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by Steve Risner

As previously mentioned, my wife, Michelle, and I visited the Ark Encounter in June of this year. The Flood of Noah's day is of paramount importance in terms of the Biblical worldview and the authenticity of Scripture. If the Bible's account of a global Flood is false, then we should be suspicious of the entire Bible. If we determine to regard the Bible's stories of creation, the Flood, crossing the Red Sea, and/or God defeating numerous, powerful armies for the Israelites as fables, myths, legends, or allegories, then we must do the same with God's pronouncement on sin and the path only He provides for redemption for mankind. In fact, we would be forced to consider that mankind is not lost or that he doesn't have a sin nature because these things are brought out in the creation narrative. We would ultimately find there is no value in a Christ who is a literary figure. But if the Flood did happen we know several things: 1) God has proclaimed certain things to be sin, 2) He hates sin, 3) man's nature is to sin, and 4) God dealt with a world heaped in sin that literally thought evil things all the time by destroying it. Scriptural evidence supports these ideas and that this happened about 4400 years ago, give or take. If there is ample evidence around the globe that a Flood took place as the Bible describes, then no one has any excuse to continue to not believe in the God of the Bible. This, of course, is my opinion, but I believe it's based on solid logic. Let's take a very brief view at some of the evidence that this catastrophe did, in fact, happen. It's all around us.

No one doubts that the earth was covered in water—no one from either side of this argument. That's one thing that I think gets overlooked a lot of times. The Bible, without any physical evidence from around the globe, made the claim thousands of years ago. Scientists today agree. How and when is a source of disagreement, but the fact remains that the earth was covered with water in the past just as the Bible states. We know the planet has undergone major changes in geography and topography. The Flood explains this as well, but we'll get into Flood models later. However, we also understand this because we have fossilized sea creatures on the highest mountain tops in the world. Why would we find animals from the ocean at the top of the Himalayan mountains if this were not so? The walls of the Grand Canyon, which in and of itself is a testimony to the Flood, are riddled with fossilized sea creatures. The Grand Canyon sits at an average elevation of well over a mile above sea level. So, we are pretty sure the evidence is in favor of a planet covered in water. Ever see pictures of horses and fish fossilized together? Seems interesting to me. This screams of a Flood that catastrophically annihilated the planet. The evidence is all around us.

Another interesting thing to note is that sediment layers (as their name implies) are layers laid down in water. We find them all over the planet. This is what the geologic column is made of. In fact, we find many sediment layers that actually cover entire continents or cross from one continent to another! How could this be if there were not a huge Flood? The Tapeats Sandstone found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is found all across the US. Most if not all of the very thick layers (called megasequences) of the Grand Canyon are found throughout North America. Slow, gradual processes, which the currently popular view by secular scientists claims deposited these layers, cannot be a serious consideration, especially if we're talking about layers that have fossils in them. A dead animal would be scavenged long before it could be buried in sediment if the process was a very long one. And because we see either very rapid or no erosion between the layers of the geologic column wherever it's found, we know it wasn't deposited over a long period of time. Many secularists are starting to change their ideas on this and accept a catastrophism type mentality—but they'll not accept a word of the Bible!

An extremely viable option for how rock layers formed, some of which cover thousands and thousands of miles across continents or from one continent to another, is the Flood of Noah's day. If you study the Lower Carboniferous Redwall Limestone layers of the Grand Canyon, you'll find they have identical counterparts in England containing the same materials and the same fossils. Again, how could this be if they are thousands of miles apart? Flood models account for such things quite easily. I believe the Truth is often simple. The Cretaceous chalk beds of southern England can be found in Northern Ireland, France, Poland and as far away as Turkey, Israel, and other parts of the Middle East—even Kazakhstan! Those are gigantic fossil beds that are composed of trillions of fossils. Not only does the Flood account for why these rock layers formed, but it explains why all these sea animals died all at one time (which clearly they did). The evidence is all around us.

A fantastic bit of evidence, I think is one of the most notable, is the fossil record in general. It is rare to find a single fossilized organism. Most fossils are found in vast graveyards where it’s clear that a huge catastrophe occurred, killing a large number of organisms at once. Another thing to note is that these large numbers of fossils found together indicate a couple things: 1) the position of these huge graveyards indicates flood waters washed the bodies into large heaps where they were covered in sediment, and 2) the organisms died most likely in water/mud from the position we find many of them in—the death pose. This pose has been postulated to be the result of drowning, but that is not conclusive. Now, to me, it seems fairly obvious most if not all fossilized animals were in water at some point near their death since they were buried very quickly and died or vice versa. That's simply how it works. See the above remarks for clarification on the formation of sediment layers and why it necessitates water being involved.

But it's significant that we find these huge graveyards of animals. It supports an enormous Flood like the one described in the Bible. These gigantic fossil beds are all over the world. Dr. Andrew Snelling, a geologist and Biblical creationist, made this statement: “As part of the evidence of the Flood, we would expect to find rock layers all over the earth filled with billions of dead animals and plants that were rapidly buried and fossilized in sand, mud, and lime. And that’s exactly what we find.”

To demonstrate why catastrophic flooding (not just “regular” flooding) is a very reasonable explanation for these fossil graveyards: I work in Findlay, OH. We often have a lot of water issues around here. The Blanchard River is not friendly to us. This June and July has been extremely wet. Recently, we had over 5 inches of rain in some places on top of the several inches we've had in the last week alone. The river has risen to engulf much of downtown Findlay. Where am I going with this? Stick with me. Because of this rain, there is often flooding. With the flooding, we have water that may run across the road in certain low-lying places. This plays into the fossil graveyard idea like this: after the rain stops and the waters recede, we find evidence of the water crossing the road. In the country, there are huge debris fields in all of the areas that water was moving over the road. The straw and corn husk, in particular, often accumulates in giant piles. That's because the water rushes it to a place where it gets stuck, settles, and eventually, after the water level goes down, the debris is left in large heaps.

I took the above picture after the recent flooding in our area. This pasture is just grass, but a huge amount of straw accumulated at the corner because of the flooding. Think of this as a straw graveyard, like the fossil graveyards. Just imagine if each of those bits of straw were a dead animal that drowned in the Flood and accumulated in a place the water flowed through but the animal carcasses couldn't. This is how these fossil graveyards are formed, I believe. It's very common to find huge numbers of fossils together rather than a single one here or there. This is indicative of massive flooding and is not consistent with the idea that the planet was under water all at one time in eons past.

It takes some digging and a lot of reading, but you can find the arbitrarily written timelines for various things online. You can find that Pangea, the last of the supercontintents, broke apart about 200 million years ago, according to secular thinking. This doesn't work with many of the intercontinental rock layers we find. The White Cliffs of Dover, the chalk beds I wrote of above, allegedly developed and then split apart into these various places, between 60 million and 100 million years ago (again, allegedly). I suppose it's possible this particular transcontinental rock layer developed at the same time over this vast area (also consistent with the Flood), but this doesn't help the skeptic of the Flood. It still means a gigantic catastrophe occurred, killing all of these sea creatures all at once and burying them instantly. The Flood models explain this with ease. The secularists' models have a hard time with it, as far as I can tell. The evidence for the Flood is all around us.

How likely is it that a guy writing thousands of years ago happened to describe an event that explains a vast number of global clues without having any knowledge of those clues? I guess he was just super lucky, huh? I'll cut this short for this week. Next week, we'll further discuss evidence for the Flood. I hope you find this informative and thought provoking even if you disagree with the Bible's narrative.

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