“‘I tell you,’ he [Jesus] replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.’” (Luke 19:40)
One of the fatal flaws of the old Earth position is the denial of a worldwide flood. Organizations like Answers in Genesis and Kent Hovind were the original pioneers of this view, and they have spawned a plethora of other young Earth organizations. They have done a good job highlighting the overwhelming evidence that a worldwide flood occurred in the recent past.
Another weakness of old earthers is that they do not have a strong biblical basis. It is pretty clear that the Bible describes the Flood as a worldwide event, and the Creation Story is certainly not poetic. I am not doubting their faith, but to claim the Bible is the Word of God and then twist it like this seems very wrong.
I will not rehash all the evidence for a worldwide flood, but will add a few that I do not think get enough play. The first is the absence of non-flood stories.
There are over 200 ancient stories describing a world that became corrupt. In each one, the wickedness of man was so great that God decided to destroy mankind. There was, however, one person or group that was righteous. God protected this person or group, and their descendants repopulated the earth.
One can imagine a story like this being told over a campfire on a warm midsummer eve. It is easy to see how someone could invent such a fanciful yarn, and then repeat it for their children to help them make sense of the world. Over the generations, fiction became fact, and story, reality.
What is compelling about the story is the means of destruction. It is always a flood. 200 stories from all over the ancient world, and in every one, God destroys the world with a flood. There is never a story about God destroying the world with a pandemic, even though most cultures believe that sickness came from the gods. God never sent a drought or pestilence to destroy mankind. These were also seen as supernatural. We do not read of a hurricane or great wind that destroyed the people, no fire or hail from the sky, no wild animals, or an angel of death. The possibilities are limited only by the creativity of the storyteller. But it is a flood. Always a flood.
If this were a court of law, the storytellers would be charged with collusion. It is impossible for 200 different storytellers, each from radically different cultures, speaking different languages and separated by mountains and oceans, living thousands of miles apart, to spin the same yarn. If there were ten similar stories, that could be a crazy coincidence; 30 would be very fortuitous, 50 suspicious. But 200-plus stories leave no doubt. Either the story is real, or the storytellers colluded. There is no other reasonable explanation.
Logic demands that the story was based on an actual event, and the source must have been the survivors. Although the details of the story have changed over the millennia, the fundamental story remains intact. This is a true story. It is an important story, partially answering the most fundamental of all human questions: “Where did we come from?”
This is not speculation or wishful thinking. It is science. A scientist examines physical evidence (in this case, ancient stories) and makes a logical conclusion based upon them.
The ancient stories are just the tip of the iceberg. There is physical evidence as well. Take, for instance, the Grand Canyon.
A person looking at the Grand Canyon can easily imagine it being carved out suddenly by a huge rush of water. The folds and curves of the rock leave little doubt that the layers were laid down at the same time, not over millions of years. They were obviously shaped while still soft. Trillions and trillions of plants and animals being rapidly buried and fossilized would be expected in a great flood. This is a logical and reasonable conclusion based upon the evidence.
One has to jump through a lot of hoops to accept the scenario of millions of years. Believing the river at the bottom of the canyon formed the Grand Canyon is foolishness. I live by two great rivers, the Minnesota and the Mississippi. Where are the canyons from these rivers? Have they only been flowing for a few thousand years? What about all the other rivers in the world? The erosion from all the other rivers in the world is evidence that the earth is thousands of years old, not millions. The Grand Canyon is obviously an anomaly. It is the exception to the rule. Again, logic demands another explanation.
And the notion that dinosaurs, some 120 feet long and weighing 70 tons, could be buried by anything less than a worldwide flood seems like pure fantasy to me. And we are not talking just a few of them. There are several dinosaur graveyards in the world where thousands of dinosaurs are buried. The amount of sediment covering them is an insane amount. According to the National Park Service: (https://www.nps.gov/dino/learn/nature/geology.htm)
Twenty-four rock layers are exposed in the monument. These rock layers are remnants of extinct ecosystems spanning nearly a billion years,
Even a great flood could not accomplish this. It had to have been a worldwide flood, with huge tides and tsunamis carrying these massive beasts to their final resting place, and then covering them with feet of sediment.
I realize I do not have the credentials to speak authoritatively on the topic, and that is the point. You do not have to be a professional to understand the evidence. It is simple and straightforward. It is the “wise” of this world who twist and distort the evidence.