Don Martin:

     Personally, I have said many times that I would welcome ANY evidence of the existence of any god, and I have even specified indirect evidence that would be quite convincing, not only to myself, but (I suspect) to all the wicked atheists here: the residue of the Noachan Flood. It avoids the problem of "how can there be physical evidence for a spiritual being?" by focussing on one instance in which that spiritual being supposedly interacted physically with the physical world in a way that would have produced distinctive physical consequences. While we have seen fundies claim that their god is so deceitful as to cover his tracks, I, for one, would presume that such a dishonest being is unworthy of being taken seriously, much less of worship.

     I do not concern myself here with the issue of the needed two additional hydrospheres of water and its drainage out of Earth's gravity well, nor with the necessary consequences resulting therefrom by operation of the laws of physics: the atmospheric pressure resulting from a "vapor canopy" that would prevent the existence of life as we know it, the heat release from the condensation of that much water that would be sufficient to melt lead anywhere in the atmosphere, etc. are very serious impediments to the veracity of the story, but most, if not all, fundies lack sufficient knowledge of physics to be able to follow the reasoning. It only confuses them, leading them to drag out yet another version of the Deceitful God, who, they claim, sets the laws of physics aside his wonders to perform. Instead, I simply take the Genesis account at its face value, looking at the effects that much water falling at that rate would inescapably have upon the face of the Earth.

     We have an account of a global flood directly produced by Yahweh in the Bible. Given the fact that we have information, presumably from a source inspired by omniscience, of the extent of the flood ("over the highest mountains," or roughly 30,000 feet above present sea level) and of the time of the rain (40 days and 40 nights = 40 24-hour days = 960 hours), it is easy to calculate the rate of the rainfall: 30,000/960 = 31.25 feet of water fell per hour. That is a little more than six inches of rainfall per minute.

     I would think that "gullywasher" fails to do this rate justice, inasmuch as that term is applied to rainfalls of one or two inches per hour. Suffice it to say that this rain would wash away pretty much any particles smaller than Volkswagens and deposit all of this in a single stratum covering the low-lying areas world-wide.

     We know from geology that floods leave evidence in direct proportion to their size (this stratum would, for instance, be far thicker than any other ever created and would cover all the area on Earth with its thickness varying in inverse proportion to altitude), and we further know from the mechanics of disposition of suspended solids in fluids the type and extent of the stratum that would be laid down by a global flood. Those larger particles would lie at the bottom of the stratum, with progressively smaller bits covering them. In addition to that, the contents of that stratum, particularly in the region of shorelines where the braking effect of standing water would cause the flow to drop much of its initial load, the remains of ALL creatures mingled together under optimal conditions for fossilization (heavy sedimentation at great depths, with the finest materials thickly sealing the top) are known: in short, a universal unique event would produce a universal unique outcome--a stratum like no other in the geologic column.

     Such a stratum would furnish perfectly good indirect evidence for the existence of this Yahweh person, just as tracings on a photographic plate tell us of subatomic particles or the behavior of objects in space tells us of the existence of enormous gravitational forces explicable only by the presence of a black hole.

     So show us this stratum. That would be evidence.