This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 1, Issue 6, from 1987.
People are sometimes surprised to learn that there still exist today individuals who sincerely believe the earth to be flat and to lie at the centre of the universe. Genuine flat-earthers really do exist and are based in California. Also based in American’s most crank-ridden state are the devotees and promoters of a far more popular but equally ludicrous set of beliefs – the self-styled “scientific creationists.”
According to organisations such as the San Diego-based Institute for Creation Research, the earth is only 6000 years old. fossils prove nothing, and the Genesis account of creation is the literal truth. Being fundamentalists, they are compelled to accept every story in the Bible as historical truth, thus Jonah really did get swallowed, the sun really did stop for a day, and the first woman really was formed from Adam’s rib. In their attempts to prove tales which ought to be taken with a pillar of salt, the creationists resort to gross distortions of fact, ignore mountains of contrary evidence, and use the most absurd fallacies and sophisms. Here I shall examine in detail one of their favourite “theories” – Noah’s Flood – which is also one of the easiest to disprove.
As historians and archaeologists have long known, the ancient Sumerians living in the Tigris-Euphrates valley were subject occasionally to disastrous floods, one particularly severe flood giving rise to the flood story in the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and, after centuries of exaggeration, the story in Genesis. The creationists do not want to know. They believe that the flood took place in 2348 B.C., and the fact that Egyptian history carried on through that period is of no consequence: the Egyptologists have got it wrong.
The creationists tell us that prior to the flood the planet was surrounded by a huge water-vapour canopy which maintained a tropical climate over all the earth. In reality, such a canopy would require conditions like those on Venus to maintain it, and the humidity would have been suffocating. One is also left wondering how all the organisms adapted to extreme cold or dryness survived or even why they were so adapted. Imagine polar bears, cacti, and penguins living together in the conditions of a sauna!
A divine meteorite disrupted this impossible canopy and caused massive precipitation. Fortunately, the earth’s topography was not the same then. There were no very high mountains, so the amount of water needed was not too great. The mountains were thrust up later as the ocean basins opened up to allow the water to drain away afterwards. The creationists ought to learn about plate tectonics.
The “evidence” for all this consists of a few fossil graveyards where whole communities of living things have been wiped out suddenly and the fact that flood tales are common around the world. It does not occur to them that sudden burial and fossilisation can be achieved quite simply by local, natural floods. Nor does it occur to them that most ancient civilisations lived in fertile but flood-prone river valleys – hence the preponderance of flood myths.
Naturally, the geological record contains no record of any world-wide flood. The creationists’ answer is that the geological record is itself the record of the flood! All the rocks from Cambrian times onwards and all the fossils within them were laid down during and by Noah’s Flood. This “flood geology” is supposed to explain the ordering of fossils in the strata. Organisms dwelling on the sea-floor were the first to be buried and so appear at the bottom of the record. Fish are next, then slow-moving land animals, then more mobile ones, and finally the birds, as they can fly and so evade the rising waters the longest. Regrettably for the creationists, the fossil record is hopelessly at variance with this. Whales occur above equal-sized marine reptiles; corals should only be present in the lower levels whereas they occur continuously from the Ordovician to the present day; plants, being rooted to the spot, should all occur together, yet giant tree-ferns and mosses clearly precede flowering plants, and so on.
It is not just the order of fossils that contradicts flood geology. The Permian rock-salt beds of Cheshire formed by evaporation of sea-water, the Carboniferous Fossil Grove in Glasgow with its still upright tree-stumps, or the giant fossil coral reefs over a mile across in the Silurian limestones of northern Indiana all occur in the middle of the sequence of rocks that creationists tell us were laid down during and by Noah’s Flood. The mind boggles at how seas can evaporate, trees grow, and huge coral reefs form during a planetary flood.
The creationists are fond of telling us how the Ark would have been big enough to take on board all the animals. and they reckon it was about the size of H.M.S. Invincible. However. they tend to underestimate just how much living matter had to go on board. An article in Nature in December 1986 put the total number of species at between 1 ½ and 30 million, probably over 10 million. One wonders how a family of eight can, for about a year, look after a floating menagerie of several million sea-sick animals, including dinosaurs!
It is not just land animals that would have had to go on board. The mixing of salt and fresh water together with vast amounts of sediment would have made the oceans intolerable for most aquatic organisms. Presumably Noah somehow managed to cram on board the 90 or so species of Cetaceans, though I am not sure how the various pairs of whales were supposed to survive off a single pair of krill, or how the krill managed. Plants, too. pose problems. A large supply of fresh plant material would be required for food. Where it was all kept is not clear. Seeds (in hermetically sealed containers to prevent premature germination or decay due to the damp) of every species would be needed, as plants and their seeds would perish under miles of water just as surely as any animal. Those animals requiring specialised food would have a problem. The single pair of ants would not have lasted the pair of anteaters long, and pandas will eat nothing but fresh bamboo.
It doesn’t end there. How did diseases survive the flood? Did Noah and his family all carry smallpox, diphtheria, malaria, polio, syphilis, and all the other diseases of mankind? If so, then why did they not die, and if not, then how did the diseases survive? Were the bacteria and viruses kept in little phials in the fridge, perhaps? Thousands, possibly millions, of creatures are utterly dependent upon the Amazon rain forest for their survival. As any ecologist knows, such jungles take millennia to grow or to recover from damage. What did all those poor creatures do while waiting thousands of years for their habitats and food-supplies to regenerate?
Finally, I would like to finish with just one more little fact for the creationists to ponder. In some parts of the world, where lakes form around the foot of melting glaciers, one gets a seasonal variation in the sediments deposited in the lake. The sediment deposited in the summer is coarse, being washed in by the meltwater, and is rich in organic matter from the stagnant, algae-rich water of the lake. In the winter the sediment is the very fine clay left in suspension from the summer and is poor in organic remains The result is an alternation of layers, each pair of layers representing one year’s deposition, and they can be counted back just like the rings of a tree. These sediments, called varves, can contain up to 12,000 pairs of summer/winter layers and. because they contain carbon, they can also be dated by the carbon-14 method, which correlates with them as far back as 12.000 years.
Do those varves show any sign of a break at around 2348 B.C.? Not at all. The sequence is completely unbroken. These simple muds, on their own. are better evidence against the Biblical flood than all the creationists’ half-geology, semi-meteorology, and pseudoscience in general can ever counter.
