Global Flood

[Chem]

This is my first post so forgive me if it sounds unusual. I have viewed a lot of the postings in this forum and have some questions with regards to the idea of a global flood.

Firstly, as I understand YEC's claim that the flood water came from the ground, to cover the whole world. A quick calculation based on the radius of the Earth being ~6.378 e6 m (6378 Km) and the height of Mount Ararat being ~5200 m, this would suggest a volume of 3.4 e18 m3 of water to cover the Earth to the height of Mount Ararat. Of course this does not take into account the presence of higher mountains or low lying areas that would require less water. this would wiegh in the region of 3.4 e21 kg or about 0.06% of the estimated weight of Earth.

Apart from the problem of storing and getting rid of such an amount of water, the questions I have are:
1. Was the water fresh or salty? I presume salty if derived from the Earth and this leads onto a second question:
2. How did fresh water fish survive if the water was salty (if not then how would salt water fish survive in a reduced salt environment?)
3. Furthermore if such huge amounts of water were present then what about greenhouse effect that water vapour and huge release of carbon dioxide would generate? (I understand that some of the carbon genertade would be sequestered by the water and some would be used to generate sedimentary rocks).

[Jose]

Welcome to the forum, Chem! I think that some of your questions have been kicked around in a couple of other threads--but I'll give you links to otseng's particular posts that describe the most detailed of the flood models. The model, as near as I can tell, was developed to provide a mechanism that could account for the water "being relased from the deeps" as well as being mere rain, and to account for the idea that the flood "covered the low hills" and later created the mountains we know now. It doesn't discuss the fish. I don't think its author, Walt Brown, knows much about osmoregulation.

You might start here then here
...and my suggestion here
then here
and then here which eventually graduated to the thread, The Flood As Science.

I think we found that the model takes care of the questions of where the water came from, how the mountains were changed, and where the water went--partly because we pretty much have to postulate that the laws of physics were different then. But after the flood god established the laws of physics as we still have them, so the sedimentation of rock that occurred and the subsequent events should be dependent upon the laws we know now. (This avoids a lot of argument over things we can never solve, but still gives us plenty to work with).

Usually, we sort of ask "hard questions" of each other, and tend not to listen to the answers. Why not ask easy questions? It seems to me that the depth of feeling on this suggests that we should give the Flood a fair test, and treat it as its proponents would (you'd think) wish for it to be tested. It's the best hypothesis we had for over a thousand years...so let's treat it as such, and determine what predictions that hypothesis makes.

But going back to the fish...I think the traditional answer is that most of the fish went extinct. That's why there are fossil fish, after all! The ones we have are the fish that made it through. There's been a lot of microevolution among them, to generate the diversity we now see, but, you know, they're still fish. They didn't turn into armadillos or anything goofy like evolution would make them do.

The Global Flood thread became fairly long, and the Flood as Science thread rather bogged down as a result of few members offering data. We should ask guru otseng whether this is a good place to start a new thread, or whether we should move this discussion to the earlier Global Flood thread, just to keep the index of threads tidier. Whaddyathink, otseng?

[otseng]

First off, thank you Jose for answering the first two questions for me.

As for the third question, we can perhaps discuss this more here.

3. Furthermore if such huge amounts of water were present then what about greenhouse effect that water vapour and huge release of carbon dioxide would generate?

I believe excess water vapor would have eventually precipitated after everything stabilized. The atmosphere would then be similar to what it is now.

We should ask guru otseng whether this is a good place to start a new thread, or whether we should move this discussion to the earlier Global Flood thread, just to keep the index of threads tidier. Whaddyathink, otseng?

I would tend to think that the Global Flood thread has served its purpose. That is, it presented the Flood Model for a general understanding of it. And now we can branch off to address different aspects of it, such as the Flood as Science thread (which I hope to get back to sometime, but I seem to push more things onto my stack than I can pop them off!).

Also, btw, I'm only a "guru" because I have more than 1000 posts.

[Chem]

I'm delighted to be up and running, so to speak.

I believe that excess water vapour would have precipitated after everything stabilised.

Where- locked into the ice sheets or as water? Is there not a hydrological cycle similar to the carbon cycle- an equilibrium situation whereby upsetting one part of the cycle will have consequences else where in the cycle.

An example these days is the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the concurrent rise in atmospheric temperature (melting ice caps etc.). This increase may also have a welcomed side effect in helping plant growth (some plants anyway).

It is not so easy to return to an equilibrium that we would see today.

We still have to deal with the amount of carbon dioxide generated with such a massive "extinction" event as described in the flood.

A little aside- what about the formation of the Black Sea as the forebearer of the biblical flood?

[Jose]

Also, btw, I'm only a "guru" because I have more than 1000 posts.

Modesty becomes you well, otseng. What he's not saying, Chem, is that he's also enough of a guru to have solved the problems I had setting up my own BB for another set of discussions elsewhere, for which I am eternally grateful.

I would tend to think that the Global Flood thread has served its purpose. That is, it presented the Flood Model for a general understanding of it. And now we can branch off to address different aspects of it, such as the Flood as Science thread (which I hope to get back to sometime, but I seem to push more things onto my stack than I can pop them off!).

Good. We'll proceed here. As for the push-down stack, I sympathize entirely--and I figure you'll return to it as time becomes available. You've sort of got the responsibility of monitoring everything at once here, which is no small task.

I believe that excess water vapour would have precipitated after everything stabilised.

Where- locked into the ice sheets or as water? Is there not a hydrological cycle similar to the carbon cycle- an equilibrium situation whereby upsetting one part of the cycle will have consequences else where in the cycle.

There is, indeed, a hydrological cycle, just as you say. But, I suspect that we're going to have to hypothesize that the current version of that cycle was established during/after the flood, since we can't get very far looking for data about how the world worked beforehand. We can look for "footprints" of the flood, but since the flood kinda wiped out the prior world, it's hard to analyze that part of it. Any time we say "that's not how it works now" it can be countered with "that's because it was before the flood."

So, I'd guess that the water vapor precipitated as water (maybe even rain for 40 days and 40 nights!). Certainly, however, some of it must have been ice, inasmuch as we have ice now at the poles. Presumably, that would be where it came from. I'm not quite sure how it would have ended up in 140,000+ layers, such as we see in the Greenland ice cores, though. Presumably, that ice would have to have been deposited post-flood, when Greenland was no longer covered by water. Or do we conjure up a modification of the flood model in which Greenland was so cold that thousands of thin layers of ice formed on it as the flood covered it? I don't think scripture offers any clues about this.

We still have to deal with the amount of carbon dioxide generated with such a massive "extinction" event as described in the flood.

I dunno...the plants are supposed to have formed oil and coal beds, and the animals fossilized, so maybe the CO2 didn't get released until we started digging up the oil and coal and burning them. Do you have a different reason to suggest a great increase in CO2? We can't look at C12/C13 ratios in limestone to get a measure of paleo-CO2 levels if we're using a flood model (at least, I have a vague notion that there's some mechanism for determining CO2 levels in the past, even if this ratio isn't relevant). Those measurements, after all, are for traditional geology that goes back a few billion years.

A little aside- what about the formation of the Black Sea as the forebearer of the biblical flood?

This is the kind of inundation that leads historians to conclude that the biblical flood, like other flood stories in other collections of texts, is based on a tribal oral history that recounts a massive, albeit regionally local, flood. This satisfies many of the biblical scholars who have thought so deeply about scripture and other religions that they consider it reasonable that God sent a local flood "of the tribe's known world." There's no point in flooding Australia, if they didn't even know it existed, after all. This would both satisfy our scientific understanding and the basic truth of scripture, where the latter is retold in the form of instructive (not literal) stories. Alas, it does not satisfy the fundamentalist/literalists who believe that so much as considering doubting the veracity of a world-wide flood represents blasphemy for which they will be punished for all eternity. Theirs must be a very vengeful god.

[QED]

I've been a bit put-off from joining the long thread about the flood, but there is an issue that I don't think was raised anywhere that I'd like to explore: I hadn't realised before questioning the rainbow as a sign of covenant, that the bible was explicit about there being no rainfall on the Earth before the flood. The first drops that fell being those that lasted for 40 days and nights.

So I searched the forums for the words Evaporation and sweat, but couldn't see anything along the lines I'm thinking about... so just how were the laws of physics modified such that open bodies of water would not evaporate to form rain-clouds while at the same time humans were able to regulate their temperatures by sweating?

[juliod]

so just how were the laws of physics modified such that open bodies of water would not evaporate to form rain-clouds while at the same time humans were able to regulate their temperatures by sweating?

I don't think you will get an answer. As I keep saying, there is no actual creationist theory. What we see here (and elsewhere) is ad-hoc non-explanation.

It's ad-hoc because it's just made up on the spot to conform to the creationist myth. It's a non-explanation because it doesn't actually have anything to explain.

For example, we sometimes hear about a so-called "vapor canopy". It can't count as a theory because it doesn't explain anything. There are no facts observable in the world today, nor in the geological record, that would require explanation by a "vapor canopy".

DanZ

[QED]

I don't think you will get an answer. As I keep saying, there is no actual creationist theory. What we see here (and elsewhere) is ad-hoc non-explanation.

That would be a shame. I do hope that upholders of the literal interpretation have an answer, as the whole point of me asking is to satisfy the natural curiosity that is an essential part of every human being.

[Jose]

I don't think you will get an answer. As I keep saying, there is no actual creationist theory. What we see here (and elsewhere) is ad-hoc non-explanation.

That would be a shame. I do hope that upholders of the literal interpretation have an answer, as the whole point of me asking is to satisfy the natural curiosity that is an essential part of every human being.

We should remember one of the Basic Rules, which I think I have gleaned from discussions here. To scientists, a scientific explanation is one that is testable, makes predictions, and incorporates or at least is consistent with, all other information available. To creationists, a scientific explanation is one that uses naturalistic phenomena to provide a workable scenario for biblical lore. Prediction, testability, and consistency with other observations seem not to be necessary to call it "scientific." I suspect that this is the commonly-held view of "scientific" in our country, since science is so seldom taught as an investigative problem-solving process with built-in validity checks, but rather as a lexicon of memorizable statements. That is, I don't "blame" creationism itself for the lack of scientific understanding among the majority of Americans. Rather, the lack of basic scientific understanding interferes with distinguishing science from religion.

Therefore, it is seen as sufficient to say that the humidity and temperature were just right to prevent the need for sweating in the Garden of Eden (which, by the way is in Lucas, Kansas). And of course, the vapor canopy is what provided these ideal conditions, prevented storms from happening, and maintained adequate moisture in the air to enable plants to photosynthesize without loss of water. It's a pity that the Flood wiped out all traces of these prior conditions, so we can't investigate the physical laws that held them in place, but that's what happened.

So, we need to fall back on the next-best thing: determining whether the world today reflects the presumed Flood, because it was at the time of the Flood that God re-organized the laws of physics to what they are now. Even so, it's difficult to distinguish a scientific explanation from a sciency-sounding explanation, as we see from the creationist explanation of the Grand Canyon. The G. C. itself has features that cannot be explained by Flood Geology, but that doesn't seem to matter if the definition of "science" is different.

[otseng]

Where- locked into the ice sheets or as water?

Both. As was noted earlier, the other Global Flood thread details the entire Flood Model. Reading through this is necessary if we are to avoid rehashing things already brought up in that thread.

We still have to deal with the amount of carbon dioxide generated with such a massive "extinction" event as described in the flood.

Practically everything was buried, so the carbon elements did not become a gas, but rather turned into the hydrocarbons.

A little aside- what about the formation of the Black Sea as the forebearer of the biblical flood?

Uh, what about it?

So just how were the laws of physics modified such that open bodies of water would not evaporate to form rain-clouds while at the same time humans were able to regulate their temperatures by sweating?

I don't think anyone has suggested that evaporation could not have happened prior to the flood. And not all clouds that form must produce rain. The water canopy created more of a uniform temperature across the planet. Warm/cold air fronts did not exist since the temperature was fairly constant. So, without the warm/cold air fronts, it could not rain.

For example, we sometimes hear about a so-called "vapor canopy". It can't count as a theory because it doesn't explain anything. There are no facts observable in the world today, nor in the geological record, that would require explanation by a "vapor canopy".

Actually, this is false. We know from the geologic record that the climate in the past was different than now. Animals and plants grew much larger in prehistoric times. The vapor canopy helps to explain this. The water canopy produced a greenhouse climate on the planet. It probably also increased the atmospheric pressure. And it provided additional protection from damaging radiation from outer space. These factors contributed to things growing larger in the past. And it is why land animals/plants do not grow as large now.