A geologist gives 21 evidence-based reasons why Noah’s Flood never happened. It’s nice, short, succinct, and clear, and is going to be useful in future discussions about creationism. It’s also all really obvious — we have a few hundred years of observations by geologists, who were mostly Christian, that made it irrefutable that, in the most charitable interpretation, the book of Genesis was a metaphorical fable.
You’ll never guess who is very sad about the article, though. Poor Ken Ham and his crew at Answers in Genesis. They can’t address the arguments, so they resort to indignation.
“Now, we’re used to hearing false claims like that. What made me sad was that Collins was specifically writing this article to give Skeptical Inquirer magazine readers counter-arguments to use against Christians. And who are the readers of this magazine? Most are skeptics and atheists!” Ham continued.
“A professing believer (who claims on his website that he has ‘sought to bring people to Christ’) is trying to equip unbelievers to tear down the faith of believers! Ultimately, he is helping atheists attack God’s Word and the Christian faith. I would not want to be in his shoes standing before our holy God — he will give an account one day,” he added.
Yeah, the author of the article is a Christian. I definitely do not think he’s trying to tear down people’s faith. It seems he is a living example that you can simultaneously accept the science (Yay!) and still believe in God and Jesus (unfortunately, from the perspective of this atheist — but I’ll accept the progress). There are Christians like Ham who demand that you accept their every absurd interpretation of the Bible, refusing to recognize just how idiosyncratic their beliefs are, and then there are Christians like Lorence Collins, who recognize that their understanding of their religion is imperfect and incomplete and must be tempered with an accommodation to reality. If you must be a Christian, be like Collins, not Ham.
Oh, and AiG has one other well-worn argument. Andrew Snelling asks, “Were you there?”
“We don’t see a global flood happening today, so we would have never seen one in the past. Well, how do they know? They weren’t there in the past,” the AiG geologist continues.
“We need an eye-witness who was there to tell (the story), and a reliable witness,” Snelling says, noting that Collins’ authority should be God’s Word.
Sheesh. Everyone knows that material evidence trumps eye-witness testimony.
Were they there when they say their god created the universe?
Were they there when Adam and Eve were cast from the garden?
Were they there for the Noachian flood?
Were they they when Jesus was resurrected?
Were they there when the biblical books were written?
Were they there at the First Council of Nicaea?
Were they there when Utnapishtim built his flood evading boat?
Were they there when a serpent tricked Gilgamesh and stole his potential immortality?
Newsflash. Humans have often lived near bodies of water and floods happen. Sometimes there are huge losses of life. If a flood impacts an area people take as the entirety of their known world it is “global” to them. Historical memory gets embellished and legends are born.
Weren’t there two conflicting accounts of the biblical flood story reflecting differing traditions?
Eye-witnesses lie for their friends and if they do so in a court of law end they can up getting charged with perjury. If an eye-witness had actual evidence it would be produced as evidence/exhibits and no one would risk perjury.
My point being, the account given one day, may be against those who hold false witness because they had no evidence.
Yes I was, prove that I wasn’t.
The most fun I ever had with a Creationist was when I took a page from the old Talk Origins site and answered his ‘Were you there?” with “Yes, yes I was there. I am billions of years old and I saw the formation of this universe, our galaxy, planet, and the evolution of biological life from single celled organisms all the way to the Humans we know and love.”
He replied by saying that I was lying and that humans only live for about 75 years. To which I replied “How do you know? Were you there?”
Good fun.
OH YESSSSSSSSSSSS.
“Sheesh. Everyone knows that material evidence trumps eye-witness testimony.”
Everyone who is not a dishonest, moronic dipshit, that is.
Well see, there’s your problem right there. We don’t trust the reliability of men who claim to be 600 years old at the time of the event.
“We don’t see a global flood happening today, so we would have never seen one in the past.”
Did anyone ever make that argument? I’ve certainly never seen it.
I read an analogous post (by a creationist) about how radiometric dating was also definitely not flawed. A quick google fails to find it. Does anybody have an ‘in’.
As to the flood, when I was about 7, I asked a nun (my teacher, alas) ‘Where did the water go?’, then shredded her response ‘Into the ocean’ with ‘No. the ocean was already full.’ For a while after that, many pupils were forbidden (by their parents) to talk to me.
@ aziraphale: a global flood would have to be at least one Mt Everest (29,026 feet) deep. (Then where would the water go?)
“Everyone knows that material evidence trumps eye-witness testimony.”
They do? Not so much in my experience!
derek lactin@11: “a global flood would have to be at least one Mt Everest (29,026 feet) deep. (Then where would the water go?)” A possible error in this argument lies in your implicit assumption that, during that flood, what are now the ocean basins would have to remain filled with water. Surely God could have lifted the oceans and left vacuum (or angeliferous ether; \/\/hatever) beneath them for 40 days! (I’m not sure that even so there’d be enough water to cover the pre- and post-flood surface of the earth as high as you calculate. On the other hand, I don’t think there had to be that much; after all, there weren’t any humans living very far outside the Near East at the time of Noah—for instance, it wasn’t until the children of Ham got there that any humans at all lived in Africa!! As to animals, well, who knows?)
“a global flood would have to be at least one Mt Everest (29,026 feet) deep”
No no, you don’t understand. Mount Everest was *caused* by the flood and the bible plainly says that the highest mountain at the time was Ararat.
“Ultimately, he is helping atheists attack God’s Word and the Christian faith.”
I don’t see what the Christian faith has to do with the story of Noah’s ark. In fact, I don’t think Ken Ham is a Christian at all, but an Old Testament deist.
They don’t seem to realise their ‘were you there’ shtick can be defeated by simply replying ‘yes’. If they say that you need eyewitness evidence, then they can’t say you’re lying when you say ‘yes’, unless they are saying they were also there, and personally witnessed the lack of you being there, or, at the very least, have testimony from an eyewitness specifically saying you were not there. If they manage to conclude that you weren’t there from other evidence, they would be correct to do so – but would also have defeated their own original point that you need eyewitness evidence.
Assume Mt. Everest was covered by water. How much water is required?
Back of the napkin calculations
Radius of earth = 6,371 km
Radius of earth + Everest = 6379.85 km
Volume = 4/3 π r³, plug in the numbers for each.
Subtract the two to get the difference: 4.52 billion km³. the amount of water required to cover Mr. Everest.
An Olympic-size swimming pool is about 2.5 km³, so the flood waters would be in the neighborhood of 1.8 BILLION pools.
Supposedly the 4.52 Billion cubic kilometers of water drained off in 150 days, so that’s about 30 million km³ per day. The largest river, the Amazon, drains 209 km³ per second or about 18 million km³ per day.
@#14:
“No no, you don’t understand. Mount Everest was *caused* by the flood and the bible plainly says that the highest mountain at the time was Ararat.”
Yeah! And since water tends to wear down mountains, rather than build them up. Everest would have been taller before the flood, and Ararat (by this evidence) taller than that. So the global flood would have been significantly deeper than Everest depth…
@#17:
“4.52 billion km³. the amount of water required to cover Mr. Everest.”
Love the calcs, but then you went with the wrong units when you went with swimming pools. I believe the unit you were looking for was: “or roughly 3 times the current volume of the Earth’s oceans.” https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml
You got a math error there, Usernames @17. 209,000 cubic meters is not equal to 209 km^3. You’re off by a factor of a million because of the ^3. Which then strengthens the “but where did all the water go?” question.
“I definitely do not think he’s trying to tear down people’s faith.”
Of course Collins is trying to dear down people’s faith in Ol’Hambo, “the world’s holiest man who knows more about religion and science than everyone else.”
“Collins can’t be a real Christian because he’s like all those horrible atheists who think evidence trumps the Word of God – he’s even giving succour to people sceptical about a recent worldwide flood and that it – surely that’s implied in Genesis – carving the Grand Canyon in a matter of weeks.”
Thank you for the information Dr Myers
Can I get one of those swimming pools?
That 2.5 km^3 Olympic swimming pool, if a cube, would have 1.4 km sides. Quite the engineering accomplishment.
An actual Olympic size swimming pool has a volume of about 1 megalitre. So a 2.5 km^3 volume holds about 2,500,000 Olympic swimming pools.
But, you know, being out by a factor of 2.5 million is pretty good by creationist standards.
@10 I bet you got a damm good thrashing for that ?
As for where the water went, obviously it fell over the edges of the Earth and disappeared into space.
@#27, What a Maroon, living up the the ‘nym: ” As for where the water went, obviously it fell over the edges of the Earth and disappeared into space.”
Oh good grief. THAT IS WHAT THE TURTLES ARE SWIMMING IN. I can’t believe I had to explain that.
:-D :-D :-D
@What a Maroon #27:
All those turtles need to get the occasional drink somehow.
kestrel, Rich Woods,
What about the elephants?
sez What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym @30: “What about the elephants?”
They’re standing on the turtles. Duh.
cubist,
Well, yeah, but do they get to drink?
derek lactin @10, https://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
So let’s try this with real numbers:
Total volume of all the Earth’s water: 1.4 billion km^3
Volume of water required to fill the oceans from current sea level to tip of the tallest mountain: 4.52 billion km^3
Amazon river discharge: 18 km^3/day
Total discharge of all continental rivers into the ocean: 102 km^3/day
Let’s assume for the sake of this ridiculous argument, that all that ocean water disappeared by magically draining into itself, and let’s also ignore that the Bible authors clearly believed that Mt Ararat is the highest mountain on Earth, missing out by only 3175 metres!. (Ararat isn’t even the highest mountain in the region. Mt Damavand in Iran is nearly 500m taller).
This means that if all the rivers on Earth were to drain that excess water at current flow rates, returning from Noachian to modern sea level would take 44.3 million days, or 121,400 years…which would be impossible if the planet were only 7,000 years old.
I guess this is what creationists count as a watertight argument.
A nice old YEC once explained to me how the biggest mountains were a lot shorter once, and quietly without anyone noticing grew to their present size over a couple of thousand years. A bit like mushrooms after rain, or something. I asked him why the ancient Chinese hadn’t written anything about these mushroom mountains, seeing that they were actually present at the time. Mumble mumble something mumble.
Scientists explain that magma contains water, creationists exclaim that scientists have found out where the fludd water got to.
[titanoboa – Josh the geologist]
Collins notes that Jesus himself believed in the flood myth (Luke 17:27), and that’s all believers need to know. As for Collins’ 21 “proofs,” they’ll all just say “Yadda-yadda, I believe the story anyway.”
AiG attempted to rebut that Collins article. But not in writing. Only in an Answers News YouTube video posted last week (where as usual comments are ‘disabled’).
FWIW, this is the video ashley@#39 refers to — it’s linked to in the christianpost article :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9fqMAFABD8
As it says in the description, the response to the 21 reasons is “interview with Andrew Snelling”. I haven’t watched it yet myself, but it looks like all he does is say the lines quoted by him in the article.
If eyewitness accounts are so accurate, then Mohammed must have flown off to heaven on a winged horse (Buraq). It says so in the Koran, written by people from that time period. Therefore it must be true, right?