Reviewing Sarfati on Shallow Pre-Flood Seas

Sarfati had answered Don P. from U.S.

CMI Feedback : Noah did not take fish on the Ark!
First published: 16 July 2013 (GMT+10)
Re-featured on homepage: 23 July 2016 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/no-fish-on-noahs-ark

Don P. "How did the many sessile species, from sponges and corals to anemones and barnacles, detach themselves and waddle through however brief a trip it may have been?"

Sarfati answers adequately that sea creatures remained in the sea.

Don P. "A problem analogous to that of terrestrial arctic and desert dwellers would be the exotic inhabitants of the abyssal and hadal zones of the ocean depths. To postulate only shallow seas before the deluge precludes the very existence of deep-sea dwellers."

Here Sarfati answers, less adequately, this:

"Who said anything about the seas all being shallow? Seems like you have invented your own straw men to knock down."

Actually, not quite.

If deeper seas is where Flood water was drained off into, forming after Flood, or end stage of Flood, obviously shallower seas must have been there before the Flood. Precisely as mountains were less high too, Flood water was not 15 cubits above present height of Andes or Himalaya, as these mountains were as yet not so high.

Obviously, the kinds whereof all present species are deepsea dwellers now need not have been so pre-Flood.

If Noah confindently could write or formulate orally a thing like ...

Genesis 7:[19] And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. [20] The water was fifteen cubits higher than the mountains which it covered.

... Then we must presume that Noah knew either the height of all high mountains (since he was six hundred years old, this is no problem) or at least THE highest mountain, THEN that he was, from the Ark, in a position to measure how high water had risen above one of them.

This would be the case if Noah had either gone to one of several mountains all of equal height, or to the one which was higher then the rest, and had taken a fathoming from the Ark and last fathoming was 15 cubits.

If Calvary or Mount of Olives were as high as pre-Flood mountains got, or one of them being the highest, then we can see how this works out.

But if the highest mountains were more like Mount Everest, it might have been nearly as hard to save mountains to the level of that top as to save them from the Flood after it. So, we must presume that Mont Blanc, Mount Everest, Lake Titicaca are on heights which before the Flood did not even exist.

"Another straw man is presupposing that the Ark was in the land we now call the Middle East, overlooking the drastic continental reshaping in the Flood."

Is Sarfati trying to squeeze in a case for a pre-Flood Pangea as reconstructed by today's geology and palaeontology?

I would say the different pieces of land were reshaped in different portions. Some places mud was not being slid above the river beds from the four paradisal rivers, which is why these are identified as identic - we must presume in some parts of the beds, not in their totalities - to post-Flood rivers.

On which matter, see here:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Four Rivers
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2016/05/four-rivers.html

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St James the Greater
Apostle and Martyr*
25.VII.2016

* Sancti Jacobi Apostoli, qui exstitit beati Joannis Evangelistae frater; et, prope festum Paschae ab Herode Agrippa decollatus, primus ex Apostolis coronam martyrii percepit. Ejus sacra ossa, ab Hierosolymis ad Hispanias hoc die translata, et in ultimis earum finibus apud Gallaeciam recondita, celeberrima illarum gentium veneratione, et frequenti Christianorum concursu, religionis et voti causa illuc adeuntium, pie coluntur.