Brad Alles

As mentioned in the previous blog, the Bible’s account of Noah’s Flood is the most detailed and longest account of all the recorded histories that we have. It makes sense since God revealed it to Moses as he wrote Genesis. However, through the years, many objections have been raised against the veracity of the worldwide Flood account. An excellent book to respond specifically to those objections is The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris.

The Flood did cover the mountains as the other accounts indicate; Genesis 7:19-20 says the water covered the mountains by more than 20 feet. But do we have enough water on the planet to do that? The answer is yes; there is actually enough water in the oceans for covering the earth 1.7 miles underwater if all the mountains were leveled and the sea valleys were filled in. In other words, if the planet were as smooth as billiard cue ball, there’s enough water to cover the earth 1.7 miles deep all over. Moreover, the mountains of Noah’s time may not have been as high as they are today due to the catastrophic nature of the entire Flood and its aftermath. Where is the Flood’s water today? In the oceans and seas, since three-quarters of our planet’s surface is under water.

Meteorologists raise another interesting objection to a worldwide flood. “We don’t have enough cloud cover to get rain to fall for ‘forty days and forty nights’ to flood the earth.” That’s a valid point, but that’s not what Scripture says. According to Genesis 7:11, the Flood happened because “all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” It wasn’t clouds with rainwater that flooded the earth, but possibly a release of massive subterranean waters by seismic and volcanic activity. These waters, under enormous pressure from the earth above it, were released very quickly through some huge earthquake, jetting water into the atmosphere high above. This would also have been when that extra layer of water vapor above our planet (from day two of creation) collapsed and helped flood the earth. “Volcanic eruptions associated with the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep could have thrown dust into the water vapor canopy, causing the water vapor to nucleate on the dust particles and make rain.”

Another possible explanation is catastrophic plate tectonics. The earth’s crust split at lines traversing the globe, possibly due to some enormous earthquake. Besides water bursting forth, the mantle, or the hot rock beneath the crust, rose to fill the voids in the crust, instantly turning to steam cool seawater in the ocean. This in turn formed a line of steam jets that projected significant amounts of seawater into the atmosphere. It fell for forty days as rain. Thus the “springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” Furthermore, oceans would have flooded continents due to the rising mantle, since the ocean floor itself was rising, as well as the increased water from the “springs of the great deep.” Clouds and their rainwater didn’t flood the earth—the Bible is clear on that.