Testimony to a Global Flood
● The Bible states that God “did not hold back from punishing an ancient world, but kept Noah, a preacher of righteousness, safe with seven others when he brought a deluge upon a world of ungodly people.” (2 Pet. 2:5) Those eight human survivors were the patriarch Noah, his three sons, and the wives of these four men. They, along with specimens of the wild beasts, domestic animals, moving animals and flying creatures, were preserved in a mammoth ark built under divine direction. Outside the ark, “all flesh that was moving upon the earth expired, among the flying creatures and among the domestic animals and among the wild beasts and among all the swarms that were swarming upon the earth, and all mankind.”—Gen. 7:11-23.
● Yet, is there geological evidence of the Flood? Indeed there is, and it has long been recognized by various scholars. For example, in 1761 Alexander Catcott, A.M., wrote A Treatise on the Deluge, citing what he considered to be proof of the cataclysm. He has been quoted as saying: “We appeal once more to Nature and find that there are, at this day, as evident, as demonstrative, as incontestable proofs of the Deluge over the face of the earth . . . as if it had happened last year . . . Search the earth; you will find the moose-deer, native of America, buried in Ireland; elephants, natives of Asia and Africa, buried in the midst of England; crocodiles, natives of the Nile, in the heart of Germany; shell-fish, never known in the American seas, together with the entire skeletons of whales, in the most inland regions of England; trees of vast dimensions, with their roots and their tops, and some also with leaves and fruit, at the bottom of mines.”
● Bible students, however, do not base their belief in the global flood on the evidences of geology. They accept the Holy Scriptures as the truthful Word of God. (1 Thess. 2:13) Yet, it is interesting to note that eminent scholars have found throughout the earth features that they accept as testimony to a global deluge.