ron, how do you reconcile the absolutely clear as crystal words of God Himself in the Holy Scriptures with a LOCAL FLOOD?
God bless,
jon
No – I am refusing to budge from the text of the scripture in order to satisfy a doctrine that arises from a philosophy that is alien to the Hebrew scriptures. You insist that the Hebrew text does not mean what it says both by changing the meanings of words, denying the Hebrew grammar, and ignoring the historical context. You have thrown out both aspects of the historical-grammatical method and resorted to relying on the sheer arrogance that the Holy Spirit didn’t care about the people to whom Moses wrote but instead had him write to convenience people over three millennia later to fit their worldview.
Actually that’s you. I read the scriptures in four different languages, and refuse to budge from the original ones; you read it in a translation and show that you don’t even understand how the language you read it in works. And you have the self-righteous arrogance to think that God has spoken to you above all others, as evidenced by the fact that you pretend that no other interpretation of the scriptures has ever been put forward by anyone, that you ignore scholars who grew up reading and studying the Hebrew text as though you know better.
YEC requires that He does, along with requiring that the Holy Spirit had no respect for the actual audiences of the various portions of the scriptures. YEC does this by demanding that the Holy Spirit had to speak in their modern scientific worldview.
Exactly – which is why I will not budge from the text that He inspired.
Exactly – which is why people here have been so astoundingly patient with you spouting the same false claims and logic and pointing us to the same sources of lies as people have been doing for years.
I know – that is eminently clear in the messages that you throw out of the text of the scriptures.
You have only one possible answer here: show us where the Bible says it is to be taken as teaching us science. If you cannot, then admit that your foundation is not the word of God at all but is human wisdom brought from outside the scriptures.
Where does the Bible say that? Show us.
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Excellent article. It always baffles me that YECers agree that prophets spoke in the terms that to them described what they saw, but when it comes to the numero uno OT prophet they reject the same concept.
From the article:
The debate exists because of the assumption made by some Christians that the ancient biblical description of the world must be compatible on a scientific level with what we know today.
Just as there was debate in the middle ages because of the assumption made by some Christians that the ancient biblical description of the world must be compatible with the science of their day of a motionless Earth where everything was made of air, earth, fire, and water.
That YECers cannot see that they are repeating a mistake down through the centuries shows an incredible ignorance – or a refusal to know.
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Did it ever occur to you that this applies to every Christian here?
My big problem with YECrs is that they claim that they “believe in faith that the Bible is faithful and trustworthy” yet they refuse to actually deal with the text of the scriptures, instead replacing the text with imaginary meanings derived from current human science. It is baffling that the YEC enterprise is supposedly opposed to “secular” modern science but cannot recognize that their definition of truth rests on the idea that modern science is a legitimate measure of truth.
The “sand dune migration” one caught my eye for two reasons: one, that it doesn’t cover inland dunes that propagate from beaches with a sufficient supply of sand that the dunes reach several miles inland but aren’t deserts; two that there are species that can have the first ten, twenty, or even thirty feet of their trunks buried but continue to live while others will die from having just two to three feet of sand around their bases. There are trees along the edges of an inland dune area near where I live that have had a foot or two of sand bury their bases during the dry part of the year, then that sand is overgrown by grasses during the wet part, then when the dry period returns more sand is deposited, and they continue to thrive for decades as this cycle repeats, while other species nearby die when the second dry stretch puts sand over those grasses.
Another interesting thing to me was that I have observed eight of the items on the list.
A final comment: in terms of volcanism, there are trees which will eventually appear to have been a forest covered in place by mud but which were actually torn from the ground by volcanic activity, deposited in a lake, sank and settled with roots downward and trunks vertical, which then got covered over thousands of years by slow filling of the lake with sediment.
Why do you continue to use deceptive language by saying “local flood” when what the scripture actually speaks of is a massive flood of the world known to Noah? That is not something anyone would normally call a “local” event, and since this has been pointed out to you the only conclusion is that either you refuse instruction and/or correction or that you are being deliberately deceptive.
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Dear Roy,
no matter which translation you care to read using sound exegesis principles and methods the True meaning of the Holy Scripture is contextually the same as the subject Scripture:
A fraction of relatively random examples of this same Scripture are below, though many dozens more can readily be added,
יא וַהֲקִמֹתִי אֶת-בְּרִיתִי אִתְּכֶם, וְלֹא-יִכָּרֵת כָּל-בָּשָׂר עוֹד מִמֵּי הַמַּבּוּל; וְלֹא-יִהְיֶה עוֹד מַבּוּל, לְשַׁחֵת הָאָרֶץ. 11 And I will establish My covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.’ Genesis 9:11 Torah
11 And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. KJV Genesis 9:11
11 And I will establish My brit (covenant) with you, neither shall kol basar yikaret (be cut off, violently killed) any more by the waters of the mabbul; neither shall there be any more mabbul l’shachat (to destroy) ha’aretz. Genesis 9:11 Orthodox Jewish Bible
11 I establish My covenant with you; and all flesh shall never again be eliminated by the waters of a flood, nor shall there again be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11 NASB
וַהֲקִמֹתִ֤י אֶת־בְּרִיתִי֙ אִתְּכֶ֔ם וְלֹֽא־יִכָּרֵ֧ת כׇּל־בָּשָׂ֛ר ע֖וֹד מִמֵּ֣י הַמַּבּ֑וּל וְלֹֽא־יִהְיֶ֥ה ע֛וֹד מַבּ֖וּל לְשַׁחֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃ 11
I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11 The Contemporary Torah, JPS, 2006
11 I promise every living creature that the earth and those living on it will never again be destroyed by a flood. Genesis 9:11 Contemporary English Version
11 I will establish my covenant with you: Never again will all living creatures be cut off by the waters of a flood. Neither will there ever again be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11 English Heritage Version
11 And my covenant will I establish with you, that from henceforth all flesh shall not be rooted out by the waters of the flood, neither shall there be a flood to destroy the earth anymore. Genesis 9:11 1599 Geneva Bible
11 I will establish my covenant with you: No living beings will ever be cut off again by flood waters, and there will never again be a flood that destroys the earth.” Genesis 9:11 ISV
11 I am establishing my covenant with you, that never again will all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, nor will there ever be a flood that destroys the earth.” Genesis 9:11 Lexham English Bible
11 And I have established My covenant with you, and all flesh is not any more cut off by waters of a deluge, and there is not any more a deluge to destroy the earth.’ Genesis 9:11 Young’s Literal Translation
11 I shall make my covenant with you, and each flesh shall no more be slain of the waters of the great flood, neither the great flood destroying all [the] earth shall be (any) more. (I shall make my covenant with you, and never again shall all flesh be slain by the waters of a great flood, and never again shall there be a great flood destroying all the earth.) Genesis 9:11 Wycliffe Bible
11 I will establish my covenant with you, and all flesh shall be no more destroyed with the waters of a flood, neither shall there be from henceforth a flood to waste the earth. Genesis 9:11 Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition
11 And I establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood, and henceforth there shall be no flood to destroy the earth. Genesis 9:11 Darby Translation
11 I will establish my covenant with you that never again will all living beings be destroyed by the waters of a flood, and there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11 Complete Jewish Bible
Now you claim that I have “resorted to relying on the sheer arrogance that the Holy Spirit didn’t care about the people to whom Moses wrote but instead had him write to convenience people over three millennia later to fit their worldview” and that you refuse “to budge from the text of the scripture in order to satisfy a doctrine that arises from a philosophy that is alien to the Hebrew scriptures.”
I refute such claims on all counts as unhinged, plain wrong and sadly accusatory.
The Holy Scriptures listed above all have the same basic meaning, i.e., they all say the same thing! Read each one for yourself if you disbelieve.
As you are claiming that the Bible translation I had quoted, to wit, in this case the King James Version, and as all the other translations are essentially identical in meaning, you realise I hope that you are tacitly stating that at the very least well over sixty translations I have access to that are essentially the same are all incorrect.
Put another way you are stating that the many thousands of people over many hundreds of years were all wrong, were all incapable of doing an accurate translation.
Either you believe the Holy Scriptures state that the Flood of Noah destroyed ALL flesh on Earth or you don’t, and instead you believe the Flood of Noah was merely a Local Flood somewhere.
Which is it?
Roy, get a grip man!
I most certainly do not “have the self-righteous arrogance to think that God has spoken to [me} above all others,…”; that is nothing more than accusatory bile from the pit, and should remain there.
Do you realise that you are are making accusations against hundreds of thousands of Faithful, Honest, God fearing Christians who in sincere faith, trust the Holy Scriptures to mean precisely what ALL translations clearly, plainly say and mean, and contrary to your persistent slander, they do NOT think that God tells lies.
You have a different view, I get that, but that in no way gives you licence to accuse and denigrate other fellow Christians, simply because you disagree with what they believe and as it turns out also with what ALL translations we have today so clearly state.
I am getting very tired of dealing with your imaginary fixation that ALL the hundreds of thousands of Faithful, Honest, God fearing Christians who in sincere faith, trust the Holy Scriptures to mean precisely what ALL translations plainly state to mean think that “the Bible says it is to be taken as teaching us science.”
Again,please get a grip on reality!
No one that I know or know of, thinks “the Bible says it is to be taken as teaching us science,” that is simply a fact.The inevitable rebuttal of this fact that I’ve witnessed coming from you dozens of times on this website against honest Christians is plain wrong, reprehensible, predictable and ultimately boring.
I sincerely hope the clear evidence in Genesis 9:11 will allow you to understand your error about the Flood of Noah only being a Local Flood.
If that doesn’t reveal the Truth to you, then please consider the monumentally enormous ark that God had Noah build, that must have taken an enormous amount of effort and time to construct, and all done without any machinery and only hand tools and an enormous amount of sheer ingenuity and hard work!
Photo of Ark Replica constructed to actual Biblical dimensions.
PLEASE, Just apply a modecum of Common Sense here and consider the enormous size of the Ark, then ask yourself why did God have Noah build this enormous ship for a mere local flood?
Surely you can see that does not make any sense at all.
That is all I can do, the rest is up to you, to look outside the paradigm you are presently in.
God bless,
jon
The irony . . . it burns!!
This is exactly what people are telling you about the first part of Genesis.
Or, we can use your literalist approach. In that case, you should be a Geocentrist because the Bible clearly states that the Earth does not move.
“But to want to affirm that the Sun, in very truth, is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without traveling from east to west, and that the Earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves very swiftly around the Sun, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures….”
–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
Heliocentrism contradicts scripture. So are you going to allow science to overrule the Bible?
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If they were correct then rocks wouldn’t contain billions of years of radioactive decay.
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What assumptions?
The same way you reconcile Heliocentrism and a Bible that says the Earth doesn’t move.
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- You’ve been in the bush too long.
- Translator’s Preface - Everett Fox (1995) [Translator of The Shocken Bible]
- Sefaria’s Web Page for Geneis/Bereshit
P.S. Can somebody explain how there can be a setting and a dawning before there’s sun and moon?
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Dear T_Aquaticus,
this is very sad, that you feel you must attempt to damage the credibility of anyone who does not hold to what you believe.
The Bible is very, very clear that the flood of Noah was absolute in its extent, that it drowned all flesh on Earth. The Bible is very clear that the enormous Ark was built to bring Noah, his family and all nephesh chayyah animals safely through the flood to repopulate the Earth.
Think, please just stop your knee jerk reaction for even a few moments and then consider the reality. If the flood was only local, there would have been no need for God to bring the breeding pairs of ALL the animals on Earth to Noah when the Ark was completed would there?
Do you really believe that God would have had Noah and his sons build the enormous Ark by applying an almost unimaginable amount of hard manual work if the flood was only local?
They all, (i.e., Noah, his family and the animals), could have simply traveled the necessary distance to out of the flood zone.
God is a God of purpose, He is Love, He is Righteous, He is Just, He had Noah construct the Ark as the Bible so plainly tells us, because it was necessary, because outside the Ark there was no land anywhere under heaven that was not flooded!
Please take a long hard look at the Replica Ark in my post above and consider the enormous difficulty of building it from scratch without chainsaws, timber jinkers (log trucks), lumber yards, powered cranes, power tools such as drills, thicknessers, planers, circular saws, routers, or other powered machinery etc…
And the translations listed all say the same thing, that God promises to never again cause a flood to destroy the Earth.
יא וַהֲקִמֹתִי אֶת-בְּרִיתִי אִתְּכֶם, וְלֹא-יִכָּרֵת כָּל-בָּשָׂר עוֹד מִמֵּי הַמַּבּוּל; וְלֹא-יִהְיֶה עוֹד מַבּוּל, לְשַׁחֵת הָאָרֶץ. 11 And I will establish My covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.’ Genesis 9:11 Torah
OR if you prefer:
וַהֲקִמֹתִ֤י אֶת־בְּרִיתִי֙ אִתְּכֶ֔ם וְלֹֽא־יִכָּרֵ֧ת כׇּל־בָּשָׂ֛ר ע֖וֹד מִמֵּ֣י הַמַּבּ֑וּל וְלֹֽא־יִהְיֶ֥ה ע֛וֹד מַבּ֖וּל לְשַׁחֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃ 11
I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Genesis 9:11 The Contemporary Torah, JPS, 2006
But we still observe local floods all over the world regularly!
I must be honest here, I cannot comprehend WHY people such as yourself, (who profess as I do that Jesus is Lord of ALL, good Christian people I am sure), are so unable to understand what is so palpably clear and straightforward. The only explanation that makes any sense is that it appears those people are completely blinded by their belief in the prime paradigm of the deception of ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’.
God Bless you,
jon
Just as it is very clear that the Earth does not move.
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