If sea floor fossils are in the high mountains in every part of the world, then all parts of the world were under water in time past. Doesn’t this that flood water was global?
The problem is that a) it isn’t everywhere in the world in the same way and b) the sea floor isn’t ON the mountains, but IN the mountains, meaning it was laid down and THEN the mountains rose up.
By the same argument, since every part of the world has had the sun shining on it, there was some time in the past when the sun was shining on all parts of the earth’s surface. As Apos said, at the time when Mount Everest was under water (i.e., before the Himalayas were pushed upwards), other parts were not. In any case, the future Mount Everest was under water long before human beings were on earth.
If there was a giant flood we would expect to see a jumble of fossils laid down all together (as they would have all died at the same time and in a huge jumble of bodies during the flood). We’d see dinasaurs mixed in with mammoths (or whatever), people with trilobites, etc etc. There would be no order to the deposits. Instead, we see layers of fossils, with era’s or different species laid down in different layers. No humans with dinosaurs, no saber tooth lions with terradactyls, etc etc.
Also, there IS no evidence of a global flood. There is evidence that SOME places that are currently dry were once sea beds (but not flood zones), etc. Lots of such places in the South Western US, parts of which were once a shallow inland sea. But a global flood of the type posited by the bible would leave rather distinctive features that COULDN’T be hidden if it had occured world wide. There would be evidence that would scream of such an event. Sort of like the thin layer of iridium in a certain layer world wide that indicates a meteor strike, or ash deposit layers that indicate the erruption of a volcano.
-XT
I agree. The mountains were raised up after the sediment were deposited. Catastrophic Plate Tectonics occured during the big catastrophe. The question now is “when did it happen?” A global catastrophe would not make the whole world look the same.
If there had been a global flood less than six thousand years ago, what would the world look like today?
So during the Great Flood there were also massive earthquakes? I wonder why they aren’t mentioned in the Bible.
By the time I composed my post several others had already weighed in, but at the risk of redundancy I’ll post it anyway.
Mountains are mountains because they’ve been uplifted over a lengthy period of time. In some locations, such as the Himalayas, this uplifting process is going on right now.
Fossils are usually found embedded within sedimentary rocks. Fossils on top of mountains composed of sedimentary rocks are not evidence that water covered the entire earth to the mountain tops; they are evidence that the sedimentary rocks were once low-lying seabeds that were raise by mountain-builing processes.
BTW, fossils will not be found simply everywhere in mountainous regions, because in many locations the mountains may be made up of igneous rocks, which predate the erosion and depositional processes that created the sediments and allowed fossils to be embedded within them.
If you are interested in this subject, I would advise you to get a basic geology text and read up on the rock cycle, sedimentary and mountain-building processes.
Oh yeah, one more thing concerning the Flood. Where did all the water come from, and where did it drain off to?
A planet pretty much devoid of life would be my guess. Most species would have been wiped out, including just about every higher order form of life in the oceans (salinity levels and all, not to mention lack of oxygen in the water as all that debris such as silt and mud from the land washed in suddenly). We certainly wouldn’t see a planet like we see it today.
If we posit hundreds of millions of years we’d see a catastrophic extinction event where 90+ percent of all life forms died off, then we’d see whatever remained start to re-fill the various ecological niches and slowly spread out again.
-XT
So, how long did this take to happen? Hours? Days? A few years to raise Everest five miles up?
Do you realize that Everest and the other Himalayas are still rising, and no catastrophe is necessary?
How about mountain chains, like the Appalachians, which are now eroding away. Did they rise up at the same time? Why is their age so different from that of the newer chains?
I hope you try to answer xt’s question about fossil sorting.
If you want to call the whole thing a miracle, be my guest. It’s still a free country. But it has zippo to do with science.
God of course. Any being that could simply wave his celestrial hand and make a fish wouldn’t have much trouble conjuring water…then waving it away when it had served its purpose. Hell, even Harry Potter can create water by waving a wand…
You touch on only one of the myriad things that makes the idea of a global flood in biblical times extremely unlikely to say the least (though if we are going to branch into the Noah story we can REALLY have some fun)…
-XT
The cultural landscape would look a lot different. There would of course be some diversity of language still, but there would be a lot of similarities between art styles and the like. There would also be a very clear demarcation of artifacts found before and after the flood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY has a nice display case of Chinese pottery stretching back before the so-called flood, which clearly shows the continuity. Why doesn’t the later works show Middle Eastern influences. Ditto for South American civilizations, etc.
If there had been a flood we’d know it - no twisted explanations would be required.
Actually, it does not mean all parts of the world were under water at some point. It only means that those areas in which such fossils are found were under water at some point. Nor does it mean that all those mountains were under water at the same point in time (“sea floor fossil” is a pretty broad term; not all sea floor fossils are equal…).
I’m not sure if you are saying this tongue in cheek, but I don’t see how humans could have survived such a global flood as proposed by the bible (unless we are going to bring magic or some other kind of divine intervention). If by some chance an isolated group of humans HAD managed, somehow, to survive, I have serious doubts we’d have such a wide divergence in genetics as we see today in a mere 6000 years. Humans would have had to REALLY get hopping in order to, say, make it across the land bridge to the America’s (whats the current estimate? 10k years ago? 12k?)…they’d have had to find a time machine in fact. Either that or we have to speculate that several isolated groups of humans managed to survive a world wide flood by being on the tops of some fairly inhospitable mountains before hand…AND having the forsight to bring enough food to survive for a few decades while things sorted themselves out.
One other thing. Think about what dumping trillions of gallons of fresh water into the oceans REALLY means from a global WEATHER perspective. Unless I’m way off, it means the global conveyors would be completely shut down…which means…ice age. AFAIK, we didn’t have a major ice age (and this one would be huge…ice ball earth type thing) 6k years ago.
-XT
Fossils are laid down in jumbled piles. A flood would create orderly layers.
The eruption of Mount Saint Helens produced many layers in one quick mud slide. Orderly layers are produced quickly in a catastrophic flood.
If there is any separation of species in the layers, it would be a sign of habitat, not time.
And realize my theory. It is not a calm regular flood. A mile deep of sediment was stirred up on the entire surface to the earth. Mountains were raised. That is why I call it a catastrophe, not a flood. A calm flood would have a layer. A catastrophe would make a completely new crust.
And all black people look alike? Fossils are laid down at different times and in different ways. Some are jumbled piles (some are in fact local flood events, or when herds attempted to cross rivers in flood and were wiped out together), some are not. They all form distinct layers though…era in which like species lived together.
Only if magic is involved. Otherwise you’d have species jumbled together, where dinosaurs would be mixed in with more modern animals, etc. No natural process would separate species into distinct layers and place them with similar species, but not allow earlier or later species to occupy those same layers.
Also, as I said above, we DO have fossil and geological records of local event floods…and they are certainly not ‘orderly layers’. They are rather distinct in fact…hard to miss.
Where do you get that idea? We are talking about a world wide flood here. It would be a jumbled mess of something like 90% of all species on earth mixed together all at once…in a very short period of time. I have my doubts ANYTHING could have survived something like that described in the bible. And there is no evidence of such a catastrophic even happening on earth…ever. Not just 6000 or 10k, or 100k years ago…but ever.
:dubious:
When do you propose that such an event took place…and where is the evidence for it?
-XT
You are way off; I think it was Carl Sagan who pointed out that the frictional heating from a worldwide rainfall and flood that covered the world would have boiled the entire planet. Even worse than an ice ball; there wouldn’t be anything left.
No they are not; they are layed down in layers, each species in the approprate layer(s) of sedimentary rock. They are organized by time, not a flood; a flood would not neatly place trilobite below dinosaurs below wolves, every single time.
And kill the world in the process, as I pointed out. The evidence just isn’t there; there is a mountanous amount of evidence against your fantasy - I won’t dignify it by calling it a theory.
You’re right, of course. The stuff wrong with the flood could fill volumes. One cool calculation is to show how many people would be on the earth during the height of Egypt, say, if there was a flood. You can compute a birth rate that gets us to our current level of people now, but it doesn’t work too well to explain the population 3,000 years ago. I believe the creationists suggest a massive burst of speciation after the flood, thus making them actually radical evolutionsts!
We can also drag out the calculations of how much energy would be released by all that rain falling. crackle crackle burn everything right up. 
But I still like the cultural diversity example for those with more of an artistic bent, who don’t really get genetics. We all know what fossils in natural history museums say about the so-called flood, it’s nice that work in art museums has the same message.
Hey, Carl is my main man. I STILL re-read his Demon Haunted World book and think it should be required reading in HS. But…he could and was wrong. I find it hard to believe that friction due to rain would cause such an effect…where I know that dumping that quantity of fresh water into the oceans WOULD have the effect of a rather massive ice age. After all, its happened before, and we have evidence of it (unlike evidence of a global flood). Either way, it would be rather bad.
Out of curiosity, do you have a link to Carl Sagan saying the above? Just for my own curiosity sake.
-XT