A commentary on the controversy brought up by Grayson Hawk
by Patrick Reany
17 October 2024
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMjOpvn8XO4
Title: Creationists Can't Answer This Question That Debunks the Flood
Presenter: Grayson Hawk
It seems that young-earth creationism debunker, Grayson Hawk has tried in the video to debunk the Biblical Flood by pointing out
(1) that there is a real lack of human fossils in the archeological period between Adam and the start of the Flood and
(2) creationist Dr. Rob Carter apparently didn't have a good answer for this.
Why did I say 'apparently'? Because I didn't watch the video beyond the first minute. Why? Because I'm afraid that if I did, I would feel compelled to write a very long reply and I don't have the time for that right now.
Who am I? I am an average Christian, but not an apologist. I am a young-earth creationist, but not an expert on the subject. However, I am prepared to give my layman's answer to this challenge.
Hawk claims that his goto question to stump creationist (and crumble the entire Flood model) is this:
Hey, where are all the human fossils?
My comment: Gee, I didn't even know that there is a dearth of human fossils!
It seems obvious that Hawk thinks that either the Bible or the archeologic record or both demands that there ought to be a lot more human fossils in the earth in the pre-Flood period (6000 years ago to 4500 years ago) than there is.
If there really is a dearth of human fossils in the archeologic record corresponding to those years, then that just might be a problem for young-earth creationists to deal with. But it seems to me that if this archeological claim is true, then it's a far bigger problem for old-earth evolutionists, because they ought to predict there being a lot more human fossils than creationists would.
So, I will now ask a serious question: According to the young-earth-Flood model, why ought there to be any human fossils in the earth from that period? Seriously!
Hawk claimed that creationists don't have a ready good reply to his question when he has asked it of them. Well, I can't say if they do or don't, because I don't have the time to follow creationists in depth these days. But I am willing to give my own reply to the question.
(1) The Biblical-Creationist-Flood model is largely informed by whatever Genesis has to say about it. But that only takes us from Genesis 1 to Genesis 7, because by this chapter the world was described as flooded over the tallest mountains around at that chapter. That's not much to go on. Anyway, all humans outside the Ark should have died by then.
(2) However, the Bible does not tell us, even approximately, how many people were alive at the time of the Flood. Nor does it tell us how fast humans were procreating in the pre-Flood period. Nor does it tell us how fast they were dying in that period. We have no idea how many people died prior to the moment the Flood rains began. 10,000? 10 million? We don't have anything to go on from Genesis to answer this.
(3) And, no, we can't just use current birth rates and death rates in our modern world to apply to that world. That's pure speculation, and from a biblical perspective, ludicrous. Those few chapters of Genesis give examples of people living very long lives.
The Bible does tell us that God destroyed the world that was then because that generation alive at that time was, on average, the most wicked generation ever to live on the earth. But does that imply a great deal of murder and thus death? Maybe, maybe not. After the example of what God did to curse Cain for murdering Abel, perhaps people were content to perform their wickedness in other activities than murder. But this is all speculation. Even if there were a lot of death, we don't know how they dealt with the bodies.
(4) What if 95%, say, of all people who had ever lived in the time from Adam to the beginning of the Flood were still alive? If that were so, there might not be many human bodies already in the ground able to make human fossils in the first place. Surely it's reasonable to believe that those who died in the Flood did not leave their bones to posterity by fossilization. It's more reasonable to believe that they were lost to the mechanical ravages of the Flood and to scavengers, both large and small. It would be highly unlikely for a human bone bed to be formed from the bodies of the people who died in the Flood. But what about the bones of people who died prior to the Flood? Good question.
(5) We have no idea how pre-Flood peoples dealt with the dead. Maybe we should speculate the answer, right? I don't think so. Throughout history, people have dealt with dead bodies in many ways besides deep burial, most of which would not preserve bones able to be fossilized. You can bury them at sea or in a bog. You can burn them on a funeral pyre. You can leave them for scavengers. You can bury them so shallow that scavengers will dig them up anyway. You could leave the bodies aloft in some kind of elevated structure. You could cremate the bodies and place the bones in an ossuary, but that probably wouldn't make for a likely way for those bones to get buried during the Flood, to make them candidates for fossilization.
(6) So, what if there were a lot of people alive at the begining of the Flood? Once the flood rains began, God's priority was on the safety of the Ark and its occupants. It took a while for the Ark to finally be lifted up by the boyancy of the waters around it. (It would make no sense for God to make huge tsunamis over that part of the earth before the Ark made its way to deep waters.) The point being that the people outside the Ark were not caught suddenly by huge tsunamis on day one of the Flood. They were not caught unaware that things were getting progessively worse. In a matter of weeks or months, depending on where they lived relative to the seas or oceans or lakes, they would conclude that they have to migrate to higher ground, and they would have time to do so.
If the majority of people alive at the time of the Flood used their intelligence to get to high ground, then they will have eventually died on that high ground when the surface of the water raised above the tallest hills and mountains, forcing them to tread water or their unscrupulous neighbors mnight kill them first to survive. But human bodies that end up on the surface of the water are unlikely to then endup being buried deeply enough to be preserved eventually as fossils. And remember that the point of the Flood was to kill off all land animals that drew breath, but that does not include the predators of the sea. So, I suppose those sea predators would scavenge the human remains on the surface or that manage to find their way to the sea floor.
(7) If there aren't many human fossils to be found in that time period between 6000 to 4500 years ago, how do old-earth evolutionists answer the same question, "Hey, where are all the human fossils?"
(8) Dem bones, dem bones, dem wet bones, weren't around in the right places at the right times to become human fossils. But who knows why?