The replica ark that Dutchman Johan Huibers built.

I know, I’ve had conversations, either face to face or online with professed Christians, most much longer in the faith than me, who apparently are too smart for God, smarter than God? Who cannot accept, and refuse to believe The Flood was a global impact event.

EXACTLY as is written in God’s inerrant infallible unchanging eternal living and active Word.

But, they apparently know better. Because worldly science classes have either refuted and poop pooped the idea of a global flood and the accuracy of God’s Word, or else the subject never came up in a class, but they just know, being as smart and logical as they are — reducing God’s ability and power.

The God Who created all things known, but, of course, incapable of doing what He has told us in His inerrant infallible Word [see Genesis 6, Genesis 7, Genesis 8, and Genesis 9].

Or, just cut those 4 chapters out of your Bible since you don’t believe what God revealed to Moses and you view The Great Flood, which covered the earth, not merely a region in the Middle East, as just a story, can’t possibly be true as written.

What’s that? To do so would be to desecrate the Word of God? You could never commit such an act?

Why then, why not begin to believe every word within the Word — which is in its place for a reason, exactly as the Holy Spirit of God gave those words, that truth to Moses and the men who put down those words for us to know and cherish — and believe this very day?

Read on…

Ken Pullen, Sunday, October 6th, 2024

Was Noah’s Flood a global event?

Refuting Gavin Ortlund’s local flood compromise

Noah’s Flood covered the whole globe

24 September 2024

By Jonathan Sarfati

Reprinted from Creation.com

Many professing Evangelical spokespeople compromise the Bible to fit in with secular ‘science’. Sometimes it is due to respectability craving, which never works anyway. Sometimes the compromise doesn’t stop with science but extends to compromising on morality, as with theistic evolutionist Francis Collins.

A newer creation compromiser is Gavin Ortlund (1983– ), President of a ministry calling itself Truth Unites. He is also a fellow of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, named after theistic evolutionist Tim Keller (1950–2023). He has a Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary, an M.Div. from Covenant Theological Seminary, and a B.A. in religion and philosophy from the University of Georgia. Ortlund’s father is Raymond Ortlund Jr. (1949– ), former and founding Pastor of Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and influential in the ‘Young, Restless, and Reformed’ (YRR) movement. Raymond Jr., in turn, is the son of the late Raymond Sr. (1923–2007) and Anne Ortlund (1923–2013), both Evangelical speakers and authors. Gavin’s siblings include Eric Ortlund, an Old Testament Professor, and Dane Ortlund, the author of the popular but controversial book Gentle and Lowly.¹

Gavin Ortlund often advises Christians to agree with the secular ‘consensus’, ignoring Christian and even secular dissenters. E.g., he promotes global warming alarmism and ignores the information presented in our detailed paper, Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW): a biblical and scientific approach to climate change, our video, A Biblical Approach to Climate Change, or the highly credentialed Evangelical climate scientists at the Cornwall Alliance.^2,3 Ortlund himself lists no scientific qualifications—and it sure shows—as we will explain in more detail below!

Ortlund’s review of Is Genesis History? was also published on the soi-disant Gospel Coalition site.⁴ This organization is known for making badly informed attacks on biblical (‘young-earth’) creation (see refutation). Not surprisingly, Ortlund’s review was not as favorable as ours, and he takes the disastrous line that Neanderthals were not human. This stance is likely from progressive creationist Hugh Ross—Ortlund is listed as a ‘visiting scholar’ at the ‘old earth’ organization, Reasons to Believe, founded by Ross. (Fazale (Fuz) Rana has led RTB since July 2022.) We have addressed the severe problems with that line.

One of the problems with saying that Neanderthals are not human is that we know from fossils that Neanderthals hybridized with anatomically modern Homo sapiens, such as the Lagar Velho 1 child skeleton. We also know from genetics that most humans today carry Neanderthal DNA. The logical implication of the RTB/Ortlund view is that most humans today have animals in our ancestry (caused by bestiality!). In fact, this is the logical conclusion that Fazale Rana himself admitted to having embraced. Fazale (Fuz) Rana wrote:

“[I]n the last few years I have become largely convinced that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred … Even though it appears that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred, other lines of evidence indicate that these two hominins were distinct species.”⁵

“While the discovery of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals does stand as a failed prediction of the RTB human origins model, it doesn’t falsify it. Rather, it forces us to revise the model.”⁶

“Is There Biblical Warrant for Interbreeding between Modern Humans and Neanderthals? … a more careful consideration of the biblical text leaves room for this possibility.”⁷

(See also Neandertal-Human Hybrids: Old earth apologetics gone real bad.)

In his local flood video, Ortlund explicitly gushes over Hugh Ross’ stuff on the Flood.

However, he is also listed on the site of the syncretistic theistic evolutionary site, BioLogos.

Local flood compromise

Ortlund wrote quite a detailed article trying to refute a global Flood.⁸ What was immediately striking is how Ortlund parrots all the village atheopathic arguments against a global Flood and Ark, perhaps via Genesis compromisers such as Hugh Ross or William Lane Craig.

It is also very obvious that he hasn’t even read basic YEC material, such as our Creation Answers Book (CAB), or has read it but pretends that it doesn’t exist. He certainly hasn’t acknowledged John Woodmorappe’s classic 1996 book Noah’s Ark: A feasibility Study (NAFS), which answered nearly all his points in more detail. We also addressed many points in the video Noah’s Ark: Fact or Fiction?.

In another book that Gavin Ortlund wrote, titled Retrieving Augustine’s Doctrine of Creation, Ortlund similarly focused his sights on biblical creationists. In reality, the book really exposed Ortlund’s lack of familiarity with the nuanced hermeneutics of Augustine. Augustine, after all, believed in a ‘young’ earth, and he took the Genesis account as a real historical event. For example, Augustine wrote a whole chapter titled “Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World’s Past” in his book, the City of God. Augustine said:

“Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. … They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.”⁹

Like many who are unfamiliar with the writings of the Church Fathers, Ortlund points to the allegorical interpretations in their writings and then assumes that the Church Fathers did not read Genesis historically.¹⁰ However, it is actually the other way around. The Fathers drew out their analogies after first affirming the historical reality of Scripture. In fact, for Augustine, the historical reality of the Fall was key to understanding the Doctrine of Original Sin.

We see the same familiar modus operandi in Ortlund’s writings when it comes to the issue of a global Flood.

Intellectual honesty requires addressing the strongest case for the opposing position. Ortlund hasn’t even addressed the introductory case.

So now, let’s go through his article point by point. (His headings are red, and blockquotes from his article are red and double-indented.)

What does “all the earth” mean?

Here we get the usual excuses that ‘all’ (Hebrew kol כֹּל) doesn’t always mean literally ‘all’. But as we have often pointed out, just because ‘all’ can be used non-literally in some contexts, it doesn’t follow that it’s not literal in other contexts. In reality, it’s not just that the word kol appears, but that the universal language is piled on. Genesis 7:19–23 reads:

And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. … And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. … Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ark.

In fact, kol appears 72 times in the four chapters of Genesis 6–9. Also, in the Flood account, there is a double-all construction: all (kol) the high mountains under the whole (kol) heaven were covered. Lutheran OT scholar H.C. Leupold writes (back in 1942!):

Yet since ‘all’ is known to be used in a relative sense, the writer removes all possible ambiguity by adding the phrase ‘under all [kol] the heavens’. A double ‘all’ (kol) cannot allow for so relative a sense. It almost constitutes a Hebrew superlative.¹¹

Commenting on the non-literal senses in Genesis 41:57; Exodus 9:25, 10:15; Deuteronomy 2:25; and 1 Kings 10:24 (two of the verses Ortlund cites), Leupold writes, “However, we still insist that this fact could overthrow a single kol, never a double kol, as our verse has it.”

Other problems with a local flood

Furthermore, we have pointed out that a local flood makes no sense.

1. Since water seeks its own level, it would take a miracle to keep a local flood for a year without spilling over. If the local Flood was in the Middle East, the problem is even greater; it is shaped like a half bowl, open towards the Indian Ocean. Even if the flood somehow stayed up for a year, when it drained, the Ark would have been carried to the Indian Ocean—the opposite direction from the mountains of Ararat.
2. Why build an Ark longer than a football field, wide enough to block six lanes of the USA Interstate system, and taller than a four-storey building? It had the carrying capacity of 340 semi-trailers. Why not migrate, like Lot did from Sodom?
3. How could a local flood wipe out all humans but eight on the Ark? Ortlund, following Ross, claims that humanity hadn’t spread out very far. However, secular scientists believe that humanity was spread out over the whole globe at the time—well beyond the limits of his local Flood in his desired time frame. E.g., secular anthropologists place the Australian Aborigines older and older, and of course Hugh Ross had to keep adjusting his dates for Adam and the Flood to fit in.
4. What about the real rainbow promise (as opposed to counterfeit rainbows)? It is a symbol of God’s promise to Himself that He would never repeat this act. What act? A local flood? Since there have been many devastating local floods since then, it would mean that God repeatedly broke His promise. Yet we can trust God to keep His promises (otherwise, Christians are in trouble!). What God promised never to repeat was another global Flood—and He has kept this promise.

Ortlund also claims:

Furthermore, as others have pointed out, if erets means the entire globe in Genesis 6–8, then consistent literalism would demand a global desert after the flood, since Genesis 8:7 and 8:14 claim that the “earth” became completely dry after it was flooded.

Whoever these ‘others’ are, the point is lame. There is no “completely” (or kol) in the text. The two verses actually have subtly different meanings. Genesis 8:7 was after Noah could see that the earth was dry in the sense of not being covered by water but still soggy. The tops of mountains were first seen since the tenth month (Genesis 8:5), and the dove that was sent out after the raven in Genesis 8:6–7 found no place to set her feet as “the waters were still on the face of the whole earth”. Only after Genesis 8:10–11 do we read about the dove returning with a freshly plucked olive leaf, and we are now told that the waters had subsided from the earth. The mention of an olive leaf here refutes Ortlund’s point that a literal reading demands a global desert after the Flood. It is actually the opposite.

After a week, the dove was sent out again, and this time around it did not return (Genesis 8:11). However, Genesis 8:13 is the first time Noah saw that the waters were dried from off the earth—the face of the ground was dry. This was the first day of the first month. Genesis 8:14 tells us that Noah continued to stay on the Ark until the 27^th day of the second month, when the earth had dried out. In other words, we are given a chronology of how the earth was gradually drying out from the global Flood until it was no longer soggy and then suitable for human habitation. In addition to the earlier mention of an olive leaf, we also know that, soon after the Flood, Noah planted a vineyard. A plain reading of the Flood account actually says the opposite of what Ortlund claims to be true.

Envisioning a global flood

Ortlund begins:

Let’s assume the flood was global. Water six miles deep covered the Rockies and Everest with unbroken waves and torrent.

Mt. Everest’s summit has marine limestone with fossils of bottom-dwelling crinoids. Thus it was once under water. It was pushed up by earth movements during and after the Flood.

Of course, even basic creationist books point out that the mountains were not covered at their current height. Indeed, the very sharp bends in the rock layers point to their still being soft because floodwater freshly laid them down. It means that the Rockies and Everest were formed as a result of the Flood. Everest has marine limestone on its summit, with fossils of bottom-dwelling crinoids, showing that it really was once underwater.

We don’t know where all this water came from, and where it went, but let’s not trouble with that now.

It wouldn’t have been much trouble at all, because the answers are readily available, e.g., Noah’s Flood—what about all that water?.

Overloading the Ark

Every single species on planet Earth, both male and female, got on the ark and lived there for approximately a year.

No, only every kind, which is broader than ‘species’, and only land vertebrates (animals with backbones).

Arctic wolves travelled the 8000 miles from Northern Canada, kangaroos hopped over from Australia, and all the various species indigenous to Madagascar journeyed up the coast of Africa (all somehow traversing the ocean and surviving the alternate weather conditions).

As we have long pointed out, this presupposes that animals before the Flood were in their current locations and, in fact, that the Flood left the geography alone. In reality, the Flood drastically rearranged Earth’s geography, e.g., probably by splitting a single pre-Flood continent via catastrophic plate tectonics. Also, Arctic wolves are descendants of the pair of the canid (dog) kind on the Ark, adapted to the cold (and note adaptation is not evolution).

Subsequently, 8 people within 7 days load all these millions of animals into the ark (there are approximately 7–9 million different animal species on Earth, so two of each animal, even with a generous definition of how the Bible defines “kind”, yields a lot of animals).

Don’t expect Ortlund to provide the documentation. This is all parroting old village-atheist arguments that grossly overload the Ark—arguments that Ortlund’s likely source, Hugh Ross (and Reasons to Believe), happily recycles. In reality, more sober sources say there are “2.16 million species on the planet. In the chart, we see the breakdown across a range of taxonomic groups—1.05 million insects, over 11,000 birds, over 11,000 reptiles, and over 6,000 mammals.”¹²

There is a common myth that 99% of species are extinct. But what is the evidence? Only about 250,000 fossil species are known. The 99% is an extrapolation based on the innumerable intermediate forms required by evolution but not found in the fossil record.

Also, as CMI pointed out decades ago:

Most people don’t realize that in terms of numbers of fossils, 95% of the fossil record consists of shallow marine organisms such as corals and shellfish. Within the remaining 5%, 95% are all the algae and plant/tree fossils, including the vegetation that now makes up the trillions of tonnes of coal and all the other invertebrate fossils, including the insects. Thus the vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) together make up very little of the fossil record—in fact, 5% of 5%, which is a mere 0.25% of the entire fossil record. So comparatively speaking there are very, very few amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal fossils, yet so much is often made of them. For example, the number of dinosaur skeletons in all the world’s museums (both public and university) totals only about 2,100. Furthermore, of this 0.25% of the fossil record, which is vertebrates, only 1% of that 0.25% (or 0.0025%) are vertebrate fossils that consist of more than a single bone!

Number of kinds

Only land vertebrates are obligate passengers, meaning 1.05 million insect species, 113,813 mollusc species, 110,615 arachnid species, 80,122 crustacean species, and 36,367 fish species are irrelevant to the calculation. There was no need to rescue aquatic creatures from the Flood (although many were killed and buried). Small invertebrates could survive on floating vegetation mats and pumice (perhaps not the 70-cm-wide dragonfly-like Meganeura and Meganeuropsis or the giant millipede Arthropleura, 2.5 metres (8 ft, 2 in) long and body mass of 50 kg (110 lb), which could explain their extinction).

When it comes to Ark passengers, the numbers would be 11,733 reptile species, 11,188 bird species, and 6,596 mammal species (and these include aquatic species such as whales and dolphins that would not be on the Ark, but let’s just count those numbers). The total is 29,517 species. One pair of each species, with seven pairs of the very few ‘clean’ animals, is feasible. Whitcomb and Morris’ 1961 classic, The Genesis Flood, documented this.

Ark capacity

For more up-to-date calculations, the Ark had the carrying capacity of 340 semi-trailers. One semi-trailer can haul 37 1,200-pound slaughter steers, 90 500-pound feeder calves, 180 250-pound pigs, or 300 125-pound sheep. So the Ark could have taken 102,000 sheep-sized animals. Most animals are much smaller than sheep, including most birds, rodents, and lizards. The median size is about a rat.

Kind ≠ species

However, while the Ark would have been feasible if the ‘kind’ = the species, it is not necessary. Despite Ortlund dismissing the difference between ‘kind’ and ‘species’, there is very good reason to think that the kind is much broader. Whitcomb and Morris made this point before I was born, and creationist scholars made the point even earlier. In fact, even before Darwin, creationists understood that comparatively few Ark animals gave rise to many varieties and even what we would call new ‘species’.

One reason that the kind must be broader than ‘species’ is that there are many examples of so-called different species forming hybrids, including fertile ones. A real ‘biological species’, by definition, can’t interbreed with another species and produce fertile offspring. So if two different ‘species’ can reproduce with each other, or with the same third ‘species’, then they are really the same biological species. If they can hybridise at all, then they descended from the same created kind.

So NAFS Ch. 1 treated the ‘kind’ as a genus (plural genera). The book totalled about 8,000 genera, including extinct genera, thus about 16,000 individual animals that had to be aboard. There was plenty of room on the Ark for them—with only one layer of cages per deck.¹³ Since that book, analysis of dinosaur bones showed they likely went through an adolescent growth spurt. So they could have been on board while they were much smaller than full size.

There are also hybrids between genera, meaning that the kind is as broad as the family. Sometimes there are fertile hybrids between genera, meaning that they are really the same biological species. (In fact, sometimes even creatures from different ‘families’ can hybridise, meaning the kind is at least as high as the suborder.) If kind = family, then there would be only about 1,000 pairs, so about 2,000 animals. We pointed this out in our CAB chapter: How did all the animals fit on Noah’s Ark?.

Some anti-creationists (I haven’t seen evidence that Ortlund is one of them) accuse creationists of redefining kind away from ‘species’ to lower the number of passengers to prop up the Ark account. In reality, anti-creationists split the kinds in non-biological ways to overload the Ark.

Mendacious hyper-evolution charge

Ortlund, in his local Flood video, does parrot the Rossite charge that YECs must believe in hyper-evolution if we think that all extant species evolved from a few Ark families. But we have often addressed this canard, for example:

1. God pre-loaded the created kinds with immense genetic diversity. This enabled their descendants to comprise many varieties, which could adapt to many different environments. Most of today’s animals have lost much of their diversity, so they would not be as able to have as much diversity in their descendants. We see this even in humans: a biracial couple can have children of different skin shades, much as Adam and Eve probably did. But couples of a single skin shade will generally have children of the same shade (with some exceptions).
2. Even evolutionists understand that most varieties and even species arise in small isolated populations—allopatric speciation. Evolutionists also recognise that mountainous regions are ideal for speciation because the mountains provide strong natural barriers as a population disperses. Therefore we would expect rapid speciation as the animals dispersed from the mountains of Ararat!
3. Usually, the hyper-evolution charge is the claim that YECs believe that thousands of Ark creatures evolved into the millions of living species. But, as we pointed out, most of these are not land vertebrates, and we certainly don’t think that land vertebrates evolved into fish or invertebrates. In reality, it’s not thousands → millions but thousands → thousands, regardless of whether the Ark passengers were every species, every genus, or every family.

Then, for the next 370 days or so, these 8 people not only survived themselves aboard the ark, but provided ventilation, sanitation, and fresh food and water for all these millions of animals.

What “millions of animals”? But yes to everything else, long ago shown in NAFS Ch. 4, as well as in How could Noah care for the animals?.

And then they opened up the ark, and all the animals traveled back to where they were from over the globe and repopulated their regions.

Again, this presupposes a globe-covering Flood would leave the geography untouched. But indeed animals migrated over many generations, as we showed years ago in our CAB chapter: How did animals get from the Ark to places such as Australia?. One major way was via land bridges uncovered when ocean water moved onto continental ice sheets during the Ice Age caused by the Genesis Flood. Another contributing mechanism is the role of humans in animal migration as they sailed around the world after the Flood. For example, we read that Solomon’s trading fleet in 1 Kings 10:22 involved the transportation of exotic animals from around the world.

Then Ortlund lists a number of tired old canards from another long-age compromiser, David Snoke (whom we have also refuted), which I will refute point-by-point. Ortlund goes on about the need for ‘miracles’, although many of the responses will show the non-necessity of miracles (not the same as non-occurrence). In my Genesis Account, Ch. 18, I write:

The biblical evidence suggests that God used natural means for much of this. E.g., God commanded Noah to build an Ark, rather than levitate them all or recreate all kinds. For the Flood itself, God named water sources that already existed. God used natural means to abate the Flood, and Noah had to use natural means to decide when it was safe to leave the Ark.

Despite this, it could be argued that since the Flood was a major disjunction in biblical history, it was clearly a time of special intervention by God. Biblical creationists need not be closed to miraculous causes for such one-off, special events, rather than worry about ‘scientific’ rigour or ‘economy of miracles’.^14,15 After all, we don’t need to find a quasi-naturalistic explanation for the Resurrection or feeding the 5,000. This is different from ordinary repeatable ‘operational’ science, where ‘God did it’ is not acceptable.¹⁶

But the problem is that the Bible does teach many natural causes for the Flood, so [we generally don’t appeal to what could be called a deus ex machina], in the original sense of a problem resolved by a divine intervention that has no connection with the main storyline.

1. The miracle of transportation of millions of animals to the Ark from Australia, the Americas, Antarctica, and the islands.

Addressed above. What millions of animals? What Australia, etc., when the pre-Flood world was so different?

2. The miracle of the compression of the animals in the Ark. The described volume of the Ark is not large enough for all the millions of animal species plus the food and fresh water they would need for 370 days aboard the Ark.

Again with the millions of animals. But if Ortlund abandoned this atheopathic strawman, there would be little left of his article. There was a lot of rainwater available for drinking, but as NAFS showed even if Noah had taken all the water he needed onboard, there would have been more than enough space.

3. The miracle of the feeding of the carnivorous animals on the Ark. If carnivorous animals came along, then many extra animals of other types had to come for food, unless meat was miraculously refrigerated.

No miracle is needed. Dried and salted meat would both last a long time and reduce mass and volume load. They could be reconstituted with the ample water available.¹⁷ Ortlund might also like to familiarize himself with the indigenous Northern American food pemmican, a mixture of tallow, dried meat strips, and sometimes dried berries. It is a high-energy food adapted by fur traders and polar explorers. Most relevantly, it can last for one to five years at room temperature.

Another idea is fodder tortoises.¹⁸ Indeed, the seamen on the Beagle, on which Darwin made his famous voyage, proved that. They took 30 of the giant Galápagos tortoises on board, discarding the shells and bones as they consumed them.

Note, while God didn’t permit humans to eat meat until after the Flood (Genesis 9:3), animals became carnivorous after the Fall. So humans may have learned how to feed any carnivorous animals they kept for pets or sheep-herding.

4. The miracle of the caretaking of millions of animals by just eight people, including tons of dung production per day.

No miracle, just low-tech and low-maintenance methods that have allowed farmers to take care of lots of animals as a group over winter. E.g., slatted floors for waste to drop through, as I have seen on sheep farms in New Zealand, or what Dutch farmers have used for centuries, the potstal (deep litter system) and grupstal (gravity drain gutter system). There is also vermicomposting, composting by worms, which could be another food source for the carnivorous passengers.¹⁹

Feeding and watering could also be achieved from central filling stations and pipes to the troughs carrying grain, dried meat pellets, or water.²⁰

5. The miracle of the survival of the occupants of the Ark despite the huge heat production in a closed space.

The Ark had a window one cubit high all along the middle of the roof, or a row of windows one cubit high all along the Ark. This would be good for ventilation. Indeed, many factories and warehouses today have such an opening on their roofs because it allows a fair amount of sunlight and good ventilation.

Judging by modern large public buildings, just five air changes of the whole building per hour would be sufficient to dissipate excess animal body heat. NAFS Ch. 5. calculates that even on a calm day with a 5 km per hour breeze, only a fraction of the windows would need to be open to ventilate the Ark adequately.²¹

6. The miracle of the survival of special-climate animals (e.g., polar bears and penguins) on the Ark.

Zoos in temperate and even tropical countries keep both. In any case, the ursid (bear) kind pair was on the Ark; polar bears are their descendants who adapted to the cold. Similarly, there are tropical penguins, such as the Galapagos penguin (see also Were penguins specifically designed for freezing cold environments?). Genesis 6:19–20 and Genesis 6:22 tells us that all land creatures and birds that breathe air through their nostrils (including penguins) were on the Ark.

7. The miracle of the feeding of special diet animals (e.g., the koala) on the Ark.

As we pointed out 30 years ago, koalas were not always so picky. In fact, the now near-exclusive diet of eucalyptus leaves is a behavioural addiction to the eucalyptus chemicals, first tasted in their mother’s milk.

8. The miracle of the creation of water out of nowhere and the destruction of that water afterwards. In a local flood, water moves from one place to another, but in a global flood, new water would have to be created.

No need. The water came from the fountains of the great deep, caused by massive oceanic rifts when the pre-Flood continent broke up. The evaporated water would then fall as torrential rain. More in our CAB chapter: Noah’s Flood—what about all that water?.

It didn’t need to be destroyed afterwards either; it’s there in the oceans. There is actually more than enough water in the oceans today to cover the whole surface—that is, if the earth were totally smoothed. It is well known that “If all the land in the world was flattened out, the earth would be a smooth sphere completely covered by a continuous layer of seawater 2,686 metres [1.669 miles] deep.”²² Indeed, this has been known for over a century. Even Darwin’s co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who had trained and worked as a surveyor, explained how this could be worked out, and his results are in the right ‘ballpark’. He wrote:

According to the best recent estimates, the land area of the globe is 0.28 of the whole surface, and the water area 0.72. But the mean height of the land above the sea-level is found to be 2,250 feet, while the mean depth of the seas and oceans is 13,860 feet; so that though the water area is two and a half times that of the land, the mean depth of the water is more than six times the mean height of the land. This is, of course, due to the fact that lowlands occupy most of the land-area, the plateaus and high mountains a comparatively small portion of it; while, though the greatest depths of the oceans about equal the greatest heights of the mountains, yet over enormous areas the oceans are deep enough to submerge all the mountains of Europe and temperate North America, except the extreme summits of one or two of them. Hence it follows that the bulk of the oceans, even omitting all the shallow seas, is more than thirteen times that of the land above sea-level; and if all the land surface and ocean floors were reduced to one level, that is, if the solid mass of the globe were a true oblate spheroid, the whole would be covered with water about two miles deep.²³

So the floodwater moved into the oceans when the mountains rose and the valleys descended after the Flood.

9. The miracle of the non-sinking of the continents under the weight of that water.

Why would they sink under water but not under the current load of much denser, thicker rock? In fact, there is an issue with weight, but nothing as simplistic as Ortlund thinks. Tectonic plates partly ‘float’ on the weaker underlying asthenospheric (weak, plastically deformable) rocks, with their bottom sinking in. Like icebergs floating on water, they have the same proportion above the surface. With icebergs, it’s about 10%, hence the expression, ‘the tip of the iceberg’. So if the iceberg grows by snow adding ice to its top surface, then although its bottom would sink deeper into the water, the buoyancy forces would adjust its height such that about 10% of its mass still lies above the water. Something similar happens to tectonic plates: if mass is added at a certain point, the bottom would sink, but the top would also rise so that the same proportion would be above the baseline. This is called isostasy.

Under CMI’s preferred Catastrophic Plate Tectonics model (loosely held, as all man-made models should be), the crust would thicken at the boundaries where plates collide or subduct. The thickening would cause rising by isostasy. This explains the significant simultaneous uplift of all of today’s high mountains that occurred during the Pliocene–Pleistocene times (using uniformitarian designations). The dramatically higher plate speeds of CPT than the uniformitarian version would be much more likely to generate such thickened zones in the first place.

10. The miracle of the survival of trees and plants under that water.

Why? Even Darwin showed that garden seeds could still sprout after 42 days’ immersion in salt water, so they could have travelled 2,240 km (1,400 miles) on a typical ocean current.^24,25 This shows how plants could have survived without being on the Ark—again by floating on driftwood or vegetation rafts, even if they were often soaked.

Another demonstrable possibility is vegetative propagation, where new individual plants can grow from stems, roots, bulbs, and other parts of a plant.²⁶ Paul uses the real-world fact that olive branches can be grafted to illustrate believing Gentiles (“wild olive shoots”) and believing Jews (“natural branches grafted back in”) coming into the commonplace of blessing (Romans 11).

11. The miracle of the survival of fresh water fish in salt water (or, salt water fish in fresh water).

See our Creation Answers Book chapter: How did freshwater and saltwater fish survive the flood?. Briefly, fresh water can float on salt water. Salinity gradients (haloclines) mean that saltwater and freshwater regions would persist. Also, current specializations sometimes arose from the loss of salinity tolerance information from an ancestor that could tolerate a wider range of salinity. Finally, I saw for myself that a freshwater and a saltwater fish could share the same tank—as long as they were acclimatized gradually.

12. The miracle of the survival of amphibious and tidal pool creatures on the Ark. Certain species need particular conditions of water environment. In addition to bringing food and water to drink for the regular animals, Noah would have had to set up special aquariums that changed the type of water at different times of day.

They were probably not obligate passengers and could survive in the watery conditions off the Ark.²⁷ They are also nowhere near as delicate as Ortlund thinks.

13. The miracles of the survival of worms, insects, etc. underwater (or, the miracle of the transportation of all insects, worms, etc. to the Ark, including all the necessary ingredients for termite hills, ant colonies, etc.).

Who said they were underwater, as opposed to on floating vegetation rafts, driftwood, and pumice? Darwin himself proposed some ways that even snails could be transported across oceans, e.g., by sticking to the legs of land birds and floating on driftwood. He also showed that snails undergo a form of hibernation that enables them to survive unharmed after submersion in brine for a week.²⁸

Extra-biblical explanations?

In his video, Ortlund complains about the explanations that are not found in the text. But neither are his objections. He ignores our common points about ministerial vs. magisterial uses of science, e.g., as explained in Flood models and biblical realism.

We don’t claim that the Bible is exhaustive, just that it’s true. It clearly teaches a global Flood but doesn’t answer all our questions about it. We are thus entitled to use extra-biblical explanations to answer extra-biblical objections as long as we are not dogmatic about them. We should NOT allow extra-biblical objections to override the clear teaching of Scripture.

Conclusion

After addressing what Ortlund calls 13 ‘miracles’, I find it baffling that anyone seriously engaging with the scriptural text could think that Ortlund was a reliable and intellectually honest critic.