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) \u201cfor God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.\u201d<\/em> God\u2019s Word is infallible but we are not, especially YEC.<\/p>\r\n So, let\u2019s look at the flood account.<\/p>\r\n Genesis 7<\/em><\/span> Let\u2019s start by eliminating an easy YEC trope that there was no rain before the flood. First, even some YEC don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t know what rain was and the people he warn certainly don\u2019t know.<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n Genesis 1:29\u201330 \u201c<\/strong>29<\/strong> Then God said, \u201cI give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30<\/strong> And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground\u2014everything that has the breath of life in it\u2014I give every green plant for food.\u201d And it was so.\u201d<\/p>\r\nGenesis 2:17<\/strong> \u201cbut you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die<\/strong>.\u201d – \u201cdying you shall die<\/strong>\u201d muth temuth<\/td>\r\n \u201csurely die\u201d <\/span>Genesis 20:3<\/b> \u201cBut God came to Abimelech in a dream one night and said to him, \u201cYou are as good as dead<\/u> because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.\u201d Genesis 20:7<\/b> \u201cNow therefore, restore the man\u2019s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not restore her,<\/i> know that you shall surely die<\/b>, you and all who are yours.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n Animals died before Adam and Eve, but the Garden of Eden might be a unique place<\/p>\r\n<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n Spiritual and physical death after the fall, animals, Adam and Eve created immortal<\/p>\r\n<\/td>\r\n Let\u2019s begin with the YEC global flood interpretation.\u00a0Theologically 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.<\/p>\r\n The Hebrew words here for throughout the earth\/all the earth are \u201ckol erets\u201d<\/em> most of the time don\u2019t mean the entire globe. The first time these words were used is in Genesis 2:11 (ESV) \u201cThe name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah<\/strong>, where there is gold.\u201d. In Hebrew \u201cthe kol erets<\/em> of Havilah\u201d obviously did not mean the entire planet of Havilah.\u00a0 Another usage is in Gen 2:13 \u201cflowed around kol erets<\/em> of Cush.\u201d Again this is not the entire globe of Cush.<\/p>\r\n Let\u2019s look at another example of kol erets<\/em> without a qualifier. Genesis 41:57 (ESV) \u201cMoreover, all the earth<\/em><\/strong> came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth<\/em><\/strong>.\u201d It would be unreasonable to suggest everyone around the planet came to Egypt to buy grain and there is no reason to think there\u2019s a severe famine in North America or China. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n There are dozens of examples how \u201ckol erets<\/em>\u201d does not mean the entire planet. Even the New Testament uses this expansive language but it doesn\u2019t mean that is it referring to the entire planet. e.g. Colossians 1:6 (NIV84) \u201cAll over the world<\/strong> this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God\u2019s grace in all its truth.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 Acts 2:5 (NIV84) \u201c<\/strong>Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven<\/strong>.\u201d<\/strong> At the time of Paul the gospel definitely has not reach North America yet nor were there Jews in Jerusalem from New York City.<\/p>\r\n 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? \u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>m\u0113 genoito! The Bible was not written to us.<\/strong> It was written in context to the people at that time so they would understand. I don\u2019t know why so many Christians today don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n 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\u2019t matter if the Bible said the immovable earth is flat sits on pillars and everything in heaven revolves around it. You shouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n Anyway, they say what everyone has been taught in school about the stratification in geology is wrong. YEC claim it didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n YEC would hone it on a single perceived anomaly and declare victory.<\/p>\r\n \u201cIn 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!\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n Except, this is not exactly what we find. On top of The Great Unconformity:<\/p>\r\n That is not the only problem with this YEC folding theory. If the flood is global, why doesn\u2019t 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?<\/p>\r\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n Here is my coup de gr\u00e2ce. It is simple, straight forward and doesn\u2019t 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<\/strong>, a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva<\/em>) located in the White Mountains of eastern California, was estimated to be 4,789 years old <\/strong>when sampled in 1957 by dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman. Another bristlecone pine, sampled by Tom Harlan, was reported to be 5,062 years old<\/strong> in 2010, though its core sample was lost and the claim remains unverified.<\/p>\r\n The YEC <\/strong>placed the flood date<\/strong> around 2348 BCE<\/strong>, based on biblical chronologies like Ussher\u2019s. That would make the Methuselah tree 484 years<\/strong><\/span> older than the flood. How did a global flood not kill this tree?<\/p>\r\n My advice to the YEC. Stick to the Bible and ignore reality. Ignore what you see in the physical world and don\u2019t get confused by the facts. Eventually the YEC will become extinct and this problem will go away, like flat earth and geocentricism.<\/p>\r\n I will address the problem with YEC age of the earth and death before fall in the next couple of posts.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[22],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology","category-yec","tag-young-earth-creationism-yec-ken-ham-genesis-flood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304,"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions\/304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teleological.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n
1 The Lord then said to Noah, \u201cGo into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation<\/strong>. <\/em><\/span>
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, <\/em><\/span>
3 and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth<\/strong><\/span>. <\/em><\/span>
4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth<\/u> for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth<\/span><\/strong> every living creature I have made.\u201d <\/em><\/span>
5 And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him. <\/em><\/span>
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth<\/u>. <\/em><\/span>
7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons\u2019 wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood<\/u>. <\/em><\/span>
8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, <\/em><\/span>
9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. <\/em><\/span>
10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth. <\/em><\/span>
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah\u2019s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month\u2014on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth<\/strong>, and the floodgates of the heavens<\/strong> were opened. <\/em><\/span>
12 And rain<\/strong> fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. <\/em><\/span>
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. <\/em><\/span>
14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock<\/strong><\/span> 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. <\/em><\/span>
15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life<\/strong> in them came to Noah and entered the ark. <\/em><\/span>
16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in. <\/em><\/span>
17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. <\/em><\/span>
18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. <\/em><\/span>
19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens<\/strong><\/span> were covered. <\/em><\/span>
20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet<\/span><\/strong>. <\/em><\/span>
21 Every living thing that moved on the earth perished<\/span><\/strong>\u2014birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind<\/strong><\/span>. <\/em><\/span>
22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. <\/em><\/span>
23 Every living thing on the face of the earth<\/strong><\/span> 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.<\/em><\/span>
24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n YEC<\/strong><\/td>\r\n OEC<\/strong><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Man and Animals created immortal, no death, no predation<\/td>\r\n Man and Animals created mortal, Man had access to Tree of Life<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n Bible never refers to plants as living: flourish, wither, fade but not die.<\/td>\r\n YEC wrong: Job 14:7-9 \u201cstump die<\/strong> in soil\u201d John 12:24 \u201cgrain of wheat falls into the earth and dies<\/strong>\u201d<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Bacteria, protozoan, worms, insects, invertebrates don\u2019t count only higher animals.<\/td>\r\n 90% of all living species are invertebrates<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n No death before fall, Man and animals were vegetarians<\/td>\r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n Spiritual death after fall and physical death before and after the fall, Adam and Eve not created immortal<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Animal death after the fall<\/td>\r\n There have always been animal deaths Romans 5:12 only applied to human death and sin. Gen 2:15-17 also only referred to Adam and Eve<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Global Flood: plain reading of Gen 7 expansive and encompassing language used, all means all, whole earth means the whole planet<\/td>\r\n Local Flood: expansive and encompassing with respect to the understanding of the people at the time. Not written to YEC in 2025AD historical grammatical interpretation<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Flood catastrophic geology<\/td>\r\n Gradual incremental geology<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Evidence of global flood found in Grand Canyon<\/td>\r\n Grand Canyon was created through millions of years of erosion<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n 6,000 years old<\/td>\r\n 4.5B years and 13.5B years<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n \r\n
\r\n
<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"