The good news

Feeling evangelical? Want to convince your neighbours that the earth is only 8,000 years old? Yes, I know that conventional geology says that that's about how long it takes to form an inch of limestone, never mind everything. The big problem though is that even after you've added up the ages of all the people in the bible and remembered to take everything in it literally, there's still usually a few snags - ummm fossils are one. Oh yeah and dinosaur bones. Erosion too.

Luckily enough for 100 million+ people worldwide who do believe that the world is less than 10,000 years olf there are now 'creatonist geologists', who are trying to fit the story of Noah's Ark around the planet's history, regularily ignoring carbon-dated evidence and people with brains ("heathens"). There's a book called "The Genesis Flood", in which a relatively obscure, century-old theory of Noah’s flood as the most violent catastrophe in earth history was succesfully revived. The flood - apparently - warped the normal geological processes and caused rapid transformations. Water from the skies and from within the earth (“the floodgates of heaven”) slammed into the oceans, killing the sea creatures and covering the “high mountains,” as it said - apparently - in Genesis. For months afterward, the planet convulsed with earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. After a brief ice age, the earth became the ecosystem we know today. Apparently. Continents shifted; the water receded; the animals left the ark and spread over the earth.

One question. Just how big was this ark? If it fitted two of every creature in the world it would have used Titanic sized boats for liferaft. So far science has identified over 2 million species that live on earth, with many believing that there is in the region of 30 million. Now if we take the creatonists view that evolution does not happen, we have to believe that every creature that's here now, was here then. So that's 30 million creatures, in pairs. 60 million. On a boat.

Well excitingly enough this list below will help you illustrate what actually happened over the course of Noah's flood, explaining away evolution of both animals and humans. Now some might say that forty days and nights is not long enough but hey, we all saw what happened in the first seven days! And 'he' even rested for one of them, so there!