The ape-men that have been set forth by evolutionists should be an embarrassment to them. By the way, if you want to study up on this on your own time from a secular perspective, there's a good book out. It's called "The Bone Peddlers" by William Fix and I highly recommend that because from a secular perspective he demolishes the ape-men frauds.

William Fix is neither an evolutionist nor a creationist. Instead, his book The Bone Peddlers promoted a theory of his own called "psychogenesis", about which I now remember no more than the name. I read Bone Peddlers some years ago, and no longer have a copy handy for evaluation. I do recall that the chapter on Peking Man was a particularly sleazy hatchet job, rivalling Gish at his worst.

Still, one can get a good idea of the quality of the book from the following table which summarizes his conclusions about the hominid fossil record:

PROPOSED ANCESTORS OF MAN: A CHRONOLOGY
Proposed
ancestors
of man: Year
discovered
or first
proposed: Promoted by: Career
as missing link:
Neanderthal 1856 Most early evolutionists Abandoned as ancestral species by many anthropologists in 1960s and 1970s
Homo erectus (Java man, Peking man) 1891 Eugene Dubois,
Teilhard de Chardin,
Franz Weidenreich Ancestral status made highly questionable by discovery of skull 1470 in 1972
Piltdown man 1912 Arthur Keith
and most evolutionists Exposed as a hoax in 1953
Hesperopithecus 1922 Harold Cook Found to be an extinct pig in 1927
Australopithecus africanus 1924 Raymond Dart,
Robert Ardrey,
Maitland Edey Disqualified by the discovery of skull 1470 in 1972
Australopithecus robustus 1938 Robert Broom Disqualified by discovery of Homo habilis in 1960s
Gigantopithecus 1946 Franz Weidenreich Dropped by most anthropologists as too improbable
by 1950
Zinjanthropus 1959 Louis Leakey Displaced by Leakey’s discovery of Homo habilis in 1960s
Homo habilis 1960 Louis and Richard Leakey Ancestral status is still indeterminate
Ramapithecus 1964 David Pilbeam
and Elwyn Simons Found to be the ancestor of Orangutan in 1979
Lothagam man 1967 Bryan Patterson Disqualified by new measurement in 1977
Australopithecus afarensis
"Lucy" 1979 Donald Johnson,
Timothy White,
Maitland Edey Beset by many problems and mounting controversy in early 1980s

First of all, note that many of the items in this list are completely irrelevant to modern thinking about human origins (and some of them were never relevant).

Piltdown Man: this was discovered to be a hoax nearly 50 years ago, and had actually ceased to be a considered a human ancestor for at least a decade before that because it was too anomalous compared to all the other known fossils.

Nebraska Man: unlike Piltdown Man, this wasn't an influential fossil even during it's brief heyday, which ended some 75 years ago.

Australopithecus robustus: was not 'disqualified' by the discovery of Homo habilis, because it had never been 'qualified' in the first place. This was never considered to be anything but a robust australopithecine, even by its discoverer Robert Broom.

Gigantopithecus: again, it's misleading to describe this as 'dropped by most anthropologists', because it had never been adopted by them in the first place. Weidenreich was probably the only anthropologist who ever thought Gigantopithecus had anything to do with human evolution.

Zinjanthropus: it was indeed displaced by Homo habilis within a few years of its discovery, but even before then it had never been considered to be a human ancestor by anyone but Louis Leakey.

Ramapithecus: Fix's description of Ramapithecus's status is accurate. Rama was a serious contender for human ancestry for about 15 years, from the early 60's to the late 70's, before further finds showed it to be related to orang-utans. Score one for Fix!

Lothagam Man: the Lothagam fossil is a small jaw fragment with one tooth, about 5 to 6 million years old. Although possibly hominid, it is too small to reliably identify what species or even genus it belongs to. It has never been 'disqualified' as a human ancestor because it never qualified as one in the first place.

Let's now see how Fix did with the items on his list that are still potentially ancestral to humans:

Neanderthal 1856 Abandoned as ancestral species by many anthropologists in 1960s and 1970s
Homo erectus (Java man, Peking man) 1891 Ancestral status made highly questionable by discovery of skull 1470 in 1972
Australopithecus africanus 1924 Disqualified by the discovery of skull 1470 in 1972
Homo habilis 1960 Ancestral status is still indeterminate
Australopithecus afarensis
"Lucy" 1979 Beset by many problems and mounting controversy in early 1980s

Neanderthal Man: it's true that many, probably most, scientists now consider Neandertals to be an extinct offshoot of humanity. However, an extinct group of non-ancestral humans seems better evidence for evolution than against it; how did such a group of people appear if they and humans did not both evolve from a common ancestor?

Homo erectus: has not been displaced by the discovery of ER 1470. Such claims are based on early reports of 1470 which exaggerated its modernness, and on an early erroneous dating of ER 1470 which had been corrected by the late 1970's.

Australopithecus africanus: supposedly disqualified by the discovery of ER 1470 in 1972. As with Homo erectus, this 'disqualification' is based on the early erroneous dating of ER 1470 which had been abandoned about 5 years before Fix wrote his book.

Homo habilis: 'ancestral status is still indeterminate'. It's difficult to determine any relationship between fossils with absolute certainty. But the habiline fossils are in the right time and place, and with the right characteristics, to be very good candidates for human ancestry.

Australopithecus afarensis, "Lucy": 'beset by many problems and mounting controversy'. Well, it's been true that there's been plenty of dispute about the exact mode of Lucy's locomotion: was she completely bipedal, or partly arboreal? However, all participants in the debate accept that Lucy spent a considerable amount of time on the ground, and that she was predominantly or completely bipedal when on the ground. None of these positions is incompatible with her being ancestral to humans, and most scientists still consider afarensis a good candidate as a human ancestor.
Conclusion
In summary, Fix's criticisms of the fossil record have no validity. Although creationists occasionally like to promote Fix as someone who is skeptical of evolution from a non-creationist viewpoint, his criticisms appear to have been mostly borrowed from creationist literature. Fix's book has, in fact, sunk into almost total (and well-deserved) oblivion. A web search for it found no references to it except for the occasional creationist web page.

Paul Z. Myers, in his excellent Pharyngula blog, has some more information about Bone Peddlers. The one-line summary: William Fix is a total crackpot.

This page is part of the Fossil Hominids FAQ at the talk.origins Archive.



http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/bonepeddlers.html, 07/23/2004
Copyright © Jim Foley || Email me

The bacteria argument is EASY. Mutations sometimes have some beneficial results. No change of specie has ever been recorded, just a benefit like resistance to chemical that that specie is normally not resistant too. But resistance to a chemical is not upward evolution just as a human born with no hands is not happy about their mutation untill they are being arrested and the cops cant put handcuffs on this person. This is plain truth. It's incredible that whenever a valid answer is given, the only recourse is to attack personally and label someone a religious zealot. Should I just have labeled your cut and paste guy as an anti-god zealot? Deal with the information.

You will find this more and more that creationists are marginalized because of their scientific findings. We all have the SAME evidence. We also all have a WORLD VIEW. That world view determines the way we interpret evidence.

The best way I can explain this is.... Mutations are a LOSS of information. There is NEVER a GAIN of information. As explained above this LOSS of information sometimes results in beneficial results. The fantasy of upward evolution requires an GAIN of information.

When lacking any intelligent response, wait 5 days and draw a picture.

I just found this forum and thread from a search engine after doing some research one on of my favourite authors William Fix, so id thought i would sign up to post on this thread.

I am a follower of William Fix and his work. William Fix is an archeologist, he has degrees in behavioral science, history and philosophy. He has written a number of books he is not a crackpot.

Concerning this thread, i couldn't agree more with Chief Renegade.

Wiliam Fix's book most of the first half completey exposes the frauds in evolution. The second half is even better, William fix draws on evidence from Hinduism, Shamanism and many other ancient religious texts and writings around the world, parapsychology studies, and he draws evidence from the famous psychic Edgar Cayce and lays out an alternative to evolution called "Psychogenesis".

William fix did not originate Psychogenesis, Psychogenesis is what is taught in the Vedic texts and many other ancient religious and spiritual texts around the world for 1000s of years. The theory basically says that we have devolved down from a spiritual realm to become covered in matter.

Psychogenesis has nothing to do with evolution or biblical creationism, you will not find it taught in the classroom. I agree with the guy who started this thread however, evolution is a fairytale.

I am a botanist student, i have carried out many investigations, and concering mutations there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation which can cause macroevolution (it seems Chief has already touched on this), mutations cause genetic degeneration. Of course if you want me to explain more on this. Then just ask.

Talk origins, is a dishonest website which fabricates and distortes scientific references and data, this is not a website to learn from, as you can see all they do is call people "crackpots" who do not support there narrow minded dogmatic evolutionary theories. If you want an honest scientific website, just ask me. Cheers. And also to some of the people replying on this thread i suggest you read William Fix's book before attacking it, don't trust anything you see on talk orgins, as explained it is a dishonest, biased, unscientifc website.

Two major competing models of the Earth's past are:
New Earth creation Scientists generally conclude that:

God created all of the species during a short period of time, perhaps about 4004 BCE, and certainly not before 10,000 BCE.
God created all of the species of bacteria, primitive one-celled creatures, trilobites, dinosaurs, humans, etc. within a few days of each other. Just as The Flintstones cartoon shows, humans and dinosaurs wandered about the earth together.
During the 40 days of rain and the approximately nine months of drainage of the Noachian flood, all of the land animals outside the ark were drowned. Various deposits were formed with sediment and the bodies of dead animals; their remains became fossils, embedded in rock layers.

Most scientists believe that a very different sequence of events happened:

That a primitive, one-celled life form came into existence by some series of natural processes, billions of years ago. Scientists are currently only dimly aware of the nature of these processes.
Billions of years later, this primitive life form had evolved into more complex species (e.g. trilobites), even as the primitive life forms became extinct.
Later species evolved into Dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago. They died out, probably becuuse of extreme environmental changes brought about by a massive collision of an asteroid with the Earth. But new species that evolved from the dinosaurs and other species that were on earth with the dinosaurs continued to evolve.
Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, and some of the higher apes appeared much more recently, and shared a common ancestor. Neanderthals became extinct.
All during this extinction of old species and arrival of new species, individual animals died. A very small fraction of those with hard shells or a skeleton became converted to fossils and were embedded in rocks.
Most scientists do not believe that any world-wide flood has occurred. There are serious questions about where all the water came from and went.

In addition, there are some Christians who believe that God created the universe billions of years ago. There are also hundreds of stories of origins taught by various religions around the world. We concentrate here on new earth creationism and the scientific consensus because these are the most commonly discussed belief systems.



Why scientists believe that creation science's concepts of origins are wrong:
The above are two very different models of the past. It is fairly simple to show why almost all scientists reject the creation science model:

If creation science is correct, then the fossils and sedimentary rocks were formed quickly during the flood. Fossil-containing rocks which are closer to the surface will contain generally larger animals of all the species that have ever lived, while the deeper rocks will tend to contain more smaller species of animals. That is because the smaller animals would presumably drown first with the rising water level, while larger animals could survive longer before dying, and travel further from the rising flood waters. But there would be the occasional fossil from a large animal mixed in with the smaller animals deep in the fossil record. Remains of ground-hugging plants would tend to be in the deepest layers of rocks; larger trees would be in rocks closer to the surface. But there would be the occasional fossils of a fallen tree that would be trapped in a deep layer of sedimentary rock among "ground-huggers".
If you looked long enough, you would find (for example) the occasional dinosaur mixed in with human remains. You would find a Jurassic Cycad (an extinct tree) mixed with some more modern Maple trees. Trilobites would be found everywhere. As Charles Pellegrino stated:

"As we dug deeper and deeper beneath Thebes, everything would be the same; we would find hand axes, clams and dinosaurs mixed together all the way down." 1

In addition, as you excavated through layers of rock, you would occasionally discover signs of human habitation at the bottom layer -- cities, towns,villages, cornerstones, etc. -- which were covered first by the flood. Scientists would find shaped rocks that were once part of buildings; remains of campfires; fabricated tools; fabricated timbers, graves, corner stones, etc. at the bottom of the fossil record.

If the Theory of Evolution is correct then the fossil record and sedimentary rocks were formed over many hundreds of millions of years, as species evolved. One would expect to see that deeper rocks would contain more primitive forms of live, and shallower fossils would be of more highly evolved species. The tens of thousands of geologists and paleontologists working over the past centuries would never find a single Jurassic Cycad fossil mixed in with a Maple tree fossil. That is because Maples emerged during the more recent Cretaceous era when the Cycads were long extinct. Dinosaurs would never be mixed with the remains of humans, dogs, cats and other modern mammals. Only a primitive, small mammalian species would be found together with Dinosaurs. And no mammals or dinosaurs at all would be found with trilobites (an early form of life that is long extinct). There would be no signs of human habitation at the lowest layer; only very primitive life forms. In fact, there are probably at least 1 million pairs of species that would never be found together in the same rock layer.

In brief:

If creation science is true, then the fossil record, from bottom to top would be mainly composed of gradually larger species. But there would be the occasional random mixture of species as well: trilobites with humans with dinosaurs with maples with Cycad trees. Species would be somewhat mixed. The very bottom layers would include signs of human habitation.
If the theory of evolution is true, then the fossil record, from bottom to top, would show gradually more complex, less primitive species. And certain species would be only found in certain layers; they would never be found in others. A trilobite would never be found with a dinosaur; a dinosaur would never be found with a human fossil. Species would be rigidly segregated. There would be no signs of human habitation in the lowest layers.

Scientists have concluded that the theory of evolution is true. They have travelled to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and to thousands of other locations around the world, and studied the fossil record. They have found fossils of thousands of species of plants and animals which evolutionary scientists believe did not exist on the earth simultaneously. The older species died out before the first member of the more recent species evolved. They can pick any pair of species (e.g. dinosaurs and humans). The found that the fossils of the two species have never been found together. Also, archaeologist have never found remains of ancient villages and towns in and below the oldest layers of rock.

The vast majority of scientists working in the field of biology and geology have concluded that the teachings of Creation Science are incompatible with the observed fossil record. To continue with Charles Pellegrino's quotation:

"... we begin to see the stages of a lengthy history, in which dinosaurs and other creatures are segregated in specific layers of rock, and the farther back we track along the stream of time, the more unlike modern creatures the animals become".

In short, the distribution of fossils in rock is a persuasive indicator that convinces scientists that young-earth creation science is false.



Additional reasons why most scientists disbelieve in creation science:
Scientists completed analyzing core samples taken from the bed of the Atlantic Ocean in early 1997. Their three drill samples taken from three locations off the east coast of Florida. 1,2 Their drills penetrated up to 92 meters (300 feet) showed:

the deepest layers contained evidence of many species of animals and came from what the project leader, paleobioligist Dr. Richard Norris, called a "happy-go-lucky" ocean.
above this was a small layer with green glass pebbles, that were originally fused under intense heat. This is believed to be ocean bottom material that was instantly melted by the intense energy release of a colliding asteroid
next was a rusty brown layer that is thought to be from the "vaporized remains of the asteroid itself," dated about 65 million years ago. This layer is found elsewhere in the world and contains a high content of iridium, which is a chemical "signature" of asteroids.
above this is about 5 centimeters (2 inches) of gray clay with strong evidence of a nearly dead ocean. "It was not a completely dead ocean, but most of the species that are seen before [earlier in the core sample] are gone. There are just some very minute fossils. These were the survivors in the ocean"
above this layer, core samples showed evidence of renewed life.

These results showed that the iridium layer, which has been found at many locations around the world on land, is also observable in the ocean bed. Fossils of highly developed species (man, large mammals, etc.) have never been found below that layer; fossils of ancient species (dinosaurs, trilobites, and a few tens of thousands of other species) have never been found above that layer. If all species were created within a one week period, as described in Genesis, and all the land animals were preserved on Noah's ark, then all land species would be found both above and below the iridium layer.



Some reasons why many scientists believe Genesis to be inaccurate:
There are additional indicators why many scientists believe that the order of creation described in Genesis could not have happened:

Some plants rely upon birds and ants for propagation. If plants were created on Day 3, and birds and ants were created on Day 5 and 6, and if each Genesis "day" is equal to 1000 or more real years (as some creation scientists believe), then some plants would have had to survive without propagation for thousands of years. To other creation scientists who believe that a "day" in Genesis is literally 24 hours, then this does not present a problem.
The fossil record clearly shows that land animals developed before birds. But the Genesis account indicates the reverse.

Scientists have found many other indicators that other parts of the book of Genesis are in error. Some examples are:

Theologians have generally agreed that the Bible teaches that the earth is less than 10,000 years of age. However, in Wyoming, the Green River Formation shows that varves -- a 260 meters thick formation made from annual layers of sediment -- were laid down for the past 2 million years. 3 Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice. In each case, one detectable layer of sediment or ice is laid down each year.
The Bible said that Noah loaded the entire ark with two (or seven) from each species within a 24 hour day. This would have required him to have taken into the vessel, classified and stored 480 species per second.
Noah took his wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law into the ark. Each person would have had to sort, house, look after, feed, water, and remove the excrement from about 5 million animals each day.
Noah is said to have built an all-wooden arc about 450 feet long. Long wooden ships, some as long as 300 feet, have actually been built, but they required extensive metal reinforcing - an option not available to Noah. And they leaked badly, requiring either a large crew or mechanically driven pumps to remove water from the hold. Motor driven pumps were not available in those days, and there were not enough humans on the arc to manually pump the water.
Many animals can only survive in certain small regions of the earth where the food supply and temperatures are ideal. These species could not have left their homeland, moved through jungle and desert in order to reach the arc; they would not have survived the journey.
There was no mechanism whereby animals found only in North America, South America, and Australia could cross oceans and arrive at the arc.
When there are fewer than about 40 members to a species, extinction is inevitable, even when massive human intervention occurs. After the flood there would have been only 2 or 7 members to each species; they would not have survived.
The Bible states that the Tower of Babel was constructed 110 to 150 years after the flood. One might ask how could the 3 fertile female human survivors of the flood (Noah's daughters in law) produce such a large number of descendants within 6 generations?
There is no indication of a worldwide flood in ancient Egyptian, Indus or Chinese writings, temples, pyramids, sculptures, etc., which existed at the time of Noah. Yet, if the flood really did occur, then all of the world's early civilizations would have been completely destroyed. The entire population of the world would have consisted of 8 people, in the vicinity of the ark. It would have taken millennia for humanity to become re-established in China and elsewhere. Also, they would have developed a very different culture from the pre-flood society. The archaeological record in Egypt would show a sudden change from ancient Egyptian artifacts, to no signs of civilization, to ancient Israelite culture after the time of the flood. The archaeological record in China would show a sudden change from ancient Chinese artifacts, to no signs of civilization, to ancient Israelite culture after the time of the flood. And so on. But the archaeological record shows that the various cultures were not interrupted; they continued to develop throughout the period when the flood is supposed to have happened. For example, the Egyptian "Old Kingdom" covered the era from 2649 BCE to 2134 BCE, the 3rd to the 8th dynasty. In particular, the fifth dynasty covered the interval 2465 to 2323 BCE, straddling the time when religious conservatives believe that the flood happened.
One might ask how would the fish survive? Some fish require fresh water, some brackish water and some salt water. If sufficient water were added to the oceans so that the level rose above that of the highest mountains, then the salinity of the oceans would drastically change. There would have been a mass die-off of fish species; only a few tolerant ocean fish would have survived. The salt content of all the fresh water lakes in the world would drastically increase, causing a die-off of numerous fish species found only in fresh water. None of this happened, except in one small area of the world: the Black Sea circa 5600 BCE. This is believed by many scientists to be the source of the world-wide flood myth of ancient Babylonian that was adopted by the ancient Jewish writers who wrote the Bible.



References:
Paul Recer, Associated Press news release, 1997-FEB-17.
U.S. News & World Report, 1997-MAR-3. Page 18.
John Banister-Marx & Larry Flammer, "Varves: Dating sedimentary strata," Evolution & the Nature of Science Institutes, (1999) at: http://www.indiana.edu/


Copyright © 1996 to 2009 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance

In their book, The Genesis Flood, Doctors Morris and Whitcomb say that only 35,000 individual animals needed to go on the ark. John Woodmorappe, the author of Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, believes that an even smaller number of animals would have been transported upon the ark. Woodmorappe explains that the word "specie" is not equivalent to the "created kinds" of the Genesis account, so as few as 2,000 animals may have been required on the ark.

As many as 50,000 animals (including creatures that may now be extinct) could have fit on board the ark. These would not have needed to be the largest or even adult specimens.

With only a few very large animals, such as the dinosaur or the elephant, and these could be represented by young ones. "Assuming the average animal to be about the size of a sheep and using a railroad car for comparison, we note that the average double-deck stock car can accommodate 240 sheep. Thus, three trains hauling 69 cars each would have ample space to carry the 50,000 animals, filling only 37 percent of the ark. This would leave an additional 361 cars or enough to make 5 trains of 72 cars each to carry all of the food and baggage plus Noah's family of eight people.

Noah's ark*
In the book of Genesis, the God of the ancient Hebrews is depicted as regretting he'd created such wicked creatures as human beings. He favors Noah and his family but destroys most other living creatures, not just the humans whose wickedness offended him, but all animals and presumably all plants as well. God plans to drown the whole world in a flood. To save himself and other animal species, Noah is directed to build a big boat that will save them from the flood.

In Genesis 6:19-21, it is written:

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.
In Genesis 7:2-3, it is written:

Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
Presumably, this contradictory set of instructions was no bother to Noah and to future Biblical literalists. If he takes seven pair, then he also takes two pair. And in some ancient esoteric traditions it is possible that seven means two. Also of no importance is that these flood stories appear to be cribbed from the neighboring Bablylonians. Even though the scientific evidence strongly indicates that the Babylonian texts are older than the Jewish texts, Bible believers know that can't be so. Therefore, the scientists are wrong. The Bible story is older. End of story.

Noah's ark is the boat built by the Biblical character Noah and his family. At the command of God, according to the story, Noah was to build a boat that could accommodate his extended family and a lot of animals. Some Bible folks say he only needed to bring about 16,000 pairs of breeders. (He just needed to bring "kinds" of animals, not samples of each species, which some moronic interpreters think is the intended meaning.) Others say that the number of species needed ranged from 1.5 million to 4 or 5 million. Of course, we're including insects and maybe a few bacteria or viruses. Anyway, the craft had to be big and had to be constructed to endure the divinely planned universal flood aimed at destroying every other person and animal on earth. Aquatic animals pose a minor problem since most can live only in sweet water or salt water but not both. A universal flood would mix the seas with the sweet water lakes, rivers, and streams.

There were no insurmountable problems, however, according to Dr. Max D. Younce, who says by his calculations from Genesis 6:15 that the ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet deep. He says this is equivalent to "522 standard stock cars or 8 freight trains of 65 cars each." By some divine calculation he figures that all the insect species and the worms could fit in 21 box cars. He could be right, though Dr. Younce does not address the issue of how the big boxcar filled with its cargo rose with the rainwater level instead of staying put beneath the floodwaters. Would the weight of all those animals keep a boat of these dimensions from floating? I don't know but it doesn't matter because even if the boat should sink it wouldn't because God wouldn't let it. The story would make no sense if such a boat would sink under the weight of its cargo. In any case, as one Biblical scholar has pointed out: animals are mostly water and water floats in water. So, how could there be a problem?

Another part-time Biblical scholar, John Renish, who also does work pro bono for a certain skeptic, writes:

Using the good Reverend Younce's figures, the ark (not a boat, but a box in Hebrew) displaced (assuming it floated at half its height) just under 76,000 cubic feet of water. [I calculate this to be just above 500k cubic feet of water, but I can't be trusted to add 2+2. B.C.] Assuming further that the water was nearly as dense as seawater (64 lb./cu. ft.), we get 4,860,000 lb. or 2430 tons for the vessel's gross weight, presumably about 1600 tons of cargo, including people, animals, and food for all of them. A cow weighs about half a ton; so, for the clean cattle alone, we're talking 3.5 tons. Ditto for camels, perhaps 3/4 ton for sheep, and 1/2 ton for goats. Add in all the marsupials, bison, rhinoceroses, elephants, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and so on, and we quickly exceed 1600 tons for animals alone, let alone their feed. As for "kinds," the Bible makes it clear that doves and crows are different "kinds," suggesting that at best, kinds are roughly equivalent to genus. That's a huge number of "kinds" to be accommodated. For the box to founder, it could support somewhat less than about 3200 tons of cargo.

My figures are quick and dirty--I don't know how many genera of animals have been identified, for example, or how many genera of plants can't tolerate six months of total immersion. I also didn't consider how long it would take for plants to recolonize the Earth, providing the necessary forage for the vegetarians and, ultimately, the necessary food for the carnivores. What are the poor meat-eaters to eat before the bunnies, elands, etc. do their thing?

Feeding mammals requires about 15 kcal/kg of body weight per day (that varies widely: for shrews, for example, it's on the order of 250 kcal/kg. That is, 1600 tons of animals would consume something on the order of 32,000,000 kcal/day, probably more because the vast majority of genera are physically much smaller than humans. For six months, that would come to at least 4,800,000,000 kcal. Even if the food were entirely fat (the most calorie-dense food), that would require 53,333 kg (roughly 56 tons) of food. But since ungulates mostly eat grass or hay, we're talking a lot more food--each elephant consumes 65+ kg of forage a day and other large ungulates consume some tens of kg of food per day--the four elephants (two genera) alone would consume 260 kg daily, or more than 50 tons during six months. For that matter, since the Flood followed the Fall, many "kinds" would have to consume meat, which you can't preserve that long except by drying, requiring enormous amounts of fresh water in addition to that consumed by most animals--mammals require perhaps three liters of water per 100 kg per day. Those poor elephants have to consume among them some 750 liters (200 gallons) of water per day. Assuming the oceans were so diluted by the rain as to make the water potable (highly unlikely), the ability of the ark to carry cargo would be less--only about 98% of my original estimate.

The largest wooden ships in history were more modern and somewhat smaller--the odds are that the technology of the time and the reputed material (gopher wood or shittim wood = ?acacia) would have made such a structure too flimsy for the purpose.
Frankly, all this calculating makes me dizzy. It seems fruitless anyway, since believers think they can invoke a miracle whenever they get stuck in an apparently illogical corner. (Objections have been made to Mr. Renish's playful excursion into Biblical mathematics. Click here to see the objection in all its simplistic detail and the response in all its glory.)

Those not familiar with the story might wonder why God would destroy nearly all the descendants of all of the creatures he had created. The story is that God was displeased with all of his human creations except for Noah and his family. Annihilating those one is displeased with has become a familiar tactic of the followers of this and many other gods. In any case, we're talking about God here and He doesn't have to make sense to us or explain himself to his creatures. If he wants to annihilate us, he can. It's his right.

Despite the bad example God set for Noah's descendants--imagine a human parent drowning his or her children because they were "not righteous"--the story remains a favorite among children. I say this is a bad example because we were made in God's image and we know we should strive to be as godlike as possible. Imitating God would be a good thing, wouldn't it? Anyway, it's clear that God likes good people and dislikes wicked people. He lets good people ride on a boat with a bunch of friendly animals. He shows them a great rainbow after the storm. And they all live happily ever after and do wicked deeds no more...well, maybe that's an exaggeration. You'd think that if anything would teach us a lesson it would be a universal flood but human memory is short and soon we were back to our old ways. In any case, even adults like the story, though they might see it as an allegory with some sort of spiritual message, such as God is all-powerful and we owe everything, even our very existence to the Creator. Furthermore, the Creator expects us to behave ourselves. But there are many who take the story literally.

According to the story told in chapter 7 of Genesis, Noah, his crew, and the animals lived together for more than 6 months before the floodwaters receded. There are a few minor logistical problems with this arrangement, but before getting to them, there is one other thing that needs commenting on. It is obvious that floods are no laughing matter. The destruction of life and property caused by floods has plagued many animals, not just humans, from time immemorial. To watch one's family or home swept away in floodwaters must be a terrible spectacle. To see one's children drown, one's life and dreams washed away in an instant, must be a devastating experience. But if one were to discover that the flood was not a whimsical effect of chance natural events, not unplanned and purposeless, but rather the malicious and willful act of a conscious being, one might add rage to the feelings of devastation. We must remember, however, that it is God's world; he created it, so he can destroy it if he feels like it. But such an attitude seems inappropriate for an all-good, all-Loving , all-powerful God. The logical conclusion is that God is either not all good and all loving or God is not all-powerful. But we're talking about God, here. God doesn't have to be logical. We know the Bible is true, so if we are asked to choose between logic and the Bible, we choose the Bible.

There are, however, a couple of problems with this story. If there were a universal flood, there should be a lot evidence left behind. The problem is that scientists who have studied floods and scientists who have studied the sedimentary layers of the earth can't find any traces of a universal flood. We should find the geology around the world "beginning with coarse-grained poorly sorted deposits of sand and gravel and boulders from the fast-water stage of the flood. Once a flood recedes, it can leave only one kind of deposit: a single layer of mud" (Prothero 2007: pp. 66). Instead, we find enormous variety around the world, but mostly we find sedimentary layers that were put down one upon the other over long periods of time. Donald Prothero writes that "in a supreme twist of irony," Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky:

is built upon the famous Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati Arch, which span millions of years of the later Ordovician. If you poke around the slopes all around the area (as I have often), you will find hundreds of finely laminated layers of shales and limestones, each full of delicate fossils of trilobites and bryozoans and brachiopods preserved in life position that could never have been disturbed by flood waters—and each layer of hundreds represents another community of marine organisms that grew and lived and then was gently buried in fine silts and clays. There is no possibility these hundreds of individual layers of delicately preserved fossils were deposited in a single "Noah's flood." (Prothero 2007: pp. 62)
We'd also expect to find a universal flood would have done severe damage to the fossil sedimentary record, mixing fossils from all time periods as it ravaged the earth. But just as we do not find the universal layer of mud from such a flood, so too we do not find any rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer, nor any layers with both dinosaurs and humans.

the "finding" of the ark

As preposterous as the Noah's ark story is, there are people in the twenty-first century who claim they have found Noah's ark. They call themselves "arkeologists." Yes, they say that when the flood receded, Noah and his zoo were perched upon the top of Mt. Ararat in Turkey. Presumably, at that time, all the animals dispersed to the far recesses of the earth. (No small feat, when you think about it, but they had come to Noah from the four corners of the earth to get on board his lifeboat, so what was another 3,000 mile swim or flight? Especially impressive are animals like pandas and koalas who only eat bamboo and eucalyptus, respectively. Feeding to and fro the ark for such creatures was no small feat.) How the animals got to the different continents, we are not told. Perhaps they floated there on debris or swam or walked on the water. More problematic is how so many species survived when they had been reduced to just one pair or seven pairs of creatures. Also, you would think that the successful species that had the furthest to travel, would have left a trail of offspring along the way. What evidence is there that all species originated in Turkey? None. But that's what the record should look like if the ark landed on Mt. Ararat. God could have teleported them home, but you'd think Moses would have mentioned it in his book (assuming, of course, that Moses wrote Genesis 6 and 7).

Still, none of this deters the true believer from maintaining that the story of Noah's ark is the God's truth. Nor does it deter those who think the ark has been found. For example, in 1977 a pseudo-documentary called "In Search of Noah's ark" was played on numerous television stations. CBS showed a special in 1993 entitled "The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark." The first is a work of fiction claiming to be a documentary. The second was masterminded by George Jammal, who has admitted that the story was a hoax. Jammal said he wanted to expose religious frauds. His hoax was seen by about 20 million people, most of whom probably still do not know that Jammal did not want them to take it seriously.

During his show, Jammal produced what he called "sacred wood" from the ark, which he later admitted was wood taken from railroad tracks in Long Beach, California, which he had hardened by cooking in an oven. He also prepared other fake wood by simmering a piece of California pine on his kitchen stove in a mix of wine, iodine, sweet-and-sour, and teriyaki sauces. He also admitted that he had never been to Turkey. The program was produced by Sun International Pictures, based in Salt Lake City and which is responsible for several pseudo-documentaries on Nostradamus, the Bermuda Triangle, the Shroud of Turin, and UFOs.

the evidence for a universal flood

Stories of floods are not unique to the ancient Jews.* What geological or archaeological evidence is there of such a universal destruction of all human societies, all plants and all animals except for the ones on Noah's boat (or Ziusudra's [Sumeria], or Utnapishtim's [Babylon])? There should be a layer of sediment dating from the same time which contains all the bones of these poor creatures. There should be evidence that all human societies were wiped out simultaneously. No such evidence exists of a universal flood. Evidence of a great flood, perhaps caused by melting glaciers bursting through the Bosporus strait some 7,000 years ago, has been discovered off the coast of Turkey by Robert Ballard (who found the remains of the Titanic) and some (like Ryan and Pitman) have claimed this is evidence of Noah's flood, but this is pure and inane speculation. (In any case, this flood supposedly occurred because of melting glaciers 8,000 years ago, before God even created anything!). The Biblical flood is due to rain, not a bursting dam. As archeological anthropologist John Alden notes

...the story in the Bible is clear -- it rained for weeks before Noah's flood, and after it stopped raining the floodwaters receded. The Black Sea flood wasn't caused by rain, and after the water rose it never went away. And neither [the Sumerian nor the Biblical] story mentions the most dramatic consequence of the Black Sea flood, which turned fresh water into salt. Noah's flood, in short, doesn't sound anything like the inundation of the Black Sea.
However, for the sake of argument, let's agree that there was a universal flood, but that somehow the evidence got twisted around so that geologically and archaeologically it doesn't appear that the flood occurred. There are still a few questions we should ask before accepting this story. There is the problem of gathering the animals together from the various parts of the world that, as far as we know, Noah had no idea even existed. How did he get to the remote regions of the earth to collect exotic butterflies and Komodo dragons? Or how did he communicate to those animals that they needed to come to him pronto? Another miracle, I suppose. How did he get all those species of dinosaurs to follow him home? How much time would it take to round up 5 million pairs of animals? or even just 30,000 or so?

But let's grant that Noah was able to collect all the birds and mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, and a couple of million insects that he is said to have gathered together on his boat. There is still the problem of keeping the animals from eating one another. Or, are we to believe that the lion was lying down with the lamb on the ark? Did the carnivores become vegetarians for the duration of the flood? Yes, of course, or Noah fed them dead meat that he'd stored in his food locker.

It's true that the Flood came after the Fall, so the need for meat as feed would be enormous and somewhat messy. For those who don't study the Bible regularly, like myself, I pass on the reminder that T. Rex was an herbivore before the Fall. How do we know this? Because there was no death before the Fall. If you don't believe me, watch the video below and listen to Bill and Rusty misguide children on their "Biblically Correct Tour" of a science museum.



How did Noah keep the birds from eating the insects? Again, Noah went to the food locker. After all, if Noah could engineer the building of a boat that could hold all those animals, it would have been a small feat to add room to store enough food to last for more than six months. Of course, Noah would have to store enough food for himself and his family, too. But these would have been minor details to such a man with such a plan guided by God.

Still, it seems difficult to imagine how such a small crew could feed all these animals in a single day. There is just Noah, his wife, their three sons and three daughters-in-law. The "daily" rounds would take years, it seems. Delicacy forbids me from mentioning the problems of the "clean-up" detail, but I would have to say that if the noise of all those animals didn't drive Noah insane (not to mention the insect bites), the smell should have killed him. At least they didn't have to worry about water to drink. God provided water in abundance.


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See also creationism, faith, miracle, and wishful thinking.

reader comments

further reading

books and articles

Cerone, Daniel, "Admitting 'Noah's Ark' Hoax," Los Angeles Times, October 30,1993, p. F-1.

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths and Mysteries - Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology 3rd ed. (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1998).

Moore, Robert A. "The impossible voyage of Noah's ark," Creation/Evolution 11:1-43.

Plimer, Ian. Telling Lies for God (Random House, 1994).

Prothero. Donald R. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. (Columbia University Press, 2007).

websites and blogs

new Creationists Fight Over "Real" Noah's Ark "...two groups of creationists ... each think they've found the real Noah's Ark in the Ararat mountains -- and they're each accusing the other of producing fake evidence."[/new]

The Whole Silly Flood Story by Bob Riggins

Problems with a Global Flood

Why Isn't "Flood Geology" Accepted Today? by Edward T. Babinski

Creationist "Flood Geology" Vs Common Sense -Or Reasons why "Flood Geology" was abandoned in the mid-1800s by Christian men of science by Edward T. Babinski

Order of the Geologic Column and Flood Geology by Edward T. Babinski

WAS MT. ARARAT UNDERWATER? Compiled and written by Edward T. Babinski

Sun Goes Down in Flames: The Jammal Ark Hoax by Jim Lippard

Has Anyone Discovered Noah's Ark?

RON WYATT: ARE HIS CLAIMS BONAFIDE? by Bill Crouse

The Search for Noah's Ark

Fact Or Fiction: Could Noah’s Ark Really Have Happened? - Tiny Frog

news stories

'Noah's Ark' found in Turkey A group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers say they have found wooden remains on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. Yeung Wing-Cheung, from the Noah's Ark Ministries International research team, said: "It's not 100 per cent that it is Noah's Ark, but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it." (Did you follow that, children?) The website says "ministering to God's children through his animals." It's hard to believe that there are still adults on Earth who think the story of Noah's ark is science. Even The Sun uses scare quotes to refer to the mythical ark.
























...or maybe not.

Noah's Ark Discovered ... Again and Again By Benjamin Radford

Satellite Sleuth Closes in on Noah's Ark Mystery By Leonard David

Latest photo of the ark (or is it a turtle?)

Satellite Search Underway For Noah's Ark By Leonard David, Space.com




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* With apologies to those who take their Bible seriously. This article is not intended to be a piece of Biblical scholarship, but a piece mocking those who take the story of Noah and the ark literally, especially those who try to defend the literal story by scholarship or arkeological finds. (If I were to approach this subject as a scholar, I would trace the origin of the Biblical myth to its Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian origins. Read the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Homer Smith's Man and His Gods.) Please don't write to tell me that insects weren't included because they breathe through tubes rather than nostrils or that since Noah only needed two of each type of animal he didn't need 2 donkeys, horses, and zebras, etc. Also, I realize that Noah's God is omnipotent, so Noah could accomplish any task as long as the Omnipotent One directs the show. No task would have been too difficult.

I do not take the story literally, do not believe Noah was a real 600-year-old guy, and certainly do not believe he built a boat to hold animals while God flooded the world. It's a nice story for unsophisticated nomads of ancient times and for kids today, but excuse me if I can't take it seriously enough to be Biblical in my scholarship. Think about it. God is supposed to be perfect, yet he gets so angry with his creation he kills almost everybody and everything. Anger is an imperfection. We're supposed to be grateful he let a few folks live and they just happened to be his favorites, the ancestors of the chosen people, who just happened to compose and pass on the story.


Last updated 12/09/10


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N'kisi | the Nobel disease

In response to Noah's ark.

There are hundreds of stories that pre-date the Noah's ark story from many different cultures.

This leads rational thinking people to believe that somebody when writing the bible thought "this is a good story to scare people into not lying, but since we all know that the entire earth never flooded ill put this little bit in about god being happy with killing everyone off save one mans family and that he wont do it again"

And just to cover bases there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE that supports that the entire earth flooded at the same time. An event like this would leave tons of evidence not only fossils of the humans that died all over the world at the same exact time but also all the animals that died and the plants. Oh yes and the fact that there would of been huge silt deposits all over the earth at the same exact point in the rock layers.

This is science by rational thinking people, not the ones who bias there results to make it seem like their always right.

Oh and how exactly with all the amazing technology of the freaking dark ages did Noah build this ark?

did god fly in the lumber or did he just send it to him in pre-cut planks ready to build?

And if this boat was built how have we not found it? I would figure that finding a giant wooden boat on a mountain would of been a pretty easy task.

And if scientists and archeologists have missed this for all these years believe you me I will be the first one to ask "How in the Hell did we miss that?!?!?"

Same old tired soundbites from a troll on the Missouri forum. If the global flood actually happened, would we expect several written accounts? Of course! We are "flooded" with scientific evidence!


The Bible does not tell us that Noah and his sons built the Ark by themselves. Noah could have hired skilled laborers or had relatives, such as Methuselah and Lamech, help build the vessel. However, nothing indicates that they could not—or that they did not—build the Ark themselves in the time allotted. The physical strength and mental processes of men in Noah’s day was at least as great (quite likely, even superior) to our own. They certainly would have had efficient means for harvesting and cutting timber, as well as for shaping, transporting, and erecting the massive beams and boards required.

If one or two men today can erect a large house in just 12 weeks, how much more could three or four men do in a few years? Adam’s descendants were making complex musical instruments, forging metal, and building cities—their tools, machines, and techniques were not primitive.

Evidence of Noah’s Flood can be seen all over the earth, from seabeds to mountaintops. Whether you travel by car, train, or plane, the physical features of the earth’s terrain clearly indicate a catastrophic past, from canyons and craters to coal beds and caverns. Some layers of strata extend across continents, revealing the effects of a huge catastrophe.

The earth’s crust has massive amounts of layered sedimentary rock, sometimes miles (kilometers) deep! These layers of sand, soil, and material—mostly laid down by water—were once soft like mud, but they are now hard stone. Encased in these sedimentary layers are billions of dead things (fossils of plants and animals) buried very quickly. The evidence all over the earth is staring everyone in the face.

Flubber, I've attended many scientific debates on this subject. Macro evolution is an inverted fantasy. Everything we see is devolution. Time and chance forming upward evolution is impossible!

here are, however, a couple of problems with this story. If there were a universal flood, there should be a lot evidence left behind. The problem is that scientists who have studied floods and scientists who have studied the sedimentary layers of the earth can't find any traces of a universal flood. We should find the geology around the world "beginning with coarse-grained poorly sorted deposits of sand and gravel and boulders from the fast-water stage of the flood. Once a flood recedes, it can leave only one kind of deposit: a single layer of mud" (Prothero 2007: pp. 66). Instead, we find enormous variety around the world, but mostly we find sedimentary layers that were put down one upon the other over long periods of time. Donald Prothero writes that "in a supreme twist of irony," Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky:

is built upon the famous Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati Arch, which span millions of years of the later Ordovician. If you poke around the slopes all around the area (as I have often), you will find hundreds of finely laminated layers of shales and limestones, each full of delicate fossils of trilobites and bryozoans and brachiopods preserved in life position that could never have been disturbed by flood waters—and each layer of hundreds represents another community of marine organisms that grew and lived and then was gently buried in fine silts and clays. There is no possibility these hundreds of individual layers of delicately preserved fossils were deposited in a single "Noah's flood." (Prothero 2007: pp. 62)
We'd also expect to find a universal flood would have done severe damage to the fossil sedimentary record, mixing fossils from all time periods as it ravaged the earth. But just as we do not find the universal layer of mud from such a flood, so too we do not find any rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer, nor any layers with both dinosaurs and humans.

chief noahs ark is a fairy tale for conservative christians

Proof of a global flood is EVERYWHERE. The Grand Canyon is a monument to the flood. You have a severe misunderstanding of how fossils are made. If one of those creatures laid there for millions of years it would turn to dust. Fossils result from catastrophic events, such as a global flood.

You can build this anti-God story all you want but ORIGINS SCIENCE is equally philisophical on both spectrums. Your statements regarding flood geology are patently false. You are guilty of only studying ONE SIDE of the controversy. EVERY SINGLE debate that I've been to, the scientific evidence for creation cannot be refuted.

Your position requires faith in spite of the evidence. By the way, the account of Noah's ark is found in the Jewish scriptures. Don't blame it on conservative christians. Your effort to disprove God is a dangerous one.

Chief,
The grand canyon is cut through layers of granite, A large deluge of water cannot carve a canyon through granite, it takes millions upon millions of years of erosion to do that. You sound like that nut Ken Hamm from answers in Genesis, I am sorry but it is you that is living in the fairy tale. If there was a large flood that laid down all of the fossils you would have dinosaur,man, horse, dog ,cat ,moose, elephant, deer, etc... fossils all in the same layer, and no matter how much you argue that is simply not the case, the fossil record is clear that the earth went through different periods of life. It is you that has the blinders on and you are only seeing what you want, you are refuting scientific evidence for make believe.

Pardon me as a 'Johny Come Lately' on this thread. I don't about fossils, layers, horses, dogs, cats . . . .

How did LIFE itself get here in the first place?

Maybe you gentlemen have already addressed this previously.

Dean

Eric wrote:

"Flubber, I've attended many scientific debates on this subject. Macro evolution is an inverted fantasy. Everything we see is devolution. Time and chance forming upward evolution is impossible!"
__________________

Dean says, Correct! It is one of those LAWS of thermodynamics. That things get progressively disorganized over time, not organized. Entropy I believe they call it.

To take the other view - you would have to believe something like this:

You go to a massive junk yard. Parts of cars all over the place. Well, if you just sit on your *ss long enough, that slowly, ever so slowly - they will MAGICALLY come together one day and be a Ferrari. . . . Now, talk about talking some faith!

For more than a century, evolutionary geologists have tried to explain how the Grand Canyon in the United States might have formed slowly over millions of years. Ideas that the Colorado River eroded the canyon, or that enlargement of streams and gullies caused it, have been shown to be improbable. Both these theories have a difficult time explaining where the products of tens of millions of years of river erosion went.

Study the Kaibab Upwarp. It's a serious problem for evolutionists.

Things change over time. No doubt about it. But it is called DECAY, not getting better and better . . .

And again - tell me about the ORGIN of life? How did it get here in the first place? How did someting as complex as a string of DNA or RNA get here in the first place?!

That baffles me the way a compass always pointing north baffled Einstein. . . .

"A watch must have required a watchmaker; a car could not have formed itself from parts."



The above statements from creationists are certainly true, but they have nothing to do with the behavior of atoms and molecules. Car parts in a junkyard don’t speed inside the yard at a thousand miles an hour, constantly colliding with each other, fusing together with a similar part (or different ones) so violently that enormous quantities of energy are given out – enough to make them white hot.

Why give a silly illustration like that? Anyone knows that it is not an inherent quality of metal parts to spontaneously join with similar or quite different parts to form complex new arrangements. Yet, this IS precisely the normal behavior of most of the chemical elements that constitute the world and the universe. The value of the second law of thermodynamics is that it quantitatively describes the energetic aspects of the chemical elements and the compounds they form. The chemical potential energy (the enthalpy of formation) that is bound in most of the 20,000,000 known kinds of molecules is less than that in their elements. Thus, energetically , the second law says that the majority of compounds now known could spontaneously form from the corresponding elements. In complete contrast, watches or cars are not lower in thermodynamic energy than the total energy of their individual components. Therefore, the second law says that it is totally inappropriate to compare them with the behavior of chemical compounds and elements.

Incessantly moving at a few hundred to two thousand miles an hour at ordinary temperatures. hydrogen and many other atoms behave in a fashion that is impossible for car parts: Most atoms spontaneously "bond" when they vigorously collide, forming extremely powerful associations in very specific ways. These new arrangements can be molecules so stable that temperatures of thousands of degrees can't tear them apart again. Molecules are not atoms randomly stuffed in a package. When three or more atoms join to form a molecule, they are arranged in precise order, normally unchanging over time, and with a relatively fixed geometric relationship.

Finally, many kinds of molecules can strike other kinds very violently and produce totally new types of molecules – another mode of formation of new complex ordered structures due to the same innate nature of atoms to form strong bonds and spread out energy to the surroundings. Amino acids when simply melted with other amino acids (to make them move more rapidly) form huge new compounds. These are NOT useful or valuable proteins. The process simply illustrates the probability of the existence of complex gigantic substances in nature. Though not proteins, they are "proteinoid" in that they have hundreds to thousands of amino acid units firmly joined in the same kind of bonds that hold proteins together.

A simple example of the spontaneous behavior of elements is the reaction of hydrogen gas with oxygen. Hydrogen atoms have such a great inherent tendency to form strong bonds with oxygen to yield water that a small energy of activation, in the form of a spark affecting only a relatively few molecules, causes the two substances to start to react, resulting in an enormous evolution of energy. This is exactly as the second law predicts: some of the energy in a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen becomes spread out (so much and so rapidly that it is an explosion) when the lesser energetic compound, water, is formed. Yet, water is more complex than the simple elements and its atoms are arranged in an exact geometric pattern.

There are millions of compounds that have less energy in them than the elements of which they are composed. That sentence is a quiet bombshell. It means that the second law energetically FAVORS — yes, predicts firmly — the spontaneous formation of complex, geometrically ordered molecules from utterly simple atoms of elements. Popular statements such as "the second law says that all systems fundamentally tend toward disorder and randomness" are wrong when they refer to chemistry, and chemistry precisely deals with the structure

The second law of thermodynamics is quite complex and your junkyard explanation just does not hold up.

Chief,
The colorado river washed the erosion out to sea, Explain how a large flood can cut a canyon through granite it is impossible, the water would flow over the top of the rock it would not cut a canyon in it.