Does the evidence support the Flood? (attn: DwarfishSquints)

The "Confessions of a Former Christian" thread has drifted somewhat off-topic, and spiraled into a discussion of Flood apologetics. I'm proposing this thread to continue the discussion in a more appropriate location.The last reply from DwarfishSquints, with some formatting added by me for easier reading: Once again, DS, there is not enough water on the entire planet, even including all of teh subterranean water, all water trapped in rocks, all of the moisture in the atmosphere, and all of teh water frozen in the polar ice caps to Flood the entire world to a depth of 15 cubits above even the continental shelves - that means, even without mountains, there is still not enough water.Let's do the math for you:A "cubit" was a unit of length in ancient times, and had a variety of measurements depending on the country of origin. The Hebrew cubit was typically between 14 and 18 English inches long - this is one of the shortest measurements (making it the most generous one to use, since it requires far less water than, say, the Egyptian cubit which was about 3 English feet in length). I'll be using 1 Cubit = 18" for the purposes of this calculation, because it gives you the best possible benefit of the doubt.The Bible states that the Earth was Flooded to a depth of 15 cubits (the Bible includes the mountains, but once again for ease of calculation and to give you the best possible benefit of the doubt, we'll ignore mountains compeltely).15 Cubits = 22.5 feet = 6.858 metersSo, we need to cover all of the continents, excluding mountains, to a depth of almost 7 meters.The surface area of the Earth is 510,065,600 km^2. Unfortunately, we can't simply calculate the amount of water needed to cover this surface area by 6.858 meters, because the continents are not at sea level - if they were, we'd all be standing in a puddle every time the tides came in.It's very difficult to arrive at a reasonable number for the height of the continents - all of the average elevations include mountains, and aside fom that the continents still vary greatly in elevation. For the sake of argument, I have picked Indiana, a state near the middle of the US that is not a part of any mountain ranges. Indiana's average elevation is 210 meters above sea level (Colorado, in contrast, is over 1000 meters above sea level in places; the middle east is almost completely above 500 meters) - so we need to raise sea level by at minimum 216.858 meters, and this is with us granting a much "flatter" Earth that includes no mountains and ignores the fact that even non-mountainous regions are still frequently at very high elevations above sea level.To be more specific, we need to raise the sea level by 210 meters to make it even with our land mass, and then add that amount of water to the amount of water needed to cover the entire surface area of the Earth in 6.858 meters to provide the global Flood as described in the Bible.The surface of the oceans is approximately 361,000,000 km^2.361,000,000 km^2 * .210 km = 75,810,000 km^3 of water needed to bring sea level up to the average elevation of Indiana.510,065,600 km^2 * .006858 km = 3,498,029.88 km^3 of additional water required for the Flood.75,810,000 km^3 + 3,498,029.88 km^3 = 79,308,029.88 km^3 total water required to be added to the oceans to cover the continental landmasses not including mountains to a depth of 6.858 meters assuming an average elevation of 210 meters, which is a more than generous assumption considering that most areas are significantly higher.A large quantity of the ice in the ice caps will not have a significant effect because they are already in water - melting their entire load of ice will not raise sea level significantly. The relevant portion is that which rests on land, because all of that water is added to the oceans. For the sake of the argument and once again to give you the biggest possible advantage, we'll assume that all of the polar ice rests on land, and all of it will add to the water in the ocean. This is massively inaccurate, but it's in your favor to demonstrate how wrongheaded your model is.The total amount of ice trapped in the polar ice caps is a little more than 34,500,000 km^3 (this is the total of Greenland and Antarctica, which make up about 90% of the ice caps). Note that this is less than half of the water required to Flood the Earth - basically, you haven't even brought sea level up to the average height of the continental shelves yet. Sure, coastal regions are devastated, but inland regions don't even feel a change. It's not a global Flood.So now let's add in the total amount of subterranean water and the water in the atmosphere.There is only about 12,900 km^3 water in the atmosphere at any given time - a drop in the proverbial bucket. Every drop of water contained in every cloud in the world could fall to Earth and it wouldn't even make a significant contribution to a global Flood.There is approximately 23,400,000 km^3 water total trapped underground.Adding these up:34,500,000 km^3 from the ice caps + 12,900 km^3 from the atmosphere + 23,400,000 km^3 from all underground sources = 57,912,900 km^3The amount we calculated as necessary to Flood the Earth as described in the Bible was 79,308,029.88 km^3.What does this mean?If you by some physics-violating miracle take all of the water in the ice caps, all of the water from underground, and all of the water in the atmosphere, you will still be over 21,000,000 km^3 short. That's about 1/4 of what we said was needed.There is not enough water on the entire planet to Flood the Earth as claimed in the Bible, even ignoring mountains, giving an absurdly low average elevation for the continents, ignoring all of the facts that make taking all of the water on the planet out of the atmosphere and up from the ground and melting it from the ice caps completely impossible, and giving the Creationist side the most favorable measurements and assumptions possible. It's not even close.If you mention again your little "idea" that the water in space was moved there from Earth, well...I'll outright call you insane. Water is one of the top ten most common molecules in the entire Universe - if all of the water in space came from the Earth, the oceans would be larger than our galaxy (okay, I'm pulling a rough estimate out of my ass, but the frequency of water is true). And of course you would need to propose some mechanism by which water is ejected at escape velocity from the Earth - that's a neat trick. If you say "miracle," you admit that you have no evidence for your "idea."You also bring up "some movement" of geological features, resulting in the formation of the mountains, etc. But this is yet another gigantic problem, DS: a flood cannot deposit sediments at a level higher than the flood itself reaches. If the flood doesn't cover the mountains, it can't create the mountains.You may start referring to "hydroplate theory" or "catastrophic plate tectonics," but both of these are total non-starters as far as geology is concerned. They require so much geological activity that a Flood would be the least of the world's problems - catastrophic plate tectonics in particular causes enough heat to be released in such a short amount of time that all of the water would have boiled away, and teh Earth would have been a molten ball of slag. No little boat filled with animals is going to survive that.The evidence we have is quite simply not consistent with a global Flood.There are many other arguments against the Flood, but this is already getting long, and I've only started replying to you, so I'll leave it at that for now. But that's not what we find in the geological record. Why are stone and metal tools, which cannot run for their lives and which do not float even a little, always found above dinosaurs and other creatures? Why are faster creatures like the velociraptor that were extremely light and should have not only fled to high groundbut should also have been somewhat bouyant always found below wooly mammoths that were also supposedly killed in the Flood, but which would have been slower to find high ground and were likely less buoyant?The evidence we have is quite simply not consistent with a global Flood.I think this is enough for a single thread. I'd include your ridiculous accusations regarding Darwin being "an inbreeder," or your Irreducible Complexity argument, or your halfhearted attack on abiogenesis, but that just makes the topic far too broad.Geology and the Great Flood, please.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Hi Rahvin,You know I am not a scientist so I try to stay away from these science forums, but I had a few questions about your post. I do know a little about math. You know in Arkansas they taught us reedin, ritin, and rithmatic. I would like to find out where you get some of your figures for your calculations. You know the old adage GIGO. You seem to have made a significant calculation here, and I see no support for any of your numbers. Are these numbers from some scientific source, or from a website? Could you give me a source for this number? Are you talking about bringing the water level up to the average elevation of Indiana before or after the sediment would have been left from a global flood? Or, are you assuming that the elevation of Indiana would be the same after the flood as before? At 210 meters, could the state have been underwater before a global flood? Could you give me a source for this number? You say the amount WE calculated. Was someone else involved in these calculations besides you? I thought scientists were not supposed to use words like impossible. Wouldn't it be better to say highly unlikely? I know this is a science forum so miracles are probably off limits. But this is a Biblical scenario, and if God was involved that kind of changes the whole picture doesn't it? I am only playing catch up on this geological stuff, but I did not think that all or most mountains were sedimentary formations. Could you explain to me how a flood depositing sediments has anything to do with "some movement" of geological features creating a mountain?I imagine DS is talking about some sort of uplift due to geological activity.As for the water covering the tops of the mountains, there are fossils of sea critters on the tops of the mountains in Colorado. I have personally seen them.To sum up this post. I do not see where you get your numbers. If you pulled them from another web site, then give me the link. If you have some scientific source that has made these calculations, then give me the support.I was thinking of something, and I thought I would run it by you. It is only an idea, and you guys usually don't like my ideas, but I will try anyway.I was looking at this Chemistry book titled "The Quest for Insight." I think its a good title. Well I was looking at this book, and studying about water. The book says that a lot of the water on earth came from outer space. I thought that was interesting. The book also says that the emissions from volcanos contains a lot of water. I assume that would turn the water into water vapor, and it would come down as rain.Also, I noted that water is made up of Hydrogen and Oxygen. It said Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It accounts for 89% of all atoms. If we look at all the fossil fuels on this earth then it appears at one time there was a lot of plants living that were producing Oxygen. Now isn't it possible that this Hydrogen and Oxygen got together and made water somehow. H2O.
I was just wondering.Regardless, it seems that you need to support your numbers. You also need to take into account in your calculations the geological impact of a worldwide flood, and the sedimentary impact of that same flood. If Indiana was 200 meters above sea level after the flood, it could have quite possibly been below sea level before the flood. I can almost assure you from the limited floods that I have seen, that Indiana was not 200 meters above sea level before a world wide flood.I have been in those mountains in Colorado that you talk about and seen fossils of sea critters on the tops of those mountains. I have also been to Dinosaur National Park out in Western Colorado, and they have those dinosaurs stacked one on top of another. It looked like something buried them pretty fast.

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"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be." - Charles Sanders Pierce

Feel free. They're from multiple websites, actually. I fully admit that my numbers are the result of google-fu, and if you (or better yet any resident geologists or oceanographers) take issue with any specific number and think you have a more accurate source, by all means provide your figure and your reasoning.As for my sources, there are severl, so let's see if I can find them all in my history: Groundwater estimates
Atmospheric waterThis site gives a lower estimate for the total in ice caps that I used...but of course I was trying to be as generous as possible to the Flood position. This is a USGS site - it's maintained by the United States Geological Survey. I don't see the site I used for the ice caps in my history, but again, I used a significantly higher number than the USGS estimates (as I recall, it's roughly a 10,000,000 km^3 difference) which is a significant advantage for the Creationist side, and yet the numbers are still insufficient.The surface area of the Earth was from Wiki - if you google "surface area Earth" you'll see my number right on top. I used the same method to research the surface area of the oceans.My numbers for average elevations were difficult to come by, as I mentioned in my original post - since I was trying to ignore mountains, and mountains are necessarily included in average elevation figures, I simply looked at non-mountainous inland regions that would have needed to be flooded, and picked one of the lower regeons (basically I saw that Indiana was one of teh lower elevations in teh US, it's distantly land-locked, it's not part of a mountain range, and it's where I was born). I also mentioned the average elevation of teh middle-east, which I observed on an online topographical map. Forgive me - I do not have my sources.All of this is a very amateurish attempt at gaining a very rough estimate on terms as friendly to the Creationist side as possible without being too ridiculous (I could have picked an elevation of 20 meters, but the vast majority of the continental landmass is an order of magnitude higher than that). If you think you have a better set of numbers to work with, please provide them and I will recalculate. I'm talking about the current elevation of Indiana. The possibility of additional sediment deposits and other Creationist arguments are the reasons I used such an arbitrarily low elevation for my initial figure. Again, the average elevation in the middle-east is over twice as high, and a great deal of the US is even higher than that. *sigh*No. I was the only one performing these calculations, unless you'd like to include the fine people at Google, or the guys at Microsoft who programmed the calculator application."We" was meant only to imply agreement with the calculations I had just made. If you disagree with those calculations, by all means provide your reasoning and rebuttal. 1) I'm not a scientist.
2) Given the numbers and calculations I provided, and global Flood in the sense of simultaneously covering the entire Earth with water to a depth of 15 cubits is impossible. Even a scientist will occasionally use that word when it is warranted. If you like, take it to mean "so improbable as to have the same probability as a penny's worth of copper coating the Earth to a depth of 1". When there is insufficient material to perform the required task, the task as defined is impossible given the set amount of material. The entire point of the initial conversation was the lack of evidence for Biblical accuracy. Allowing miracles that specifically cover up contrary evidence allows the same type of thinking that says we could all be in the Matrix; yes, it's possible. No, there's no reason to think so. That was me responding to DS' claim. You are correct - mountains are not the result of sedimentary formations, except when sedimentary rock is pushed upwads by tectonic plate movements (which is why we sometimes find sedimentary rock and aquatic fossils on mountaintops).DS claimed that the mountains were created during the Flood becasue there were no mountains (at least none of the height we see today) prior to that event; this means that either the Flood created the mountains as a sedimentary process (which we know is false, but I chose to point out that this meant even more water would be necessary as a different avenue of attack), or tectonic movements would have needed to speed up so as to complete billions of years of motion in the 150 days that the Earth was submerged. This is called "catastrophic plate tectonics," and if you utter those three words in teh presence of a geologist he will laugh at you, and possibly provide you with a tinfoil hat. The amount of energy required to not only speed up but also slow down continental movements to such a degree as to form mountains in less than a year is astronomical. The heat from the friction would have, as I said, turned the Earth's crust into a molten ball of slag. The Flood would have been the least of Noah's worries, as all of the water vaporized from the extreme heat. Exactly. Which would produce evidence that we simply do not see - continental movements, even those underwater, do not happen without consequences. This is the reason we have such things as volcanoes. Squeezing the amount of geological activity he's talking about into such a short timeframe has catastrophic results that not only would we be able to detect today, but also would have killed Noah and destroyed his little boat. And as I said, this is the result of the very process that creates mountains: uplift from tectonic plate motion. Again, speeding this process up to the degree required by the Flood model would have detectable and catastrophic results. This process takes many, many years.As a side note to the geological facet of this conversation, you'll note that in many places the rock has been bent by the extreme pressures involved. In others where more rapid motion has occurred (think earthquakes), the rock is fractured rather than bent. Folding of rock requires slow, constant pressure - this is only possible given extremely long timeframes. I've now given you my sources. Feel free to dispute them if you feel you have a better source. Yes, but water only accumulates on Earth - it can't leave without being sent up on a spaceship. This means that, while most of the water on Earth likely arrived in the form of icy comets, we have never had more water on Earth than we have right now - so my calculations are once again the most generous possible for the Creationist side. The numbers I provided also included subterranean water (the "fountains of the deep" seem to require it, anyway). That's not quite the way it works. Water doesn't tend to be "made" here on Earth except when we do it in chemistry labs. Hydrogen is such an easily reactive atom that it tends to bond with otehr atoms very, very quickly - like Oxygen. Per Wikipedia's entry on Earth's Atmosphere, Hydrogen accounts for only 0.55 ppmv (0.000055%) of the air around us, becasue it tends to bond with something almost immediately. It can't be stored as hydrogen naturally without bonding to something else. Hell, we have difficulty storing Hydrogen gas - the atoms are so small the gas leaks from even the smallest fissure, and once it's out it'll bond to somethign else fairly quickly (remember the Hindenburg? Yeah, that's what happens when Hydrogen and Oxygen get together with even the smallest spark - you can't really keep them seperated, they form water immediately). And yet the water would have still needed to cover Indiana at the present elevation in order to deposit those sediments. The water can hardly deposit sediments higher than the water level! And localized floods, like the flash floods of the American southwest, can do that. Of course, given a muddy area, it's also possible for many creatures over a long time to become trapped and fossilized, giving the "piled up" look.The fact is, there isn't enough water to Flood the Earth a claimed in the Bible. If you want to discuss sedimentary layers, we can do that as well - that evidence contradicts a global Flood even more strongly.

It appears from your comments that the numbers and assumptions used for your calculation were not very substantial. And, at the end you reach this conclusion. This may be a fact. However, nothing in your posts or calculations has shown this to be a fact. No offense intended.Does anyone else argue this point? I looked at the talkorigins website and they have pages of what they proclaim to be problems with the flood, but I cannot find any argument about the quantity of water that would be required to cover the earth at that time.I am presently attempting to read a book on biology and learn more about this thing called life. As a result, I do not have time right now to help you find good numbers (I don't even know where to look), or to develop good assumptions (I would have to do a lot of thinking to figure these out) so that you can make a somewhat accurate calculation to prove what you appear to be trying to prove. This being that there is not enough water available to cover the earth as it would have existed before a global flood. At least I think that is what you are trying to prove.I would definitely be interested in seeing and evaluating your results if you can make an accurate calculation.It would be much eaiser for me to evaluate if you state exactly what you are trying to prove, state clearly your assumptions, and show the authoritative source of each of your numbers. Regardless, I would be interested in learning more about how Hydrogen bonds to Oxygen through this covalent bond. You say that water cannot escape from the atmosphere, however it appears that Hydrogen will escape. There does not seem to be much free Hydrogen on the earth (that is not trapped or bonded with water). This may even have some potential effect upon your calculations.

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"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be." - Charles Sanders Pierce

And on top of Mt Everest, as well - a couple of thousand feet of sediment that's made of fossil seashells. But all of it has been metamorphosed. That's a fancy way of saying that, after it was laid down under a sea somewhere, it was buried deeper than about five miles by other sediment and heated to somewhere over 600 degrees F, under very high pressure, so it could get converted from limestone to something approaching marble. And after that it was uplifted enough for those five+ miles of sediment to be eroded away, and then uplifted enough more to be six miles above our current sea level.All in 6000 years, do you really think?

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Totally off-topic message "whited out".

Then support your assertion. My numbers were taken from teh United States Geological Survey website, as I linked, or from sites which gave numbers more favorable to the Creationist side. If you believe the numbers are inaccurate, then support your assertion with evidence. That's because there is even more evidence with better arguments from other information, such as the actual sorting of sedimentary layers, Creationist insistance that the Grand Canyon and other such features could have been created by a Flood, etc.But once again, Wumpini, popularity is irrelevant - refute my assertion or concede. You haven't done that yet, you've simply made the baseless asserion that my numbers are "weak." How are they weak, Wumpini? Do you have more accurate numbers, and a way to back them up? This is a science forum, which demands evidence be provided with assertions and rebuttals. I have provided evidence for my claim. You must now provide evidence in order to refute it.Else you're nothing more than a child saying "nu uh!" That's pretty much it. But if you don't have the time to actively participate in the debate, then stay out of it. Bare assertions are not looked on favorably in the science section. A compeltely accurate calculation is extremely difficult, which is the entire purpose behind leaning towards the data favoring the Creationist model in every single case. I chose my numbers so as to give the maximum advantage to the Creationist side - if teh calculations fail even then, does this not mean the accurate calculation would be even worse for the Creationist side?A real calculation would be far more complicated than mine, becasue as you raise sea level you face diminishing returns -the surface area of the water increases as more land is covered, requiring more water to raise sea level each meter. My calculation ignored these diminishing returns, meaning an accurate calculation will require vastly more water. I also assumed a rather low elevation for the average continental height in order to compeltely ignore mountains and once again "fudge" the math in favor of the Creationists. An accurate calculation would once again require even more water.My polar ice cap calculations, as I stated in my opening post, assumed that all of the polar ice currently rests on land when it does not. This means the effect of melting ice caps would be far less than what I calculated - I once again "fudged" the math in favor of the Creationist side.I never claimed my numbers resembled an accurate calculation, Wumpini. I specifically stated, repeatedly, that I was using numbers that favored the Creationist side whenever possible, and that my methodology was adjusted to favor the Creationist side whenever possible. That there is still not enough water even grossly underestimating the water requirements and grossly overestimating the amount of water that can be added to the oceans means that the Creationist position is solidly debunked. I did state my position. I did state my assumptions. And I provided the sources of my numbers when requested.Would you like me to recalculate using only the numbers from teh USGS, which were less favorable to the Creationist model? It would be more accurate, seeing as the USGS site is run by actual geologists. It only makes things worse for the Creationist model, but I can do that if you'd like. Hydrogen is the least dense gas in existence - it rises above all of teh more dense molecules, reaching the upper atmosphere where it can be slightly bled off. Water, on the other hand, is far heavier, and never reaches so high in meaningful quantities - that's why clouds don't escape into space.This has zero effect on my calculations, and your clumsy attempt to cast doubt is irrelevant until you back up your assertion with evidence.

It is hard to tell at this point in my study. You seem to be convinced that a global flood 6000 years ago was not able to leave the geological evidence that you see on Everest. I think we both agree that those mountains were under water at one time.I guess I will have to wait and see where the evidence eventually leads me.

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"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be." - Charles Sanders Pierce

DeletedEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Totally off-topic message "whited out". Signature shut off.Edited by Wumpini, : Deleted Off Topic Message

First, you say that I am a child if I do not provide evidence to refute your calculation. Then over and over again in the same post you tell me the calculation is not completely accurate or real. Why would I need to refute a calculation that even you do not see as accurate or real? I really don't have time to participate in this debate right now. Nothing personal, but I am studying other areas at the present time.However, I have not made any bare assertions. You made the assertions yourself. I only pointed them out.

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"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be." - Charles Sanders Pierce

No, we don't. That is not at all where the evidence leads. The rocks that are now on top of Everest (or the mountains at Banff or Boulder) were the floor of a sea when they formed. They were near-horizontal ses-bottom. Under water, yes, but not mountains, and not even dreaming about mountains. The rocks that ended up on Everest went through the travails I outlined above before ending up on top of a mountain. And it would take more than a couple of miracles to do all that in a few thousand or a few hundred thousand years.

There is no need to argue about where the water came from and where it went. All you have to do to falsify the flood story is check for evidence of where that water was at the appropriate time.Biblical scholars place the flood in the close vicinity of 4,350 years ago. We can give it a thousand years latitude or more just to be on the safe side.Now, the question is -- can you find evidence of a flood in all areas of the globe at about that time, say 5,000 years ago for a nice round number. And the answer is no.The trick here is to ignore geology, and the Cambrian explosion and the other events hundreds of millions of years ago. When you are dealing with events 5,000 years ago you are looking to archaeology and sedimentology, rather than geology.Pretty much all areas of the world have examples of soil development that includes that period -- many areas of the world have tens of thousands of years of nicely stratified soils undisturbed by discontinuities (caused by rivers, floods, landslides, and the like).I do archaeology. In the area in which I work, the western US, there are a lot of archaeological sites that have evidence of continual soil buildup for thousands of years. They also have continuity of human cultures and of fauna and flora. What they lack is a clean break, with evidence of flooding somewhere around 5,000 years ago -- flooding that would create one of those discontinuities I mentioned above.Even more telling is the continuity of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). There is a cave in southern Alaska, called On Your Knees Cave, from which a partial skeleton was unearthed. It was radiocarbon dated to 10,300 years ago, and the mtDNA from that individual has been found in nearly 50 living individuals spread from California to the tip of South America. There is no evidence of a break in that mtDNA haplogroup at about 5,000 years with replacement by one of the Near Eastern haplogroups -- the same mtDNA lineage can be found along the west coasts of North and South America over 10,000 years later. I have a second example from my own research of the same exact thing, but the time span there is only 5,300 years. In either case there is no replacement of the haplogroup with Near Eastern types after a "flood." The Native American haplogroup continues unbroken from pre-flood to post-flood. mtDNA from Noah's female kin do not show up at all.Another line of evidence that is also quite telling: in southern and eastern Washington there is evidence of a series of post-glacial floods. As the ice melted from the last ice age, large lakes formed in Montana, blocked up by ice dams in the Idaho panhandle area. Periodically the water overwhelmed the ice dams, and the water was let loose, scouring southern and eastern Washington pretty thoroughly. (Google "channeled scablands") But these small floods (small compared to a global flood) can be discerned and dated. Why can't a flood less than half as old and reportedly hundreds of times larger be discerned as well?Face it, the evidence for a global flood comes from scripture -- and that evidence is not confirmed by scientific studies.To argue to the contrary you have to begin overturning one field of science and then the next. Radiocarbon dating, pollen studies, zoology, and on and on. And each problem you try to put a band-aid on will only produce more problems, and band-aiding those will produce still more problems.Example: some creationists try to claim the decay constant used in radiometric dating is not a constant, but a variable, and that all of that radioactive decay occurred in less than 6,000 or so years. Problem: that would release a huge amount of heat all at once, rather than over billions of years, and effectively parboil the earth. (Surely the Egyptians would have noticed that! And, by the way, why didn't they write about a global flood? They kept careful records of the annual flooding of the Nile, so surely they would have noticed a much larger flood.)The overall conclusion for anyone who is following science and scientific evidence is that there was no global flood at the appointed time. No amount of twisting facts and band-aiding can change that.So this is what you have to look forward to when you finish arguing about where the water came from and where it went. Where was it in between?

Let's just say intellectually incapable of both following and appreciating a good physical 'back-of-the-envelope' calculation. You would fail most of my interview questions. Unless you are just being deliberately rude and disingenuous to someone who has put in serious effort to first produce his argument and then document his sources for you.The precision of his answer is irrelevent - he has deliberately chosen the lower bounds on all of his variables to favour your position, and thus his error bars, which are large, are heavily skewed in the direction that makes the actual answer almost certainly even more detrimental to your position. His accuracy is perfectly good enough to make his point. It is now dowm to you to refute the calculation. If you do not have the time nor inclination, then politely decline and submit to his calculation for now. Otherwise you are simply yet another rude troll.

Hi Wumpini,Let me try a simple analogy to explain why you have to take Rahvin's calculations seriously.Joe: "I just drove my car from New York to Los Angeles in 4 hours."Bill: "Impossible. I'm going to be as favorable to your position as possible by using very approximate figures slanted in your favor. We'll call the driving distance between NY and LA 2000 miles (it's actually around 2800). The maximum average speed you could attain has got to be less than 100 mph, but let's be as favorable to your position as possible and say that your average speed was 200 mph. It would take 10 hours for you to drive 2000 miles at 200 mph, therefore it would have been impossible for you to complete the trip in 4 hours."Notice that although Bill has used figures that deviate by large margins from realistic figures, he deviated in a manner designed to be as favorable to Joe's claim as possible.Rahvin did the equivalent thing for the flood. He used very approximate figures that were on purpose extremely favorable to the creationist position. More accurate figures would be much less favorable. Demanding more accurate figures would only show the flood to be even more impossible than Rahvin just demonstrated.The reason the possibility of Noah's flood is easy to refute is because flood theory wasn't developed by building a theory around data gathered from the natural world, but by reading Genesis. As luck would have it, unless God is playing games with us by placing false evidence in the rocks, Genesis is not an accurate historical account.--Percy