Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2005

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Claim CH542:

Source:

Response:

1. Not all plants could survive the Flood for some of the following reasons:
   • Many plants (seeds and all) would be killed if soaked for several months in water, especially salt water.
   • Some plants do not produce seeds; they would have been killed when the Flood either uprooted or covered them.
   • Not all seeds could survive a year before germinating (Benzing 1990; Densmore and Zasada 1983; Garwood 1989).
   
   
2. The Flood was an ecological catastrophe. Creationists credit it with eroding and redepositing sediments miles thick, raising mountains, carving immense canyons, and even repositioning continents. This alone would doom many plants to extinction, even if they or their seeds survived the Flood, for some of the following reasons:
   • Most of the world's seeds would have been buried under many feet -- even miles -- of sediment. This would keep them from sprouting.
   • Many plants require particular soil conditions to grow. The Flood would have eroded away all the topsoil which provides the optimum conditions for most plants.
   • Some seeds will germinate only after being exposed to fire. After the Flood, there was nothing to burn.
   • Most flowering plants are pollinated by insects, but the only insects around after the Flood would have been those Noah carried aboard the ark. The surviving seeds would have had to find the proper conditions of soil type and burial depth in a small area around where the ark landed.
   • Plants live not as individuals, but as communities. If you cut down the redwoods, you kill not only the redwoods but also dozens of other plants that depend on the community structure. After the Flood, there would have been no ecological communities, only bare land. Any plant that depends on a mature community (for shade, shelter, humidity, or support, for example) could not survive until such a community matures, which usually takes years to decades.
   
   Woodmorappe (throughout his book, not just regarding plants) made two fundamental errors:
   1. He noted that "many" could survive the flood conditions, disregarding the significant number that could not, but that are alive anyway.
   2. He assumed that plants and animals could live in isolation, ignoring that life lives in, and depends upon, ecologies. Simply preserving plants and animals would keep them alive for a very short time. Noah would have had to rebuild many entire ecologies to maintain the life we see today.
   
   
3. Evolution predicts the geographical distribution of plant kinds that we observe, with many species occurring on one continent and not others. Flood geology predicts that this pattern would not occur. Flood theory fails.

References: