A question about the flood myth, baraminology, and Pangaea

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I'm mostly just enjoying watching this, since I'm really busy, of late.

However, I had to jump in here... when I worked at the KDHE, the Environment department (mine) shared a floor with the Geology department. Literally every geologist working there whom I met was a Christian, complete with office bibles, pins on lapels, and the various desktop debris that lets them announce their faith to the world. They were among the most religious bunches I met in a science field. All of them knew as much about evolution as I do; in fact, geologists had the timeline and nature of evolutionary history figured out before biologists did.

As for the "flash flood", do a little math, Drich. We'll say that only Mt. Ararat was covered, as a lowball figure, since the story doesn't mention Everest. Mount Ararat is 16,854 feet tall. It rained, according to the story, for 40 days and 40 nights. That's 40 x 24 = 960 hours of rain.

In order for the floodwaters to have covered the mountain in that time, it would have had to rain 17.55 inches of rain per hour that entire time. No flash flood? The heaviest sustained rainfall on record is Tropical Cyclone Denise, at 71" in a 24-hour period, or 2.95 inches per hour, back in 1966.

Even if you say that half the waters were from "the deep", you're still talking 8.775 inches per hour, nonstop, for almost a month and a half, day and night.

No flash flood? Really?

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_we...cords#Rain

I think you forgot to convert the height of Mt. Arrat to inches.  Because 17.55 inches of rain would be 16,848 inches of rain or just 1404 feet.

Good catch!

Yep... I forgot to multiply the feet by the number of inches in a foot. Ugh. S'what I get for trying to rush something because my focus is elsewhere. Or trying to have my focus elsewhere and hurry. Take your pick.

So yeah, take all the figures I did and multiply it by 12 to make inches/hour. 

Height of Mt. Ararat: 16854 ft x 12in/ft = 202,248 inches. 

202,248 in  /  960 hrs = 210.675 inches per hour of sustained rainfall.

Half of that, to account for their claims of water from "the fountains of the deep" (???) would be 105.3375 inches per hour, or roughly 7.6 times harder than the hardest hourly rainfall ever recorded (in WVa). Ever.

Another interesting thought occurred to me, while I was redoing my calculations...

The present claim being addressed in the discussion was that the salt and freshwater didn't combine because everything was so gentle that it couldn't have churned up the freshwater lakes, and thus they were able to remain saline-free without intermixture. Then why, on the other hand, does the Answers In Genesis crew claim the Grand Canyon was carved when the floodwaters receded, so violent was the rush of all that water? It's not a workaround for the problem of freshwater lakes, to say that the fountains opened up; it makes the problem worse, because apparently the rush of such waters to and from "the deep" is violent enough to carve canyons!

My favorite thing I found while trying to look up how long and how the AiG crew claims for the formation of the Canyon, I found this interesting tidbit on the NCSE website:

The basic idea [proposed by AiG] is this: the lowest rocks of Grand Canyon (green), such as the Vishnu Schist and the Zoroaster Granite, were formed on Day Three of Creation, with the commandment, “Let the dry land appear” (Genesis 1:9). Some creationists pin this event at 4004 b.c. For a while people populated the earth, and sediment formed on this new land; geologists call this sediment the Grand Canyon Supergroup (red).

According to some calculations, the Flood began in the year 2348 b.c. (the timing of which might have rather inconvenienced the reign of Pharaoh Unas of Egypt, though he never complained about it in any of the written records from the time). In Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, creationist Steve Austin describes what happened next:

Massive erosion occurred as the upheaval moved and flexed great bodies of earth’s crust including [Grand Canyon Supergroup] strata.

(Italics for quoted section and the bold emphasis, as usual, are my own.)

http://ncse.com/blog/2013/12/creationist...re-0015274