Against Omphalos

The Omphalos hypothesis is that although the earth and universe are young (6,000 years old is the usual claim among young earth creationists, or YECs), God created it with the appearance of age. That is, he carefully constructed life on earth, the ground beneath our feet, the stars in the sky, and everything else so that it would look billions of years old. The name comes from the Greek word for "navel," based on the implication that Adam was created with a navel even though he didn't need one. Although Omphalos isn't a very common position even among fundamentalists, there really are people who believe that dinosaur bones were planted by God to fool the scientists and other heathens.

So, is Omphalos a reasonable hypothesis? I will argue here that it is not.

What Omphalos Concedes
Before we begin, it's important to note what supporters of Omphalos must concede: that there is strong evidence for an old earth. This is crucial, because it means YECs who support Omphalos acknowledge that they seem to be wrong. Everything from asteroids to ice cores to DNA points to them being incorrect: they're supposedly right only by theological technicality. Once this is admitted, the only thing standing in the way of a true old earth view is demonstrating Omphalos' many flaws. Some supporters may then retreat back to a YEC view, but this only betrays an obstinate need to preserve their beliefs whatever the cost.

Is It a Good Explanation?
There are three reasons that we should be highly suspicious of Omphalos right out of the gate. First, an Omphalos-style universe would be identical to a truly old universe. Therefore, Omphalos is unfalsifiable: it can't be disproven, so if it's wrong we would have absolutely no way of knowing it. Intellectually honest people should want to know whether they're right or wrong, and Omphalos doesn't allow for this.

The second point is almost too obvious: there's just no evidence that Omphalos is true. The only reason some Christians advocate it is so they can continue believing what they've always believed. They can't point to anything in the physical world to support Omphalos. Nor does it have any theological basis: there's nothing like this claimed anywhere in the Bible, and (as we'll see later) there's no reason for a good God to act in this way.

The third reason is based on Occam’s razor. The old earth hypothesis explains the evidence at least as well as Omphalos, but the latter requires a huge additional assumption: that it only appears old because an omnipotent deity carefully designed it that way. Thus, the "old universe" hypothesis is the better explanation.

Is the Deception Justified?
Most Christians realize intuitively that Omphalos implies deception on God’s part, and therefore reject it. It's true that God would be knowingly causing people to believe something untrue, but could he somehow be justified in doing so? I'll examine a few ways that this might be the case, and then show why they're flawed.

The first argument was used by Philip Henry Gosse in his 1857 book Omphalos, in which the hypothesis was first formally proposed. He claimed that because God created a world with mature plants, animals and humans, he could have also created the rest of the world in a "mature" form. But there's a huge difference between creating mature beings that can care for themselves and elaborately faking the evidence found in craters, fossils, tree rings and countless other sources. The former is for the clear purpose of creating a functioning world, while the latter is blatant deception carried out for no apparent reason.

Second, maybe God set things up this way to test our faith, to see if we can ignore the misleading physical evidence and find the spiritual truth. But there's no good reason to trust personal revelation over empirical evidence. We know from studying the brain and human behavior that we're highly fallible and prone to everything from poor reasoning to hallucinations. In contrast, the scientific method is a massively successful truth-finding tool—and that tool points us to an old universe. If God wants to test our faith, he can do so without resorting to deception: for example, by seeing how we react in times of trouble, or asking us to do something difficult like missionary work.

If Christians still aren't convinced, they should imagine being raised in a non-religious home and brought up with the perfectly sensible old-earth conclusion. If they were later faced with the Omphalos hypothesis, which would be more reasonable to accept? The naturalistic explanation supported by a large body of evidence, or one that says a divine being has gone to great lengths to deceive them by creating fake evidence, in the hopes that they'll somehow see through the deception? Clearly the former. So would God be justified in sending them to an eternity in hell for believing a mountain of evidence over a mere gut feeling? Clearly not.

The elaborate deception that Omphalos implies also opens up the possibility that God is deceiving us about other things as well. For instance, maybe this is all a test—but in reverse. Maybe God will send those who accept the evidence to heaven, and send those who believe dogmatically in the unfounded claims of an ancient text to hell. While this is unlikely, it's still more reasonable than the traditional Omphalos hypothesis since it gives proper weight to empirical evidence.

Finally, once Omphalos proponents have run out of options, they may appeal to omniscience and claim that God could have a good reason for his deception that we just can't comprehend. Like Omphalos itself, the appeal to omniscience is a terrible explanation: it's unfalsifiable, has no supporting evidence and violates Occam's razor. Plus, we can only hope to understand God’s motives using our human reasoning, and based on this reasoning deception would seem malevolent. To believe otherwise is to rely on blind and unquestioning faith, which would be dangerous if God did turn out to be malevolent.

Conclusion
As I've shown, the Omphalos hypothesis is inconsistent with a good God because it would require elaborate, unjustifiable deception that would result in eternal punishment for millions of people. I have also shown that even if Omphalos didn’t require such deception, it would still be highly suspect due to its lack of falsifiability, evidence and parsimony. Therefore, Omphalos is an unreasonable hypothesis and a poor explanation of the natural world. Once we realize that the evidence clearly points to evolution and an old universe, we should embrace it instead of grasping desperately at far-fetched alternatives.

Those Pesky Craters

Young earth creationists have a pretty serious problem. They're burdened with the task of explaining how all of this...

Yes, those are all craters on the moon.

...happened in just 6,000 years. We see craters like these on most solid bodies in our solar system, but for the sake of simplicity let's focus just on lunar craters for now. These craters demonstrate that our world is old in two ways. First, there's the evidence from sheer numbers. There are an estimated 300,000 craters larger than 1 kilometer on the near side of the moon alone—and the far side actually has significantly more. Based on the rate of such impacts, they must have taken place over hundreds of millions of years.

Then there's the evidence from big craters. The largest confirmed crater in the solar system is the massive South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is shown in dark blue on the right of the picture above. It measures an astonishing 2500 km (1600 mi) across. That's equal to the distance from San Diego to Memphis, from Dallas to Boston, or from Paris to Moscow. Had an impact of this caliber occurred while humans were alive, its effects would surely have been visible from earth, so why is there no mention of it in the historical record?

In addition, some craters on earth are also quite large, although tectonic activity makes them harder to find. The Chicxulub crater on the coast of Mexico is over 180 km (110 mi) across, and may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This impact would have resulted in worldwide earthquakes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions and kilometers-high tsunamis, filled the atmosphere with thick dust and broiled the planet’s surface. And that's not even the biggest crater. The largest one known, the Vredefort crater in South Africa (at right), is nearly 300 km (180 mi) across, so its effects would probably have been significantly worse. If impacts like these all occurred in the last few thousand years, isn't it strange that we have no human record for any of them?

There's not much YECs can do to effectively respond to these facts. Here's how Henry Morris, the father of modern creationism, tried to explain lunar craters in his book The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth:

"[T]he possibility is at least open that the fractures and scars on the moon and Mars, the shattered remnants of an erstwhile planet that became the asteroids, the peculiar rings of Saturn, the meteorite swarms, and other such features that somehow seem alien to a "very good" universe as God must have created it may have been acquired later. Perhaps they reflect some kind of heavenly catastrophe associated either with Satan's primeval rebellion or his continuing battle against Michael and his angels."

That's right, folks. The man largely responsible responsible for popularizing creationism in 20th century America believed that craters on the moon may have been caused by an outer space battle between angels and demons.

Nowadays, YECs make the (only slightly less silly) claim that these impacts, while caused by real asteroids, were made during Creation Week, the Fall or the Flood. What they always conveniently fail to mention, however, is why. They could argue that the impacts on earth might be some form of divine punishment. But what possible reason could God have for hurling asteroids at the moon and even distant planets? Such actions would not have affected us in any way.

The truth is that most believers in a young earth never even consider the implications of phenomena as simple and obvious as impact craters. The few that do can only offer explanations that are both ridiculous and inadequate, letting their faith fill in the rest.

Endogenous Retroviruses

If I were asked to present the single line of evidence that best supports common descent, endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) would probably be my choice. They attest not only to evolution in general, but to human evolution specifically and even to the age of the earth—and they present a potential point of falsifiability.

Retroviruses reproduce by inserting their genetic code into a cell's DNA. In rare cases, they happen to do this to one of the host organism's germ line cells (which become sperm or egg cells). When that organism reproduces, the retrovirus' genetic code is passed down to future generations. The retrovirus is now an ERV, which then lies dormant in the genome, slowly accumulating mutations just as the rest of the DNA sequence does. ERVs are essentially genetic fossils, remnants buried not in the ground, but deep within every cell of the body.

We know ERVs are actual remnants of viruses—and not just because they look exactly like viruses, although that should be evidence enough. In 2006, a team of French scientists actually revived an ERV from the human genome, which they dubbed "Phoenix." When introduced to a cluster of human cells, Phoenix was able to infect them—which would of course be impossible if Phoenix wasn't a real virus that actually infected one of our distant ancestors.

Even if ERVs didn't demonstrate our common ancestry with other animals (I'll get to that in a minute), they'd still be completely incompatible with a 6,000 year old earth. They make up almost 8 percent of the human genome in the form of 98,000 fragments from 30,000 retroviruses—and everyone's ERVs are more or less the same, give or take a few mutations. For that many viruses to insert themselves into just the right sperm or egg cells and spread evenly throughout the entire population would take several orders of magnitude longer than the young-earth paradigm allows.

So why are ERVs important evidence for evolution? Simple: they're arranged in patterns called nested hierarchies, and there's no reason to expect to such patterns unless common descent is true. If an ERV shows up in one species, which later splits in two, it will show up in both "daughter" species. For example, in the graph below, some specific ERVs are found in gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimps, and humans, because the virus infected the common ancestor of all five. Some ERVs are found in just the latter four, some in just the latter three, and so on. What's more, we find them in the exact same location in the genome of each species, meaning that the virus didn't happen to somehow infect them independently.

From Lebedev et al 2000. Time goes left to right.
Arrows represent ERV insertion at specific points in the genome,
which carry over to all subsequent species in that lineage.

At no point should we ever expect the same ERV in the same location in, say, humans and gibbons but not chimps—and we don't. The same goes for any two species that don't share a direct common ancestor, and the pattern holds each and every time. Let no one ever tell you that evolution is unfalsifiable; if the above examples turned to be true for some ERV, it would be completely unexplainable by common descent. However, the nested hierarchies we do find beautifully match the ones formed by other types of evidence.

So there we have it: ERVs point powerfully to an old earth, human evolution, and common descent in general. Naturally, creationists have tried to undermine this evidence, and as usual they fail miserably. I've already answered one objection (that they were never viruses at all), but these two blog posts by a graduate student specializing in ERVs offer a better response than I ever could. It saddens me that so many people—40% in America—believe in strict creationism, when most of them have never so much as glanced at the extraordinary evidence available.

Creationism Notes Refuted, Part 3

The previous section of notes covered dinosaurs, dating methods, and the age of the earth. Next up are arguments in favor of young earth creationism and intelligent design.

Young Earth "Evidence"

These claims are generally meant to line up various measurements of the age of the earth with the time of the flood.

Notes: The Sahara is growing too fast (it's about 4,000 years old)!

Answer: The desert itself is young, but not the earth.

N: Methuselah, the world's oldest tree, is just 4,300 years old!

A: Wrong on multiple levels. It's older than that, it's not the oldest, and individual trees are the least of YEC's problems.

N: The Great Barrier Reef is under 4,200 years old!

A: No, no, no. It's way older than that, and once again it's not even the oldest.

N: Oceans could get from fresh to saltwater in under 5,000 years!

A: Nope. And even if they could, millions of freshwater species would have to very quickly evolve a tolerance to saltwater.

N: Stalactites in Carlsbad Caverns could have grown really fast!

A: Wow, they're using a lot of Hovind's stuff. Anyway, nope.

N: Earth's continents would erode away in just 14 million years!

A: Yeah, totally... as long as new land masses were never formed ever.

N: The first writing is 5,000 years old, fully developed, and found in Mesopotamia!

A: So they've taken to proudly admitting problems with their worldview now? Their precious flood was supposedly about 650 years later than that. And even leaving that aside, they're still completely dead wrong.

N: The Chinese calendar starts in 2700 BC!

A: Look, it should be obvious that this is terrible evidence, but in case it isn't, here's a link.

N: Who did Cain marry? His sister, of course! Problem solved!

A: Except that such tiny population sizes create a huge genetic bottleneck that we could easily observe today. The post-flood starting population of 6 (Noah and his wife had no more children) is an even more recent issue.

Design Arguments

Most of these are arguments take the form "I don't know how it happened, so it couldn't have happened." This is fallacious because it assumes we will never figure out how something happened—a very poor assumption given that scientists are constantly learning more about the world around them. Unlike incredulously asking questions, doing real science takes time, especially since there are so many evolved features to study. And even so, many of the examples below already have plausible explanations.

N: The bombardier beetle's chemical system couldn't have evolved.

A: Yes, it could. One model for how it could have come about is given here.

N: The woodpecker's tongue couldn't have evolved.

A: Yes, it could. This claim stems from a misunderstanding of woodpecker anatomy.

N: The gecko's suction cups couldn't have evolved.

A: First, they're actually tiny hairs called setae. Second, I don't know how they evolved, but it doesn't seem all that difficult. Creationists seem to think that tiny things are harder to evolve, perhaps because it would be difficult for us to make them due to our size. But evolutionary processes have no "size" and thus work just as well on a small scale.

N: Spiders' different types of webbing... couldn't have evolved?

A: It wasn't quite clear what was meant by this. Certainly various web-spinning strategies evolved and diversified to fill different environmental niches, though. It even seems that spiders themselves diversified based on differences in silk. Here is an entire book on the subject.

N: Ears couldn't have evolved.

A: Not only could they have evolved, but we have detailed fossil evidence of how mammalian ears evolved from reptilian ones.

N: Eyes couldn't have evolved.

A: Not only could they have evolved, but a model for their evolution was proposed 150 years ago in The Origin of Species.

N: Lizard "salt sneeze" glands... couldn't have evolved?

A: Again, not quite sure what was meant here. Here is a book chapter on salt gland evolution, though.

Intelligent Design

N: Intelligent design (ID) bases its assumptions on science, not the Bible.

A: ID is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable and does not propose any testable hypotheses; its nebulous designer can be molded to fit any set of facts. Furthermore, most of its proponents are creationists who are merely hiding their religious motivations in order to appear legitimate.

N: Michael Behe has found irreducibly complex (IC) systems.

A: First, many of the systems he's claimed to be IC are not—that is, they can have parts removed and retain partial function. And second, paradoxical as it may seem, even truly IC systems (as Behe defines the term) can evolve in multiple ways. See here for a great list of articles on the subject, and here for a 10-minute YouTube video efficiently summarizing the problems with IC.

N: The bacterial flagellum is IC and thus couldn't have evolved.

A: Yes, it could. It probably began as a Type III secretion system. One possible model is summarized with this graphic.

N: Entirely new structures like wings and eyes couldn't have evolved.

A: The reasoning behind this is unclear. In general, though, either they're created from scratch (e.g. eyes began as patches of light-sensitive cells), or new features are added to existing structures (e.g. wings are modified theropod forelimbs, and feathers likely evolved from scales).

N: DNA is a complex code and couldn't have evolved.

A: It most likely came from RNA, which in turn came from even simpler molecules.

N: Specified complexity suggests an intelligent agent.

A: This idea basically ignores the proposed mechanisms for abiogenesis and evolution altogether. Many have criticized this concept as flawed or even incoherent.

N: SETI searches for recognizable patterns of signals as a sign of intelligence.

A: One huge problem with this analogy is that there is no known mechanism by which such signals could be generated naturally.

That's all for this batch. The next one will thankfully be the last.

Creationism Notes Refuted, Part 2

I've already covered the intro, human transitionals and Noah's flood portions of my sister's school creationism notes. Next up is dinosaurs, dating methods and the age of the earth. But her notes also included a printout of an article by Brian Thomas called "No Fruit Fly Evolution Even after 600 Generations," which can be found here. He claims that no evolution was observed in three long-term scientific experiments involving bacteria and fruit flies. In doing so, he blatantly misrepresents their findings; it's hard to tell if he's lying or just really dumb. Here is one response, but I'll summarize the article's errors below.

In the first experiment, the scientists collected mutant stains of fruit flies in order to identify the genes for body development (which turned out to be similar to corresponding genes in other animals in a way that supports evolution). They were trying to get deformed fly embryos, yet Thomas falsely says they wanted to "document...evolution in action," and accidentally ended up with deformities, which showed "that fruit flies could not evolve." Next Thomas claims that the E. coli in the Lenski experiment were "hobbled by accumulated mutations, and the only changes that occurred were degenerative." No evidence is provided for this, and in fact the E. coli evolved several useful features, including the ability to breed 75% faster and to eat citrate.

Finally, there's the titular "600 generation" experiment. Scientists succeeded in getting fruit flies to develop 20% more quickly in the human equivalent of just 12,000 years, although some other traits were negatively affected. Thomas complains that the genes had not yet become "fixed" in the population, and though he mentions the authors' suggestion that not enough time may have elapsed for this to occur, he doesn't actually respond to this possibility (plus, genes may not need to be fixed in sexually reproducing populations at all). Overall, the article is a hopeless mess of confusion, mistakes and baseless assertions.

Now then, on to the notes.

Dinosaurs

It's not clear whether the teacher thinks actual winged, fire-breathing dragons have existed in the recent past, or just dinosaurs. On the one hand, the notes mention that the word "dragon" was used a few centuries ago to refer to dinosaurs—a fair point. But then they turn around and cite Isaiah 14:29 and its "fiery flying serpent" as evidence. They're really sending mixed messages about precisely what level of crazy they're willing to endorse.

Notes: Post-flood dinosaurs went extinct due to climate and human hunting.

Answer: I find it highly doubtful that well over 1,000 species—covering a wide range of sizes and niches (including air, land and sea)—could have died out that fast.

N: There are many stories about dragons, including Bible references (note: KJV).

A: And? There are also stories about Bigfoot, Nessie, krakens, UFOs and so on. Heck, there are entire fields of pseudoscience called cryptozoology and ufology. Are those things all real because there are stories about them? (Also, dragon myths were likely inspired by actual dinosaur fossils, just as giant squids inspired kraken myths.)

N: In Daniel 14:22, Daniel kills a dragon the Babylonians were worshipping.

A: This verse isn't even in the Bible. It's a later addition.

N: A dictionary from 1946 called dragons "rare" rather than "mythological."

A: Uh... huh. So 60-odd years ago there were still a few dragons hanging around? Is this for real? Do the people teaching this have brain damage or something?

...Ahem.

Anyway, this seems to be the entry in question:

"Now Rare" quite obviously refers to usage of the word "dragon" to mean "a huge serpent." The phrase's formatting (capitalized and italicized to distinguish it from the definition itself) and the second listed definition ("A fabulous [i.e. mythical] animal...") both confirm this.

N: Soft tissue has been discovered in dinosaur bones.

A: Not necessarily, and even if they did, it still doesn't indicate recent fossilization.

N: Ica stones have drawings of dinosaurs.

A: Yeah, except they were created as souvenirs for tourists.

Dating Methods

N: The geologic column is based on circular reasoning.

A: No, it isn't. Strata were mostly dated relative to one another, and index fossils create an additional reference point.

N: Radiometric dating is based on unprovable assumptions.

A: Some of the assumptions are reasonable, some are taken into account. And some methods avoid making assumptions.

N: The RATE project concluded that decay rates change.

A: There were numerous problems with that project, and tons of scientific studies disagree. My personal favorite detail is that "radioactive decay at a rate fast enough to permit a young earth would have produced enough heat to melt the earth."

N: Certain mammoths yield differing dates for different parts of their bodies.

A: This claim seems to have resulted from misinterpreted data.

Old Earth "Counterexamples"

The following are supposed limits on the earth's age.

N: Exponential growth of the human population!

A: Wow. Seriously? Okay, look. The fact is that population growth rates fluctuate wildly: war, disease, famine and natural disasters kill people off, and innovations such as agriculture and medicine allow them to flourish. This is what the actual population curve looks like.

N: Too few supernovas (just 300)!

A: Nope. And here are all the ones we've found so far—notice that there are way more than 300, and the number discovered per year has recently exploded.

N: Jupiter's cooling off too fast!

A: Nope. It's just not.

N: Ganymede's cooling off too fast!

A: Here are two possible explanations (see bottom paragraph of section).

N: Saturn's rings should have disintegrated!

A: Nope. They're relatively young and kept in place by Saturn's moons.

N: The moon is moving away from the earth too fast!

A: Nope. Based on bad data.

N: All the comets should have disintegrated!

A: Nope. New comets come from the Oort cloud.

N: No direct evidence for the Oort cloud!

A: So? Its existence is supported by indirect evidence (see previous link).

N: The earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast!

A: Nope. Sure, it's decaying right now, but it fluctuates.

N: Earth's rotation is slowing too fast!

A: Nope. Based on bad data.

N: The Mississippi River delta doesn't have enough sediment!

A: Nope. The delta's location changes periodically.

I am continually amazed by how abysmal these arguments are. At times it's like they've scraped clean through the bottom of the barrel and just keep on digging. To think that parents are paying the school thousands of dollars a year for their kids to be taught this stuff.

About halfway done now. Just two more posts to go.

Creationism Notes Refuted, Part 1

Recently my sister mentioned that she was being taught about creation and evolution at her (Christian) school. Out of curiosity, I looked to see if she had any notes on the subject. What I found was much worse than I expected: she's been taught about two months' worth of absolute raving lunacy. It's even more ignorant than the stuff I learned while I was there. I had wanted to take on various creationist claims slowly and steadily, but I've decided to accelerate my pace by quickly picking these notes apart. Because there's so much (mis)information, I'll do this with a combination of personal commentary and external links.

Before I start, I want to emphasize that I certainly don't blame my sister for content of these notes. She just wrote down what she was taught, and although she's a very intelligent person, it's remarkably easy to simply go along with those teachings without questioning them. I know that from personal experience.

Introduction

Notes: References to Prov. 4:23, 22:6; 2 Cor. 2:4-5.

Answer: These verses have the effect of encouraging close-mindedness and child indoctrination. Creationists have to be on their guard against religious doubt; honest and unbiased investigation of the evidence is not even an option.

N: Science has to be observable.

A: And evolution is—we see it directly on a small scale and indirectly through other evidence. (Indirect evidence is perfectly valid, else forensics would be non-science just because the crime itself wasn't observed.)

N: There are no transitional fossils.

A: There are so many it's not even funny.

N: Quote from biologist Colin Patterson apparently claiming uncertainty about transitionals.

A: A very common creationist misinterpretation.

N: Many scientists think aliens planted the first life on earth.

A: A huge exaggeration. A few have suggested it as a possibility, but there are far more plausible explanations.

N: Timeline that places the Big Bang at 20 billion years ago.

A: The actual time is about 13.5 billion years ago.

Human Transitionals

The point of these examples is to cast doubt on human evolution. But even when they actually get something right, their focus is still only on a few unusual and often insignificant cases, ignoring all the other fossil evidence.

N: Ramapithecus turned out to be an orangutan; this shows that we should be skeptical.

A: A legitimate error, but in fact it was an ancestor of orangutans. And we should always be skeptical—now if only YECs would apply this to their own crazy beliefs.

N: Java man was a gibbon skull and a human leg bone found 50 feet away.

A: The femur is indeed human. However the skull is similar to that of a Homo erectus and not even remotely gibbon-like.

N: Lucy was a chimpanzee, and her knee was over a mile away from the rest of her.

A: The chimpanzee claim ignores human-like features such as the pelvis. The knee claim has long been proven false, and some creationists have even retracted it.

N: Piltdown man was a fraud.

A: Yes it was, although some scientists had always been skeptical of its authenticity.

N: Neanderthals just had rickets and are now simply categorized as humans.

A: No and no. They definitely didn't have rickets, and they have several features distinguishing them from humans.

N: Nebraska man was based on an extinct pig tooth.

A: It was indeed a peccary tooth. However, scientists were highly skeptical of the find, the imaginative reconstruction was for a popular magazine, and peccary teeth are surprisingly similar to human ones.

N: The Ida fossil was a lemur, and rejected as a human ancestor.

A: This is scientific skepticism at work: scientists test their hypotheses and reject them when they fail. Also, Ida has several differences from modern lemurs.

N: Rick Potts didn't conclude that Ardi was related to humans.

A: He said it was "too soon to tell exactly where it stands."

The Flood

N: 270 stories from around the world support a worldwide flood.

A: Flood stories are common because most civilizations live near a water source that is subject to flooding. These stories also differ widely in many aspects, and those that are very similar were most likely spread by missionaries.

N: Explorers may have found the ark on Mt. Ararat.

A: I'm amazed they can teach such a repeatedly debunked falsehood.

N: Sediments have to quickly bury organisms for fossils to form.

A: There are several counterexamples to this. And believe it or not, natural disasters don't have to be global.

N: Marine fossils have been found on mountains.

A: Geology explains this. The flood cannot.

N: Rocks could only have folded while solidifying.

A: Lab experiments have shown otherwise.

N: Genesis 1:6 says there was a vapor canopy above the earth before the flood.

A: Even most creationists avoid this one. It's totally unfeasible.

N: Baby animals were taken on the ark since they use less space and resources.

A: The main problem is they would be utterly helpless once they got off the ark.

N: 8,000 "kinds" were taken on the ark.

A: There are about 11 million species on earth—and that's not counting extinct ones. Even taking into account aquatic "kinds" that weren't on the ark, that would mean an enormous amount of speciation in just over 4,000 years—far more than even evolution predicts.

That's just the first quarter or so of this nonsense. I'll cover the rest in later posts.