A common argument against evolution is that the theory contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics that claims disorder, or entropy, always increases or stays the same over time.  This law has plenty of everyday examples. Buildings break down over time, and food spoils if not eaten soon enough.  In both cases, the amount of disorder increases with time, but the opposite is never true. Buildings don’t strengthen themselves, and no amount of waiting will cause rotten food become edible again.  But because evolution results in an increase in the order and complexity of species — which is a decrease in entropy — some critics claim evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Defining the System

However, this objection is grounded in a misunderstanding of the second law, which states any isolated system will increase its total entropy over time.  An isolated system is defined as one without any outside energy input. Because the universe is an isolated system, the total disorder of the universe is always increasing.

With biological evolution however, the system being considered is not the universe, but the Earth. And the Earth is not an isolated system.  This means that an increase in order can occur on Earth as long as there is an energy input — most notably the light of the sun. Therefore, energy input from the sun could give rise to the increase in order on Earth including complex molecules and organisms.  At the same time, the sun becomes increasingly disordered as it emits energy to the Earth. Even though order may be increasing on Earth, the total order of the solar system and universe is still decreasing, and the second law is not violated.


Misapplication of The Second Law

To claim that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics is also grounded in a misunderstanding of where the law applies.  Nobody has ever figured out how to apply the second law to living creatures. There is no meaning to the entropy of a frog. The kinds of systems that can be analyzed with the second law are much simpler.

A living organism is not so much a unified whole as it is a collection of subsystems. In the development of life, for example, a major leap occurred when cells mutated in such a way that they clumped together so that multicellular life was possible.  A simple mutation allowing one cell to stick to other cells enabled a larger and more complex life form.  However, such a transformation does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than superglue violates the law when it sticks your fingers to the kitchen counter.

There are many examples of order arising from disorder in nature. Research conducted by Ilya Prigogine¹ and others on systems far from equilibrium has shown that order can spontaneously arise in systems that are driven in the right way. It turns out that living systems are characterized as being far from equilibrium.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics also has interesting implications for cosmology, as it requires that universe began in a highly ordered state.

Astronomers and geologists have determined that the universe and Earth are billions of years old. This conclusion is not based on just one measurement or one calculation, but on many types of evidence. Here we will describe just two types of evidence for an old Earth and two types of evidence for an old universe; more types can be found under Further Reading. These methods are largely independent of each other, based on separate observations and arguments, yet all point to a history much longer than 10,000 years. As Christians, we believe that God created the world and that the world declares his glory, so we can’t ignore what nature is telling us about its history.

Age of the Earth from seasonal rings and layers

If you’ve ever seen a horizontal slice of a tree trunk, you’ve seen how a tree forms a new growth ring each year. In years of drought, the tree grows less quickly so the ring is narrower; in good growing seasons the ring is thicker. A tree’s age can be found by simply counting its rings. By comparing the pattern of thick and thin rings to weather records, scientists can verify that the method is accurate. This method can even be used on dead trees that fell in a forest long ago. For example, the last 200 rings in the dead tree might match up with 200 rings early in the life of the living tree, so the two trees together can count back many years. In this way, multiple trees can be used to build a master chronology for a forested region. European oak trees have been used to build a 12,000-year chronology.¹

The annual ice layers in glaciers provide a similar method that goes back much further in history. Each year, snowfall varies throughout the seasons and an annual layer is formed. Like the tree rings, this method can be verified by comparison to historical records for weather, as well as to records of volcanic eruptions around the globe that left thin dust layers on the glaciers. Scientists have drilled ice cores deep into glaciers and found ice that is 123,000 years old in Greenland² and 740,000 years old in Antarctica.³ These annual layers go back much farther than the 10,000 years advocated by the young earth creationists. The Earth must be at least 740,000 years old.

How can an old Earth be reconciled with Genesis? See Scripture Interpretation

Age of the Earth and solar system from radiometric dating

In your high school science classroom, you may have seen a large poster of the periodic table hanging on the wall. The periodic table shows the types of atoms that make up the world around us. An element in the periodic table can come in different flavors called isotopes. Some isotopes are unstable, and over time these isotopes “decay” into isotopes of other elements. For example, Potassium-40 is unstable and decays into Argon-40. As time passes, a rock will have more and more Argon-40 and less and less Potassium-40. Radiometric dating is possible because this decay occurs at a known rate, called the “half-life” of the radioactive element. The half-life is the time that it takes for half the radioactive sample to change from one element into the other.

Some isotopes have short half-lives of minutes or years, but Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Radiometric dating requires that one understand the initial ratio of the two elements in a given sample by some means. In this case, Argon-40 is a gas that easily bubbles out and escapes when it is produced in molten rock. Once the rock hardens, however, all the Argon-40 is trapped in the sample, giving us an accurate record of how much Potassium-40 has decayed since that time. So, if we find a rock with equal parts Potassium-40 and Argon-40, we know that half the Potassium-40 has decayed into Argon-40, and that the rock hardened 1.3 billion years ago.⁴

It’s hard to find rocks on the surface of the Earth that have not been altered over time. Most old rocks have been eroded by wind and water or submerged by continental plates. The oldest reliably dated rock formation is in Greenland, where several different isotopes were used to find an age of 3.6 billion years.⁵ Scientists also recently dated zircon grains (which resist erosion) in Western Australia to 4.4 billion years old.⁶ To find older rocks that haven’t been eroded, we need to look beyond Earth. Meteorites are rocks from the solar system that have fallen to Earth recently and haven’t suffered much erosion. Their pristine interiors give an age that dates back to their formation at the beginning of the solar system. Nearly all meteorites have the same radiometric age, 4.56 billion years old.⁷ Thus, the solar system, including the Earth, is about 4,560,000,000 years old.

Age of galaxies from the travel time of light

What about the ages of stars and galaxies, and the age of the whole universe? One way to measure these ages is with the travel time of light. Light travels incredibly fast – 300,000 kilometers per second, or 186,000 miles per second. On Earth, the delay due to light travel time is a tiny fraction of a second. But in space, the distances are so vast that the light takes a substantial amount of time to travel to us: 8.3 minutes from the Sun, 4.3 years from the nearest star, and about 8500 years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That delay means that we don’t see these objects as they are right now, but as they were when the light left. The universe actually works as a sort of “time machine,” in which we can see into the past simply by looking far away.

The calculation of the light travel time is simple once you know the speed of light and have a measurement of the distance. The speed of light is well known from experiments on Earth, and various astronomical observations confirm that the speed of light has not changed over the history of the universe. But measuring distances in astronomy is not trivial – you can’t just string a measuring tape from here to the center of the galaxy! Instead, astronomers use several interlocking methods to determine the distances, such as geometric calculations and brightness measurements. For example, some galaxies look much smaller and fainter than other galaxies of the same kind, showing they are much further away.⁸

The Andromeda galaxy, a near neighbor to our own Milky Way galaxy, is 2.3 million light years away. That is, we are seeing it as it was 2.3 million years ago. But that is just our local neighborhood. In recent decades, astronomers have detected galaxies located several billion light years away. If the light has been traveling billions of years to reach us, then the universe must be at least that old. This is completely independent of radiometric dating of the solar system, but both methods point to an age of billions of years, not thousands.

See Did God create everything recently but make it appear old?

Age of the universe from expansion

Not only can astronomers measure the distance of galaxies, they can measure how galaxies are moving. Galaxies are not holding still in space, nor are they moving randomly. Some galaxies are moving towards their neighbors, attracted by their mutual gravity. But the biggest pattern we see is that galaxies are moving apart from one another. This motion apart is not all at the same speed; instead it follows a pattern where galaxies that are further apart are moving more quickly.

This particular pattern indicates the whole universe is expanding. To see why, consider a loaf of raisin bread. The raisins are like galaxies and the dough is like the fabric of space in the universe. As the dough rises, it carries the raisins along, pulling them apart from each other. Raisins that started out on opposite sides of the loaf will be a few inches farther apart after the dough rises, while raisins that started out near each other may only move half an inch. So, the speed of their motion is proportional to the separation between them. In the same way, the space of the universe pulls galaxies further apart as the universe expands.

Astronomers detect a galaxy’s motion by looking at its light spectrum. When a galaxy is carried away by the expansion of space, its light waves are stretched out, making it appear redder. The change in the galaxy’s color is called the red shift, and can be used to calculate its velocity. From the measurements of many galaxies, astronomers can accurately measure the expansion rate of the universe as a whole.

The age of universe can be determined by imaging what the universe looked like in the past, “rewinding” the expansion. In the past the galaxies must have been closer together, and in the distant past they would have been packed together in a tiny point. If we assume that the expansion rate is constant over time, the age for the universe as a whole is about 10 billion years. However, astronomers have been working over the last 20 years to determine how the expansion rate changes with time. We now know that early in the universe the expansion was slowing down, but now it is speeding up. Using careful measurements of this change in expansion rate, the age of the universe is now known quite precisely to be 13.7±0.13 billion years. ⁹

Conclusion

Many different and complementary scientific measurements have established with near certainty that the universe and the Earth are billions of years old. Layers in glaciers show a history much longer than 10,000 years, and radiometric dating places the formation of the Earth at 4.5 billion years. Light from galaxies is reaching us billions of years after it left, and the expansion rate of the universe dates its age to 13.7 billion years. These are just a sampling of the types of evidence for the great age of the Earth and the universe; see the resources below for more.

"I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights; and I will blot out from the face of the land every living thing that I have made." — Genesis 7:4

Introduction

The Genesis Flood of Genesis 6-9 tells a fascinating story. Sometimes referred to as Noah and the Ark, it is a common fundamentalist claim that the biblical flood must have been a worldwide one, or else Scripture as a whole is undermined. From this point of view, the flood is often used in an attempt to account for the geologic column, which is otherwise seen as evidence of a very old Earth. However, a balanced interpretation of Scripture does not force the reader to believe that the Flood was a worldwide phenomenon. The scientific and historical evidence summarized below supports the idea that the flood was indeed catastrophic, but that it was local, recent and limited in scope. Beyond its place in history, the Genesis Flood is also a part of the greater narrative of the Bible. It highlights theological points concerning human depravity, faith, obedience, divine judgment, grace and mercy.¹

The History of “Flood Geology”

In the 19th century, a growing body of extrabiblical evidence began to undermine the traditional belief in a global flood. As early as the first half of the 19th century, geologists and theologians Edward Hitchcock, Hugh Miller and the Rev. John Pye Smith viewed this evidence not as a threat to faith, but as an occasion to reach a better understanding of Genesis.²

But in the 20th century, George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist from Canada and self-taught amateur geologist, took a less compliant stance and began the modern flood geology movement, which ascribes many features of Earth’s present state to a recent, global flood. In his book The New Geology, published in 1923, Price explained the Christian fundamentalist perspective of geology, and he did so with such style and sophistication “that readers untrained in geology are generally unable to detect the flaws.”³ Others followed Price in the modern flood geology movement, including Byron Nelson, Harold Clark, Alfred M. Rehwinkel, John C. Whitcomb, and Henry M. Morris.

See "What was the Christian response to Darwin?".


 

In the 1950s, Bernard Ramm, a baptist theologian and author of The Christian View of Science and Scripture, along with J. Laurence Kulp, a geologist and Plymouth Brethren member, critiqued Price’s book by pointing out critical errors and omissions.⁴ Ramm, Kulp and others encouraged the American Scientific Affiliation and other organizations not to support flood geology.⁵ In 1961, Young Earth Creationists Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr. updated Price’s work by writing The Genesis Flood. This book argued that the creation of the Earth was relatively recent, and that the Fall of Man started the second law of thermodynamics. The book also claims that Noah’s Flood was global and produced most of the geological strata we see today. Many regard the work of Morris and Whitcomb to be a major foundational step in the development of modern day creation science, which has since gained a worldwide foothold.

Let us now consider the actual evidence for this position from both the Bible and from science.

A Local Flood

The language used in Genesis 6-9 does not insist that the flood was global.

First of all, the Hebrew kol erets, meaning whole Earth, can also be translated whole land in reference to local, not global, geography. The Old Testament scholar Gleason L. Archer explains that the Hebrew word erets is often translated as Earth in English translations of the Bible, when in reality it is also the word for land, as in the land of Israel.⁶ Archer explains that erets is used many times throughout the Old Testament to mean land and country. Furthermore, the term tebel, which translates to the whole expanse of the Earth, or the Earth as a whole, is not used in Genesis 6:17, nor in subsequent verses in Genesis 7 (7:4, 7:10, 7:17, 7:18, 7:19).⁷ If the intent of this passage was to indicate the entire expanse of the Earth, tebel would have been the more appropriate word choice. Consequently, the Hebrew text is more consistent with a local geography for the flood.

Moreover, in this period of history, people understood the whole Earth as a smaller geographical area. There is no evidence to suggest that people of this time had explored the far reaches of the globe or had any understanding of its scope. For example, the Babylonian Map of the World,⁸ the oldest known world map, depicts the world as two concentric circles containing sites of Assyria, Babylon, Bit Yakin, Urartu, a few other cities and geographic features all surrounded by ocean. There are also small, simple triangles that shoot out from the ocean labeled as nagu or uncharted regions.⁹ Contextual evidence also suggests that Greek geographers developed comparable maps during the middle of the first millennium, where Greece was positioned in the middle of a circle surrounded by oceans.¹⁰ These maps remind us that people were most familiar with the regions surrounding their homelands. Therefore, to say that something happened in the kol erets –– or referring to "all people" (Genesis 6:13), –– would have been an appropriate way of referring to the entirety of Earth and its population in a manner in which ancient Israelites would have been familiar. Davis A. Young, author of The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church's Response to Extrabiblical Evidence, sums this up when he states:

"Given the frequency with which the Bible uses universal language to describe local events of great significance, such as the famine or the plagues in Egypt, is it unreasonable to suppose that the flood account uses hyperbolic language to describe an event that devastated or disrupted Mesopotamian civilization — that is to say, the whole world of the Semites?" ¹¹

Scientific Problems with a Universal Flood

There are a number of practical problems that conflict with the idea of a global flood.

First, a universal flood would have changed the topography of the land. For example, in the event of a worldwide flood, the Hidekkel, or Tigris, and Euphrates rivers of Genesis 2:14 would have disappeared under layers of flood-laid sedimentary rock.¹² Instead, the Euphrates is mentioned again in Genesis 15:18, and the Hidekkel is alluded to in Daniel 10:4. This suggests that the rivers’ integrity was maintained.¹³

Second, it would require an inordinate amount of water to flood the entire Earth. One popular explanation for this problem is that prior to the flood, the world was watered by mist from a global canopy of water vapor which then condensed, causing the first rains to flood the Earth (Genesis 2:5-6). However, this explanation is incongruent with archaeological evidence that concludes ancient Mesopotamia — the land of the Tigris and Euphrates — was “an extremely arid environment that necessitated the use of irrigation for successful agriculture.”¹⁴ Furthermore, the pressure necessary for the condensation of such a large quantity of water would have been fatal for all living creatures. In fact, a closer look at the Septuagint version of the Old Testament shows that the word for fountain was used in place of the word for mist. Some modern translations have used similar words like stream and spring.¹⁵ In either case, the water is said to have risen from the Earth, which makes it more likely that these terms were referring to irrigation canals.¹⁶ A similar terminology is used in reference to the flood (Genesis 7:11), where “fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.” But when we look closely at the original Hebrew text and consider the use of the words fountains and deep in other passages, it is more likely that the fountains of the deep were also irrigation canals.¹⁷

Another supposition is that all animals and humans are derived from the survivors on Noah’s Ark. There are several problems with this idea. First of all, there is no way that the 2 million known species of animals could have fit onto the ark — not to mention the estimated 10 to 100 million species yet to be discovered. The dimensions of the Ark were 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits (Genesis 6:15). At 18 inches per cubit, the Ark would have been 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet tall. This was indeed a large ship by the standards of the time, but not nearly large enough to carry such a vast and varied cargo. Getting all of the animals to fit on the ark, along with the necessary food would not have been feasible. Some have argued that not all species were included, but only representatives of each type. Not only would this still represent an improbably great number of creatures, it would also require that the evolution of related species be drastically accelerated after the flood, in order to account for current diversity of species.

Finally, the migration of animals across mountains and oceans is quite difficult to explain. To make matters worse, there are no traces of animal ancestors along the proposed courses of migration. These are just a few of the many scientific problems with interpreting Genesis 6-9 as a truly universal flood. Efforts to find physical evidence of a global flood have failed. Even some of the most capable Christian researchers, including John Woodward, George Frederick Wright, William Buckland and Joseph Prestwich, all failed in their searches. Young states, “It is clear now that the evidence they were searching for simply does not exist.”¹⁸

The Location of the Flood

Assuming that the Flood was local, its location has not yet been precisely determined. Though excavation of flood deposits in Mesopotamia provides evidence of ancient flooding, there is no evidence that it is unambiguously the biblical flood. ¹⁹ Young writes:

"Nevertheless, the stratigraphy of some of the Mesopotamian flood deposits, literature pertaining to Gilgamesh and ancient Sumerian cities, the New Eastern setting of the biblical account, and the obvious affinities of the biblical and Mesopotamian flood traditions all converge to suggest that there may very well have been a catastrophic deluge in the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys that severely disrupted the civilization of that area — a civilization that represented the world to the biblical writer — and it may be that this is what the biblical story is all about."²⁰

Scholars still speculate about where a great flood may have occurred in the Near East. For example, in the 1990s Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman concluded that a massive local flood took place in the area we now know as the Black Sea. They theorized that when the Ice Age ended and glaciers melted, a wall of seawater surged from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea.²¹ This flood, which may have occurred around 5500 B.C., would fit into the Old Testament timeline of Noah’s Flood. Robert Ballard, famous for finding the Titanic, led a 1999 expedition with the hope of finding more evidence for this theory. The expedition revealed an ancient shoreline for the Black Sea, and after radiocarbon dating, the findings supported their hypothesis that a freshwater lake and surrounding manmade structures were in place before the flood. Conflicts with the Black Sea explanation do exist, however. For example, 5500 B.C. is too early for Noah to have used metal tools to create the ark, and the location of the Black Sea does not fit the Sumerian and Babylonian accounts of the flood, which strongly suggest that it took place in Mesopotamia.

The location of the flood remains mysterious and of continued interest to modern geologists.

Other Flood Stories

Many flood stories permeate mythology around the world. At one time these flood stories were thought to be evidence of a global flood; proof that its survivors carried the story with them from the Near East as they spread out around the globe.²² It is now clear, however, that the evidence for this claim is lacking.

Some of the most notable compilations of these stories were collected by James Strickling and Byron C. Nelson.²³ Strickling did a statistical analysis comparing 61 flood stories from around the world. After comparing their similarities and differences, he concluded that one family of eight people could not have populated the Earth after a worldwide flood catastrophe. In order to account for the many stories throughout the world, Strickling concludes, “Either catastrophic flooding of global or near-global dimensions occurred more than once, or there were more survivors of the Great Deluge than one crew, or both.”²⁴ In 1931 Nelson compiled more than 41 flood stories and found that despite their remarkable similarities, there were also striking differences. For example, only nine of the 41 stories mention the preservation of animals and only five mention that there was divine favor on those saved from the flood. ²⁵ With regard to these differences, geologist Dick Fischer writes, “However tempting it might be to attribute all those ancient stories to a one-time global catastrophe to conform with the traditional interpretation of the Genesis Flood, a literal reading of Genesis does not require it, and the unyielding revelations of nature and history disavow it.”²⁶

According to the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, the “Flood stories are almost entirely lacking in Africa, occur only occasionally in Europe, and are absent in many parts of Asia. They are widespread in America, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific.”²⁷ This evidence again raises concerns for the theory that flood stories have all spread from one original source.

Lessons of the Flood

Regardless of the details surrounding the event, there are significant theological lessons to be learned from the Flood narrative.²⁸ In the early church, Tertullian, Jerome, Ambrose, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Augustine understood the story of the flood to encourage moral conduct.²⁹ For example, Noah can also be used as an example of Christian perseverance, since he had great faith to build the Ark that God commanded (see James 5:11).  Origen, Jerome, Augustine and others also employed other allegorical methods to illustrate Christian principles. ³⁰  Being conversant with other flood stories from ancient Mesopotamia as well as the general theology of Genesis will also help us understand the point of this story.  The biblical flood is a response by God to the corruption of humanity, save Noah.  The flood waters are not a random punishment, however, but an undoing of creation –– a return to the state of chaos that existed before God gave order (this is described in Genesis 1).  The waters of chaos had been kept at bay by the firmament, the raqia, which is a solid dome above, and by the earth below.  That is how Earth became habitable.  When we read in Genesis 7:11 that the "fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened", it means that God is letting the barriers give way so that the waters of chaos can crash back down upon the Earth, thus making it uninhabitable again.  In other words, God's intention in this story is to bring Earth back to its state of chaos and start over again, with a new "Adam" (Noah).  We will read throughout scripture that God's plan of "starting over" will culminate in Jesus, the "last Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45).

See "What factors should be considered in determining how to approach scripture?".

 

Conclusion

An informed reading of the Genesis story neither permits nor requires it to be a universal, global flood, and geology does not support a universal reading. A non-global interpretation does not undermine the lessons learned from the Genesis Flood account that are pertinent to the life of faith.