Flooddidit

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Rescued from the

Global Flood

Icon flood.svg
Seven of the clean kind

Flooddidit is a member of the main trio of arguments used by creationists when goddidit can't be applied. (The other two arguments are falldidit and satandidit.) Flooddidit is used to summarily dismiss the entire bodies of knowledge science has acquired in Astronomy, geology, paleontology, geophysics, physical geography, geomorphology, climatology, meteorology, glaciology and hydrology. It is primarily an attempt to argue that chapters 6 to 9 of Genesis represent literal fact, and hence Noah really did build a boat, God really did flood the earth and 99.9% of everyone and everything died as a result. In creationist publications it is generally referred to as Flood geology.

[edit] History of the argument

In the early days of the Enlightenment genuine efforts were made to come up with a naturalistic interpretation of the events recounted in Genesis. However by 1830, the scientific community had largely abandoned the attempt. This was because the geological actions of localized floods had been by then studied and well-documented, and everyone (including the Reverend William Buckland, the 'father' of modern geology who had originally been an influential advocate of biblical accuracy) conceded that there was simply no similarity with large scale geology.

Flooddidit as we know it today was born in 1961 when Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr. published The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. This book was heavily based on the 1954 book The Christian View of Science and Scripture by Douglas Ramm (which also acted as the source for most of the footnotes). Throughout the 60s the book languished in obscurity, but it began to become popular with evangelicals in the late 60s. Morris went on to establish the Institute for Creation Research in 1970.

[edit] How it works

As with falldidit and satandidit, flooddidit requires an incredibly inconsistent application of certain processes, in this case specifically to do with erosion, sediment deposition, bacterial growth rates and volcanoes. Essentially all geological formations can be explained by a huge amount of water rising, lots of volcanoes, a massive amount of erosion, a lot of volcanoes dying mysteriously and then water pushing rocks around, while bacteria decide to behave in ways never observed since. In the case of the so-called "zenithic" rocks, the rocks were actually created by the water itself.[1]

Once relieved of the need for any actual evidence, flooddidit is a supremely powerful explanatory tool. Chalk beds don't take millions of years to build up, because "...under cataclysmic Flood conditions, explosive blooms of tiny organisms like coccolithophores could produce the chalk beds in a short space of time."[2] Fossil forests? " the geological evidence is more consistent with the trees having been uprooted from another place, and carried into position by catastrophic volcanic mudflows"[2] Why is there so much sedimentary rock and why is it so diverse? Because "...moving water transports sediment into a ‘basin’ and, once deposited, it is isolated from the system. The same volume of water can pick up more sediment as it is driven across the continents, for example, by earth movements during the Flood."[2]

Oh and by the way there was an ice-age immediately afterwards. The Bible accidentally forgot to mention it.

[edit] Footnotes

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