Creationism - National Center for Science Education

The Duke of Argyll, in Primeval Man, states:
That the Deluge affected only a small portion of the globe which is now habitable is almost certain. But
this is quite a different thing from supposing that the Flood affected only a small portion of the world which
was then inhabited. [N.d.:91-92]
The great antiquity of Chinese and other civilizations argues against the traditional
understanding of Noah’s Flood, he points out. If the Flood, though not global, indeed
destroyed the inhabited world, then it must have been a lot earlier than usually supposed.
Argyll, not a strict creationist, concludes that “the difficulty of reconciling the narrative
of Genesis with an indefinitely older date is a very small difficulty indeed, as compared
with the difficulty of reconciling it with a very limited destruction of the Human Race”
(n.d.:92-93).
J.M. Woodman, though he promoted the old Neptunist (Flood) theory, did not
claim that all of earth’s geological formations were deposited by Noah’s Flood alone, but
in earlier ages. In God in Nature and Revelation, he wrote that Noah’s Flood, caused by
a tilt in the earth’s axis, consisted of great tidal currents. Asia, Europe, and North Africa
were submerged by trapped waters from these currents, but animal life in other regions
survived.
Pierson (1886:124-126) discusses a theory advanced by Haywood Guion in which
the pre-Flood world consisted of a solitary continent rising dome-like out of the seas,
with a uniform topography and climate. At the time of the Flood, this dome was
shattered by vulcanism and earthquakes, and its roof collapsed into the ocean, becoming
the bed of the Pacific Basin.
Sir J.W. Dawson, according to Ramm (1954:163), “sternly rejects a universal
flood” in The Meeting-Place of Geology and History (1894). Dawson did not even
suppose that the Flood covered all areas inhabited by man. “Rather, he adopts the view
we have expounded,” says Ramm, “that the deluge was universal in so far as the area
and observation and information of the narrator extended.” Likewise, the Table of
Nations in Genesis concerns only the descendants of Noah’s sons and does not say
anything about other people who may have survived the Flood. It concerns one series of
migrations from Mesopotamia, and says nothing about other peoples in other areas.
Despite this denial of the Flood’s universality, even for man, Dawson insisted on its great
significance. The Flood, which Dawson thought was caused by subsidence of land
occurring some time after the Ice Age, marked the division between primitive and
modern man. In The Historical Deluge in its Relation to Scientific Discovery and to
Present Questions (1895), Dawson stated: “The Deluge thus becomes one of the most
important events in human history; so that any attempt to discuss the history of primitive
man, or his arts or his religion, without reference to this important factor, must
necessarily be fallacious.”
Patrick O’Connell, like Dawson, believed there was only one Ice Age. In The
Deluge and the Antiquity of Man (Book II of Science of Today and the Problems of
Genesis, O’Connell explains that science shows there was a definite “hiatus”—a break
between older and more modern types of mankind—at the close of the Ice Age, around
7000 B.C., between the Mousterian and Aurignacian periods (1969:(II) 16-17). This
hiatus was the Flood. He states that this date is confirmed by evidence from Jericho and
many other sites, and cites data from Scandinavian glacial varves which suggest a date of