Was Noah's Flood Global or Local?
Gen.1-11, Part 4 - 50 brief answers for skeptics, Amazingly long lifetimes, the Ark, Noah's Flood
The ‘Ark Encounter’, Williamstown KY. Probably the largest timber framed structure in today’s world. 510’ long, 55’ high, and 85’ wide, based on the measurements in Genesis 6:14-16.
The exponential decline of the long lifetimes of the first people, The Nephilim/Giants, the ark, a global or local flood? a bottleneck in world population growth, the ice age after the Flood
Bonus reading - I found a gem of a little book to recommend to folks who have questions about God and the bible. “One-minute Answers to Skeptics” by Charlie Campbell, alwaysbeready.com. (Note: I don’t get a commission on this; just want to get the word out)
Noah was 600 in the year of the Flood
We don’t know how they lived so long in the beginning, but it’s interesting that the decline follows an exponential curve when you plot a graph of the ages of Noah’s descendants recorded in Gen.11:10-26.
The flood drastically changed the world. A graph of the decline in ages after the flood is one proof of this change, and that the flood was global. It’s also evidence that these numbers weren’t made up as in a story tale. The math is just too close to perfect, and exponential curves weren’t known when the bible was written.
Population bottleneck
Genetic bottlenecks (or population bottlenecks) occur when a significant proportion of the population dies or proportions become isolated. Such a bottleneck occurred at the time of Noah’s flood when the human population was reduced to eight people. There would have been a genetic effect, with the loss of a great deal of the genetic variety in the population. That could have had something to do with the decline in ages.
radioactive carbon disruption
All living organisms have carbon in their bodies, and a percentage of that carbon includes radioactive carbon, symbol C14. There is an equilibrium ratio of C14 to C12 as long as plants and animals are alive and breathing. Animals exhale CO2, and plants take in CO2, maintaining a balance. But when an organism dies, the radioactive C14 atoms keep decaying into nitrogen (N14), while the C12 atoms remain stable. So the ratio is changed, and measuring the change gives a way to estimate how long ago the organism died, given a few assumptions. For example, we have to assume the decay rate has been constant. The half-life of C14 is about 5700 years. When Noah’s flood wiped out all land plants and animals, the normal C14/C12 ratio was radically disrupted. So radiometric C14 dating can be reliable from the time of the flood, about 4300 years ago, but beyond that, an adjustment has to be made for the hiatus in the C14/C12 ratio caused by the drowning deaths of all the living, breathing life forms..
If you’d like to dig deeper into the topic of radiometric dating, here’s a whole list of articles on it.
Why did God wipe out the world?
If you think the presence of evil in the world is bad today, think how bad it was in Noah’s day.
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Gen.6:5
As bad as our generation is, even the really bad guys might occasionally have a good thought or intention.
It’s amazing that Noah lived so long in such a wicked world and wasn’t corrupted by it. He was a righteous man – maybe the only one in the whole world!
Nephilim - giants in those days
There’s another consideration as to why God wiped out everything and everyone and started over with Noah’s family. There is a mysterious passage about the Nephilim that has caused a lot of speculation. This immediately precedes the verse telling us how wicked the world was, so there’s probably a connection.
“Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God* saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.” Gen.6:1-4
*After a lot of study on this, I’m taking the “sons of God” to be angels, and in this context, those angels that followed Satan’s rebellion, the “daughters of men” to be human women, and the “mighty men” to be the giants (and possibly the ‘gods’ of ancient mythology) who were the offspring of the union of “sons of God” and “daughters of men”.
Ryan Pitterson, in “Judgment of the Nephilim”, makes the case that the Nephilim giants were the offspring resulting from rebellious angels actually marrying the daughters of men. By the time of the flood, this corrupt genetic source had spread through the population and something had to be done or mankind was doomed. He contends that the only way to stop the spread of these ‘bad genes’ was to start over. However, one of Noah’s daughter-in-laws may have had some of these genes, because later we still find some giants in the land of Canaan, like Goliath, before they eventually all died out. Pitterson’s theory sounds pretty speculative, until you read his book and see how much scripture he brings into it.
The ark
After visiting the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, I love to talk about Noah’s Ark.
My wife and I were astounded by the scale of this project.
It’s one thing to read about it; it’s quite another thing to experience it. It’s so BIG!
We read in Gen.6:15-16 “This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits….you shall make it with lower, second, and third decks.”
But the massive size just doesn’t sink in until you see it. Bev and I had a similar experience at the Grand Canyon. We didn’t really appreciate how vast it was until we actually hiked down into it.
Most people today wouldn’t know how long a cubit is, so the whole passage on the ark’s dimensions is often not understood. Plus a mental picture that has confused many is the silly little cartoon-like pictures of the ark not much bigger than a bathtub with a couple giraffe’s heads sticking up.
Shame on those who mislead our children!
A cubit was the distance from your elbow to your fingertips – so it varied from about 18 inches to 22 inches.
Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, took the middle road, and used a 20.4 inch cubit to build an ark in Williamstown, KY, to the biblical dimensions.
That works out to 510 feet long, 55 feet high, and 85 feet wide.
Believe me, you could get lost in it.
It’s believed to be the biggest timber-framed structure in the world.
How?
How did Noah get all those animals in the ark?
First, most species on earth are marine – they live in the ocean and didn’t need to be saved on the ark.
Only the land animals and birds were on the ark. The largest animals could have been taken as juveniles.
The carnivores must have been peaceable, perhaps by God’s intervention*, and/or possibly by going into hibernation or a near state thereof. They too could have been juveniles. Baby lion and tiger type cats are kind of cute and too little to kill other animals for food. Noah was instructed to bring enough food for all the animals.
*God intervened also by causing the animals to come to the ark. Noah didn’t have to go out an round them up!
“Of clean animals and animals that are not clean and birds and everything that creeps on the ground, there went into the ark to Noah by twos, male and female, as God had commanded Noah.”
The actual number of animals could have been much smaller than what you might think. The key is in understanding the difference between basic “kinds” and species. The basic kinds that God created had the genetic potential for the vast variety we see today. For example, take the ‘cat’ family. The basic kind, let’s call it a prototype, would have had all the variety in its original DNA to be capable of generating all of the different ‘cat’ types we see today, from lions and tigers to the common house cat. This principle is easily demonstrated in the history of our domestic breeding experiments with everything from pigeons and dogs to cattle and horses. For example we know that the hundreds of ‘dog’ breeds can be traced back to an original dog. Extrapolating back in time, it’s not hard to imagine that there was only one basic kind of ‘dog’ that led not only to our domestic breeds, but also wolves, coyotes, hyenas, and dingos.
“The origin of the domestic dog from wolves has been established … we examined the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs representing all major dog populations worldwide … suggesting a common origin from a single gene pool for all dog populations.” Science, 22 November 2002, quoting Savolainen, P., Zhang, Y.P., Luo, J., Lundeberg, J. and Leitner, T., “Genetic evidence for an East Asian origin of domestic dogs”, Science 298(5598):1610–1613, 22 November 2002.
Answers in Genesis has done a great deal of research on the concept of basic kinds. Use their search bar. Here’s a good example - an article on the dog kind, titled “Did God Create Poodles?”
The flood – was it global?
“Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.” Gen.6:13
Rather than take the approach of skeptics, I’m starting with the premise that the bible is true and accurate, and going from there. Then when we have questions, we’ll see if there might be a reasonable answer.
“All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. Thus He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark.” Gen.7:21-23
It couldn’t be stated any more clearly, that nothing survived on land.
But just to make sure you understand that the flood was global and not just some local event, Gen.7:19 says “The water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered.”
The mountains probably weren’t as high then. Geologists will agree that mountains have risen due to earth movements; the only questions is “When?” Biblical creationists say it was recent; not millions of years ago. But one thing we’ll all have to agree on - if all the mountains were covered, then the flood as described in the bible had to be global.
Where is the evidence?
It’s all over the earth. What do we find? Thousands of feet of sedimentary layers, laid down by water.
What’s in those layers? Fossils. How did the fossils form? They had to have been buried quickly, in order to be preserved. We don’t see fossils being formed today. What we see is that when something dies, it gets eaten by scavengers, or it decays – it’s not preserved. So sedimentary layers full of preserved dead plants and animals all over the world are exactly what we’d expect to find if there was a global flood.
When were the fossils formed?
This is a real bone of contention; pun intended. Of course we’ve been taught all our lives that fossils are millions of years old. But how do they know? Aside from radiometric dating, which I’ll talk about in a minute, circular reasoning says the fossils are old because they’re found in old layers, and the layers are old because the fossils found in them are old. That’s not very scientific.
radiometric dating
All such dating methods are based on assumptions that cannot be proven. My physics degree helped me to appreciate that when I studied these dating methods. Also, it’s worth mentioning that there’s a big difference between C14 dating and the other methods like potassium-argon and uranium-lead. That’s because of the huge difference in half-lives. The half-life* of C14 is only 5,730 years, making it actually quite useful for dating organic material, that is, anything that was alive at one time, whether plants or animals. Rocks, on the other hand, are inorganic - they don’t contain carbon, like all living things do. U238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years! You have to assume the inorganic rock layers are millions or billions of years old to even use such methods, so that’s quite an assumption to begin with! *the time for half the radioactive atoms to have decayed
What about the ice age?
Again, let’s start with the premise that the bible is true. A global flood with the “fountains of the deep” bursting forth probably would include volcanic activity; not just spouting water. We do know there was a tremendous amount of volcanic activity at some time in the past. My state of Oregon seems half covered with lava flows, including the famous Columbia Gorge. Volcanic activity would warm the oceans. Warmer oceans would have more evaporation, which would lead to more condensation in the form of rain and snow. The volcanic dust would darken the skies, blocking sunlight and cooling the earth. So years of more snowfall and cooler temps so it wouldn’t melt in summer in the higher latitudes, reasonably creates an ice age. Meteorologist Michael Oards has studied this thesis in depth and has written about it here.
next week - Flood aftermath – ice age, repopulation of the world, and the Tower of Babel