I’ve been exceedingly busy and am going to be spending some time with my son, who has been away at college, for his spring break, so I am bringing back some articles from 2024 for those who haven’t read them. I had a much smaller following back then.

This series is my attempt to explain why not taking the first 11 chapters of Genesis literally could be a problem for a true Bible believing Christian because it breaks the foundation upon which the rest of the Bible is built. I am including quotes from several technical articles and links to the articles to provide more details. I strongly recommend checking out the linked articles.

My plan is to do Part 4 on more historical, anthropological, and scientific evidences supporting the Genesis narrative. Part 5 will explain internal evidences that Genesis is literal history. Part 6 will explain how our understanding of Genesis supports or undermines the rest of the Bible.

The biggest evidence the old age proponents have is the deep sediment layers covering the Earth. Of course there are two main ways these layers could come into being: through long, slow deposition of dust or through catastrophic, sudden deposition. Believing in an old Earth means that all of this sediment must have accumulated over long ages. Believing in a young Earth means this sediment must have been deposited by a catastrophic global flood as described in the Bible. Which matches the evidence more?

Anthropological Evidence:

Before getting into the science, I want to get into a few anthropological evidences. If there was truly a global flood, we would expect different cultures around the world to mention a global flood. This is exactly what we see. There are multiple flood stories from multiple cultures on every inhabited continent.

• 95% say the flood was global
• 66% say it was caused by wickedness of man
• 88% say there was a favored family or individual
• 66% say the remnant were forewarned
• 70% say survival was due to a boat
• 67% say animals were saved
• 73% say animals played a part
• 57% say survivors ended up on a mountain
• 35% say birds were sent out1

Right now I am reading Echoes of Ararat by Nick Ligouri, which includes over 300 flood stories from North, Central, and South America. One tribe’s story even describes how it took 104 years from the dispersion due to languages (Tower of Babel) until they arrived at their current location in Mexico. It is true that none are identical to the story in Genesis, but there is enough commonality that it is clear that there is a common experience from which each story comes. The Biblical account is the only one that includes details that align with reality and mention places that are not close to where the people who wrote the story live, suggesting it is the most accurate telling of what happened.

Many times the biblical flood story is compared to the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and attributed to being borrowed from the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, but what makes more sense: Was the biblical story taken from the “Epic of Gilgamesh” or was the “Epic of Gilgamesh” taken from the Bible and/or actual history? The dimensions of the Ark in Genesis 6:15 “This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits” just happens to be the proportions that modern ship builders have determined to be most stable in rough seas. In the “Epic of Gilgamesh” the ship is a cube. The only less stable shape would be a sphere. If there really was a flood, which description is most likely to be true? The Biblical description, of course! It gives the only truly realistic, believable description. If the global flood story was only a parable or moral story, why would they get the physical dimensions of the ark so perfectly described? For that matter, why would they have dimensions at all?

Another example comes from the Miao people in China. They have passed down a song that parallels the first 11 chapters of Genesis very closely. I am including the section on the flood, but it is worth reading the whole thing because it is amazing how well the two texts match in details. These people were separated from the West, the Jews, and the Christians for thousands of years and yet they tell of the same beginnings (which makes sense if Genesis 1-11 tells the true story of the beginning of mankind).

So it poured forty days in sheets and in torrents. Then fifty-five days of misting and drizzle. The waters surmounted the mountains and ranges. The deluge ascending leapt valley and hollow. An earth with no earth upon which to take refuge! A world with no foothold where one might subsist! The people were baffled, impotent and ruined, Despairing, horror stricken, diminished and finished. But the Patriarch Nuah was righteous. The Matriarch Gaw Bo-lu-en upright. Built a boat very wide. Made a ship very vast. Their household entire got aboard and were floated, The family complete rode the deluge in safety. The animals with him were female and male. The birds went along and were mated in pairs. When the time was fulfilled, God commanded the waters. The day had arrived, the flood waters receded. Then Nuah liberated a dove from their refuge, Sent a bird to go forth and bring again tidings. The flood had gone down into lake and to ocean; The mud was confined to the pools and the hollows. There was land once again where a man might reside; There was a place in the earth now to rear habitations. Buffalo then were brought, an oblation to God, Fatter cattle became sacrifice to the Mighty. The Divine One then gave them His blessing; Their God then bestowed His good graces. link

If you compare this text to Genesis 7, they match very well. Because the Miao tribe’s oral traditions were recited as couplets (two lines that mean basically the same thing), it is self correcting and is less prone to error than a straight narrative. It is truly worth reading the whole linked article. You will see the oral tradition matches (with only very minor disagreement) Genesis in creation, man, a wicked world, the flood, and the Tower of Babel. Even the names are similar. Look at the names from the Bible vs Miao names.

• Seth ~ Se-teh
• Lamech ~ Lama
• Noah ~ Nuah
• Ham ~ Lo Han
• Shem ~ Lo Shen
• Japheth ~ Jah-hu

This close of a description from two groups that are so geographically and culturally diverse does not happen unless they are describing real events that the descendants of both experienced. Genesis isn’t analogy, mythology, or parable. It is history.

Flood Layers:

If you believe in deep ages, you almost have to believe there is no global flood because it only makes sense that the deep sediment layers come from one or the other.

The Continents are covered with deep layers of sediments that mostly fall into six (or possibly more) megasequences composed of multiple layers with the lowest layers having the coarsest particles up to the highest layers with the finest particles and then an unconformity that can only be caused by sheet erosion from receding water. Conventional, old-age geologists say millions of years are missing at the unconformities, but this makes no sense because there is no erosion, no valleys nor gullies, no burrows, just a knife edge line. This strongly suggests that this surface was only exposed for hours or days, not years, and definitely not millions of years. A catastrophic, progressive, global flood would almost certainly have large tsunamis that would encroach on the land, and recede, followed by another tsunami, causing these megasequences.

This description of the Sauk Megasequence explains both the Biblical interpretation and the conventional interpretation. Consider which better explains the evidence.

The erosion and resulting unconformity that ended the Sauk Megasequence was totally unlike anything we have ever witnessed, and would actually be wholly impossible today. This erosional episode worked on the recent Sauk deposits and planed them off to a nearly flat, featureless plain. On the entire continent, no mountain remained, for the St. Peter Sandstone covers essentially the entire continent with a sheet of sand roughly three thousand miles by one thousand miles in area, yet less than 300 feet thick! Evidently, even though subsequent erosion has now removed the sandstone in some areas, it was essentially continuous at first, implying there were no high places on the continent that received no sediment. This can be better comprehended by considering a sheet of paper 0.1 millimeters thick measuring 1 kilometer by 0.6 kilometer draped across a surface flattened with extreme care. This could not have been accomplished by river erosion. The only adequate mechanism is by “sheet erosion”—rapidly flowing water of equal depth that covered a wide area. Uniformitarianism considers the sand to have been deposited by a transgressing shoreline, with sand accumulating on the beach and offshore over about five million years, all the while migrating across the continent. They consider the St. Peter Sandstone to be Early Ordovician in age, or about 480 million years old. But the widespread catastrophic conditions required make the Flood proposal more likely. link

Many of these sediments have been proven to have been transported vast distances over wide areas across continents. The conventional explanations of how this happened, i.e. blown dust, meandering rivers, transgressing shorelines, etc. do not match the evidence well.

Creation researchers are interested in transcontinental sedimentation because this kind of deposition would be expected from a worldwide flood. Geologist Andrew Snelling recently reported that the Coconino Sandstone, visible in the walls of the Grand Canyon, is part of a vast slab containing a colossal 10,000 cubic miles of cemented sand. Where did all this sand come from? The first clue is that “cross beds within the Coconino Sandstone (and the Glorieta Sandstone of New Mexico and Texas) dip toward the south, indicating that the sand came from the north.” The nearest northern source of similarly colored sand was likely from far away Utah, and must have been washed down by a widespread sheet of water. In another instance, the Navajo Sandstone, exposed in portions of Utah, appears bright white because of the purity of its sand grains. Again, where could these sediments have come from? Researchers found that radioactive uranium within the sand has a signature that matches rocks from the Appalachian mountains, about 1,250 miles away. Another study verified the direction of water flow that formed many of these sedimentary layers. Scientists “accumulated data from over half a million paleocurrent vectors” across North America that “verified the “stable southwesterly pattern” that had been documented by other researchers. Although park rangers and posted signs tell area visitors that all this sand was blown in by wind, the evidence strongly indicates water deposition. So how, in all these examples, did these massive amounts of sand move from one side of a continent to another? The Siberian research team proposed that the “zircons originated from the southern margin of Siberia …and were transported to the Verkhoyansk margin by a major transcontinental river system that existed for ~200 million years, the paleo–Lena River.”1 However, there is no evidence of channels or deltas from such a river. Today’s rivers do not build anything like the massively thick sedimentary layers observed in Siberia and North America. Indeed, “how could water be flowing across the North American continent consistently for hundreds of millions of years? Absolutely impossible!” Only an event as cataclysmic as the worldwide Flood that is recorded in Genesis could have done this kind of continent-wide rearranging of sediments. link

In addition to these continental and intercontinental sandstones, the Whopper Sand out in the Gulf of Mexico also strongly supports the global flood, because there is otherwise no good explanation for how this deep, pure sand got so far out into the Gulf.

The Whopper Sand was first discovered about 200 miles off the coast in the deep Gulf of Mexico in 2001. The first well penetrated an unexpected 1,300 feet of nearly pure sand near the bottom of the Paleogene interval, coincident with the base of the Tejas Megasequence.

Surprisingly, the newly discovered sand had sharp boundaries on the top and bottom

“This was also puzzling, since we were trained to expect gradational coarsening-upward bedding during regression [sea level drop] and fining-upward during transgression [sea level rise], rather than the sharp contacts we were seeing,” wrote Joshua Rosenfeld, a retired oil geologist.

Furthermore, Rosenfeld described the sand layer “as being sheet-like rather than channelized.” Apparently, no river systems, such as the Mississippi River, could have formed the Whopper Sand.

Uniformitarian scientists remain puzzled. How could a massively thick and clearly defined sand layer reach these depths and distances offshore? Drilling proves that these sands are thicker and more extensive than initially imagined. Although geologists have found some channelized (river-like) sands and pancake-like thin sands in deeper parts of the Mississippi Delta, it was thought that thick pure sands could not be transported great distances out to sea (200-plus miles).

The recent discoveries by Shell confirm that the Whopper Sand extends beyond 40,000 square miles across the deep Gulf of Mexico in water depths approaching 10,000 feet. It is commonly over 1,000 feet thick and can be up to 1,900 feet thick. link

No slow gradual process could transport this much sand over this large of an area out in deep water. It would take a global flood draining off the entire North American continent to have enough energy to transport this much sand 200 miles out to sea.2

Another example of sediments that cover great areas are the vast, pure chalk beds that make up the famous White Cliffs of Dover and reach great distances.

The Chalk beds that make up the White Cliffs of Dover extend over an extensive area and seem to extend to other continents.

The famous White Cliffs of Dover in southern England. The same beds of chalk are also found along the coast of France on the other side of the English Channel. The chalk beds extend inland across England and northern France, being found as far north and west as the Antrim Coast and adjoining areas of Northern Ireland. Extensive chalk beds are also found in North America, through Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee (the Selma Chalk), in Nebraska and adjoining states (the Niobrara Chalk), and in Kansas (the Fort Hayes Chalk) link

How could such pure chalk beds be deposited across such wide areas without a global flood to deposit them? See this article for details of how these beds could be formed in the global flood and why the conventional idea of many millions of years doesn’t make sense.

Erosion

In addition to looking at sedimentary deposits around the globe, we can look at erosion. We can measure how quickly the continents are being eroded. We can measure how quickly the continents are being raised. The continents are being eroded much more quickly than they are rising and should be planed down below sea level in much less time than the billions of years that the old age proponents say we have been around.

In 1973 creation geologist Steve Austin (then writing under a pseudonym) pointed out that erosion rates are so high that all the continents would be planted down to sea level in just 14 million years. Note that 14 million years is how long into the future the continents can survive, given today’s erosion rates. Moreover, at today’s rates, the sediments already present on the ocean floor would have accumulated in about 30 million years. So at most, both the past and future lifetimes of the continents can’t exceed tens of millions of years. Yet the evolutionary story requires them to be billions of years old! link

If the Earth was as old as we are told, the continents should not exist. Of course some people might say, that the amount of accumulated sediment is much greater than would be expected if the Earth was only ~6,000 years old. That is true if erosion had remained constant over the entire 6,000 years, but what does the Bible say happened in the past that could have caused faster erosion in the past? The global flood would have caused massive erosion as the water drained off of the continents into the seas. This could easily account for the extra sediment. The old-age geologists don’t have a good answer for why there is not enough sediment. link

In reality, the long ages pushed by scientists are pushed so hard because long ages are necessary for Evolution to be plausible. They need Darwinian Evolution so they can say that God didn’t create humanity, because God’s creation of humanity and the universe is what gives God the right to say what is right and wrong. Those who want to do as they please and who want to be their own “gods” will do anything to “disprove” god.

This post has gotten too long, so I will have to address evolution in another post at a later date.

Trust Jesus.

If you do not yet know Jesus, I beg you to trust in Him. Below are some verses that will tell you what you need to know to be saved. If you have any questions, I’d love to answer them. Just message me on Substack.

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (Romans 3:23)

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For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)

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But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

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that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; (Romans 10:9)

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If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. (1 John 1:9-10)

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For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

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He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

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But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)

All verses are NASB unless otherwise noted.