Dissecting YEC – Flood: Global or Local(Part 2)

Flood Theology

Was the flood global or local? As a Christian we need to look at this theologically first and foremost. We then should examine if our understanding reflect reality because God is not the God of confusion. 1 Corinthians 14:33 (NASB95) “for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.” God’s Word is infallible but we are not, especially YEC.

So, let’s look at the flood account.

Genesis 7
1 The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.
2 Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate,
3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.
4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
5 And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.
7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.
8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground,
9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.
10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.
14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings.
15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark.
16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in.
17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.
18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.
19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.
20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.
22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.
23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Let’s start by eliminating an easy YEC trope that there was no rain before the flood. First, even some YEC don’t agree with this anymore. It is not reasonable to think all vegetation, animals and humans could have been sustained for about 1,500 years between Adam and the flood. The Bible never said there was no rain before the flood. The Bible didn’t say Noah was confused as to what this rain was. Some people think 2 Peter 2:5 suggest Noah was warning people regarding the coming doom. But that would be silly if he didn’t know what rain was and the people he warn certainly don’t know.

YEC also point to the rainbow and God said this as a sign that I will never destroy everything on the earth this way again. But the Bible doesn’t say that there were no rainbow before this. God is just using this as a sign to commemorate this moment in time and His promise. It is like a couple saying this is our song. It doesn’t mean they have never heard that song before that moment. It just mean the song reminds them of a special moment and the song is a marker for that moment. 

Let’s begin with the YEC global flood interpretation. Theologically YEC insist that the plain reading of Gen 7 can only mean the entire planet even though they are fully aware that these types of apocalyptic and expansive languages are used elsewhere in the Bible and most of the time it does not mean the entire planet.

The Hebrew words here for throughout the earth/all the earth are “kol erets” most of the time don’t mean the entire globe. The first time these words were used is in Genesis 2:11 (ESV) “The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.”. In Hebrew “the kol erets of Havilah” obviously did not mean the entire planet of Havilah.  Another usage is in Gen 2:13 “flowed around kol erets of Cush.” Again this is not the entire globe of Cush.

Let’s look at another example of kol erets without a qualifier. Genesis 41:57 (ESV) “Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth.” It would be unreasonable to suggest everyone around the planet came to Egypt to buy grain and there is no reason to think there’s a severe famine in North America or China. I don’t know if anyone was living in those areas at the time. If they were, there is no reason to think they were having the same drought and famine as those that went to Egypt.

There are dozens of examples how “kol erets” does not mean the entire planet. Even the New Testament uses this expansive language but it doesn’t mean that is it referring to the entire planet. e.g. Colossians 1:6 (NIV84) “All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth.”  Acts 2:5 (NIV84) “Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.” At the time of Paul the gospel definitely has not reach North America yet nor were there Jews in Jerusalem from New York City.

It is not unusual for the Bible to use these all-encompassing phrases to express a local scope. In fact, it would be unusual to suggest the Bible used these phrases referring to the global. Is the Bible prone to exaggerate?  mē genoito! The Bible was not written to us. It was written in context to the people at that time so they would understand. I don’t know why so many Christians today don’t understand that. And if YEC really believe in the historical grammatical method of interpretation they would not force our modern understand to an Ancient Near Eastern Text.

Despite YEC proudly claim they are the only true defender of the Bible. Everyone else has allowed secular (basically godless atheists in their mind) science to disprove what the Bible has plainly written. Yet, they seem to think the Bible is not enough and seek a soft-concordist view of the Bible. They may try to deny this but what else would you call someone seeking evidence in science that would agree with their interpretation of Scripture. If the Word of God is the preeminent truth (which I think it is, but not the YEC interpretation) over everything including secular science. It wouldn’t matter if the Bible said the immovable earth is flat sits on pillars and everything in heaven revolves around it. You shouldn’t be looking at nature to agree with the Bible. So what, if people have circumnavigated the globe and gone up in space and saw that the earth revolved around the Sun. All those are lies of the devil because you know the truth of what the Bible said.

Anyway, they say what everyone has been taught in school about the stratification in geology is wrong. YEC claim it didn’t take millions of years to get all the layers of stratification in the rocks we see in the Barnett and Marcellus shales. YEC geologists said that to get all the layers of lamination in the shale you need moving water not standing water as the gradualist think. I hate to break the news to them. Nobody says that. What geologists are saying is that there needs to be changes in the minerals or the rate of flow for these lamination to form. It is not a dead stop process but it is gradual. On the other hand, with a global flood and the cataclysmic upheaval of water and minerals how do you even get a layering process.

YEC would hone it on a single perceived anomaly and declare victory.

“In Genesis 7, we read that the waters rose and eventually covered the whole earth. So on top of The Great Unconformity, we should find marine layers that cover the continents. In geology, we refer to a sequence of rocks that represent a rise in sea level as a transgression. That is exactly what we find on top of The Great Unconformity, not only in the Grand Canyon but on all the continents. This is not just any transgression; it is a worldwide marine transgression!”

Except, this is not exactly what we find. On top of The Great Unconformity:

• Marine layers above the unconformity show signs of calm, gradual deposition, including ripple marks, trace fossils, and bioturbation.
• The erosional surface itself shows weathering features and valley networks, consistent with long exposure, not sudden scouring.
• The timing and nature of the Sauk Transgression are well-supported by radiometric dating and fossil succession.

That is not the only problem with this YEC folding theory. If the flood is global, why doesn’t it show up around the globe? Why only around parts where we know Tectonic subsidence and continental rifting is known to occur? YEC cannot just explain it away as localize erosion or some pre/post-flood process. What exactly were those processes and erosion?

This is the same problem with the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was formed from the global flood. There were no mountains or valley before the flood. When the flood came it deposited all the layers of sandstone, limestone, shale and all the different animals neatly ordered in its stratification. 

This Great Unconformity even if true only explain the very base layers of the global stratification. The Grand Canyon exposes nearly 40 major sedimentary layers with an orderly fossil and rock layering that can’t be explained by a cataclysmic flood. The carving of the Canyon is even more ridiculous with the YEC just so story. After building the Grand Canyon layer by layer, then the canyon was split in the middle by the water from two nearby lake. When the dams from these lakes broke, instead of flattening the entire mountain it acted like a scalpel and carved out the Grand Canyon. This sounds more incredulous than the just so stories the atheists tell on Darwinian evolution.

Here is my coup de grâce. It is simple, straight forward and doesn’t take any fancy knowledge in geology or advance science. Tree rings. Everyone know how tree rings are formed and what it means. The Methuselah tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) located in the White Mountains of eastern California, was estimated to be 4,789 years old when sampled in 1957 by dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman. Another bristlecone pine, sampled by Tom Harlan, was reported to be 5,062 years old in 2010, though its core sample was lost and the claim remains unverified.

The YEC placed the flood date around 2348 BCE, based on biblical chronologies like Ussher’s. That would make the Methuselah tree 484 years older than the flood. How did a global flood not kill this tree?

My advice to the YEC. Stick to the Bible and ignore reality. Ignore what you see in the physical world and don’t get confused by the facts. Eventually the YEC will become extinct and this problem will go away, like flat earth and geocentricism.

I will address the problem with YEC age of the earth and death before fall in the next couple of posts.