What Flood? · Let's Continue, What Flood? · An Anti-Duane "Gish Gallop" Answered
Under Michael Spaulding's status, there came this comment by Ken Stephenson. To some the twenty points might seem daunting.
Reasons why the flood is impossible:
1. Not enough water, where did it come from.
2. Where did all that water go?
3. How did plants and animals indigenous to Australia, North and South America get to the ark? Did they swim 1500 miles? Plants too?
4. Yes, plants! Because they, their roots and seeds would have rotted to nothing.
5. There are 300,000 described species of animals x 2 x = 600,000.
6. There are 390,000 described species of plants, X 2 = 600,000 conservatively. Most plants reproduce sexually
7. There are one million described insects, most reproduce sexually, so 900,000 x 2 = 1,800,000 insects.
8. How did the three fertile women in Noah’s family repopulate the earth with 9 billion people in 4,500 years?
9. There are 300,000 described marine species, potentially 2 million. Few can survive fresh water. So conservatively, 600,000.
10. Noah would need six absolutely enormous saltwater aquariums, one for prey species, one for predictor species, one to protect marine species from the prey species which eat corals etc. And three more for food for these species.
10. There are conservatively, 11,000 bird species x2 = 22,000.
11. Mitochondrial DNA is passed unchanged from mother to daughter. There should be only three lineages. There are thousands.
12. How did the DNA of seven ethnic groups get into the DNA derived from three women?
13. How were the severely detrimental effects if incest and intensive inbreeding avoided.
14. How did Noah store and preserve food, meat for carnivores, and fresh water for all these species?
15. When the ramp came down after 370 days, the land was beyond rotten, so what did the herbivores eat while plants repopulated?
16. What did the carnivores eat while waiting for plants to repopulate so herbivores could repopulate so carnivores could eat and repopulate.
17. How did non indigenous plants and animals get back to there countries of origin? Swim 15,000 miles?
18. Other cultures were present before, during and after the alleged flood. They have no record of a flood.
19. There is zero evidence in the geological record of a flood.
20. Noah was not the only one with a boat! Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian and other cultures had military, merchant and fishing vessels plying the Mediterranean.
Let's take them one by one or sometimes two or more together:
1. Not enough water, where did it come from.
2. Where did all that water go?
They belong together.
The water we now have is enough to have covered all the pre-Flood mountains, with the relative shallowness of pre-Flood seas.
It went partly into the deep sea basins, through which oceans are much deeper now. And partly seas are deeper because ground got higher.
However given the seas were not as deep before the Flood, where was it?
There are more than one theory, I would consider this pretty good. Water was somehow (underground reservoirs or underground water bound up in a mineral) trapped below earth's surface in the pre-Flood world, and it rose very violently, probably not least in the Mid-Atlantic ridge, i e where that is now. As to the heat problem, that is part of where the rain come from. Heat turns water to steam, steam will rise, but sooner or later it will calm down and condense, and with that much steam, there was a whole lot of rain from this process.
Probably also some water formed as oxygen rose and hydrogen sank into a layer of Brown's gas, which was ignited and produced water which didn't exist in the pre-Flood world. Hence the pre-Flood atmosphere was larger and less heavy in nitrogen, and therefore a smaller density of nitrogen was in the upper levels of the atmosphere, producing less carbon 14. As per the Flood, oxygen was lost, nitrogen remained and in the post-Flood world takes up a bigger proportion of the atmosphere.
3. How did plants and animals indigenous to Australia, North and South America get to the ark? Did they swim 1500 miles? Plants too?
4. Yes, plants! Because they, their roots and seeds would have rotted to nothing.
17. How did non indigenous plants and animals get back to there countries of origin? Swim 15,000 miles?
Plant survival would have involved vegetation mats floating on the water.
5. There are 300,000 described species of animals x 2 x = 600,000.
6. There are 390,000 described species of plants, X 2 = 600,000 conservatively. Most plants reproduce sexually
7. There are one million described insects, most reproduce sexually, so 900,000 x 2 = 1,800,000 insects.
9. There are 300,000 described marine species, potentially 2 million. Few can survive fresh water. So conservatively, 600,000.
10. Noah would need six absolutely enormous saltwater aquariums, one for prey species, one for predictor species, one to protect marine species from the prey species which eat corals etc. And three more for food for these species.
10. There are conservatively, 11,000 bird species x2 = 22,000.
Problem 1 is, you take Linnean modern species as the standard for the Biblical kind. Rapid speciation doesn't mean rapidly developing new features, it means more like degrading in different and incompatible ways. Did you know hedgehogs aren't a species or even a genus? They are a subfamily. I'd say there was one hedgehog couple on the Ark. It has given rise to 16 to 17 species in 5 genus. A hemiechinus auritus isn't an erinaceus europaeus, both are however hedgehogs. It's possible the other subfamily, gymnures, came from the same couple, or that it didn't. If it did, that's 25 to 26 species from one couple and ten genus.
Problem 2 is, the pre-Flood sea is pretended to have been far saltier than it was. Think of it. If most of the water now on earth didn't exist, and seas had all the salt they have now, they might have been something like the saltiness of the Dead Sea. So, obviously, there was less salt in the seas. Most of the salinity has been added over 5000 years. The ancestors of species that can't survive in fresh water, had nothing saltier than brack water back before the Flood.
8. How did the three fertile women in Noah’s family repopulate the earth with 9 billion people in 4,500 years?
11. Mitochondrial DNA is passed unchanged from mother to daughter. There should be only three lineages. There are thousands.
12. How did the DNA of seven ethnic groups get into the DNA derived from three women?
13. How were the severely detrimental effects of incest and intensive inbreeding avoided.
For number 8, let's take getting the population to Babel in 401 years.
8 people. 5 % population growth each year. So, 8 * 1.05, and that to the power of the number of years, 8 * 1.05401
2 511 880 150 ... more than a quarter of today's population. Let's try 2 % instead. 8 * 1.02401
22 478 ... were there enough when Babel started, 350 after the Flood? 8 * 1.02350
8187, arguably yes. But what would this rate have given by now? 8 * 1.025000
80 158 355 092 957 128 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000, think of that!
That's clearly not what we have. How about 1 %? 8 * 1.015000
32 356 303 484 189 688 000 000
Still far too many. 0.5 %, then? 8 * 1.0055000
541 251 072 007
That's more than fifty-four times of what we actually have.
Yet, 5 % annual growth of the population is actually possible. Nigeria has, or a few years ago had 6 % annual growth.
This means, the genetic bottleneck after the Ark widened very quickly.
There was soon opportunity for outbreeding, as opposed to inbreeding. You aren't very inbred because five actual couples account for not 10, not 20, but 24 of your 128 ancestors (seven generations back). You would be somewhat inbred if they were 24 of your 32 ancestors, so you had only 16 actual ancestors in the theoretic line of 32 ancestors (five generations back). The Flood is far more generations back than that.
There aren't thousands of radically different maternal lineages, look up:
Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup
Haplogroups split over time, this is why there is a "mitochondrial Eve" (last common ancestor of Noah's three daughters in law, just as Noah himself is "Y chromosome Adam"). Since the three haplogroups on the Ark that were transmitted (Noah couldn't transmit the mitochondriae from his mother and his sons not those from his wife), splits have happened.
And since splits happen from mutations, but also from recombinations, that's also part of why all ethnicities today came from the DNA of five of the eight people on the Ark: Noah, his wife, the three daughters in law. The sons of Noah and his wife didn't contribute more DNA than they got from them.
Now, inbreeding and detriments. The inbreeding as such is not the cause of the detriments. It's an occasion for the cause, namely the double occurrence of a gene, which has the same detrimental mutation. But considering Noah lived to 950 and I probably won't live to 95, I think there has been some detriment since back then, right?
14. How did Noah store and preserve food, meat for carnivores, and fresh water for all these species?
Carnivores can eat fish. There was plenty of that around the Ark. But ... I suppose some dried meat can have done too.
I have calculated the logistics. Quoting myself:
On the other* post, I had estimated the number of couples to 2032, meaning 4064 individuals, on the average size of a sheep. Now, a sheep eats 7 kg green fodder per day, 365 days. 10,383.52 metric tons for food. How much would 4064 sheep weigh? Tame sheep weigh 45 to 160 kg for the bucks, 45 to 100 kg for the ewes. Let's add the numbers together and divide by four : (45+45+160+100)/4 = 87.5 kg. Let's multiply this by 4064. 355.6 metric tons. Living passengers with crew therefore 355.6 + 10,383.52 = 10,739.12.
So, even the smallest weight available for the animals and food and tools and the walls of the small chambers and so on has 500 tons for tools and temporary water supplies on top of needed animals and food weight. And the 2032 couples I got by reducing an evolutionist's estimate for number of species (taking mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians separately) by only 16, the number of species I thought there were of hedgehogs, but that's actually 17.
...
I think there might actually have been more animals than just 2032 couples. Especially since 7 kg food per day is not exactly typical in proportion to the body weight, the ruminants need more food. [than the other beasts do]
Creation vs. Evolution: Small Tidbits on Ark, Especially Mathematical
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2021/11/small-tidbits.html
In other words, there was plenty of room for food and water.
15. When the ramp came down after 370 days, the land was beyond rotten, so what did the herbivores eat while plants repopulated?
We don't know exactly how an olive tree was alive, the example of Aaron's rod blossoming suggests that God simply may have resurrected vegetation.
And the land was also quickly dried up, I'd suggest that the process may have involved God speeding up the decay of Uranium in zircons lying around and thus microwaved the mud from the inside, so that both the normal ground for plants and the "Uranium decay for millions of years" is explained in one go.
16. What did the carnivores eat while waiting for plants to repopulate so herbivores could repopulate so carnivores could eat and repopulate.
Carcasses and fish ...
18. Other cultures were present before, during and after the alleged flood. They have no record of a flood.
20. Noah was not the only one with a boat! Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian and other cultures had military, merchant and fishing vessels plying the Mediterranean.
Already extensively answered in the posts in reply to Michael Spaulding. What's said about civilisations goes for vessels too. The actual Flood date was 2958 BC, the actual year, and when you get to the carbon dated and now presumed year 2958 BC, insofar as it's directly from carbon, it would be something like ...
- 1759 BC
- 86.359 pmC, dated as 2971 BC
19. There is zero evidence in the geological record of a flood.
Or, in fact, plentiful.
Until you misdate nearly all of it to very diverse "geological periods" that are supposedly millions or even billions of years apart.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Lucan of Paris, Martyr
30.X.2026
Lutetiae Parisiorum sancti Lucani Martyris.