The Flood And Its Fossils
Bodie Hodge, M.Sc., B.Sc., PEI
Biblical Authority Ministries, December 5, 2025 (Donate)
The Flood of Noah’s day comes under attack openly (and subtly) in today’s culture. Many atheists and unbelievers openly denigrate the Flood and call
the event "mythological" and "mere story telling". Interestingly, these same people
stand on and next to miles of Flood sediment and mockingly ask "where is all the evidence of
the Flood?"
Anytime someone appeals to millions of years in the rock
layers that contain fossils (as textbooks, museums, and media commonly purport), it is a subtle denial of a global Flood. These rock layers were laid down by the
Flood, not slow gradual accumulations over millions of years.
Global!
The Flood described in Genesis 6-8 was a global, worldwide
event that engulfed everything under the whole heaven over the course about a
year.
The text of Genesis repeatedly uses universal terms such as all
flesh, every living thing, and under the whole heaven, which
indicate worldwide scope rather than regional or local event. The depth of the
water is described as covering the highest mountains by at least fifteen
cubits, which could not be achieved by any local flood. Water was that high, or
more appropriately, the land was that low during that phase of the Flood (consider
Psalm 104:8-9)
A local event would not require an Ark of the enormous size
God commanded Noah to build. If it were a local flood, Noah and the animals
could simply have migrated to nearby safe regions, something unnecessary if the
Flood was global.
God’s Promise
The covenant God made afterward, promising never again to
destroy all flesh by a Flood, also becomes meaningless if local floods have
continued to occur thousands of times since biblical history. It was not a mere
local catastrophe as God promised, at the end of the Flood that a Flood like
that would never again occur, yet we have local floods all the time!
Furthermore, the global Flood is tied to God’s judgment on
pervasive human wickedness—but consider that the Bible says all flesh
corrupted itself on the earth—which includes animals! Since wickedness was
worldwide, the judgment was also worldwide.
The Geology
The geological implications are that the vast sedimentary
rock layers found across continents, containing billions—perhaps trillions—of fossilized
plants and animals, are explained far better with a massive globe-covering watery
and sedimentary catastrophe than with slow local-flood processes.
Many sedimentary layers stretch across continents and even correlate
across continents, showing signs of rapid deposition such as cross-bedding,
polystrate fossils, and the absence of long-term erosional features between
strata (see creationists researchers’ technical articles about these things).
These features are extremely difficult to explain with
small, regionally isolated floods. Marine fossils located on high mountains,
including the Himalayas or the Andes mountains (where I’ve been), are consistent
with the uplift of seafloor sediments during and after the Flood.
Global “mega-sequences”—which are continent-sized sedimentary
layers that were rapidly deposited by successive high-energy surges—used in
Flood geology models are expected with rapid, continent-wide inundation and
retreats of the water. The existence of these enormous, continent-wide
sedimentary layers, which blanket regions, states, and whole portions of large countries
for thousands of miles.
These layers often show little to no erosion between them (e.g.,
things like roots didn’t have time to grow on them or worms disturb them!).
This means that they were deposited rapidly in successive, high-energy pulses
rather than over long ages of millions of years. The Flood’s advancing and
retreating waters, commonly discussed in Flood geology models, produced these
large-scale, stacked sediment packages. This makes sense in a worldwide deluge
rather than a bunch of small, localized events.
The Theology
The New Testament also reveals a global Flood. Jesus
referred to the days of Noah in a context that portrays sudden, universal
judgment, and the apostle Peter explicitly connects the Flood with a
destruction of the world that then existed, contrasting it with the
coming final judgment of the entire earth—which will also be global.
If the New Testament writers understood the event as global,
Christians have no basis for reinterpreting it as merely regional—unless they
are influenced by outside ideas to reinterpret Scripture. Sadly, this commonly happens
in churches—where people are influenced by “millions of years” and have to
reject a global Flood.
When Christians mix millions of years with the Bible it
is called syncretism or compromise—what is really happening is
they are mixing or syncing two different religions together. This new
syncretism is no different from syncretism in the Old Testament when the godly
would mix their religion with Baal worship, Molech worship, or start worshipping
a golden calf! God was never happy with them and judgement was on their
doorstep.
You have to understand that you can’t have both millions
of years and a global Flood. If rock layers were laid down slowly
over millions of years AND you have a global Flood, the Flood action
would destroy the previous layers, churn it to sediment with the water and lay
down new rock layers! So, you can’t have both at the same instance.
The Flood, as a local catastrophe, undermines biblical
authority because the text itself gives no indication of limited geography.
Instead, Scripture overtly refers to total destruction on a global scale.
The Flood destroyed all people and land-dwelling and air
breathing animals outside the Ark. It was a “reset” of human civilization due
to sin, not a targeted judgment on one valley or nation. The whole world was in
sin against God.
A local Flood could leave survivors or man and animals outside
the affected region, contradicting Scripture’s statement that only those on the
Ark lived through the judgment. The [boring] genealogies of post-Flood man also
assume a single surviving family from which all nations descend (though Babel and
dispersed).
The rainbow covenant, where God promised to never again send
a Flood like that, shows that the event was unlike anything before or after—it was
a true global deluge. The Flood was a literal, global event, not a localized
disaster.
Fossils
The fossil layers found worldwide are the results of the
rapid, catastrophic processes during Noah’s global Flood. The fossils generally
require rapid burial to prevent decay, scavenging, and weathering. It seals out
the oxygen and makes them candidates for fossilization.
Massive Graveyards Of Flood Fossils In Sediment
The Flood provides those absolutely necessary conditions: massive sediment-laden waters sweeping across continents, quickly entombing and burying critters and vegetation in thick layers of mud, sand, pressure, and silt. A rapid Flood gives us a good reason for the exceptional preservation seen in many fossils, including soft tissues (even jellyfish!), articulated and disarticulated skeletons (full skeletons and partial or sparse ones).
Marine Fossils On Mountains
Again, the presence of marine fossils, like shells,
ammonites, and so on, on high mountains, like the Himalayan and Andes mountains,
is interpreted as Flood-deposited seafloor sediments that were later uplifted
during Flood (and possibly some residual post-Flood) tectonic activity. Fossilized
sea creatures far inland are cited as additional evidence that the waters once
covered the continents.
Coal and Oil
Coal and oil were largely formed during the global Flood
when vast quantities of vegetation, marine organisms, and other organic
material were rapidly buried under massive layers of sediment. Before the
Flood, the world had abundant forests, swamps, and lush ecosystems that
produced huge amounts of biomass.
When the Flood’s violent waters tore through these
environments, they uprooted and transported enormous mats of vegetation and stripped
bark and buried them quickly in thick sedimentary deposits, preventing full decay
and causing the right conditions (temperature and pressure) for coal formation.
The heat and weight generated as heavy layers sat above compressed
the plant material into peat and rapidly transformed it into coal layers and seams.
Many of these extend for hundreds of miles and are consistent with large-scale
catastrophic processes rather than slow local swamp formation commonly talked
about in secular textbooks. We can even mimic coal formation in laboratories and it only take a few weeks.
Oil and natural gas originated from marine organisms such as
algae and plankton and even plants and animals that were likewise rapidly
buried by Flood sediments. The sudden entombment of this organic matter,
followed by increasing pressure and temperature as more layers were deposited,
initiated chemical reactions that converted the material into hydrocarbons. These
hydrocarbons were acted on by water taking them down through cracks and
striations in the layers to open areas where they pooled and separated into
crude oil or gas chambers.
These processes occur much more quickly than secular uniformitarian
models propose (i.e., over millions of years), especially under the extreme
conditions produced during and immediately after the Flood. The worldwide
distribution of oil-bearing strata and the huge reserve scale of these deposits
are evidence of the Flood. Oil has been shown in labs to be produced quickly hours to days—in one case (from algae) in as quickly as 30 minutes.
Polystrate Fossils
Another cool and common find are polystrate fossils—tree trunks or other organisms preserved upright through multiple (~poly) sediment (~strata) layers. They are rightly cited as evidence of rapid, continuous deposition of the rock layers. These organisms could not remain upright and intact for the supposed long ages that are required by secular humanism’s slow geological interpretations.
Expected Order During The Flood
Similarly, massive fossil beds, such as dinosaur bonebeds
and marine invertebrate layers, are considered consistent with sudden,
large-scale death events associated with the Flood. Rather than long
evolutionary ages, the sorting of fossils within Flood layers is attributed to
natural actions like:
1. Buoyancy, where they were living on the original inundated continents (called “ecological zonation”)
2. The natural sorting power of water (called “hydrodynamic sorting”)
3. How far and fast creatures could try to escape (called “differential mobility”)
Conclusion
The global Flood was a reality of the past—and the fossiliferous
flood sediment we stand on all over the world is a testimony to it. So much
more could be said but I wanted to keep this as a shorter concise article.
But just so you know, I did co-write a powerful book on the subject—A Flood of Evidence, with Ken Ham. In short, the Bible can be trusted against
the false allegations leveled against it in today’s secularized culture.
Bodie Hodge, Ken
Ham's son in law, has been an apologist since 1998 helping out in various
churches and running an apologetics website. He spent 21 years working at Answers
in Genesis as a speaker, writer, and researcher as well as a founding
news anchor for Answers News. He was also head of the Oversight
Council.
Bodie
launched Biblical Authority Ministries in 2015 as a personal
website and it was organized officially in 2025 as a 501(c)(3). He has spoken
on multiple continents and hosts of US states in churches, colleges, and
universities. He is married with four children.
