How Noah’s Flood Covered the “Whole World.”

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled”  (Luke 2:1)

                Hundreds of widely-scattered cultures across our world have made reference to a gigantic flood in their distant past (see a list compiled by Mark Isaak at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html).  The fact that these stories, apart from their central point of the flood, disagree with each other in many other details, does not weaken the case for granting as true the main unifying kernel of truth behind these accounts.  There are good reasons for believing that there was indeed a catastrophic flood that covered the “whole world” of Noah’s time.  Yet these good reasons are not grounded on popular interpretations of the flood, but on an understanding of both the Hebrew text and the context of the Book of Genesis.  Please do not be put off by this reality.  The challenge of interpreting Genesis correctly has far less to do with our possession of more scientific facts than could have been known in Moses’ time, than it does that we live in two widely-different cultures, with widely-different modes of verbal expression, and viewed through widely-different perspectives.    

I have several pieces of fossil-bearing shale (sedimentary) rock from high in the southern Alberta Rocky Mountains.  Indeed fossils have been found all across the world at high elevations, including the Himalayan Mountains all the way to the summit of Mount Everest (http://mathisencorollary.blogspot. com/ 2012/03/crinoids-on-mount-everest.html).  At the same time, it must be noted that there are also vast regions of land across our planet that lack both fossils and the sedimentary rock which fossils by definition require (Hugh Ross. “Global or Worldwide Flood: The Scientific Evidence.” Navigating Genesis. (Reasons to Believe, 2014), p.157.  ** See also an extended discussion of these matters at http://www. reasons.org/theflood).  Unless these fossil-less regions were geologically formed at a later time after the Genesis flood, their existence counts utterly against the notion of a flood on a global scale.

Other factors standing in the way of a truly global flood include the impossibility of accounting for the enormous amount of water required to cover the entire world, even if the highest mountains were only 500 feet above recent sea levels (Ross, p.152).  Furthermore, the movement of the earth’s crust (plate tectonics) required for the uplifting of the current mountainous landforms would have been so cataclysmic that even Noah and his family could not have survived the waves that would have been thereby produced.  The Genesis account gives not even a hint of such an upheaval of land and waves.

To be continued…