Apart from the lack of sediment layer supporting a global flood, Scott Frazer, a PhD in analytical chemistry, posed the following challenges to a global flood:
1. As mentioned, there is simply not enough water on the earth to flood the whole surface of the earth. Then there is also the question of where the flood waters would have gone after the flood was over. In the search for oil, we have now mapped out the contents of most of the world beneath our feet. The vast underground caverns of water proposed by Athanasius Kircher simply do not exist.
2. Just in his homeland of Mesopotamia, Noah would have had a large number of native animal species to save. But a global flood would demand that he also save all the animal species found in North America, South America, Australia, Africa, Asia, and even Antarctica. Thus, Noah would have had to fit millions of species of insects, rodents, birds, reptiles, and mammals onto his Ark, which would have required a much larger ark. Also problematic is explaining how those species native to other continents returned to their homes without leaving fossil evidence or offspring during the long migration to Mesopotamia or back home again.
3. Finally, there is the problem regarding the population of the world. As mentioned in chapter 9, at the time of Adam, there were approximately 7 million people on the earth. By the time of Noah, it is estimated that there were about 20 million people on the earth (Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History [New York: Facts on File, 1979], 344). A global flood would have killed them all. That would have started the evolution of Man all over again. Our population would have had only 6,000 to diversify again. That is not nearly enough time for mankind to develop the racial diversity we see today. As David Montgomery put it, “Could Pygmies, Vikings, and Aborigines all have descended from Noah in just a few thousand years, when classical statues revealed that Greeks and Italians look the same way two thousand years ago as they do today?” (Ian Wilson, Before the Flood [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001]). (Scott R. Frazer, Where Science Meets God: 12 Ways Science Reinforces LDS Doctrine [Springville, Utah: CFI, 2018], 127-28)
In a discussion on the meaning of “the face of the earth” (Ibid., 128-29), Frazer offers the following insightful comment on Gen 4:14:
Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the ace of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. (Genesis 4:14)
If “the face of the earth” meant the entire surface of our planet, Cain was going to have to figure out how to levitate to be driven off it. Only if this phrase means “the local region,” does this verse make any sense. Cain was exiled and he had to leave his home, which to him was the face of the earth. (Ibid., 129, emphasis in original).
