Talk:A Great World Wide Flood

Um, this page is not really in encyclopedic format at all. The reader is assumed to be a theist (with an emphasis on Judaism, Christianity), and the diction is very informal. I suppose I'll work on it a bit.

--Iscarus 13:32, 29 December 2008 (CST)

Huh?

Citations are needed. :) Plus it's written very badly.

"Volume of water" argument

The argument says there is not enough H2O on the earth and in the atmosphere to flood the earth. This is patently false. If the earth's crust were a perfect sphere then today's existing water would definitely flood the entire earth, probably to a depth of a mile or two. So the argument has a tacit assumption that land elevations were the same back then as today, and the oceans would have to rise 7 miles to cover Mt Everest. But a flood believer can counter that the flood caused catastrophic dislocations of the earth, and resulted in enormous upliftings of the land and corresponding depressions in the ocean. So now the same water only covers 70% of the earth's surface instead of 100%.

As far as where the water went after the flood, there are plausible fantasies to explain that away. Maybe a collision with a large comet after the flood could have knocked a large amount of water off the earth, just as such an event probably knocked off a large chuck that eventually became the moon. Or, since water is H2O, it's possible for water to simply vanish by decomposing into hydrogen and oxygen, and perhaps combining with other elements to form different stable compounds like H2S and CO2. The idea that "the atmosphere could not support the weight" of a lot of water, is inconsistent with physics - anything that is in orbit around the earth is WEIGHTLESS.

Of course, no causal arguments carry any weight with a person who believes that God can make any miracles he chooses. For the sake of the debate, it's best not to be proactive except with the science - don't create any ad hoc topic specifically to counter the flood - that's just stooping to their level of speculation. Just stick with the existing geological science, and point out how it is incompatible with the deposits that would result from a world wide flood. Then the flood believers have no logical recourse except to say that God, after causing the flood, arranged the layers of sediment in a deceptive way to make it appear that no flood occurred.

The other point in that paragraph should also be discarded. It is not a problem for believers that all other societies in the world would have been wiped out in the flood - they have always said the current population is entirely descended from Noah, and have claimed for centuries that each son of Noah was the progenitor of a different race. American Indians have often been claimed to be a "lost tribe" of Israel, and in fact that story was adopted as a central thesis of Mormonism.

Pogovio 10:07, 28 September 2009 (CDT)