If I made any errors, or left anything out, please let me know.
The claim:
A fella I had gone out to lunch with a few weeks ago challenged me to point out any errors in the Bible. It being established that he thought the Great Flood had happened, I thought it was quite impossible, and both of us needed to go, I offered to demonstrate why it was impossible in an email exchange. He accepted, but promptly tag-teamed in his friend, who is ostensibly an ex-professor of biology from some university. I only got a chance to talk with the friend for about ten minutes several days later, so I don't know if the university is a real one or some god-forsaken christian college, but either way, I feel pity for his students.
I email him my assertion:
He responds:I wrote:There exists no plausible physical explanation for whence the water for a world-covering flood could have come, or for where it could have gone, that is consistent with the events described in the Bible. Please provide such an explanation.
An argument that requires the suspension by divine magic of physical laws shall be taken as a concession of the point: if you have to resort to magic, you indirectly admit that it is impossible.
He wrote:Pangaea, Plate Tectonics and the Flood
Magnetic reversals in lava fields show that Earth’s magnetic field reversed numerous times in a short period of time. The magnetic reversals along the ocean floor show that the plates of Earth’s crust must have split apart rapidly, during a global catastrophic event, not slowly.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v9/i ... shment.asp
Pangaea existed before the flood – Genesis 1:9
Pangaea busted apart during the flood – Genesis 7:11-12
As the plates shifted, the ocean basins were shallower and the mountains were lower, causing everything to be covered by water. At the end of the flood the plates slammed together causing dry land and mountains to rise while the ocean basins sank.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/article ... -tectonics
Where did the water come from and where did it go?
http://www.answersingenesis.org/article ... od-and-ark
The waters of the flood have always been here and are still here today. 75% of our planet is covered by water. There is more than enough water in the oceans and ice caps to cover the earth if during a global catastrophic event the ocean basins were pushed up and the mountains before the flood were not as high.
Evidence that the Earth is Young
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4005.asp
The New Answers Book – we have this book in the church library
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab
My argument:
Frantic backpedaling and smokescreening ensues:I wrote: Only one of your links addressed my claim; I have ignored the rest and do not appreciate your attempt to distract from the point at hand. The following is a rebuttal the the claims made at that webpage.
The problem with catastrophic changes is that they have catastrophic results in the form of residual mechanical energy and waste heat.
If the water from the flood became oceans in great continental upheaval, how did Noah's wooden ship survive the resulting catastrophic tsunamis as water levels shifted rapidly in response to seismic activity? How did Noah himself survive the prolonged worldwide aftershocks that would necessarily have accompanied this shift?
Mechanical forces generate waste heat by the second law of thermodynamics. Specifically, even if we start them moving by magic, they release heat when they stop. The crust of the earth masses around 1.4*10^23 kg. You claim that the earth was in a Pangaeic state before the flood; if this was the case we can use half the earth as a rough estimate for the distance traveled by the plates. For them to travel this distance over 40 days requires an average velocity of about 12m/s. By T=.5mv^2, the kinetic energy involved is about 10^25J. That's roughly ten times the energy the Earth receives from the sun each year. How did Noah - and, more importantly, the rest of the ecosystem - survive the catastrophic global climate change accompanying the sudden increase of thermal input from below?
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Your answer for the source of the water is no answer at all. First, if water was stored vaporously in the atmosphere (beyond the usual amount that gives Earth clouds) then it would have released chemically stored energy from the condensation of water droplets and mechanically stored energy from falling from a great height. If enough of the water is "water from above", then Noah gets cooked. Rain in the real world is cold because the air in which it forms is cold, and it does not affect the Earth's overall temperature because its quantity is small and all the energy it releases into the atmosphere when it falls, it had to take from the atmosphere (either by absorbing heat directly or by absorbing solar energy that would otherwise have been reradiated at night or reflected back through the atmosphere) in the first place. Since Noah wasn't living in a frigid arctic wasteland, however, whatever energy stored in atmospheric water vapor would have been in addition to the total global temperature. The latent heat of vaporization of water is tremendous; calculations should be unnecessary to demonstrate that if any significant percentage of water was stored in atmospheric water vapor, Noah would have been cooked, if not vaporized.
Even if we assume that the "water from above" came in the form of liquid water, thereby eliminating most of the heat problems, we still have the mechanical potential energy to deal with. If we ignore the fact that this would create a cloud layer that would have blotted out the sun forever and killed everything on earth, we still have to deal with heat. Specifically, the heat of water falling from an average of about 6 kilometers. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4*10^21kg. By V=mgh, if one tenth of the water that was to become the oceans was stored as clouds, we have to add yet another 10^25J to Earth's climate... except that this bunch is almost all released at or near the surface of the earth over the course of 40 days. Not enough to cook Noah, but more than enough to kill him indirectly. How did Noah survive the gale-force winds that would accompany such rapid and violent shift in atmospheric temperature? How did the ecosystem survive an input of ten times the energy received from the sun over the course of a mere 40 days?
Of course, all of these problems with atmosphere-carried water are irrelevant in light of one more: pressure. Specifically, if there's water above you, it doesn't matter if you're underwater or in the atmosphere, its effect on the pressure on your body is more or less the same. If more than a fewscore feet of water were stored in the atmosphere, either as vapor or as clouds, then Noah and all the people who lived before him - as well as every other life form on the planet - would have suffered from lethal levels of nitrogen narcosis - not to mention the other negative effects of being under a large volume of water. If 1/10 of the ocean was stored in atmosphere, as I used above, nobody would have even had to worry about nitrogen narcosis, because they would all have been crushed.
And even if none of these problems existed, there would still be one more: there is no plausible physical mechanism for the Earth's atmosphere to carry that much water. It would have already fallen as rain.
That leaves the "water from below".
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Three major problems with this one. First, rock doesn't float. If the oceans were stored under the earth's crust, it would have to. This is pretty obvious. Rock is sturdy stuff, but it's not nearly sturdy enough to form an egg-shell over a liquid layer that's lighter than it; all the water would have bubbled up long before Noah's time.
Second, if the water was stored at any significant depth in the Earth's crust, it would have been in direct contact with very hot, possibly semimolten or molten rock, and hence superheated and vaporized. The average depth of the oceans is 4 kilometers; spread evenly over the world, it would be about 3 kilometers. The geothermic gradient (rate at which temperature increases with depth) averages to about 25K per kilometer. Noah (along with the rest of the earth) is boiled.
Third, if the "water from below" was projected upwards with any significant amount of mechanical energy, shot high into the atmosphere to fall as rain, and so on, once again, all that energy needs to end up as heat, adding still more temperature shift to the already more-than-lethal levels.
(Actually, he told me no such thing. He told me he didn't want to bicker. I agreed, and emphasized that I wanted a reasoned debate, assuming that an ex-professor would be accustomed to the idea of rational discourse, even if he was a nutjob, and he relented.)He wrote:As I told you on Sunday, I do not have the time to entertain your responses and I’m not interested in getting involved in a debate. If you are truly interested in this issue and want to find the truth, then I suggest that you give both sides of the argument equal time, with an open mind. Here are a few books that present the creation side of the flood argument.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicS ... 5,226.aspx
http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicS ... 4,226.aspx
http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicS ... 6,226.aspx
If however, you are only interested in finding someone to debate with then I cannot help you. There are plenty of on-line forums where you can debate until your heart is content.
I wrote back, exercising extreme amounts of self control and valiantly resisting the urge to be a jackass and offer to trade him my freshman physics textbook for one of his creationist texts if he would promise to read it:
No reply has been received, except a note from the original person whom I had had lunch with that was basically his resignation from the debate.I wrote:If you don't have time to respond to a 2 page essay, I don't have time to read a 300 page book. Particularly if that book is a 'scientific' text that cites sources that have not passed peer-review, or that is merely speculation by an unqualified layperson or a scientist making claims out of his field. I would also like to point out that I did not issue the initial challenge, here: [name] asked me to point out something that I thought was demonstrably false in the Bible, and I made my counterclaim in response. I am not interested in finding someone to debate with; I am interested in responding to [name]'s points (of which yours were effectively part). Nevertheless, I am sorry that you were pulled into this with the understanding that it would not be a back-and-forth process.
The only changes I have made from the original contents of the emails are to fix spelling errors (all mine) and to remove names.
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