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Del Tackett of the Truth Project has a blog entry today about Why I believe in a global flood. He covers all the elements of it pretty well. I wish he hadn't allowed for the possibility of an old earth, which plays havoc with scripture, and I wish he hadn't ended by saying that he knows some don't believe but "that's OK." How is it OK not to believe what God said? Anyway, the blog covers the main reasons for belief pretty well.
Here are the geological reasons he gives:
-All over the world there is clear evidence of a global flood. Huge, vast sedimentary layers cover the earth. I’ve seen them in Israel, in South Africa, in England, everywhere.
-Fossils represent creatures that were buried rapidly, not slowly.
-The sedimentary layers are laid down on top of each other in tight layers just as we see in hydro-sorting as occurred at Mt. Saint Helens and in the lab. The layers do not show signs of erosion or long periods of time between them.
-Smooth bending or “folding” of sedimentary layers show that the layers were soft, not hard and brittle.
7. The standard geological story doesn’t fit the observations.
-The story that the land sunk and was covered with a large placid ocean in which particles of sediment slowly built up on the ocean floor, then the continent rose and the sediment became hard, then the continent sunk again and a placid ocean covered it with more sediment, then rose, then sunk, rose, sunk, rose, sunk, etc. to form all of the layers defies the evidence and even my imagination. The Redwall limestone layer is 550 feet thick throughout the Grand Canyon. Picture a large placid ocean. Where did all of that sediment come from to form this layer? The Coconino Sandstone layer is 350 feet thick. The Hermit Shale is sometimes 1,500 feet thick. That is a lot of particles over vast areas that had to somehow sprinkle itself over the bottom of the ocean for millions of years.
-I’ve mentioned the fossils, but plants and animals don’t normally fossilize over millions of years. Instead, they decay. This is especially evident when we find fossils like bees whose wings are exquisitely preserved, or fish in the process of eating another fish or an ichthyosaur giving birth when it was rapidly buried.
-The use of radiometric dating of rocks is suspicious to me. Fossils that should be void of any carbon-14 because of their “old” age, are still full of carbon-14. The great assumptions that provide the foundation for radiometric dating leave it ripe for miscalculations.
-By the way, look at the picture here. Notice how the the earth has been vacated, not because of a river. It just looks like someone pulled the plug on all the water and it just washed big caverns in the earth.
[Click on it, and then again, to enlarge it to the maximum]
Much later note (October 2010): I keep coming back to look at the two pictures in this post. They are at least as good evidence for the Flood as the Grand Canyon, and in a way more obviously so. Consider the buttes and cliffs in the background, rising from the relatively flat surface into which the canyons in the foreground are cut. That flat surface is reminiscent of the Kaibab plateau that forms the upper rim of the Grand Canyon which is also smooth and relatively flat for hundreds of miles in all directions except where uplifted by volcanic action and earthquakes. This flatness is the upper surface of one of the layers that were previously laid down in the earlier stages of the Flood, the layers above it having been gouged out and washed away in a later phase of the Flood as the waters were receding. Those upper layers had to have climbed at least to the current height of the highest butte, and probably much higher as layers above them were no doubt also washed away. So the buttes indicate that the entire area was at one point completely covered to quite a depth of layering, then a great deal of it washed away and the last of the flood waters carved out the striking canyons in the pictures, leaving only a meandering river.
