by Dave Simmons

Created on: July 26, 2008

This is one of those subjects that always dismays me. Not so much because they believe in the Flood, but that they believe in the flood so thoroughly, despite all the evidence to show that this is not the case.

Before I start, the only other article on here talks about the geological evidence that there was a flood. At worst, this is an outright lie, at best, misguided ignorance. There's no physical record, geological or otherwise, of any kind of global flood within recorded human history. There wouldn't even be an interpretable geological record this recent; geology deals in epochs spanning millions of years, if not billions. There's records of catastophes, yes. The Permian extinctions spring to mind, and the KT impact. But these are so far back that any ancestors of the writers of the Bible would have been small shrewlike protomammals. They may have kept records at the time, but we've yet to discover any.

So, on to the problems. Firstly, there's just not enough water for a global flood, and never has been. Every raincloud in the sky at the moment, if compressed together, would account for around 3% of the world's total freshwater. Some claim the Flood was due to some kind of global warming type event, where the icecaps melted. Again, all well and good, unless you actually look at the figures. If both caps totally melted, it'd raise the average sea level by around 250-300 feet. That's not enough to cover a modest hill, let alone every mountain range in the Middle East, or the world.

But, it's God we're talking about here, so we're going to have to make allowances. No doubt he could have magically conjured perhaps 20-30 times the total amount of water in the world at present to cover the whole planet, and also make sure it went away again after 40 days. You have to assume these sort of things if you're going to take appropriated myths literally.

So, we have a planet completely covered with water. All the sinful people drown (and presumably all the sinful animals too, as God can be much more specific with his wrath when he wants to be. Presumably, as Eddie Izzard wondered, evil ducks, geese, and other waterfowl survived, and their descendants will take over the world before long). But not everyone dies, because God got Noah to build a boat, and gather a handful of his family and two of every animal onto it.

You know where I'm going with this. But two minor asides first. We get very exacting measurements for the size of the Ark in the Bible. Without going into specifics,

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