The Noachian Flood Part 3 - Aftermath

A few more issues about the claims of a global flood...

More Provisions

Noah's troubles are not over once the ark has hit land. He cannot just let his lions go off and find food straightaway. The first prey they bring down will be one species extinct. And lions kill about five times a week, I think. Noah will have to keep feeding the carnivores until the prey species have got sufficiently established that they can (as a species) survive being hunted. How long will that take for zebras, for example? I would guess decades.

A Change of Heart for the Eternal Unchanging...

God apparently lives outside of time, is eternal and unchanging. So it is rather amusing to read that after the flood he changes his attitude.

21 And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

The Covenant

God allows mankind to eat meat from now on.

Genesis 9:3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. 4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Later, he changes his mind, prohibiting pig meat, for example. Also, why was Abel raising sheep?

Genesis 4:2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. 3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. 4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering:

Now he could be keeping sheep for the wool and the milk, but the bit in verse 4 suggests otherwise. Abel did not sacrifice the milk or the wool to God, he sacrificed the meat (just as Cain offered the part of the plant that was edible).

The Rainbow

God sends the rainbow as a sign that he will never destroy he world again.

Genesis 9: 13 I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. 14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: 15 And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

Curious that the purpose of the rainbow is to remind an all-knowing God about his own promise... However, the really odd thing here is that apparently raindrops did not reflect light before then.

Of course, the reality is that this is just another Biblical "just-so" story. Why are there rainbows? It is God telling us he will not drown the entire world again. Nowadays we know the real reason.

Biodistribution

Given 4500 years how far can one animal species spread? How do they get across large stretches of water? Let us think about the koala, and its 7000 mile journey to Australia. Okay, only a couple of miles each year, but that assumes they have some kind of homing instinct, and head that way directly. Bear in mind they have to find food, sleep (and koalas spend a lot of time sleeping), and raise a family. And all the time, they are heading for this promised land.

I guess it was just lucky none of the faster predators caught up with them...

Why did so many marsupials go to Australia, and so few placentals (only bats, dingoes and humans; outside the fairy tale of creationism, Australian split away before placental mammals evolved, and so they are absent except bats who flew there, and dingos and humans who originally arrived by boat)? What drove quolls, thylacines and wombats so hard that none were left along the way, but no rats or horses went there before Europeans arrived?

Dinosaur Remains

How come there are no remains left today on top of the geological column of dinosaurs. According to creationism, they were around about 4000 years ago, remember, after the flood. These things had seriously big bones; did no one think to save a single one? Did no one fashion a necklace from the teeth of a T. Rex, or boots from the skin of a deinosuchus, or use the horn from a monoclonius to drink from?

History

From this YEC site: "Perhaps it is seen most of all in this very Border Sacrifice which the Emperor performed twice a year. This ceremony, which goes back at least to 2230 B.C. was continued in China for over four thousand years." This would suggest that Chinese culture was already well established by 2230 BC. How does that fit with a global flood?

Here is a timeline for Egyptian rulers, going back to Menes (3414 BC). Hieroglyphs data from about 3000 BC. See also the Wiki entry, which says that the Sahara desert formed around 2500 BC (about when creationists say there was a global flood).

Archaeologists have found Egyptian remains from as far back as 8000 BC. Could these be from communities living before the flood? The answer is no, because these remains are found at the top of the geological column. Any pre-flood remains would have to be at the bottom, buried under all the sediment laid down during the flood.

Answers in Genesis even have a table on their website giving the chronology of early Mesopotamia, going back to 5800 BC, before the time they suppose the flood happened!

Dendrochronology or Tree Ring Dating

From Wiki:

Many trees in temperate zones grow one growth ring each year, the newest ring being under the bark. For the entire period of a tree's life, a year-by-year record or ring pattern is formed that reflects the climatic conditions in which the tree grew. Adequate moisture and a long growing season result in a wide ring. A drought year may result in a very narrow one. Trees from the same region will tend to develop the same patterns of ring widths for a given period. These patterns can be compared and matched ring for ring with trees growing in the same geographical zone and under similar climatic conditions. Following these tree-ring patterns from living trees back through time, chronologies can be built up. Thus wood from ancient structures can be matched to known chronologies (a technique called cross-dating) and the age of the wood determined precisely. Cross-dating was originally done by visual inspection. Nowadays, computers are used to do the statistical matching.

To eliminate individual variations in tree ring growth, dendrochronologists take the smoothed average of the tree ring widths of multiple tree samples to build up a ring history. This process is termed replication. A tree ring history whose beginning and end dates are not known is called a floating chronology. It can be anchored by cross-matching either the beginning or the end section against the end sections of another chronology (tree ring history) whose dates are known. Fully anchored chronologies which extend back more than 10,000 years exist for river oak trees from South Germany (from the Main and Rhine rivers). A fully anchored chronology which extends back 8500 years exists for the bristlecone pine in the southwest US (White Mountains of California).

Web site of a lab that does it:
http://www.earthscape.org/t1/trl01/