OK. My problem is that there is no scientific evidence supporting either concept. They are religious, not scientific, in nature.
I have posted some specific information which argues against either concept before, but I'll do a short version again.
I do archaeology in the western US. My colleagues and I have poked our noses into every crack and cave, and excavated tens of thousands of sites over 100+ years. There is no evidence in the western US of a large-scale (global) flood. But there is evidence of small-scale flooding, and that's easy to see. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington are well-known and well-understood; the origins and limits of this event are known, as are the dates of the multiple floods which occurred. If we can spot this and smaller floods, just think how easy it would be to spot a global flood. There is no such evidence.
Now, we are not dealing with fossils, we are dealing with soils. We have a continuous record of human occupation going back past 10,000 years. We have intact soils, with no evidence of such a large-scale flood. We have fauna and flora which show no such large-scale flood.
One of the most telling points is that the mtDNA shows a continuous record of Native American habitation. If there was a flood at about 2300 BC (4300 years ago; see sources below) then the earlier peoples would have been wiped out and, after a gap, replaced by peoples descended directly from Noah and his kin. This did not happen.
We also have a record in the tree-rings of continuous tree growth now back some 12,000 years. The way this is done is simple--you go to some place which has a lot of standing dead trees. The White Mountains of California have the bristlecone pines, and fit the bill perfectly. Find the oldest one you can find, and start counting rings. When you run out of tree, look for another dead tree with overlapping ring sequences, which allows you to go back farther. This method has now gone some 12,000 years into the past. Incidentally the way you match sequences is that individual rings vary with changing weather and climate, and also with volcanic events. This serves as a separate method of calibrating the accuracy of the rings.
First, the presence of these standing dead trees argues against a huge flood.
Second, now that you have the rings, start radiocarbon dating them. Date, say, every tenth ring all the way back. Use the data to create a calibration curve to improve the accuracy of the radiocarbon method. Also, date relics from Egyptian tombs which can be dated to within a year or two based on historical records. Repeat for other historical materials.
This produces an accurate calibration curve for the radiocarbon method. That in turn lets you date the soils and the cultural materials left behind. Again, there is a continuous record of human occupation across the 4,000-5,000 year period.
Now, a lot of information on the flood can be found in Problems with a Global Flood, Second Edition, by Mark Isaak.
But, I am using my own research, and that of my colleagues. This is not something found on some website, nor will the objections found on creationist websites necessarily address this research. For some reason they seem to address the fossils and geologic strata issue, which I don't think applies at all. The answers to questions only a couple of thousand years old are in the soils.
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My sources for the date of the global flood:
2252 BC -- layevangelism.com
2304 BC -- Answers in Genesis (+/- 11 years).
2350 BC -- Morris, H. Biblical Creationism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993.
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Additional resources for radiocarbon dating:
ReligiousTolerance.org Carbon-14 Dating (C-14): Beliefs of New-Earth CreationistsThe American Scientific Affiliation: Science in Christian Perspective Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens.
This site, BiblicalChronologist.org has a series of good articles on radiocarbon dating.
Are tree-ring chronologies reliable? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)
Tree Ring and C14 DatingHow does the radiocarbon dating method work? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)
How precise is radiocarbon dating?
Is radiocarbon dating based on assumptions?
Has radiocarbon dating been invalidated by unreasonable results?
Radiocarbon WEB-info Radiocarbon Laboratory, University of Waikato, New Zealand.
How much of the Earth's crust contains sedimentary rock or evidence of aqueous deposition? How much of the Earth's surface is covered by water? How certain are you that all physical processes have taken place at the same rate and in the same degree as recorded throughout history by the human observers in whom you place confidence?
If it were still happening in any stage, show me any, "just one" living breathing transitional specimen......
Waiting......
Waiting......
didn't think so
What civility. No one could ever accuse your correspondent of being uncivil. Sarcasm is civil, isn't it?