Taken by the flood

It amazes me the mental gymnastics the biblical fundamentalists will go through to use scientific studies to shore up their contention that the Bible is literally, word-for-word true.

We've seen this sort of pretzel logic here before, of course.  Eleven years ago I did a piece about a cool scientific discovery that a mineral called ringwoodite, which contains about one percent (by mass) chemically-bound water, was abundant in the Earth's mantle, which prompted the biblical literalists to jump up and down yelling, "See?  We told you.  That's where all the water went after the Great Flood!  Ha!  Q.E.D."  A few also pointed out that in Genesis 7:11 we read that God "broke up the fountains of the deep," so this could also have been the source of some of the flood waters as well.

Never mind that the ringwoodite is six hundred or more kilometers beneath the Earth's surface, and if God "broke up the fountains" to that extent, what would come out would not be water but superheated magma.

So more flood basalt than conventional flood, really.  Not something you'd want to float your Ark on, especially if it was made of wood.

It was with only mild surprise that I saw similar reactions to a study that came out this week from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.  You might recall that earlier this week I alluded to the Zanclean Flood -- the astonishing event that occurred about 5.3 million years ago, where plate movement temporarily closed off the Straits of Gibraltar, resulting in the Mediterranean Sea drying up almost completely.  This was followed by a sudden re-opening of the gap and the creation of the Mother of All Waterfalls over the Gibraltar Sill, at its peak refilling the Mediterranean at a rate of an astonishing ten meters a day.

What I didn't know was that apparently a similar thing happened to the Red Sea.  It shouldn't have been a surprise, really; the Red Sea is like the Mediterranean in having only a single narrow connection to the world's oceans (the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb), if you don't count the Suez Canal.  It's also a tectonically-active region, with the Red Sea Rift underlying the entire thing lengthwise, terminating at its south end in the geologically complex Afar Triple Junction.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), Red Sea topographic map-en, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, the research found geological evidence of a similar scenario to the Zanclean Flood; a tectonic shift closing off the strait, followed by evaporation of nearly all of the water, followed by a second shift reopening the strait and refilling the sea.  "Our findings show that the Red Sea basin records one of the most extreme environmental events on Earth, when it dried out completely and was then suddenly reflooded," said study lead author Tihana Pensa.  "The flood transformed the basin, restored marine conditions, and established the Red Sea's lasting connection to the Indian Ocean."

I'm guessing y'all can see where this is going.

The fundamentalists are twisting themselves into knots saying, "See?  We told you.  Moses parting the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army, the waters rushing back!  Ha!  Q.E.D."

Well, needless to say -- or, more accurately, I wish it was needless to say -- there are a few holes in this claim.

First, the study at KAUST explicitly says that the transformation from salty desert back to a water-filled Red Sea was far slower than the Zanclean Flood, and is estimated to have taken a hundred thousand years.  So Pharaoh's army must have been really slow on the uptake.  If they couldn't get out of the way of a flood creeping along at that rate, they deserved everything they got.

Second, the biblical apologists also conveniently leave out that the study found the Red Sea flood happened 6.2 million years ago -- so almost a million years before the much bigger Zanclean Flood.  At this point, there were no modern humans around, and wouldn't be for about another five million years.  Our likely ancestor who would have been alive back then was Orrorin tugenensis, who has been reconstructed to look something like this:

I don't know about you, but when I picture the characters from the Old Testament, this isn't the image that comes to mind.  Although I have to say, it would have made the movie The Ten Commandments a lot more entertaining:

Moses:  Fear not!  The Lord of Hosts will do battle for us!

Israelites:  *excited hooting, one of them throws a femur into the air*

However, the people who can already twist their logical faculties around enough to believe that the Bible is the literal truth will also happily conclude that (1) the KAUST team got the chronology wrong by a factor of 1,000, and (2) the Red Sea could have filled a lot faster than that, because God.

Oh, and (3) why are there still monkeys?

You can not win with these people.  Funny the confidence you can get from assuming your conclusion.

Anyhow.  My general opinion is if you want to believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God, knock yourself out.  As long as you don't try to get it taught as science in public schools, you can believe the universe was created by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, as far as I care.  But a word of advice -- when you start cherry-picking convenient bits of science to support Fundamentalist Bunnyology, and avoiding the much more numerous bits that contradict it, I reserve the right to make fun of you.

Not that I expect it to have any effect.  The creationists, I've found, are as impervious as Noah's lava-proof Ark.

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