The most outlandish "defense" of the (biblical) flood

[kblesmis]

The scene: Debate Class Zero Period. Zero Period is the class before classes actually start. The team is comprised of multiple seniors, virtually no juniors, some sophomores, and a few freshmen. Total count - Around 20.

Many of the senior debaters were absent (gone to Baylor in Waco, Texas), so the remains of the team gathered in a huddle and eventually began to discuss religion. The school is in small town East Texas and the vast majority of my peers are members of some Christian denomination. I was born and raised Catholic, but everyone was aware of my shift of (unspoken) deism to secular humanism as of last year. The discussion was me vs. everyone else, including my coach which happens to be the optimal arrangement. Everything was all and well until I asserted that there was no evidence for a world wide flood. Then one of the sophomores retorted with a claim I will never forget.

"There is of evidence, have you ever heard of the Cambrian Explosion? That was the great flood."

I can honestly say I forgot how to breathe. As a senior debater, I am rarely at a loss for words. But this...the only response I could force past my lips was, "Huh?" Is this common? Should I expect to be faced with this idiotic ignorant excuse?

[stijndeloose]

Huhwhat?!

How on earth can the Cambrian Explosion be 'evidence for the biblical flood'?

I wonder if they could even explain that themselves.

[dinkum]

"Zero Period" sounds about right.

Ask your coach how you're supposed to debate against sheer, staggering ignorance. If the other team gets to just make up stupid shit as they go along, there's absolutely no point in pretending to "debate". You'd be better off hanging around with the cheerleaders.

And yes, this breathtaking stupidity is what you can expect from creationists.
Every.
Single.
Time.

[Chairman Bill]

... You'd be better off hanging around with the cheerleaders.

Quite right. Sod the debating

[stijndeloose]

... You'd be better off hanging around with the cheerleaders.

Quite right. Sod the debating

[Girlysprite]

As for the cheerleaders, I hope you don't mind if I'd rather hang out with hunks, or the game-nerd group, or, optimally, a group with features them both in the same persons?

As for the argument; What else is new? Creationists hears of something that contains lots of water, or flood from an actual science background and runs off with it without even understanding the matter.

[Calilasseia]

Oh dear, not the "Cambrian Explosion" nonsense again ...

First of all, how does an event dated to around 500 million years ago by rigorous, reliable dating methods support the blind assertion that the planet was flooded to a depth of 9,000 metres during recorded human history?

Second, how does an event that took eighteen to twenty-three million years to complete, according to one scientific paper in my collection, support the blind assertions erected about the fantasy flood?

Third, how does an event consisting of cladogenesis events in living organisms support a sodding flood?

Here's some relevant papers that deal with the proper scientific analysis of the "Cambrian Explosion", which many biologists now refer to as the "Cambrian Pop", because it's no longer considered to be of seminal importance with respect to the appearance of several major clades of living organisms, not least because scientists have now amassed a significant collection of Precambrian fossils covering a range of taxa. Indeed, I presented coverage of a scientific paper here a long while ago, which describes the holotype of a fossil called Bangiomorpha pubescens, which is a multicellular eukaryote organism dating back to 1.2 billion years before present. Which means that multicellular eukaryotes had appeared and were beginning the process of cladistic divergence around 700 million years before the Cambrian era. Appropriate papers dealing with relevant issues are:

Estimating Metazoan Divergence Times With A Metazoan Clock by Peterson, Lyons, Nowak, Takacs, Wargo & McPeek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 101(17): 6536-6541 (April 2004)

The Timing Of Eukaryotic Evolution: Does A Relaxed Molecular Clock Reconcile Proteins And fossils? by Douzery, Snell, Bapteste, Delsuc & Philiipe, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 101(43): 15386-15391 (October 2004)

The Cambrian "Explosion": Slow Fuse Or Megatonnage? by Simon Conway Morris, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 97(9): 4426-4429 (April 2000)

Fossils, Molecules And Embryos: New Perspectives On The Cambrian Explosion by Valentine, Jablonski & Erwin, Development, 126(5): 851-859 (February 1998)

Testing the Cambrian explosion hypothesis by using a molecular dating technique by Bromham, Rambaut, Fortey, Cooper and Penny, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 95: 12386-12389 (October 1998)

Sr and C isotopes in Lower Cambrian carbonates from the Siberian craton: A paleoenvironmental record during the ‘Cambrian explosion’ by Derry, Brasier, Corfield, Yu, Rozanov & Zhuralev, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 128: 671-681(1994)

Can fast early rates reconcile molecular dates with the Cambrian explosion? by Bromham & Hendry, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 267:, 1041-1047 (2000)

Precambrian Sponges with Cellular Structures by Li, Chen and Hua, SCIENCE 279: 6 February 1998

Molecular Phylogeny of Arthropods and the Significance of the Cambrian "Explosion" for Molecular Systematics by Regier & Schultz, AMER. ZOOL., 38: 918-928 (1998)

As usual, creationists are behind the times. But what else do you expect from people who subscribe to a doctrine that was erected 3,000 years ago, and try desperately to force-fit reality to the scribblings of Bronze Age nomads on old parchments?

[theropod]

The scene: Debate Class Zero Period. Zero Period is the class before classes actually start. The team is comprised of multiple seniors, virtually no juniors, some sophomores, and a few freshmen. Total count - Around 20.

Many of the senior debaters were absent (gone to Baylor in Waco, Texas), so the remains of the team gathered in a huddle and eventually began to discuss religion. The school is in small town East Texas and the vast majority of my peers are members of some Christian denomination. I was born and raised Catholic, but everyone was aware of my shift of (unspoken) deism to secular humanism as of last year. The discussion was me vs. everyone else, including my coach which happens to be the optimal arrangement. Everything was all and well until I asserted that there was no evidence for a world wide flood. Then one of the sophomores retorted with a claim I will never forget.

"There is of evidence, have you ever heard of the Cambrian Explosion? That was the great flood."

I can honestly say I forgot how to breathe. As a senior debater, I am rarely at a loss for words. But this...the only response I could force past my lips was, "Huh?" Is this common? Should I expect to be faced with this idiotic ignorant excuse?

Hi,

Let me try to set the record straight. There was no global flood. If the claim was true we would find lots of land animals, including higher primates like us, preserved in the deposits representing that time frame. Instead we find a world devoted to live in saline water. No land creatures of any "kind" is found in Cambrian deposits. The temporal links between the increase in the complexity and diversity of life is indisputable. Also we find fossils from BEFORE the Cambrian. Much more impressive, to me, is the rebounding of life after the end Permian event. What tough bastards!

Hydrodynamic sorting, should such a flood be true, would leave a signature much different than we find. The fossil record of ammonites is alone enough to torpedo the flood myth. Where the flood to be true the effect of hydrodynamics would arrange these hard shelled creatures largest to smallest. We find them, instead, becoming more ornate, diverse and specialized up to the end of the Cretaceous*. (Species identification/distinction is obvious between species of most genus via morphology and suture patterns).



IMAGE SOURCE

Very small microconchs can be found in the same horizon as fully adult representatives. However, as we dig deeper and deeper in fossiliferous marine formations we can directly observe the species turnover. Just like the dinosaur T. rex, which only lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, there are ammonites that lived right up to the end of that time. At any given level of deposition we never see hydrodynamic sorting that fits a global flood.

Atmospherically sorted volcanic ash can be found between layers of other sediments of both wind blown and water deposited origins. Unless the flood underwent periods of expansion and contraction which left dry land to allow for the ashfalls, and resulting environmental changes preserved between them, the whole idea is absurd.

Such a global flood would leave more than an telltale "maybe" signature of the event. The world would be completely different than we know. Corals that do not do well in water not "just so" would be extinct as a result of a global flood. I doubt Noah had the skills to keep millions upon millions of micro-ecosystems for salt/photo dependent ocean life alive. Nasty ass flood water would stop ocean breathing and cause the air to sour, planet wide.

We have a thread here of such length it is actually epic regarding all the things wrong about the idea of a flood.
Link to 345 page thread.

*Some studies suggest these Cretaceous cephalopods were, like dinosaurs, becoming less and less diverse towards the K/T event, suffering a series of localized extinctions up to the K/T.

RS

[kblesmis]

I'm a straight female myself, so the cheerleaders don't do much for me. Unfortunately, the bell rang before I could sputter out anything else. I just don't understand. The Cambrian Explosion occurred roughly 500 million years ago. How could it be evidence for the flood?

[Calilasseia]

I'm a straight female myself, so the cheerleaders don't do much for me. Unfortunately, the bell rang before I could sputter out anything else. I just don't understand. The Cambrian Explosion occurred roughly 500 million years ago. How could it be evidence for the flood?

Your question is, of course, entirely rhetorical.

What you forget here is that creationists aren't interested in reality, they are interested in supporting an ideology. They have accepted uncritically, that the blind assertions of mythology constitute "axioms" about the world, "axioms" that are to be regarded as unconditionally, eternally true, and never to be questioned, and that reality is somehow obliged to conform to the world view built upon those purported "axioms". Indeed, Henry Morris made explicit the principle lying at the heart of creationism (a principle that lies at the heart of all doctrine centred world views, but is manifest in creationism), namely that when reality and doctrine differ, reality is wrong and doctrine is right. To these people, reality is something to be subject to apologetic force-fitting to doctrinal presupposition.