I recently read something on social media that was a link to an atheist website that was poking fun of the belief in the Biblical account of the world-wide flood recorded in Genesis 6:6 – 8:19. The gist of the post was that it is ridiculous to believe that a world-wide flood could have occurred. There is more that can be said on this whole subject, including the details of the Ark, clean and unclean animals, and the logistics of getting those animals on the Ark. All of this can be explained in a reasonable manner for anyone willing to investigate it with an open mind, but for now, I want to primarily concentrate on the possibility of a world-wide flood occurring, and why believing that this could have occurred is not unreasonable at all.
If you have access to a globe, look at it for a moment. If you are like me, one of the first things that will strike you as you look at the globe is that most of the earth is covered in water, and most of that water is ocean (salt water.). A little over 2/3 of the earth is covered by water, (70.8% to be precise.) 29.2% is land, (This includes swamps and seasonal dry land.) 97.5 % of the Earth’s water is salt water (ocean.) The remaining 2.5 % is freshwater lakes, ponds, rivers, and the polar ice.
Consider also that much of the dry ground on which we live is also saturated with water underneath. The water table is very complex and formed in many different ways in different geographical areas. That is how we get water from wells. Drill down far enough at just about anywhere on the planet, and you will hit water. So, not only is the dry ground we live on surrounded by an incredible amount of water, and contain huge amounts of water in lakes, ponds, rivers and streams sitting on top of the dry land, the dry land is also sitting on top of water.
Now consider the atmosphere. At any given point in time, the atmosphere can contain an average of 37.5 million billion gallons of water in the invisible vapor phase.
With this much water on the planet, it makes me wonder why the earth is not constantly covered with water. Think for a moment about how water flows. Water flow follows the path of least resistance.
Go to the beach. Watch the tides. Why do the waves surge toward the beach, then suddenly stop, and recede back into the ocean? This is a question that many men throughout the ages have attempted to answer. Many people attribute this phenomenon to the gravity of the moon. That answer does not make a lot of sense to me. The gravity of the moon is 16.7% of that of the earth. The moon is always moving as it orbits the earth. With the moon constantly being at a different location as it orbits the earth, how can the gravitational pull remain so consistent? (Why is not the tide surge much greater or lesser at any given beach depending on the location of the moon?) Granted, there is a slight change in tides on all beaches. The tide comes in, and the tide goes out. But this is not a significant change. If the moon goes from being directly above any given area at any given time, and then later is on the complete opposite side of our globe, why isn’t the tide changed significantly more than it is when the moon is over the same general area as that area turns from day to night as the earth revolves around the sun, with the earth itself rotating on its axis as it revolves around the sun? I don’t profess to be a scientist, but this just does not seem to be a plausible explanation to me.
From all practical observations, it appears very much that the entire earth should be covered in water. And, according to the Genesis account of Creation, it originally was:
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:2 NIV)
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.“ And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:9-10 NIV)
According to the Genesis account of Creation, it appears that the dry land referred to was probably one giant land mass, or continent. Geological theory seems to support this idea. The idea that the present continents once formed a land mass was first proposed by Alfred Wegener in his 1912 publication “The Origin of Continents”. The current theories maintain that about 300 million years ago, one giant land mass existed, which is referred to as “Pangaea”
There is a lot more that can be studied and learned about the geological theories pertaining to this if the reader is so inclined to investigate. I do not profess to be an expert in any of this and admit that I only have a cursory understanding of this matter. Suffice it to say that it is not unreasonable to assume, whether you adhere to the Biblical interpretation, or the geological theories, that at some point in time the earth was entirely covered in water. If that be the case, then it is reasonable to assume that it could happen again, and the Biblical account proclaims that, in fact, it did. So, given the facts, it seems more reasonable to me to believe that the world-wide flood was a very real possibility, and requires much less work and energy to try and deny that it is even possible just because it says it in the Bible. A lot of people just simply refuse to believe what the Bible says, even if it is reasonable, simply because anything pertaining to what they define as “religion” is not even worth considering. That is sad.
Danny's Stump 