How scientific and historical evidence demonstrate that the Biblical worldwide flood is not real and possible
Just like other children who grew up in a Christian household, I too once believed the story of Noah's ark and the worldwide flood. Regardless of what kind of Christian (or even Jew or Muslim) you are, chances are that you were also taught that it is literally true, that it actually happened in history. Some would even go so far as to say that the myth aligns with science and history. But it is noticeable, and frankly concerning, how most people don't even bother to examine its legitimacy. Most of them just assume that it's true, only because it is in the Bible. Personally, questions were already popping in my head during my childhood, ever since I learned about the story. Nevertheless, I'm still convinced of it, despite my enthusiasm on studying history. It was only during the recent years when I started looking closer, and discovered just how ridiculous the story is. It's a myth. It never happened as the scriptures describe, and it's a shame how it took me a long time before I were able to outgrow it. But I kind of get why most people, including most family and friends, still believe this fable as factual history. Never underestimate the power of childhood indoctrination.
As far as I know, there is no official survey conducted in the Philippines, recording the stance of Filipinos regarding their opinions on Bible and creationism. But basing on experience, I've encountered plenty of people, both personal and online, who believes that the Bible is a literal word of God that doesn't have any errors whatsoever. I conducted a simple survey in my Facebook story on June 29, asking them whether they believe that the story of Noah's ark and Biblical worldwide flood is literally true, that it actually happened in history, and that it has evidence. Well, I'm not surprised with the results. I am well aware that this is not a legitimate survey, but the fact that more than half of people who saw and responded to my poll said "Yes" already tells something.
So for what end did I made this article? I don't really know exactly. Perhaps because the topic is appealing enough to ignite my curiosity. But also in hopes for my Christian readers, not necessarily to give up their religious beliefs (that's not my intention), but to think about why they believe what they believe, on whether those beliefs are even reasonable to hold. And also to help my atheist friends who regard the Biblical flood narrative to be bollocks but don't exactly know why it is. But maybe what compelled me the most is when I remembered my shared post in Facebook about platybelodons who once roamed in the Philippines millions of years ago, but apparently there were numerous young-earth creationists who commented that the earth is just 6000 years old instead of 4.5 billion years old (Someone even erroneously asserted that the earth is just 2020 years old, which is clearly bullshit). It is just exceedingly unbelievable that there are still people who are this mind-numbingly ignorant on the basic facts about the universe, despite our advanced knowledge.
Let me be completely clear here: one does not have to be an atheist to reject the Biblical stories as just stories, written by mere fallible human beings who doesn't have any knowledge about everything that we know today. It is possible to accept the scientific and historical evidence that refutes the fantastical myths in the Bible, and still keep the faith in one's deity. Belief in Biblical inerrancy is not a prerequisite of Christianity. Offending anyone is also not the goal here, but only to look at the facts and employ reason. We are going to talk about the historicity of the Biblical global deluge, on whether it really agrees with the scientific and historical data that we have today.
The Noah's Ark Story Summarized
The worldwide flood story was chronicled in the Old Testament, particularly in Genesis Chapters 6-8. The whole story itself is short, but there are a lot of inconsistencies (Yes, the Bible has contradictions, lots of it, whether internal or external). But we are not here to tackle all the Biblical contradictions, although that might be a future article someday, but if you are interested about it, you can visit this link from Skeptic's Annotated Bible (1). Even though most of you already know the story, let's still summarize it anyway. So, here it goes:
According to the Bible, the population of the people were start growing, and some so-called "sons of God" (they are angels, I presume) choose to marry and have sex with some ladies of the earth. Their children are the race of giants called Nephilim (which clearly did not exist in real life, by the way). Then God saw just how "evil" the humans have become, saying that He repented creating them (wait a minute, if he is all-knowing, mustn't He have already saw this coming beforehand?). So what is His grand plan to solve this? A massive genocide, of course! He said:
And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. - Genesis 6:7 (KJV)
He plans to wipe out all life on earth by drowning all of them in a massive global deluge (I get that God is pissed off in some wicked people, but really? Everyone? Including innocent babies, fetuses, and animals? What did they do to Him?). But there is this one guy that becomes God's apple of his eye: a 600-year-old guy named Noah, because he is just that great and awesome enough to spare him and his family from His plans to kill everyone. God told Noah how wicked and violent people are, and told about the worldwide flood.
So He told the old dude (that has no knowledge about making a ship whatsoever) to make a giant wooden zoo boat made out of gopher wood (or cypress wood, according to other translations), in order to save himself and his family. God told Noah the measurements and the compartments of the ark, commanded him to prepare food for the voyage, and to gather a pair of ever kind of breathing living things, one male and one female, to put inside it (But in Genesis 7:2, seven pairs of "clean" animals must be aboard of the ark and one pair of "unclean" animals). Noah had seven people to help him building the massive boat: his wife, his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and each of their wives.
And then the global flood came, and it indeed wiped out all life in the world, except for 8 people and every pair of animals in the ark. It rained 40 days and 40 nights. There are also waters from the ground that sprouted up into the air. The floodwaters are high enough to cover all the mountains (Even Mount Everest?). The flood lasted for 150 days (even though Genesis 7:17 says that it was only 40 days). And after the water gradually dried up, they finally settled above Mount Ararat. Noah sent two birds on separate occasions to check whether there are any dry lands anywhere. Afterwards, God told Noah and his family to be fruitful and multiply in order to repopulate the whole earth through incest. It took several months for them to wait until the flood has completely receded, which means Noah, his family, and all the animals, stayed inside the ark for more than a year.
Then Noah built an altar and killed every "clean" animal from the ark as a sacrifice (Yeah, those animals were put inside the ark to be save from the flood, only to be burnt alive as a divine offering. That's messed up).
And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. - Genesis 8:21-22 (KJV)
While God is sniffing all of the sweet savory smell from suffering innocent animals being burnt to death as Noah's offering, He made a promise to him to not kill everyone on the planet ever again, even making the rainbow in the clouds in order to remind him not to commit genocide for the second time. After that, Noah's sons and their wives, and their future children and grandchildren became busy pumping out incestuous babies to fill out the whole planet, for the second time around (Let's just cross our fingers and hope they will never have any genetically defective children). Noah lived for another 130 years before he finally died, which means he lived for 930 years.
This is the whole story in a nutshell. It is still astonishing how this story is being taught to children in Sunday schools, despite of the fact that it is about an all-powerful, all-loving deity committing a mass genocide to every living things, including the innocent ones. This is not the first time that the God of the Bible killed or commanded to kill a lot of people (like the story of Him sending two bears to maul 42 children for mocking a prophet's bald head in 2 Kings 2:23-24; or the story of Him commanding to dash babies into pieces and to rip open the bellies of pregnant women of Samaria for "rebelling against Him" in Hosea 13:16). I guess it's alright, considering that most of the fairy tales that we were told as a child also had some disturbing and not-so-child-friendly plots (Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, you name it). But let's set aside the morality problem of the story, and ask ourselves, is this story really true? Well no, and here's why.
Disproof No. 1: The Animals
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." - Theodosius Dobzhansky, Christian evolutionary biologist
It is not a surprise that most people who believe the Noah flood story to be factually true, are young-earth creationists (YECs) who are either uninformed or in denial of the reality of evolution by natural selection and the entire geologic history of the earth. Instead of accepting the fact that all living organisms came from some primordial common ancestor, they believe that they were somehow miraculously popped into existence by a supernatural deity in their current forms, and that it is impossible to produce species from another species (even though in reality, it's already commonly observed). It is important to remember that virtually every single scientists who lived before Darwin, are all Bible-believing young-earth creationists. Pre-Darwinian evolution was simply not that popular at that time since conclusive evidence was yet to be discovered. But it's all different now. Ever since Charles Darwin found evidence for the legitimacy of natural selection, it became the very bedrock of biology itself. We know now that a new species is being generated all the time, and since we started using reliable radiometric dating methods, we know now that the earth is definitely 4.5 billion years old. We are now have no excuse to be ignorant.
Current estimates say that around 8.7 million species are now alive on earth, most are still yet to be, discovered, named, and classified (2). Among all the named ones, there are 6,945 living species of mammals (3), roughly 18,000 species of birds (4), 11,570 species of reptiles (5), and 8,350 species of amphibians (6). That's not even counting all the fishes and the invertebrates, which are the vast majority in the animal kingdom. In total, we would have a total of less than 45,000 species of those mentioned vertebrate animals living today. If we are to believe the creationist claim that all living organisms were created in their current forms, not changing over time, we would expect that Noah must be able to fit every one male and one female of every 45,000 species, which in total, would be around 90,000 species of animals inside the ark. But considering the size of the boat, it is already highly doubtful. Furthermore, it doesn't even make sense if Noah would only pick one male and one female of every insects meticulously. Most insects like ants, bees, and termites live in colonies, and every individual has different tasks to do.
But to make the issue much worse, how about the endemic animals (species of animals that are exclusive in a particular place)? Are we really to believe that the kangaroos and koalas from Australia, penguins from Antarctica, tuataras from New Zealand, tamaraws from the Philippines, llamas in South America, and polar bears from North Pole, all managed to walk vast continents and swim large oceans just to go to Mesopotamia and enter the ark? Are we really to believe that the banana slugs in North America were able to swam across Atlantic Ocean to the Middle East without being dissolved from the salty waters? And are we really to believe that all of them went back to their respective continents after the flood? If this story really happened, we should be able to see remains of kangaroos, for example, from Middle East to Australia. And as expected, not a single one has ever found. Let's use the Occam's razor here. Which of the two explanations are more probable: That kangaroos hopped more than 11,700 km from Mount Ararat to Australia while picking up every bone of other dead kangaroos (even though they have no opposable thumbs to be able to pick them all up) in order to leave no trace of their migration; Or that kangaroos definitely never left Australia, and so does every endemic animals far from Mesopotamia because there is no ark and global flood in the first place? You'll be the judge.
Of course the authors of the Bible were never aware of the existence of Australia, the Americas, and the Polar Regions. Because the animals that their talking about are only the ones that they're familiar with. It makes more sense that way. But if we still insist on the claim of a global-scale deluge, these kind of absurdities are inescapable. Hell, we are not yet even tackling about the extinct animals from the fossil record here. Despite the abundance of our current animal kingdom, they are actually just more or less 1% of all the total animals that ever lived on earth throughout billions of years. Around 99% of all those species are the dead ones.
This is Argentinosaurus, the largest sauropod dinosaur known, and one of the most enormous terrestrial animals of all time. It used to live in what is now known as Argentina (hence, the name) during the Late Cretaceous Period, around 99 million years ago. It had an average length of 22 to 40 meters and weighed 50,000 to 100,000 kilograms. A pair of these ginormous sauropods should have crushed everyone who was inside the ark. What more if we added other big dinosaurs like Stegosaurus, Spinosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus, and many more? Or how about the prehistoric mammals like Indricotheres, Chalicotheres, Giant Sloths, and Steppe Mammoths? The boat would already be too crowded and too heavy that it would collapse and sink under the flood, in Titanic fashion. Noah would need not only just one ark, but a whole navy of arks, just to fit every animals from the fossil record. But let's forget all about that problems anyway and accept all of this without question. Maybe you think that God somehow magically made all of those animals, extinct or living, inside the ark. Maybe you also think that all the extinct animals didn't make it to the ark, which explains why they all died. Fine, if that's what you want to believe.
Young-earth creationists reject the fact that there are animals who lived millions of years ago, but the existence of dinosaurs and prehistoric animals is already undeniable, so what do they do to square this? Just claim that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, just like in The Flintstones and The Good Dinosaur (7)! Even though humans only showed up in the evolutionary phylogenetic tree around 65 million years after the last of the dinosaurs died out from a mass extinction event, some creationists still cite this thing as their proof of dinosaur-human interaction: this fossilized footprints of dinosaurs in Paluxy River in Glen Rose City, Texas, USA. This trackway was estimated to be formed during the Cretaceous Period, when a group of therapod and sauropod dinosaurs left their footprints (8). But some of those footprints allegedly look like from humans, so lo and behold, YECs quickly asserted that this utterly contradicts the geologic timeline and "proves" that the dinosaurs were in the ark. Is that really the case? Nope, not even close.
The footprints were preserved when those three-toed dinosaurs walked above the soft muds of the river, which were baked in sunlight, and gradually preserved through sedimentation. But because of constant erosion from the soft flowing waters in the shallower parts of the river, some of the footprints eroded, giving the impression that they are "man-tracks" coming from humans. And besides from that, if the global flood really happened, as described in the Bible, these trackways and every other fossilized footprints would not exist in the first place. In order to preserve these things, it would require a calm, gradual process of sedimentation. A sudden massive flow of floodwaters would destroy every single one of them. If anything, this is not a proof for the legitimacy of a worldwide deluge, but the exact opposite.
But again, let's forget about all of that anyway and accept that the Noah's ark story is literally true beyond a shadow of a doubt. Suppose that all those animals were managed to fit inside the ark. But what about the food? Sure, Genesis mentions that God commanded Noah to carry food both for their family and the animals, but how exactly did he stored them? And are those foods even sufficient for every single living thing inside (both domestic and wild), considering that it's a year-long voyage? It's not possible without some kind of refrigeration or preservation. How koalas would eat without their eucalyptus trees? How anteaters would eat if there are only two ants inside the ark? How giant pandas would eat without their bamboos? If you think about it, if there are animals that have the most food inside the ark, they're the termites, parasites (like tapeworms, fleas, ticks, lice, and mosquitos), and most of all, the apex predators.
A single adult tiger, for example, can eat 18 to 27 kilograms of meat everyday. A male tiger can even eat 35 kg of meat in just one sitting, while a female tiger, 30 kg (9). Meanwhile, a lion eats far less, with 5 to 8.5 kg of meat per day (10). Either way, it would still require thousand kilograms of meat to feed every single lions, tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, and other apex predators, for a whole year. Those would be an additional cargo to the ark. And besides, what's stopping those carnivores to eat the other animals inside the ark? God magic, I suppose? And we didn't even account for the drinking water that those animals need. Even though they are literally floating in nothing but water, those are definitely not potable. One might say that the water came from the rainfall. Fair enough, but are they enough for every single animal to drink and bathe? I don't think so.
And of course, for every food, there is an equivalent excrement. How did Noah and his family managed to shovel all of those pile of shit outside the boat everyday? Considering that the ark is extremely overcrowded and has poor ventilation, every single creature inside should have been dead due to methane poisoning from all of those feces, in just a matter of days. And with that amount of methane gas, the ark would become a literal time bomb, waiting to explode any time soon. Not to mention, that kind of dreadful ventilation and overloaded cargo must have been heaven for pathogens. It is clear that viruses and bacteria still exists today, so it's safe to say that there must be some animals there who carry pathogens with them. The ark (and every other crowded ships) are giant petri dishes, a perfect spot for strong viruses and microbes to transmit themselves from host to host.
The Bible never said that any animals who live underwater (both fresh and salt) was saved inside the ark. Because, duh, why would they need saving from the water if they already live on it? But here's the thing, if there are things that should be negatively affected by the worldwide cataclysmic flood the most, it's the marine life. The sudden mixture of saltwater, freshwater, and other sediments would disrupt the acidity level and chemical composition of the oceans and rivers, destroying marine ecosystems and killing every kind of organisms living underwater in the process. If the global flood really happened as described in the Bible, every single marine life should not exist by now. But obviously they still exist. The fact that you can still enjoy eating your favorite shrimp and tuna is already a strong disproof that the global flood never happened.
Disproof No. 2: The Boat
Let's now look at the ark itself, on whether it is in a reasonable size. In Genesis 6:14-16, God said to Noah:
"Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it." - Genesis 6:14-16 (KJV)
The Bible says that the ark must be made out of gopher wood (or cypress wood, if you ask other translations), with a length of 300 cubits, width (or breadth) of 50 cubits, and height of 30 cubits. A cubit is a Biblical unit of measurement equivalent to the length between your middle finger to your elbow. Since 1 cubit is equal to 1.5 feet, the dimensions of the ark in feet is 450 (for length), 75 (for width), and 45 (for height). The ark is also described as having three stories, a door on the side, and a cubit-sized (18 inches) window. If we are to compute the area of the ark (l x w), that would be 33,750 square feet, while in terms of the volume of the ark (l x w x h), that would be 1,518, 750 cubic feet. (Measurements could vary, depending on how someone would compute what a cubit is.) Pretty wide, but with those amount of species, not even close to be enough.
Compare that to San Diego Zoo in California, USA. With an area of 40 hectares (4,305,560 sq. ft.), housing over 12,000 animals from 600 species and 1785 employees (11), San Diego Zoo is one of the largest zoos in America, and in the world. Is it reasonable to believe that the an ark with an area of just less than a hectare could fit over 90,000 animals from every species? Maybe you think that's an unfair comparison, since a zoo is different from an ark. Alright, fair enough, let's compare a ship with another ship.
You may think that Noah's ark is very large, but it's nothing compared to RMS Titanic. It had a length of 882.9 feet, width of 92.6 feet, and height of 104 feet (12). Deemed as an unsinkable ship, and yet became a shipwreck on 1912 after it struck an iceberg in the middle of Atlantic Ocean. Despite of its vast size, it only has the maximum carrying capacity of from 3300 to 3500 passengers. Let's ask the same question again: Is it reasonable to believe that the an ark with an area of just less than a hectare could fit over 90,000 animals from every species? Maybe you say that the comparison is still unfair, because the Titanic was made mostly of steel, while the ark is made mostly from wood. Maybe you say that Titanic sank, while the ark did not. Sure, let's make another comparison, and this time, between a wooden ship and another wooden ship.
This is Wyoming, the largest known wooden ship ever built in history. It had a length of 450 feet and width of 50.1 feet, way closer to the size of the ark, even though the ship has smaller internal volume, with just 373,054 cubic feet. Unlike Noah's ark which was just used once, according to the Bible, Wyoming sailed several times before it finally sank in 1924. The main problem with Wyoming, and other very long wooden ships, is that they tend to twist in the strong currents of the sea, causing massive leakages of water inside, making it extremely prone to sinking. This is already a big challenge to Wyoming even in its first voyage. It's not far-fetched to think that the same fate would also happen to the ark if ever it actually sailed, considering that the currents of the floodwaters are supposed to be vicious, for months. During his creation-evolution debate with the CEO of Answers in Genesis Ken Ham on 2014, science communicator Bill Nye made the same point regarding Wyoming. He said:
"People in the early 1900’s built an extraordinary, large wooden ship: the Wyoming. It was a six-masted schooner, the largest ever built. It had a motor on it for winching cables and stuff, but this boat had a great difficulty. It was not as big as the Titanic, but it was a very long ship. It would twist in the sea. It would twist this way, this way, and this way. And in all that twisting it leaked like crazy. The crew could not keep the ship dry. And indeed it eventually foundered and sank—a loss of all 14 hands. So there were 14 crewman aboard a ship built by very very skilled shipwrights in New England. These guys were the best in the world at wooden ship building, and they couldn’t build a boat as big as the Ark is claimed to have been. Is that reasonable?"
Both the Titanic and Wyoming were built by groups of expert shipwrights, who had a ton of knowledge and expertise regarding naval architecture and engineering. They are not amateurs, and yet their giant ships both sank. Is it reasonable to believe that the ark, which is supposed to be the largest wooden ship in the ancient world, were built only by eight people who doesn't have any idea whatsoever on how to properly build a ship? Not only that this ark must have a large carrying capacity to keep all those animals, but also the architectural strength to withstand the tsunami-like waves of the flood. Maybe someone believes that God magically gave Noah a plenty of extraordinary knowledge on shipbuilding, but doesn't that make the story more fanciful? Maybe the story would be more believable if Noah was a Phoenician, a group of Semitic people on the coast of Mediterranean Sea known for being master shipbuilders. But even in the standards of Phoenicians, building a ship as humongous as Noah's ark would already take a great deal of sophistication and precision that only modern humans with advanced technology could achieve.
Disproof No. 3: The Floodwaters
Alright, let's forget about the problems with the animals and the boat, and accept for a second that the global flood really happened, without question. Perhaps God just miraculously made them all possible, fine. But what about the floodwaters? Where did the water come from? And where did they all go? That's something that I cannot also wrap my head around.
It is important to keep in mind that the writers of the Old Testament interpreted the earth as being a circular flat disk, floating in water (13), while standing on the great pillars, protected by a giant solid dome called firmament or raqia in Hebrew. The firmament is supposed to be the division between the waters of the earth, and the infinite waters of outer space, as Genesis 1:6-8 says. We know that the early Hebrews were flat-earthers, because the idea of a spherical earth was only developed by the ancient Greeks during the 6th century BCE, way before the Hellenistic contact between the Jews and Greeks (14). Clearly, aside from not knowing about evolution and the existence of Australia and Americas, the Biblical authors also don't have any clue on what cosmology even is, and how the water cycle works. One might excuse those verses as just being metaphorical, but this is what the pre-Hellenistic Jews actually used to believe on how the universe works. This explains the way how Genesis describes the way all the waters flooded the whole earth.
"In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights." - Genesis 7:11-12 (KJV)
The Bible says that the floodwaters came from "the fountains of the great deep," bursting waters in the air (which could mean geysers or aquifers), and from rains that lasted for 40 days and 40 nights. Ancient Hebrews used to think that rains occur whenever God "opens the gate" of the firmament, causing the water from outer space to fall in the earth. Even our elementary school students know for a fact that this is false. Rain happens whenever water from the earth's surface becomes water vapor through sunlight during the evaporation process, then becoming clouds during the condensation process, then when become heavy, the water falls back into the ground during the precipitation process, and the cycle keeps going on and on and on.
"And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered." - Genesis 7:19-20 (KJV)
Genesis also says that the flood is so high that it even covered the mountains. Of course, the Old Testament authors said that, because they were never aware of the existence of Mount Everest, the highest point of the earth above sea level (which is 29,031.7 feet). But let's say that the whole earth was covered by all water, including Mount Everest. There's a lot of problem with that. According to US Geological Survey, the earth currently has 1.386 billion cubic kilometers of water in the oceans (15). In order to cover the whole earth, including Mt. Everest, it would require another 4.4 billion cubic kilometers of water (16). How could a 40-day long rain worldwide could ever meet that amount of water?
It is impossible to rain in the entire world simultaneously, and even if it's possible, it would certainly be not enough to flood the entire planet within 40 days. It would only make sense if we are only talking about a great, but localized flood instead of a global one. There are places in the world that receives a lot of rain, like the town of Cherrapunji in India, while there are places that barely receives any rain at all, like the Atacama Desert in Chile. A rain in one place implies that it must be dry on another. But let's say that simultaneous, long worldwide rainfall is possible. What exactly we should expect would happen, if this is the reason for the Noachian deluge?
In order for a rain to occur, it needs water vapor. The water vapor that is necessary to produce that kind of monumental global-scale flood is impossibly and ridiculously high. For that to happen, the atmospheric pressure of the earth should increase around 840 times higher than it currently is (which is 14.696 psi nowadays) (16). Remember that the atmosphere today is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, and 0.1% other elements and compounds. Water vapor belongs on that 0.1%. In order for a worldwide rainfall to form, causing the global flood, the atmosphere should be 99.9% water vapor, and with that severe lack of nitrogen and oxygen, no breathing organism would survive on earth. Furthermore, geologists Charles Nelson and Leonard Soroka also pointed out in their scientific journal called Physical Constraints on the Noachian Deluge that the lack of oxygen and nitrogen would also not be able to accommodate all that water vapor in the clouds to transform it into cloud droplets. Those thick clouds would also block almost all the sunlight, preventing them to reach the surface of the earth (16). With that kind of hostile atmosphere, not only that all life would be killed before God would be able to flood the whole earth, but also that life would not even be able to exist in the first place.
We are not yet talking about the enthalpy of vaporization or the latent heat of vaporization here. Avoiding the technical scientific jargon that might confuse others, the latent heat of vaporization just pertains to the amount of energy required to transform a liquid (water) into gas (water vapor). In order to transform a kilogram of water into vapor, it would require 2,260 kilojoules or 2.26 million joules of energy (17), and when it comes to the latent heat of condensation (energy released from condensing water vapor), that same 2.26 million joules of energy is being released. This energy is a necessary requirement for typhoons, hurricanes, and thunderstorms to form. Now, what will happen if we condense all that 4.4 billion km^3 of additional water into rain to flood the whole earth? Nelson and Soroka calculated that converting all that water vapor into rain within 40 days would release 10^28 joules or 10 octillion joules of energy into the atmosphere, which means increasing the earth's temperature into more than 3500 degrees Celsius (16)! That's thousands of degrees hotter than the atmosphere of Venus, the hottest planet in the solar system. Once that heat is released on the earth's surface, all the oceans would boil, and the ark would definitely burn, making the planet a literal hell.
If a worldwide rain to produce floodwaters is not possible, then what about the "fountains of the great deep"? Isn't the Bible say that rain is not the only source for floodwaters? Yes, but that's not realistically plausible either. Because first of all, groundwater is just 0.76% of world's water supply. That's nowhere close from the required water to inundate the entire planet. Creationist Walter Brown introduced his so-called Hydroplate "Theory" where he claimed that before the Biblical global flood, there used to be an enormous groundwater reservoir under the earth's crust, and due to massive pressure, those waters ruptured up to the air, which causing the breaking of the crust, explaining the tectonic plates we have today (18). Now this is just plain bullshit. That is not how plate tectonics works (more on that later on Disproof No. 5), and storing that amount of water underground is impossible. Aside from that, Brown seems to overlook the fact that the crust and mantle would serve like a geologic pressure cooker to all of those billion cubic kilometers of groundwater, heating the water up to 1600 degrees Celsius (16). Assuming that the "theory" is plausible (even though it's not), once all of that superheated steam broke the plate and spouted on the earth's surface, it would release an immense amount of heat into the atmosphere, steam-cooking and boiling everything and everyone, including the passengers of the ark.
So if the water didn't come from rain or groundwater, then maybe a frozen comet could explain it, as proposed by none other than Sir Isaac Newton himself. Or is it? The comet containing the necessary amount of water to flood the earth must have an estimated diameter of around 2100 km, almost twice the size of Hong Kong. A 2100-km sized comet falling into the atmosphere at 15 km/second would liberate an energy comparable to 12 trillion megatons of TNT, wiping out all life on earth in an instant (16). That would be trillion times more powerful than all the atomic bombs ever made combined, and more powerful than the asteroid that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If there really was a global flood that lasted for over a year around 4500 years ago, that impact must definitely leave some kind of evidence that should be there regarding a massive comet collision, but obviously, there is none.
What if instead of a massive frozen comets, it was a series of millions of small comets falling into the earth? Sure, the collision impact would not be so powerful, but the total potential energy emitted from those falling comets would still not change. They would vaporize and heat up the atmosphere, that would cause the global atmospheric temperature to increase into over 6800 degrees Celsius. That would make the earth at the time of Noachian flood hotter than the surface of the sun (16). We should not be even wasting out time discussing about comets anyway since this is already far from what the Bible is saying. If talking about the source of the floodwaters enough to cover all the earth's surface is already extremely problematic on its own, what more if we bring up the question about where did all the water go? No matter where you look at it, any kind of hypothesis to explain where did all the floodwaters come from would make the earth a raging inferno, unlivable and hostile to any kind of life.
Disproof No. 4: The Trees
But once again, ignore all of that anyway and accept the whole Biblical flood narrative without question. How about the trees? Any terrestrial trees and plants submerged underwater for a year should have been dead and leafless after the global flood receded. And considering that the waves of the flood were supposed to be violent during the first months, most, if not all, trees should have been uprooted from the soil their standing in. Genesis 8 tells us that Noah sent a dove to check whether there's any land showing up from subsiding floodwaters, but there is none yet. He sent the same bird again one week later, and the dove came back to the ark, carrying a fresh leaf from an olive tree.
"And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth." - Genesis 8:11 (KJV)
Since according to Genesis, the flood began during the second month (7:11) and the waters began diminishing during the seventh month (8:3-4), that means the olive tree was completely soaked in the flood for five months. By that time, the tree should have been dead and leafless, especially if the floodwaters have high salinity content. Engineer Charles Munroe III conducted an experiment where he completely submerged a five-foot olive tree in a swimming pool. In the first month, it seems that nothing is happening, but in the second month, some leaves were falling into the bottom of the pool. But in the third month, the olive tree was completely out of leaves. He tried to revive it by getting it out of the water and planting it in a potting soil, but it didn't grew. It died (19).
If the global flood really happened, it was supposed to be so catastrophic that it would destroy the planet's entire ecosystem, both terrestrial and marine. The enormous salt deposits of the flood not only should have been killed all the trees, but also made all the soil infertile for centuries or even millennia. If that would be the case, then what would those herbivores eat after they get out of the ark? Even if all those animals made it out from the harsh conditions of the boat, they will still die from starvation due to all edible plants being dead and too salty. Predators would be hungry too since the only available prey are the ones who miraculously survived the voyage. Are we really to believe that koalas withheld their hunger and waited for their eucalyptus trees to grow again for centuries after they traveled from Mount Ararat back to Australia? For the same reason, it would also be impossible for Noah to plant a vineyard in a soil severely saturated with salt, as Genesis 9:20 says. Not only grapevines, mind you, but any kind of land plants ever would not sprout in that kind of soil.
Most young-earth creationists believe that the earth and the universe are just 6000 years old (others are even more generous for adjusting it for at least 10,000 years old, but still wrong, of course). This belief is primarily based on the calculations of Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland on 1654. He calculated the very long ages of the people in the Old Testament, and by adding the six-day creation, he came up with the date of October 23, 4004 BCE. He even dated the global flood happening on 2348 BCE. Ussher's chronology became one of the foundations for the modern young-earth creationism today. If the Biblical worldwide flood actually occurred in history and the earth is just 6000 years old, we should not see any kind of living trees whatsoever that are older than either of those dates mentioned above. We should only see trees that are 4000 years old, or younger. But boy, were they wrong on this one again.
This is Methuselah, a 4852-year-old Great Basin Bristlecone pine tree in California, USA, and the oldest known living non-clonal tree in the world. It was named after the oldest Biblical character, which is 969 years old (Genesis 5:27). Methuselah was supposed to be around late-400 to early-500 years old during the assumed time when the Biblical flood story occurred. If there really was a catastrophic deluge around 4500 years ago, this tree should have been dead at that time, uprooted from the violent waves of the flood, or at least died later on because of the soil's harsh salt levels. But no, it's still alive and well today. It's as if Methuselah was never informed about the worldwide flood.
Meanwhile, Old Tjikko is a Norwegian spruce tree located in Sweden. Even though its stems was dated to be just around 600 years old, its root system was dated through radiocarbon dating to be 9550 years old (20). On the other hand, despite looking like a forest, Pando is just a single organism. Found in Utah, USA, Pando is a group of Quaking aspen trees with interconnected root systems, covering around 43 hectares of land. Although the lifespan of its aspen stems is just around 100-130 years old, Pando's root system was estimated to be 14,000 years old (21). The US National Parks Services even claims that it is 80,000 years old! Both Old Tjikko and Pando are clonal trees, which means they survive time by cloning themselves into genetically identical individuals and growing in just a single location. Instead of reproducing sexually, clonal trees reproduce vegetatively, where new younger stems or trees sprout from older trunks or roots.
Aside from radiometric dating, one method that we can use to measure a tree's age is through its tree rings. Lighter rings indicate faster growth of the tree during spring to summer, while darker rings indicate slower growth of the tree during autumn to winter. It can also tell the climate of a year, where large thick rings signify a good rainy season while small thin rings signify a bad one. This is the science of dendrochronology. This is how dendrochronologists can determine how old a tree is before it died, or cut down. Or in case of living trees, they can just drill some thin samples from their trunks. Through this process, we can even compare the growth rings of a tree from another tree within the same location to get corroborating results. If the Biblical flood narrative is true, we should have observed the same data from the growth rings of all ancient trees indicating that a global flood occurred. Unsurprisingly, that's not what we're seeing.
If ancient living trees are already a problem for the global flood story, what more if we bring up the fossilized dead trees? A great example of that is the Specimen Ridge, found in the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. We are talking about a pile of 27 fossilized forests (yap, 27 forests) individually buried on top of each other while being preserved by volcanic lahar from Absaroka super-volcanoes. The bottom-most layer of the petrified forest was buried from a massive pyroclastic flow during the Eocene Epoch, 48 million years ago (22). Since igneous rocks and volcanic sediments take more than a hundred years to break down and become a new soil that sustains another forest, the growth rings from most petrified trees indicate that some of the new layered forests grew for 500 years. This process was repeated 27 times, and in order for the Specimen Ridge to form, 6000 years definitely wasn't enough.
Creationists might say that this ridge was formed due to a great mudslide from the worldwide flood, burying and fossilizing the trees from sediments in the process. Well, if that's the case, we should expect all of those trees uprooted from their soil, but no, it's not. What we're seeing is the root system of petrified forests above being connected to the tree trunks underneath them, demonstrating that they are individual layers stacked on each other. A repeated lahar flow can do that, but a single violent global flood cannot. We should also expect that if those petrified trees all died during the flood, their growth rings must be identical with each other, but again, it's not. The tree rings vary in sizes, which shows that the amount of rainfall annually also varies, just like nowadays. And besides, if there actually was such thing as worldwide deluge as the Bible says, we should expect at least some fossils of fishes alongside those trees. And yet, they're nowhere to be found.
Disproof No. 5: The Earth, Rocks and Fossils
If there is one scientific field of study that has been hijacked by YECs repeatedly, it's geology. Despite being a pseudoscience beyond a shadow of a doubt, flood geology is still being championed by some "scientific" creationists, especially in United States. 19th century early geologists and paleontologists used the Genesis flood narrative as their explanation for everything on earth: fossils, geologic formations, rocks, and others. It's not until new 20th century discoveries arrived that scientists finally realized just how insanely wrong the flood story is. Actual scientists followed the evidence and changed their minds, while creationists were stuck on the old ways of geology, still defending the flood story dogmatically, and at all costs.
It would take volumes of books just to refute the Noah's flood through geology and paleontology alone, so let's attempt to cover a bit of them here. For example, supposed marine fossils on tops of mountains has been used by creationists as their "proof" that a worldwide flood inundated all mountains. Fish fossils had been found in the Himalayas (23), while whale fossils had been found in the Andes Mountains (24). But the thing is, we know for a fact that what caused these phenomena is not the sudden Noachian deluge, it's gradual continental drift. Andes Mountains was formed through the subduction of Nazca Plate to the South American Plate, while the Himalayas was formed due to the collision between the continental plates of Eurasia and India. Those plate boundaries that were used to be underwater back then were elevated into mountains, thus explaining the fish fossils.
Even the great Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci himself expressed a skeptical attitude on his Notebooks towards the claim of global flood being the cause of marine fossils on mountains, during his study of seashell fossils being found on the Italian alps in Lombardy. He said that gradual but persistent natural processes were responsible for shaping our planet instead of an instantaneous supernatural act as said on Genesis, and that the Biblical deluge is an insufficient explanation for the existence of seashells and fishbones atop of mountains, concluding that those mountains were once under the ocean. He even predicted that future scientists would eventually find solid evidence that the earth is way older than what the Bible says (25). Considering that he lived half a millennium before the development of modern geology, Leonardo's eerily accurate observations were definitely ahead of his time.
"And if you should say that the Deluge then rose with its waters above the mountains, the movement of the sea in its journey against the course of the rivers must have been so slow that it could not have carried, floating upon it, things heavier than itself; and even if it had supported them, then as it receded it would have left them strewn about in various places. How are we to account for the corals which are found every day towards Monferrato in Lombardy with wormholes in them, sticking to the rocks which have been left bare by the currents of rivers? These rocks are all covered with stocks and families of oysters, which are we know do not move, but always remain fixed by one of their valves to the rocks, and the other they open to feed upon the animalcules that swim in the water and which, hoping to find good pasture, become the food of these shells." - Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks) (26)
Since Leonardo brought up the corals, corals are another anomaly that creationists have to account for in order to make their Biblical flood story work. It would take a year for a group of massive corals to grow from just 0.3 to 2 centimeters (27), only if the conditions are ideal, but since its not most of the time, they could grow even slower. The bare minimum time for a typical coral reef to form is 10,000 years. That's not even to mention barrier reefs and atolls that takes 100,000 to 3000,000 years to maturely form. For example, the earliest evidence for the existence of complete reef structures in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the largest barrier reef in the world, was measured to be 600,000 years ago, but the oldest corals themselves were already around for 25 million years (28).
Here's the thing, corals could not survive the hurrying waves of a global flood. The debris and sediments (dusts, sands, clay, etc.) that the global flood is carrying would kill all the corals around the world, and even if they managed to survive for some reason, they would prevent all the corals from growing rings. Yes, just like trees, individual corals also have growth rings that indicate their ages, large rings for good years and small rings for bad years. So if the global flood story is true, we should only see corals not older than 4500 years, which is clearly not enough time for any average coral reef to completely grow.
This geologic formation right here is not made of rocks, it's a giant fossilized coral reef. El Capitan is located at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in El Paso, the highest elevated area in Texas, USA. Now, what would a barrier reef do in a dry land, far from the ocean? Simple, because this part of North America was once submerged underwater during the Cretaceous Period, called the Western Interior Seaway. Since coral growth is extremely slow, it took hundreds of thousands, even millions of years for El Capitan to grow more than 8000 feet. Being inundated for just a year through the great flood is obviously not sufficient for this barrier reef to form.
The Grand Canyon is another victim of misrepresentation by the proponents of flood geology, speculating that its formations must be carved by the worldwide flood as described in the Bible. Carving the canyon through the eroding currents of the Colorado River took millions of years and the process of forming it is delicate and gradual, not abrupt and quick like a global deluge. Serious geologists are still debating on whether the Grand Canyon is 5-6 million years old or 60-70 million years old, but definitely not 4500 years old. Because the sandstone and limestone deposits on the cliffs made out of sediments cannot be deposited but just less than a year. Just like in the Paluxy River, fossilized footprints are also present in the rock formations of Grand Canyon, and as said earlier, they should not exist at all if there really was a worldwide flood, for those footprints would be wiped out by the flood waves. It is also suspicious why there is not a single fossil of pollen grains from pines, grasses, and flowering plants found in the sedimentary rocks of the canyon, but only spores from ancient algae, ferns, moss, and fungi. Because if the Genesis flood narrative is true, we should see fossils of them being mixed together (29). One may find ad hoc excuses for that, but how exactly would a giant tsunami of floodwater be able to miraculously sort out those modern pollens from ancient spores?
Staying at the Grand Canyon, geologic strata are also found there. Strata (stratum in singular) pertain to layers of rocks accumulated over a very long period of time, where the bottommost layer is the oldest and the topmost layer is the youngest. This is the reason why in the bottom stratum, we would only see fossils of ammonites, trilobites, and other ancient extinct animals, while in the top stratum, there are only modern animals. This would not be the case if the Biblical worldwide deluge happened. Instead of seeing fossilized animals sorted out in layers from oldest to youngest, we should see piles of dead animals (like people, cattle, fishes, dinosaurs, and ammonites) in a single jumbled mess. If someone would find a fossil of a trilobite alongside a fossil of a horse, not only that it would prove the reality of the global flood, but also it would utterly disprove the Theory of Evolution. But the reason that we would not find this kind of evidence is because we know that trilobites went extinct millions of years before horses would show up in the evolutionary tree.
Disproof No. 6: Genetics and Human Evolution
If there is another issue that the supporters of Genesis flood narrative should worry about, it is genetic diversity. The amount of survived fauna aboard the ark cannot account for the vast biodiversity that we have today. Genetic diversity is necessary for evolution to work. In order for a certain species to maintain population health and flexibility to adapt, there must have enough allele variations in their gene pool. Higher genetic diversity means higher chances for that species to not be wiped out by diseases, and better adaptation to a changing environment. But there are times that a certain species experiences a sudden sharp decline in their population due to either migration to a new habitat or catastrophes like droughts, famines, earthquakes, fires, and (you guessed it) floods. We call that as population bottleneck. Bottlenecks are problematic, especially in endangered species that have very low population. Why? Inbreeding.
If you remember anything about what you learn in your biology class, an offspring inherits dominant and recessive alleles from its parents (it can be beneficial, neutral, or detrimental), but a lack of genetic diversity leads to a higher chance for an offspring to inherit detrimental recessive traits. That’s why inbreeding is harmful for a species. Cheetahs, for example, are so inbred, that one can call them the Habsburgs of feline family. Biologists estimated that bottlenecks happened to cheetahs twice, 100,000 years ago and 12,000 years ago (30). It’s also happening to humans too, like when some ancient people started migrating to other continents thousands of years ago, but a recent species-wide bottleneck on humans is not yet proven. But cases of incest in some families are not new (I'm looking at you, Alabama). European royals, for example, are known for being inbred because of their tradition of keeping the bloodline “pure”.
A famous example of the dangers of inbreeding is Charles II of Spain, the last Spanish king from the aforementioned Habsburg dynasty. He was so f*cking ugly and deformed that people called him “El Hechizado” or “The Bewitched.” He suffered a lot of illnesses during his childhood, like smallpox, measles, rubella, and chickenpox. He was infertile, and had a very long unusual jaw prominent to his family called “the Habsburg jaw.” He had difficulty eating and speaking, and did not talk until he was four. Historians Will and Ariel Durant described him as "short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live" (31). His parents, King Philip IV and Queen Mariana were uncle and niece. Charles’ ancestors were very incestuous that he later paid the genetic price.
If the Noah’s ark story is literally true, then cheetahs would not be the only species that would suffer the consequences of inbreeding, it would be every single living thing inside the ark. If there really was a massive extinction 4500 years ago, we should be able to trace it back to the genomes of every living species, but the evidence is simply not there. If the human species came from just two individuals and later on eight individuals, we should have been severely genetically compromised because of the lack of genetic diversity, if not extinct for a thousands of years. We would all suffer the genetic consequences way worse than what Charles II experienced. Repopulating the earth from eight people to 7 billion is, therefore, a genetic impossibility. That’s why genetics not only disprove the Genesis flood narrative, but the Adam and Eve story as well.
One of the biggest misconceptions about evolution that most people still cannot understand is that evolution does not manifest in just one individual but to the population as a whole. It’s not like you will ever see a monkey giving birth to an anatomically modern human or a dog giving birth to a cat, because that’s not how evolution works in the first place. There never was a first human, just like there never was a first person who speak Italian. Classical Latin during Caesar’s time didn’t change that much in just a year, but give it a century or even a millennium, it will be sure as hell that you will see a major difference. Biological evolution works the same way.
Creationist worldview says that humanity came from just two incestuous couple (Adam and Eve), then the God of the Bible wiped out all of them, except for Noah and his family, through a global flood. Afterwards, the remaining eight people repopulated the earth through incest again, and their descendants began their worldwide migration around 4500 years ago after the flood. Meanwhile, scientific evidence shows that modern humans (Homo sapiens) showed up in the evolutionary tree around 350,000 years ago. Together with other greater apes like chimpanzees and gorillas, humans were evidently descended from their common ancestors who were neither ape nor human, the australopithecines, the closest ancestor being the Australopithecus afarensis which lived in East Africa around 3.9 million years ago. Our genomes indicate that all humans that ever lived, living, and will live, can trace their evolutionary genes back to Africa, not in the Middle East. This is a bitter fact that YECs cannot swallow. Basic Anthropology 101.
Hominid migration began roughly 2 million years ago, when the earlier, more diverse species of Homo erectus started wandering outside Africa and went to Europe and Asia. It’s not until about 300,000 years ago when Homo sapiens entered the picture (32), not only arriving in Eurasia from Africa, but also in Australia, the Pacific, and the Americas 50,000 to 12,000 years ago. Remember that this is not a one-time, big-time migration, but a series of exoduses that occurred in different places in different times. But let’s forget about all of that anyway, and assert that the migrations happened after the flood, that those people were Noah’s grandkids. We should only expect human artifacts and remains in Australia and Americas that are not older than at least 4500 years, right?
Wrong again. Madjedbebe, which is an archaeological site in Kakadu National Park, is one of the oldest Aboriginal sites in Australia, which were occupied 50,000 to 80,000 years ago (33). This matches with the genetic evidence that Aboriginal Australians arrived in the continent from Africa more than 60,000 years ago (34). Australia was already occupied by people, way before the date of creation according to creationists, and way after of the global flood was supposedly happened. Curious how the worldwide flood never affected the continuous cultures of indigenous peoples of Australia. It’s as if they were never informed that they were just wiped out from the face of the earth.
Native Americans, however, started populating North America way down to South America 20,000 to 14,000 years ago, when people from Siberia crossed a land bridge on what is now the Bering Strait between modern-day Russia and Alaska. One of the oldest archaeological site found in America was in Idaho, where hunting tools were radiocarbon-dated to be 15,000 to 16,000 years old (35). It would be illogical to say that those Native Americans were wiped out by the global flood, and that they were replaced by the descendants of Noah, and suddenly adopted their culture as if nothing happened. If that’s true, we should have already seen that genetic marker in Native Americans’ DNA that is only present in people from the Middle East. Take note that ancient migrations were usually done by at least thousands of people that lasted for tens of thousands of years, so are we really to believe that the grandkids of Noah reproduced at a hyper speed and repopulated the planet from just eight people?
Here’s another one. This is Cheddar Man, the oldest, most complete skeleton that ever found in Britain. He was found in a cave in Somerset, England and measured that he used to live 9100 years ago. That’s way before any dates that creationists told us when the global flood happened. And sorry to white supremacists, Cheddar Man’s DNA indicate that he had dark skin (36), further proving that Mesolithic Britons, just like everyone else, were ultimately from African descent. Of course, creationists will ignore, or even outright deny, any kind of evidence that will prove that it’s more than 6000 years old, but here’s the thing: if the global flood really happened and this man died for that result, then that means he’s definitely not an ancestor of Noah, and he must not have any living descendants to this day. But if the Biblical flood story is just nothing but a myth and that evolution is true, then we should expect to see in Cheddar Man’s DNA that he has modern-day English descendants. Geneticists now discovered that every British people living today share 10% their DNA with the early hunter-gatherers, where the Cheddar Man belongs (37). It doesn't mean, however, that they are direct descendants of Cheddar Man, but nevertheless, it's still a blow to the Noah's ark story.
Disproof No. 7: Archaeological Artifacts
No matter what internet creationists will tell you, the remains of Noah’s ark has never been found anywhere. Because if you are patient enough to read this article at this point, we’ve established that the whole story itself is not even close from being real from the very beginning. A favorite “archaeological site” that YECs love to pinpoint to be the real location of the ark’s remains is this geologic formation found near Mount Ararat, which Genesis 8:4 says to be the ark’s resting place. The Durupinar Site in Turkey was made popular by an amateur explorer and kind of an archaeologist but not really, Ron Wyatt, and attracted Christian pilgrims ever since. Wyatt also claimed to “discover” other Biblical sites like the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Ark of the Covenant. I am personally sorry for those people who actually take him seriously. This guy is already known to serious geologists, historians, archaeologists, and Biblical scholars to be fraudulent, that even some of his fellow creationists disown him.
But even if we prove that Wyatt was not intentionally lying, we still know that this vaguely boat-shaped structure is not a wooden ark, let alone Noah’s ark. They say that the samples from the Durupinar Site are petrified wood that were fossilized over time. First of all, in order for anything to be fossilized, it must be buried quickly, since oxygen exposure would accelerate the time of its decay. Nothing gets fossilized while being exposed in the air, and besides, nowhere in the Bible says that the ark was buried, it only says that it rested at the top of a mountain. Secondly, geologists have already examined the samples from the site, and neither of them are petrified wood but basalt and andesite rocks (38). The boat-shaped formation turned out to be just nothing but an eroded limestone formed during the Miocene Epoch (39). So just because a natural geologic formation looks like a boat that happens to be near Mount Ararat, doesn’t mean it’s Noah’s ark.
But then again, forget also about that anyway and let’s ask ourselves: if the Noachian flood story actually happened, then when exactly did it happen? Jewish tradition maintains that the flood occurred 1656 years after the Creation, by counting the ages of people from Adam to Noah. Nevertheless, creationists are still disagreeing with each other when it comes to its exact year even though they use the same chronological method. Both Archbishop Ussher and Answers in Genesis say that the flood happened in 2348 BCE (40). Meanwhile, Institute for Creation Research says that it’s 2472 BCE (41); Creation Ministries International says that it’s 2304 BCE (42); Pastor Jim Liles of The Sacred Calendar says that it’s 2458 BCE (43); and The Watchtower, the official publication of Jehovah’s Witnesses, says that it’s 2370 BCE (44). Nevertheless, upon further research, it seems that most YECs abide by the Ussher Chronology which places the timeline of Noachian flood into 2348 BCE, so let’s stick to that year. Now what is happening to the rest of the world during that year?
That was the time when the Akkadian Empire started flourishing where Sargon of Akkad, history’s first recorded emperor, began conquering cities in Mesopotamia. This is also the time when the Sixth Dynasty in ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom Period was about to start, after the death the Pharaoh Unas, the last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty. Keep in mind that all civilizations that we know lived during 24th century BCE were almost certainly polytheistic, worshiping multiple gods from different pantheons, so how would we square that with the Noah’s ark story where during that time, there were supposedly only eight people who all worship the Judeo-Christian God? Some creationists even adjust the date of the Noachian flood during 2900 BCE, when there really was a huge flood in Mesopotamia (more on that later), but we still know that floodwaters were not worldwide and it didn’t kill all civilizations. 29th century BCE was the time when Pharaoh Hotepsekhemwy was about to found Egypt’s Second Dynasty after the death of Pharaoh Qa’a. It is also the start of the legendary era of Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors during the Pre-Dynastic China, and the time when legendary ruler Kinh Dương Vương founded the Hồng Bàng Dynasty in modern-day Vietnam.
If the Noachian flood story is historically accurate, then we must see in the archaeological record that all civilizations were wiped out on the face of the earth during 2348 BCE, and after that year, every single people around the world must be speaking and writing in Ancient Hebrew, using the Jewish Calendar, and worshiping Yahweh as the one true God. As we expected, other civilizations continued writing their own original scripts, speaking their own languages, using their own calendar systems, and worshipping their own multiple gods, as if they never even knew that the global flood just drowned them all.
Let’s go back to ancient Egypt. It is one of the most prominent nations featured in the Old Testament, especially in the book of Exodus. Jewish legends say that Egyptians are descendants of Noah’s grandson Mizraim (which happens to be the Hebrew term for Egypt), which implies that ancient Egypt must be founded after the supposed date of the flood. Meanwhile in actual history, Egypt’s first dynasty was already established around 3100 BCE, almost a millennium before the supposed Noachian deluge, but settlements beside the Nile River already began around two thousand years before the foundation of the First Dynasty. That’s how old Egypt is. Egyptians were already developing Hieroglyphs way before Noah was supposed to be even born. So if the global flood actually happened, the practice of Hieroglyph writing must have suddenly stopped and discontinued after that flood, replacing by Ancient Hebrew. Yet their writing system endured over another thousands of years, and even evolved later on into Hieratic and Coptic.
If we stick into real archaeology instead of Biblical chronology, 24th century BCE was a time when the religion of Judaism wasn’t still a thing. Ancient Canaanite Religion was the dominant faith among Israelites, and they worship plenty of Semitic gods and goddesses, so during the supposed time of global flood, Noah should have been worshipping the supreme Canaanite creator god El. The Biblical god Yahweh back then was just a warrior god who wages wars against the enemies of Israel (45). It wasn’t until later on when El and Yahweh started to pertain to the same god, and during the Babylonian Captivity in 6th century BCE, Israelites began proclaiming Yahweh to be the one true God who created the universe, and denied the existence of other deities from polytheistic religions (46), hence the commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
Another trouble with the Noah’s ark story regards to when its first accounts were written. One of the rules that a historian must remember is that the more time that transpired before an event is documented, the less reliable it becomes. Because it is simply a fact of life that people tend to forget some details in an event, and the more time a story was passed through oral tradition before it was written down, the chance of embellishment and exaggeration increases. If you ever played the Telephone Game with your friends or classmates, you will know what I mean. Most modern Biblical scholars believe that the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) was finally transcribed by early Jews during the Babylonian Captivity in 6th century BCE from earlier written sources and oral tradition, and was completed during the 5th century BCE (47). That means, the time gap between the event (global flood) and the account (Book of Genesis) was more or less 1800 years! That’s like historians in 1960s just started to finally write down the reign of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
It’s not surprising, though. This is because during the Bronze Age, all written stories are myths and legends and even if they write about a certain historical figure, exaggerations and distortions are inevitable. Which means, people at that time didn’t care about historical accuracy, as long as they tell a story. It wasn’t until the Classical Antiquity (8th century BCE to 6th century CE) when Greeks and Romans introduced writing actual historical accounts.
Disproof No. 8: Other Flood Myths
Notice that most of the problems about the Noachian flood story that I’ve pointed out so far would simply go away when we assume that the flood is not worldwide. A massive localized flood would have been far more likely for an explanation as it happens all the time. Almost all cultures around the world have a story like this in some form or another. A creationist might say that the fact that flood narratives are everywhere proves that they are just telling the global flood in different perspectives, but the Noah’s ark story is the only legitimate story. This is another steaming pile of bullshit, because those stories definitely didn’t happen simultaneously, and most of the details are too mutually exclusive with each other that they can’t just all be true at the same time.
Flood myths are so common to ancient civilizations, to the point that their mythology is not complete without it. Why? Because most civilizations tend to reside beside bodies of water, mainly for easy source of food, drinking/bathing water, and irrigation. Ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia, for example, lived beside the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates (Mesopotamia literally means “between rivers” in Greek). The civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in modern-day Pakistan flourished near the rivers of Indus and Ganges. Ancient Chinese people lived beside Huang Ho and Yangtze Rivers. Meanwhile, the Nile River was the main source of living for ancient Egyptians. Hell, the Aztecs literally built their city of Tenochtitlan above the Lake Texcoco, now in modern-day Mexico. So it’s not a surprise for a massive localized deluge to happen, and rest assured that they will tell stories about it on the next generation.
For example, according to a Scandinavian myth, the brother gods Odin, Vili, and Ve killed the ancestor of all frost giants, Ymir. His blood from his wounds, which is made of freezing water, drowned most of the Rime Giants. But there is one family of giants (Bergelmir, his wife and children) who managed to make it out alive, and they became the ancestors of the ogre race. Meanwhile, Ymir’s blood became the oceans and his corpse became the Midgard, the realm of mortal humans (48). Meanwhile, a Welsh myth says that a massive flood was caused by a monster named Afanc who lives in Lake Llion. The two sole human survivors, Dwyfan and Dwyfach, survived through a mastless boat, landed in Prydain (the Welsh name for Britain) and repopulated the earth (49).
On the other hand, an Ifugao myth from the Philippines tells that there was once a drought that was so bad that it dried up all the rivers. The elders advised to dig down to the dried river bed in order to search for its “soul.” People dug for three days and there was a great spring that gushed strongly that it killed many of the diggers. They were happy that there is finally water, but later on, a powerful storm came and the spring sprouted uncontrollably, causing a great flood. The elders told all the people to seek refuge to the mountains, but only two people managed to climbed and survived the flood, the siblings Wigan and Bugan. They climbed separate mountains and had enough food, but Bugan is the only one who had fire. So Wigan went to his sister after the flood receded in six months, and they lived together in a valley. Time passed and Bugan is pregnant with his brother and ran away with shame, but Maknongan, a god disguised as an old man, told her that there’s nothing to be ashamed of, since they have a duty to repopulate the earth (50).
In a Yoruba myth from west Africa, the god of wisdom Ifa went in the firmament and lived with the creator god Obatala because he was sick and tired of living on earth. But without the wisdom god as their guide, humans now can’t properly interpret what the gods what. Pissed off, the god of waters Olokun, nearly wiped-out humanity through a great flood (51). While in a Chinese myth, there was a conflict between a chief from a rival tribe and the creator goddess Nu Kua (or Nu Gua). The goddess won, and because he can’t accept that a woman just kicked his ass, he went to a top of a mountain and headbutted the Heavenly Bamboo to commit a murder-suicide. It was knocked down and it tear a hole in the sky, causing for waters from the firmament to flood the whole earth and killing everyone except Nu Kua and her army (because of her protection powers). The flooding stopped when the goddess patched the hole in the sky with a plaster made of stones with different colors (52). (If you are interested to know about other flood stories around the world, click this link from Talk Origins.)
But the most interesting flood myths are the ones that were from Mesopotamia, because of just how similar they are to the Noachian flood story. 300 years ago, most people assumed that the Genesis flood narrative was the oldest and only flood story in the Middle East, until 19th century archaeologists started digging in Mesopotamia. They found out that there were flood myths written centuries, and even millennia, before the earliest copies of the Old Testament was transcribed. The most famous one came from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known surviving literature in history. Despite being written as early as 2100 BCE, the Tablet XI section of the epic was specifically made later during 7th century in Babylon (still a century earlier than the oldest manuscripts of the Book of Genesis).
"Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying: 'I will reveal to you, Gilgamesh, a thing that is hidden, a secret of the gods I will tell you! The gods once lived in Shuruppak, a city that you surely know, situated on the banks of the Euphrates. That city was very old, but it grew crowded and noisy. The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict the Flood.'" - Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet XI
The story in general is about when the gods became pissed off with humans because they are too noisy, so they decided to kill them all with a flood. But Ea, the one god who created humans from clay and divine powers in the first place, felt guilty and secretly told a guy named Utnapishtim (the son of Ubara-Tutu, king of Shuruppak) through a wall about their genocidal plan. So he commanded him to build a large boat enough to fit all the animals. Unlike Noah’s ark that has different sizes in length, width, and height, Utnapishtim’s ark are 120 cubits equally in dimension, so basically a square. Also, unlike Noah’s ark that was built only by Noah’s family, Utnapishtim’s ark has help from a lot of other carpenters and reed workers. Then the storm came and it lasted for six days and six nights (way shorter than from the Genesis story). It was so powerful and frightening that the gods themselves repented. After the sea calmed, all was quiet and all people turned into clay. Utnapishtim released all the animals right after the flood receded, and just like Noah, he made a burnt offering in a ziggurat (temple of the gods) and the gods smelled it. Enlil, the main mastermind behind the flood, was furious when he found out that there are still survivors. Ea then blamed Enlil for being cruel and denied that he leaked the flood plan to Utnapishtim, saying that he only sent a dream. In the end, Utnapishtim and his wife were the first and only humans granted immortality by the gods (53).
Sure, the Gilgamesh flood myth is older than the Genesis flood myth. But there’s another story that is older than both: the Akkadian Epic of Atra-Hasis, which was written around 18th century BCE. In fact, Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh story was mostly based from this myth, even directly borrowing some lines from it (54). The plot was almost similar, except for some names (Ea is called Enki and Utnapishtim is called Atra-Hasis) and some plots. In Atra-Hasis epic, the gods’ reason for the flood is the problem of overpopulation, unlike in the Gilgamesh epic that is because of just humans being too loud and irritating. But it turns out that even the Epic of Atra-Hasis was also based from another older epic from Sumer. That story came from tablet fragments found in the ancient city of Nippur and contains the creation story of the Sumerians, which historian Thorkild Jacobsen called the Eridu Genesis (55).
In the story, the flood hero was called Ziusudra (or Xisuthros according to Babylonian writer Berossus), the son of King Ubara-Tutu and the last king of Shuruppak before the catastrophe. Just like the previous stories, he was warned by Enki and commanded him to made a boat. Most of the parts of story are now lost, but the surviving pieces almost tell the exact same plot. But notice the ultimate similarity between the stories of Utnapishtim, Atra-Hasis, and Ziusudra: they are all described to be the son of King Ubara-Tutu, and the story were all set in the city of Shuruppak. It turns out that those floods myths may probably have a historical basis through archaeological evidence, since the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates were historically known to be prone to flooding.
This is the Sumerian King List, a clay block written in Sumerian cuneiform that chronicles the rulers from various Mesopotamian cities, and its earliest copies where transcribed around 22nd to 21st century BCE during the Third Dynasty of Ur. Its first parts describe the eight kings who ruled Mesopotamia before the flood.
Alulim of Eridu – 28,800 years
Alalgar of Eridu – 36,000 years
Enmen-lu-ana of Bad-tibira – 43,200 years
Enmen-gal-ana of Bad-tibira – 28,800 years
Dumuzi of Bad-tibira – 36,000 years
En-sipad-zid-ana of Larak – 28,800 years
Enmen-dur-ana of Sippar – 21,000 years
Ubara-Tutu of Shuruppak – 18,600 years
It’s not certain on whether these kings were real historical people or just legendary characters. But notice that the number of years these kings reigned are impossibly long (just like the ages of people in the Book of Genesis). This is most likely explained by their ridiculously complicated numbering through sexagesimal system, which instead of the number 10 in decimal system, they based their counting on the number sixty (60). They obviously didn’t rule that long and Noah definitely didn’t live for more than 900 years, it’s just that the ancient writers of those stories counted differently than ours. Going back to the kings, the Sumerian King List indicates that Ubara-Tutu was the ruler of Shuruppak before the flood happened.
“Then Sippar fell and the kingship was taken to Šuruppak. In Šuruppak, Ubara-Tutu became king; he ruled for 18,600 years. One king; he ruled for 18,600 years. Five cities; eight kings ruled for 241,200 years The Flood then swept over.” - The Sumerian King List
But according to the other copy of the list, such as WB 62, Ubara-Tutu was succeeded by his son Ziusudra (aka Atra-Hasis/Utnapishtim) as the king of Shuruppak before the catastrophe, which he governed around 2900 BCE. Now, the question is: was there really a massive localized flood in Shuruppak during the 2nd millennium BCE? Actually yes. Excavations in Iraq revealed that there are 0.3 – 3-meter-thick flood deposits in the city of Shuruppak (which is now located on modern-day Tell-Fara) and they were radio carbon-dated to be deposited around, you guessed it, 2900 BCE (56), the same time during the rule of King Ubara-Tutu (or Ziusudra). Under the immediate layer of flood deposits, archaeologists found clay pottery that were made during the Jemdet Nasr Period (3100-2900 BCE). There is, however, no evidence that a flood as massive as this ever happened in the land of Canaan (modern-day Israel-Palestine). On the other hand, there is one other hypothesis that the flood in the Middle East was caused by a giant tsunami generated by a meteor or comet crash in Indian Ocean during 3000 to 2800 BCE, which created a crater underwater called the Burckle Crater.
To cut the story short, massive local floods are possible, but not worldwide floods. Flood myths can perhaps have a historical basis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those accounts will be historically accurate. Embellishment and exaggeration of human narratives happen all the time. After the Shuruppak flood in 2900 BCE, Sumerians told about it in their legends of Ziusudra, and then by Akkadians through Atra-Hasis, and then by Babylonian through Utnapishtim, and then by Israelites through Noah. This is the most probable explanation on how we got the Noachian flood story, based on archaeology.
Conclusion
But let’s say that everything that I just said is false, and still believe that the Genesis flood story is scientifically true and historically accurate. Now what? Why is it a big deal? Since young-earth creationists strongly believe that the Bible is the literal accurate word of God that doesn’t have errors of any kind, they tend to think that if any detail of the Bible turned out to be disagreeing with reality, then God must be lying, but God can’t lie so then reality must be wrong. This is an extremely fallacious thinking. Why is it that not telling the truth must automatically mean intentional deception? How about just honestly mistaken? Even if you believe that the Bible is divinely-inspired by Yahweh, no one can’t deny the fact that when all is said and done, it was still written by mortal people with limited knowledge and tendency to make mistakes. Besides, taking the stories in the Old Testament as metaphorical and symbolic instead of scientifically/historically factual is not a real problem to other Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Dismissing the Noah’s ark story as fanciful didn’t shook their faith, so why can’t creationists as well?
But if in the end of the day, believers just say that we just have to have faith that the Biblical global flood occurred, then there is no point to say that it happened in real life, any more than I have faith that Gandalf killed the Balrog in the Mines of Moria. If you do not belong on any Abrahamic religions, you wouldn’t have a hard time dismissing the Noachian flood story as mythical, just like how you dismiss stories from other religions. All of these inconsistencies and impossibilities wouldn’t be a problem if only we remove our religious biases and abandon the idea of Biblical inerrancy. It’s just a story, damn it.
Remember that most Biblical scholars, believers and nonbelievers alike, accept the first books of the Old Testament, Genesis included, to be mostly (if not entirely) mythical and legendary. And their authors didn’t even intend to write Genesis as an accurate scientific and historical account, but mainly to make theological points. The Bible is littered with lots of symbolisms intentionally written by the authors to be religiously significant. But nah, whatever, YECs would still deny objective reality anyway and continue covering their ears if the facts don’t agree with their beliefs. Sure, everyone is entitled into their own opinions, but certainly not their own facts. Reality is what it is. It’s everyone’s responsibility to alter their worldview if it doesn’t agree with evidence, not the other way around. As Ricky Gervais once said, “Beliefs shouldn’t change facts. Facts, if you’re rational, should change your beliefs.”
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Published on July 31, 2021
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