Blurry Creatures - EP: 408 The Flood of Noah: Science and The Bible with Hugh Ross

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Astrophysicist and apologist Hugh Ross returns to the blurry basement to talk about his new book, Noah's Flood Revisited, and the case he's making that the Genesis flood account is scientifically credible when read literally and historically. Hugh walks through why he believes the flood was universal to all humanity but not necessarily global in geographic scope, how no Christian scholar explicitly argued for a global flood until the 17th century, and why the Bible itself, in Job, Psalms, and Proverbs, may rule out water covering the entire planet after creation day three. He also unpacks Noah's overlooked role as a prophet, the "two books" framework of nature and scripture, and why this passage is by far the most ridiculed section of the Bible among skeptics and believers alike.The conversation goes deep on ancient human migration, the dating of the flood to a possible Ice Age event tens of thousands of years ago, the Nephilim and what Genesis 6:4 actually says about their return, and how 300+ flood legends across the Americas support a pre-migration event. Hugh also drops news about a forthcoming book on ETI and UAPs, talks about why ancient peoples weren't as ignorant as we assume, and shares why getting skeptics past the flood narrative might be the key to getting them all the way to Jesus.  This Episode is Sponsored By: https://rocketmoney.com/blurry — Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster! https://zocdoc.com/blurry — Find and instantly book top-rated doctors today! https://timtebow.com/tree-blurry/ — Get your copy of If the Tree Could Speak by Tim Tebow on Amazon today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So often people email us and they have this story. They're out in their woods and they're looking in the bushes and they go, what's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say. What is that? What is this stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs. And that's why we partner with rough greens.

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If you're like me and you want to get some new threads for the summer, refresh your wardrobe at Quinn's. Go to quins.com slash blurry for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada. You're in America's hat. You want the goods. You can get it now. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash blurry for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quins.com slash blurry. They say I'm putting science over the Bible, that only the Bible gives us a trustworthy revelation of the past, and I'm ignoring what the Bible says, and I'm claiming that science trumps the Bible. That's never been my position. But I do believe that God has revealed himself through two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture,

and that both God has rendered utterly trustworthy and reliable. The history of our Earth is so different from what we can imagine. Joy to journey. The Smithsonian, that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it bust the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen chair.

And the problem with the modern-day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Herman event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. Welcome into the blurry basement, Hugh Ross. Thank you for coming in today.

We're going to talk about all things. Well, we're going to get you to talk about some weird stuff, but probably more than you're used to on other people's shows. But we have a new book out, Noah's Flood, revisited. We're excited. Your Apologist, astrophysicist, author. And we did one show with you about a year and a half ago. Yeah, you famously told us you didn't play golf, so you just write books, and you keep pumping

them out. It's wild. We just had NT write on the show recently, and he's written 80 books, and I'm thinking you might be coming for the crown. Yeah, I've only got 24. We didn't get to ask you. We got some time. We're sorry, we didn't ask NT write about Bigfoot.

We only had an hour with him, so we had to kind of get right into it. But you live down the street from Bill and Ted's phone booth, so you're as cool as it gets. Welcome Back to the Basement. I would love to get into this book. We've got some time here. We got a little more time with you today. So I don't know how do you kick off this topic. Obviously, it's controversial in our channels of all the things.

But here's the book. Go out there, get it, read it. And you can find you in the comments section. Give them a hard time, right? Yeah, you can. You're excited. People giving you a hard time every day. Well, that's us too.

But we just ask questions over here. We're not really presenting a lot. We just try to throw a bunch of stuff out there, see what sticks. and we're not afraid of a conversation where people, ideas challenge each other. I mean, that's what you should do. I think you like to stir up a little controversy, which is interesting because I don't think you actually like to, but you end up talking about things being an astrophysicist, and you've written a number of books on Genesis, creation.

We did that a last episode. We talked about The Age of the Earth and the uses the word yon, but these are like, funny enough, very controversial and hot topics within the Christian community, including Noah's Flood. And, I mean, you've been studying this for decades. And you wrote about it in navigating Genesis, right? So what made you want to revisit Noah's Flood at this point in your career, if you will, here? Well, it's a book I've been wanting to write for a decade, but I purposely waited because I knew scientists were going to be developing really good dates for when humans migrated at the near and Middle East into all the parts of the world. And so that happened about a year or two years ago where they nailed that down.

and says, hey, if we can nail down Genesis 10 and 11, now we got the tools to nail down what's going on at 6, 7, and 8 of Genesis. I mean, you also say in the book that it's the most, that Noah's Flood, specifically, can be one of the most, or might be the most ridiculed part of the Bible. Yeah, I've done surveys on my social media, and it's by far the most ridiculed part of the Bible. Why? Well, I mean, I get jumped on by, you know, atheists and agnostics who say, how can you as an astrophysicist possibly believe that the whole world was flooded a few thousand years ago?

And I said, well, what makes you think the Bible teaches that? And they said, well, all my Christian friends say that. And so what I realized is a lot of Christians have only looked at the Genesis chapters to develop their model of the flood. They seem to be unaware that there's more content on the flood of Noah outside of Genesis than inside of Genesis. So it's one of the things I try to do, is give people a full biblical perspective and what's going on with Noah's flood, and lo and behold,

it's in line with the latest scientific measurements. Let's start there. What other evidence outside Genesis? For example, only in the New Testament does it talk about Noah's role as a prophet. It's not in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, specifically Hebrews and 2 Peter,

it states that God raised them up, to be a prophet to call his generation to repent. And that kind of explains why he was building his ark and why he took many decades to build the ark. I mean, he was building it in a desert. And this would give people's attention. And so it served as a pulpit for him to be able to preach repentance to his generation.

And if you go into all the biblical texts that deal with how God judges evil, you note that God always sends a prophet before he brings judgment. And so recognizing Noah's role, primary role, was that of a prophet, it gives you a better understanding for why God had him do what he did, because a lot of people say, hey, if the flood didn't cover the whole world, why didn't God just have Noah move away?

Well, that could have ruined his role as a prophet. Yeah. So 100 years on a floating amphitheater, he's yelling at people. Yes. Is that what you're saying? Yes. And you got to. But probably yelling in a very godly, compassionate way, saying, hey, you all need to repent, stop what you're doing.

Not like the grandpa and the Simpsons, you know, Homer Simpson's dad just yelling out there in the front yard. It's actually like, you think he's preaching the gospel to all the people around from the boat. Well, you can get some insights by looking at other texts because I have a whole chapter in the book. What does the Bible say about how God judges rampant societal evil? He always sends a prophet, but it's interesting what the prophet does. I mean, you got Jonah going to Nineveh. You've got Lot going to Sodom. And so just using those examples, you get an idea of, and first of all, God is testing,

is the evil really that bad? And you see that with Sodom and Gomorrah. God sends a couple of angels. Hey, is it really the entire community? And part of what I had to put in the book, because a lot of people say, why is the God of the Old Testament, so different from the God of the New Testament? Notice in the New Testament era, there's no example of societal reprobation where an entire city, an entire nation, including the children, become utterly evil in their

behavior. You have individuals, but you don't have whole societies. And the reason why is what Jesus said to his disciples, says, when I leave and the Holy Spirit comes and indwells you, you'll become the salt of the earth. That salt of the earth is a preservative that prevents the outbreak of societal reprobation. So yeah, you've got God coming in and wiping on all the humans in Jericho, including all their animals

and all their material possessions. Never does that in the New Testament because there's no need. There's no societal reprobation. And I use the example of what happens when your doctor says, hey, Luke, you've got a stage four tumor.

If I don't take it out, you're going to die. Please give me permission to operate on you. And so the surgeon very aggressively removes that tumor, but a good surgeon only removes the malignancy. He leaves a healthy tissue alone. And there's a really good example of that in Genesis of 15 and 18 where, you know, you had Abraham saying, hey, if there are 20 people in Sodom, will you save it?

And he says, if there's 20, I'll save it. But, and finally he realizes, oh, the only people left in Sodom that are not utterly overcome by the evil is Lot and his family. And then he says to God, what about these wicked Amorites living up in the hills with me? And God says, their wickedness has not yet reached its fullness. I'm not going to touch him. But 400 years from now, your descendants will deal with them. So it kind of makes the principle, God waits until the evil becomes malignant, or it's in danger of infecting everybody. So in the New Testament, the view of Noah is he's a prophet.

And the Old Testament, maybe they didn't view him as that? Well, I'm just saying the Old Testament is silent on his role. Yeah. It's not totally silent. Because if you read all the Old Testament texts on how God judges societal reprobation, you could discern Noah had to be a prophet because that's the way God operates. So it's like there's no need for God to say that, assuming you've actually read all the other texts in the Old Testament on God judging reprobates societal evil.

So that helps the non-Christian who thinks why would God do this? What God did with Noah's flood was an act of mercy. Humanity was in danger of self-extermination. And so he stepped in to save humanity from being totally wiped off the face of the earth. You're out in the woods, you're looking, you see something you don't recognize. What do you do in that moment? The last thing you want out there is to have that happen to your bank account. What is this charge?

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help you really meet your financial goals this year. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at RocketMoney.com slash blurry. That's rocketmoney.com slash blurry. RocketMoney.com slash blurry. Where does the controversy come in? Where does it fork in terms of what people think before it was. Well, the big controversy is people read Genesis 6, 7, and 8 and say, look at how frequently it says, all and every. All flesh gets wiped out. All the high mountains get covered with water. They said, it's explicit. It's got to be global. And so I agree and say, yes, you do see the word all and every 29 times in those three chapters. So it's basically saying it's universal, but universal to what?

I'm making the claim in the book that the flood is universal to 100% of humanity in all their animals. But if humans had not yet migrated to Antarctica, why would God wipe out all the emperor penguins? Or why would God say to Noah,

you'd better get some kangaroos on board the ark and some Brazilian sloths on the ark. If the flood hadn't reached those areas, there'd be no need for them to take them on the ark. And so the controversy is how could Noah fit two million species, two million pairs of animals on board the ark? While it's all based on the idea that when the text says, all the high mountains were covered with water,

all flesh was wiped out, they presume it's a global event, which is why I have three chapters in the book saying, the history of what Christian scholars said about Noah's Flood. It's really interesting. Not a single Christian scholar explicitly says Noah's Flood is global until the end of the 17th century, which is the first time you got nations, two nations, namely Holland and Britain, with global navies.

And the first two scholars to write about the flood being global is a Dutch scholar and an English scholar. That's the first time humans had a global perspective. And so they read those texts and they have their global bias that causes them to interpret it that way. But the fact that nobody previous to the 17th century did that tells us, hey, maybe we better actually look. What does the Bible say about worldwide events? So again, I got a chapter in the book. Let's look at all the places in the Bible where it talks about a worldwide event.

Interesting, not a single one is global. They're all less than the globe. But it's the world of humanity. And you see that explicitly in 2.5, God brought the flood upon the world of ungodly people. Yeah. Which means as far as ungodly people extended, that's how far the flood extended.

But I think we can be sure. There were no ungodly people at that time living in Greenland or living in Antarctica. and therefore no need for God to flood those regions. So a lot of the book is, what do we know from science about how far humanity it extended at the time of the flood? Now that also means we need to nail down

when did the flood occur. That's the second big controversy. You've got a lot of Christians all of the world claiming the flood happened, oh, 5,500 years ago. If it's that recent, there's going to be physical evidence. And people point out there's zero evidence of what you're claiming. And then you actually have people claiming, well, they are actually saying that Noah's flood is responsible for 99% of verse geological features. And that really gets attention from the people who are unbelieving

scientists saying that's utterly absurd. You can't form the Himalayas or the Rockies in a single year. You can't have 40,000 kilometers of plate tectonic movement in one year without evaporating all Earth's water. And they're really ridiculing the claim that how the global flood happened is it got accelerated radiometric decay by a factor of a billion times. Well, there's a lot of potassium in your body. Point two percent of it is radioactive. You accelerate that by a billion times. your body instantly vaporizes. There's no evidence in Genesis

that all the people on board the art vaporize during the flood, or the arc vaporize, or all the water from planet Earth, and where Earth was turned into a molten sphere. You accelerate radiometric decay by a billion times. You actually transform Earth into a molten ball. And here they say that because they're trying to match dates, right? They're trying to make the dating of rock and stuff.

sediment and these things match a young, we would consider be a younger. This is really the controversy here is right, you have a young earth view versus an old earth view. And young earth which will say the earth is 6,000 years old. And they'll say that things like Adam was born at 30. He was born like a fully formed man. And so God could have done the same thing with the earth, for example. But if you're looking from a scientific standpoint and trying to place a worldwide or global flood at 5,500 years ago, as you say, there's no evidence there. We can't, we can't find that, correct? Right. What about a localized flood? Because I think what's interesting is we actually had a theologian friend that we do a lot with, Dr. Joel Matamali, who also believes it was a

localized flood, which he says one of the more controversial things he talks about, especially in biblical circles, because he believes the same way that like two, and your point now, just sort of backtrack, you're saying if you look at the human migration at this point, when they're talking about a worldwide flood, this would be the known world, right? Like they, the extent to which they knew the world, they hadn't gone to, as you say, Australia, or... There's no kangaroo arcs? Maybe they might have... They boxed.

They might have... Yeah. How did the kangaroos survive? How does the kangaroos hop all the way into it? Yeah, they did. They made it. Well, no, we talk a lot about these subjects here. I mean, we're out of the box a little bit more, but the Bible says the giants were there

before and after. So somehow they survived, right? We're all in on that topic. and we've gone down that rabbit all the time. I'm actually claiming they didn't survive, that the flood wiped about 100%. Notice what it says in Genesis 6-4, the sons of God returned.

Yeah. So it was a new generation of Nepheelin. Yeah, and we try to figure out, we don't really know. We know there's no explanation, whether it was another angelic incursion or another was like genetic. Well, some people will suggest

that they found some mountain to climb up and, you know, they have some wild theories and he had survived it somehow, but that also your argument is that no they were all wiped out so then it's it's a hard I'm actually critical the local flood theory because usually they're saying hey if it took place say in the last 10,000 years we have lots of evidence of local floods especially if push it back to say 14,000 years yeah you get some big floods the problem is all those local floods would only be able to wipe wipe out a fraction of humanity that they're

too small to wipe out all of humanity. And so I'm arguing the flood is not local, it's not global, it's universal. The distinction being the flood is big enough to wipe out all the humanity and all the animals associated with humanity. That again fits into God's doctrine of judgment that you see in the book of Leviticus, is that there are certain animals whose behavior becomes unacceptable. For example, it talks about the bull that's goring other animals and goring people. And when that happens, you're supposed to talk to the owner. And if the cow continues to exhibit that behavior, Leviticus says, the cow must be killed and the owner along with the cow. Making the point, the owner as well. He's responsible, right? He's responsible for the cow behaving that way.

And it's not that cow's sin. Likewise, the mean dog syndrome. It's not that the dog is a sinner. It's that both the dog and the cow are highly motivated to please their human owner. And what brings pleasure to the human owner is their dog viciously attacking other people and animals. That's how the dog will behave. Likewise with a cow. If the owner gets pleasure from the cow goring other people and other animals,

that's how the cow will behave. But that reads raises a point. Only certain animals bond to humans to that degree. And what you see in Genesis 7 and 8, it uses seven distinct Hebrew words for the animals that God judges by the flood. And people look at the text and says, hey, it says all flesh.

But have you actually looked at the original Hebrew words? And so it's basically making the point, all the Nefesh Basar get wiped out. The Nefesh refers to what the Hebrew is basically saying, a soulish animal, an animal that has the ability to express emotions to members of its own species, but also to us humans. That's why we make pets of birds and mammals. All birds and mammals are part of the nefesh,

and they have the capability of being tamed by us and the capability of relating to us as a pet. that's not true of salamanders. It's not true of fish. It's not true of mosquitoes. So lots of animals are not in that category. And Basar means that they're in relationship with us. And what the book of Leviticus tells us,

it's only those animals that can be damaged by human sin. If they have no contact with us, they can't be damaged. And if they're not in the nefesh category, they can't be damage. So those are the ones that are wiped out. that were saying? Those are the ones that are wiped out. And the principle there, if there were no humans in North and South America, there's no need for Noah to grab a pair of sloths and put them on board the ark because they would have had zero contact with humans. They're up in the trees. Then they're asleep. Yeah. What do you do, Luke, when you're trying to find a doctor,

that moment when you need somebody to finally decide to help you make that appointment. You got to call somebody. Who do you call? Yeah, and finding a doctor or finding care shouldn't be the trickiest piece of the puzzle. It shouldn't be like understanding the flux capacitor. That's right. Zoc Doc makes it easy to find and book an appointment with the doctor you love. It's a free app and website that helps you find a book high quality in network doctors so you can find one that you love. You just get the app, type in what you need, and it shows you real doctors near you. It's that simple. Their availability, patient reviews, whether they take your insurance, and you could have book appointment in minutes, not days, not weeks. You know, the first time I used

Zockdoc, I was looking for a dentist. They hadn't been a dentist in years. I've almost a shame to admit that. Oh, man. But I was able to find one close to my house that had great reviews, and I was able to get in in the next day, which is, you know, I didn't have an emergency dental thing like you did recently. Yeah. So I would recommend Zoc Doc to anyone who often puts off going to the doctor, the dentist, primary care, dental, specialists, all the things you need in person or virtual. And there's more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states that you can find in network for your plan. You can view thousands of verified patient reviews to give you a real sense of who that doctor is you can see real-time availability and book instantly no phone tag no waiting around appointments made

through zoc doc happened fast and typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking you can even score a same-day appointment that's the future Nate yeah so stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zoc doc doc dot com slash blurry to find and instantly book a doctor you love today that's zoc doc doc doc doc dot com slash blurry zok doc doc doc doc slash blurry thanks zok doc doc doc doc for sponsoring this message. You're saying it was a very strategic cleansing. It wasn't just like, release the hounds, the floods come up, and everything dies. It's a very strategic, detailed.

And I'm arguing that's consistent with every other instance where God judges a reprobate society. It's always an exact strategic cleansing. He removes all the malignancy, but he keeps everything. healthy alive. So besides Sodom and the flood, what other deluge do you, have you studied? There's rumors that this happened to Atlantis and some of these other places that rumored to exist. Is there any other evidence to suggest that the flood is kind of a similar model of how God judged a territory group? There's a lot of speculation where, you know, like 7,500 years ago, the Black Sea got inundated. Yeah.

People say, ah, that's Noah's flood. The problem was the inundation was very slow. And people could see the Black Sea level rising. They could walk away from it. When you read Genesis, we're talking a very sudden inundation. So sudden, people aren't able to escape it. And moreover, I would say, 7,500 years ago, that's too recent. 7,500 years ago, you got humans living in Australia, North America and South America.

So I'm arguing that the flood was earlier. That's another reason for controversy. As you mentioned, a lot of Christians think the genealogies will give you good dates. And so I actually put it in the book there. People believe that. What's interesting, they calculate a date for the flood starting with Adam and using the genealogies. And then they go from Abraham and they go back towards Noah. and again they're using genealogies.

Those two methods give you two dates that differ by one another for by 110 years. That alone should tell you that genealogies cannot be used to give accurate dates. They can give you rough ideas of the progression of time, but we should not be using the genealogies to develop dates. If you look at all the biblical genealogies, virtually every one of them drops generations.

Yeah, they kind of tell you what's important, right, in some ways, and they skip up for things that aren't, right? Right, and some of them are trying to make a theological point. Some of the genealogies make a point of mentioning not the men, but the women, making the point the gospels for both men and women. And notice the women it mentions, Rehab and Tamar. These are women that committed rather grievous sins, basically saying, hey, if you're a sinner and you repent, you're in. Yeah. And so on purpose mentions individuals and on purpose it drops certain individuals. So, I mean, obviously something we've known over the years is that people bring a lot of emotional stuff into biblical stories. They thought about the flood long before they read the story of the flood. And then

they come into the scriptures and then anyone who says anything differently, it's like they're just people's thoughts on angels. Angels and humans, there's no way that they could cross, you know, interbreed or anything like that. They've already determined. that in their mind before they read the Bible and then they come up with some wild explanation of why that's not possible. It's like, I don't have a lot of emotional attachment at this point in my life to a lot of these. I just want to, I'm just curious. I want to know what do you think the baggage that people bring into the conversation with the flood that makes them reactive to when you say things. Yeah, I mean, I've never gotten such emotional reaction since this book came out.

I haven't called every name under the sun. And it's like people are saying, you're ruining my child's I mean, they had these flannel graphs of all these happy animals coming on board the ark. And now you're saying, hey, no kangaroos. There's Bigfoot in there. Did he come on the ark? Bigfoot didn't come on the ark. He was hiding. He was in North America. Yeah, he was in North America and some trees. Yeah, so they're, they're attacking you. They're attacking me because I'm spoiling their idea of what the Bible actually says. It's also illuminating me. I mean, I've been a pastor for five decades. And it's like, this book has really taught me. There are people who think they know the Bible well,

but they've never taken the time to read through it cover to cover. Yeah. And it's like, I'm hoping this book will motivate them. Hey, you think the story of Genesis Flood is just in three chapters? You need to read the whole story. And hopefully they'll begin to read through all the biblical books and be able to draw their own conclusion. Yeah.

What changes, though, if they, if it's a low, If it's a more strategic flood. Universal flood. Yeah, then just a universal flood. Or global floods. Why do you think they have to defend that so fiercely? Well, they're thinking that the flood was 5,500 years ago. I'm saying, hey, it's probably 60 to 90,000 years ago.

When I talk about 60 to 90,000 years ago, they were immediately saying, this guy, Hugh Ross must be a heretic. That's way too far back in time. And so they react to that. They react to the fact that, hey, doesn't the text say all the high mountains were covered? I said, well, you're getting that out of Genesis 719 and 20. Have you read the next chapter? And it's like, that kind of stuns him. Hey, of course I've read the next chapter.

Well, what did you see? In Genesis 8, 5, you got Noah on top of the ark. He looks out and he can see the distant hills. Then he releases a dove, Genesis 8, 9, later in the text. And what does it say of the dove? The dove returns to Noah and the art because all the dove could see was water over the whole face of the earth.

Go back to Genesis 719 when it talks about water covering all the high hills and mountains. That's Noah on top of the ark, basically saying from one horizon to the opposite horizon, all I can see is water. And so it tells us the flood was extensive enough

that there was water over the whole view of Noah on top of the ark. The text is not saying that Mount Everest was covered. It's basically saying all Noah could see was water from one horizon the other. You get that just by looking at Genesis 8,5, and 8,9. Then also recognize, it talks about all the high hills. The two Hebrew words there, it can mean, the word for mountain, har can mean hill or mountain or mount. So if you've got a mound in your backyard, that's a har.

So it's not saying that Mount Ararat was covered. It's just saying all the hills, mountains that Noah could see were covered with water. And when it says high hills, the same word means elevated. So it means all the elevated relief that Noah could see. So when you look at the original Hebrew, you get a different point. picture from what a lot of English readers see. That's something else I've noticed in coming out with a book. It's people who speak English that get really upset about my book. It's people to speak Korean and Japanese. What's interesting about those three languages, they all have

a vocabulary size bigger than half a million words. Yeah. Biblical Hebrew, only 3,000 words. That's assuming you don't count the names of people in cities. So do you feel like there's other stories? Like obviously water was supernaturally manipulated in the story of Moses, right? Taking going through the Red Sea and then all the other evil was destroyed. Is there some sort of tie? I feel like a lot of times we see the tie between different biblical stories and how the themes interact. How does a world get flooded in a localized area with the water,

filling out into the next town. How's that happen? Is there some kind of Moses event happening there? Yeah, I mean, very good point because people think I'm coming up with a naturalistic explanation. I'm saying, hey, a flood extensive enough to wipe all human beings, plus all their animals, it's got to be a supernatural event. Yeah. I mean, you've got to get God working in such a way to bring all that water into a location fast enough. The text tells us about 40 days and 40, 40 nights of torrential rain in a desert location. So, and then there's a tectonic event that brings up water from the underground aquifers. The thing that caught my attention, the first time I read through Genesis at age 17, is it says the

flood lasted a whole year. And right away, I said, hey, you got God supernaturally intervening to bring all this water into that region, but water flows downhill. Yeah. It's going to go out into the Indian Ocean. Something has to replace the water that flows out. And we've had big floods here in North America that lasted several months. In every case, it was snow melt that explained why it lasted that long.

The liquid water flows out of the Gulf of Mexico or into the St. Lawrence, and snow melt replaces the water that flows out. Interesting thing about ice and snow, it melts slowly because of the sea. heat effusion of water. Very slow melt and explains why we have all these rivers all over the world that flow every day of the year. It's because they're being fed by slowly melting ice and snow. And so I argue that the flood must be an ice age event. And again, going all the way back to when I was 17, it has to be an ice age event because in an ice age, you could have a lot of melting snow and ice replacing the water that flows out into the oceans. And that's right in the text that lasts

one year and 10 days. So you need a lot of water. So what I point out in the book is what's interesting about the previous ice age, there were eight really major melt events. And I'm also disturbing people's ideas about the ice age cycle. Most people think, oh, the ice age cycle, you get a 10,000 year period where it's nice and warm. Yeah. 90,000 years where the planet is covered, 23% with ice. The previous ice age, we know, was more complex than that. You had thousands of feet of ice freezing over the land masses.

Then you have a melt event where thousands of feet thickness of ice melts. Then it refreezes. So you've got eight major melt and freeze events where literally land masses covered with thousands of feet of ice. The ice does this and the ice goes back. up, ice does this, ice goes back up. So I argue probably one of those major melt events would be consistent with the flood of Noah. But we don't have the scientific evidence to nail down which one it is. If you want to read something great with your kids out there, we have a new book by Tim Tebow, if the tree could speak. And have you ever thought about this? We know the story of

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sometimes with young Earth creationists sometimes. And you're kind of out on your own little island there in terms of, no pun intended. Well, yes, but when people listen, I mean, as soon as this book came out last October, I spoke to a group of scientists. They were all in different disciplines.

Most of them are Christians, but they actually listened to what I had to say about, and they said, this solves all the problems. And likewise, I had a chance to speak to theologians, and they said, this solves all the biblical problems. So people actually go through the book, they get really exciting because they said, everything that bothered me about the flood, I'm now recognizing, hey, I can trust that the Bible's giving me an accurate, literal, historical account of the flood

that's consistent what God reveals in his book of nature. Hugh, I wanted to ask about this specifically when you dated because he says something interesting here, and we were talking pre-roll, and I know that we've had a few folks on the show, show that have hypothesized or postulated that perhaps the younger dryest event, right, this common impact on the ice sheet could be the impetus or sort of the natural that God's allowing to happen that causes the flood. You said that you actually believe it happened earlier and you kind of laid out a few things where there are multiple melting and freezing events in an ice age. I know in the book you through this, but how do you date and when do you think,

what is your hypothesis for when the Noahic flood happened? And how did you arrive at where you believe it is? Well, the younger dryest event is a major freeze event, followed by a major melt event. And it's about 11,000 to 12,000 years ago. The reason I'm not comfortable with that, it's too recent. By that time, you got humans living in North America, South America, and Australia, which is why people say, well, that's the case.

It has to be global. and the Younger Dryas event was not a global event. And moreover, it's not one of the major melt-freeze events. During the previous Ice Age, there were other melt-free events that were much more dramatic than what you see in the Younger Dryas. So I'm basically appealing to those. But what's brand new in the book is how research scientists have been able to date when humans migrated out of the near and Middle East

and Eastern Africa into all of Africa, all of Europe, and all of Asia and Australia. What's interesting, it's called the Great Migration Events, and something the scientists have known about for several decades, but for the first time, we got multiple, reliable, accurate dates for when those events happened. The thing that startled me in reading through the scientific literature on this, the dates are all the same. You get Northern Europe settled the same time as Southern Europe. You got Australia settled at the same time as Europe.

You got Japan and Borneo being settled at the same time. You got Western Africa being settled at the same time. Moreover, we don't have just one dating method. We got four methods. And so one method, for example, is that we know Adam and Eve had to be cooking their food because we humans don't have the strength in our jaw muscles or the bones in our jaw or in our teeth to be able to survive on nothing but raw food.

We have to be able to soften our food by cooking it. And by cooking it, we're able to eat foods that other animals can't eat. So as now well-established, the earliest humans were eating vegetables and grasses that were poisonous to other species. of life because we roasted it, we boiled it, and we ground it, and made it safe to eat, and made it soft enough that we can consume lots of calories in a short period of time. So one of the things scientists have said, okay, what's the earliest evidence we have in northern Europe for people cooking their food? What about Southern Europe? What about Asia? What about Africa?

So that's one tool we have for dating when those migration events happen. Another one is, there's human remains. Let's, you know, get the human skeletons, and we can use that to date when people first began to inhabit Northern Europe and Australia. Another method is to look at the relics that are associated with them. Only humans were building complex tools, like bows and arrows. You know, like where we take an axe and, you know, you put a metal with it. Only humans were engaged in metallurgy. Yeah. And that's something. new in the book too. People think, well, the Iron Age didn't happen until 3,000 years ago. We now know that people living in northern regions during the last ice age were gathering

stainless steel meteorites. Yeah. So, you know, they fall in the snow. They're dark. They're easy to spot. They pick them up. A quarter of the meteorites that fall are a better grade of stainless steel than which you can buy from the steel factory. And so those people were cold forging them into complex tools. Yeah. So people look at that evidence. And then they actually look at the genetic evidence. You know, let's look at the DNA and see when it diversifies and the diversification

would be evidence when those migration events happen. So four independent methods of multiple populations all come in at 40 to 50,000 years ago. Yeah. And moreover, these are carbon 14 calibrated. dates. So the problem when you get earlier than 50,000 years, up to about 260,000 years, there's no radioisotope clock available. But carbon 14 is good from about 1,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago. So these are not just indirect dating methods, they're direct dating methods. And so that tells me, okay, now we know what's going on with Genesis 10 and 11.

And people often try to interpret the flood without looking at Genesis 10 and 11. Genesis 10 and 11, you get God speaking to Noah and he says, multiply and fill the earth. But the tone is different than what you see God speaking the same statements to Adam, implying that Adam's progeny failed to multiply and fill the earth. So God is speaking in very direct language to Noah,

hey, don't screw up this time, You need to multiply and fill the earth. Then you get to Genesis 11. Here's post-flood humanity saying, we're going to build a big city and a tower, one language, one government, so that we will not be scattered over the face of the earth. Humanity was resolute in the rebellion against God's command

to spread out over the whole of the earth. And so we see in Genesis 11, God forcibly scatters humanity, gives them different languages. Yeah. That's something else we can do. We can date when languages went from one to multiple. Again, they're consistent with a 40 to 50,000 years ago. So that becomes a Tower of Babel event.

That's a Tower of Babel event. Okay. So you just go upstream from that to, because you had to have all these people that were descendants of Noah, right? So you had to be downstream enough to have all these people, but upstream enough that you didn't have them. Yeah, I'm arguing the great migrations happened after the Tower of Babel. Yeah.

And the fact that we see Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Borneo, Borneo, Japan, Australia, all being settled at the same time gives me credence that would you see in Genesis 11 actually is literal true history. God forcibly scattered humanity over the face of the earth. I mean, because otherwise, if it's just humans working without any divine intervention, you'd expect the migrations to be spread over a period of time. You'd expect, say, northern Europe to be settled quite a bit later than southern Europe. It's warm in southern Europe.

It's cold in northern Europe. Wouldn't it make sense that northern Europe be settled? And what's also interesting, during the last ice age, you got a huge plane above Siberia. And what we now know is that humans settled that plane between Siberia and the North Pole. they didn't settle Siberia. Siberia was cold. This plane was very, just a little bit above sea level. And during the last ice age, sea levels were as much as 390 feet lower.

So this plane above Siberia became above sea level. And because of how flat it was, that's where people settled. It was warmer than Siberia. And you get that settled again at the same time as what you see in Australia. and Northern Europe. So this looks like God must have been intervening. How do you get people north of Siberia towards the North Pole

unless God's motivating and to get there? So you stick this pin in and you say, here's an event. We know we've got four different evidence, evidentiary streams that point to this timing for human migration patterns being scattered. You see this in Genesis. So if you put that,

it's taking the ground there, right? How much farther back are you post-lying that we then have a flood? Is it 10,000 years? Is it 1,000 years? It's got to be more than 50 because what we see in Genesis 11, there's quite a few generations between Noah and the Tower of Babel incident. And we know that genealogy isn't complete. So there has to be several thousand years between the great migrations and Noah's flood. So I'm arguing that, you know, a reasonable date for Noah's flood is 60 to 90,000 years ago. Wow. A conservative date would be, say, 55 to 115,000 years ago.

That's conservative. And people say, can't you be more accurate? The problem is we're now in an era where all the scientific methods are indirect with huge systematic errors, often unknown systematic errors. And again, I got a piece in the book where I say, be careful when you read the scientific literature about events in that time era. Because typically, the scientists only give you the statistical errors,

the measuring errors. They don't address the systematic errors where there's some local effect that would shift all the measurements thousands of years earlier or thousands of years later. and the reason you don't see that in their papers, they have no idea what they are. They do know what these statistical errors are.

So they quote those. But so you'll see a day, hey, we found this relic. It's 80,000 years ago, plus or minus 5,000 years. You're only getting this statistical error. If you throw in this systematic error, it could be plus or minus 40,000 years. It's interesting because, like, I think how to think about these things is difficult for a lot of Christians.

So a big part of the emotional reaction is just it's just the days, how many years they just think that it's younger. So it has to be anything you say, they have to kind of throw it out the window. I mean, there's a lot of people that don't even believe space is real that listen to our show. So anything we present that deals with the constellations, moving of stars, star of Bethlehem, all these other things, they can't accept any of that. And then you have scientists who have these major blind spots. What would you say is like some of like your blind spots, like things that are hard for you to fit into the flood narrative and the story that that that you run up against? Because I think you have to be a very particular type of thinker to have all these pieces fit in this puzzle because there's so many weird parts. There's a lot of pieces.

I mean, the fact that you got people living hundreds of years before the flood, not so after the flood. I had to put in the book, hey, we astronomers know that there was a major nearby supernova event that's responsible for over 90% of the killer cosmic rays we experience. There's a reason why none of us are going to make it past 120 years or exposed to radiation. But people before Noah's flood wouldn't be exposed to that radiation, therefore they had the potential to live longer.

Do you think that was a canopy of water? No, a canopy doesn't work. Canopy is not going to stop the cosmic race. Because that's a weird part of the story too. There's water above and below. What does that mean? I don't know. That's a big controversy.

Only recently, though. What's happened recently since the very late 20th century, for the first time you had Bible translations, translating the word rocky E as a vault over the earth. Yeah. Whereas before all the translations said a permanent, an expanse, or the sky. This is new where they're putting the vault over. And the reason for that is that there's this idea that the ancient peoples believe that the world was flat with a metal dome over it,

with sluice holes in it that explain how there was... A lot of modern people believe this too. That there was water above that and how that explains the rain. And the stars are attached to the inside of the vault. Walt. It's not so much in this book, but a book I wrote called Rescuing and Errancy that I published a year before this book makes the point, the ancients weren't that stupid. They knew the stars were very, very far away because they tried to measure the distances using basic trigonometry, and they couldn't do it. So that's how they discerned the stars had to be bodies like the sun, but so far away that they seem as these little points of light. And also they knew, that there's a limit to how far you can pump up water. The ancient peoples were irrigating their fields. This is true in Mesopotamia, who is true in Egypt.

They use things like Archimedes screws to pump water up in the river and put it up in their agricultural land. They knew they can only do that for a few feet. It takes air pressure to actually make all that work. So the idea that there was water, together with water on the ocean, thousands of feet over a dome, they knew that that was all incorrect.

And I've been having to cite people or take people to a paper that's online, written by a couple of scholars, Seventh-day Adventist scholars, and it's titled The Myth of the Ancient Heavenly Dome, making the point, yes, you'll see it in the fantasy literature of ancient people's, but it's not in their historical or scientific literature. And they, it's a 40-page paper, and they, in a very devastating way, say, none of the ancient scientists believed that any of this is true. They all knew that the earth was a spherical body. Nobody believed in the flat earth.

In fact, this idea of ancients believing in a flat earth, you don't see that until the 18th century. In the Enlightenment, you had people in Europe who were trying to attack the Christian faith. So one way they did it is say, well, the ancient Jews believe the world was flat. It's in the Bible, guys, because it talks about the four corners of the earth, and therefore they believed in the flat earth. They believed in this dome over the flat earth. An analogy I've used, it'd be similar to archaeologists, 2,000 years from now, digging in the ruins of Hollywood, and coming up with these film canisters,

and they look at the canisters, and they say, boy, those people in the 20th century, they were sure ignorant. They believed utter scientific nonsense. You know, they're looking at the film canisters of the Flintstones, where you've got these people working in work quarries, using dinosaurs as cranes. And that's our fantasy literature. It's not our scientific literature. And what these people are overlooking is humans are distinct.

We are compelled to engage in fantasy literature. even to the detriment of our survival. Missionaries I know who have worked with primitive Stone Age tribes, they're amazed at how much time and energy they devote to telling stories and recording these stories. And, you know, it's true of us here in the United States. Look how much time our children and we as adults spend engaging in fantasy. And that actually stimulates our brain and makes,

that's one of the reasons why we humans are so inventive. I mean, it's creativity. Yeah, it's a creativity. And so failing to recognize that the ancients did that just like we do it. And so, yeah, they all knew that the earth was spherical. It's easy because if you walk north, you see different constellations than you do if you walk south. And so they figured that out. They even measured the diameter of the earth by looking at the constellations

or looking at the shadow that an obelisk would have, say, in southern Europe, compared to Northern Europe, it's quite easy to show that we have to be living on a spherical body, even determine its size, and even figure out that the sun had to be the center of the solar system. People think the ancients were sure stupid. They believed the Earth was the center of the solar system. They didn't. Toll me did not have algebra. The only way he could calculate the future positions of the planets is to do the math from an Earth-center perspective.

And it wasn't Copernicus that discovered that the Sun was the center of the solar system. What Copernicus did, he left Poland and went to Italy and read the ancient manuscripts and said, oh, these ancient peoples had it all figured out. The Sun is the center of the solar system, but they lacked the math to determine the positions of future planets from the Sun's Center perspective. Interesting. He was just love kicking the bees nest. He was just kicking them all over the way. And this actually, I think we can pull it back to Noah's flood though, because like every

ancient culture has a flood narrative, right? Everything from Gilgamesh to the erudogenesis to these things. And so that anthropological standpoint as well, not only do we have evidentiary stuff, but we have this as we talk about narrative, that narrative that exists across all cultures. Well, even here in the Americas, North and South America, over 300 distinct flood legends. So why do all these different American tribes have these flood legends unless they took the story with him? That's another argument that Noah's flood must predate the great migrations. People were taking the flood stories with them.

And what you notice is the more distant you get from the near Middle East, the more distorted the story becomes. But they all have something in common. It's like the ancient telephone game. Yeah, it's the ancient telephone game. It just gets weirder. But they kept the essentials. How big, so if you could draw a circle around how big you think the flood was. Well, given that it's an ice age event, we can't determine the exact extent of the flood.

But how big? Like, you think in multiple country's size or like a size of a state? And also, like, to that question, can I add it? At this point, are we assuming that most of humanity lives in the fertile crescent area? That's where in that, in that space. I'm arguing that at that time. humanity wasn't just living in the fertile crescent. They were living in regions beyond that. Okay. So we're talking about a pretty big flood, big enough to inundate not just the Middle East,

but also the Near East, and also parts of Western Africa. So what I've done is to show people, this is the minimum extent of Noah's flood. Yeah. But even the minimum extent is four times bigger than the Mesopotamian Valley. The largest extent would take it all the way up. to the Caspian Sea. I would cover almost the entirety of the near Middle East where the elevation is low. Yeah. Because humans at that time, I'm arguing, we're living at relatively low elevations, probably living in sedimentary plains. Again, that would explain how they could live eight or nine hundred years. If you're exposed to igneous rocks, you're not going to live that long. So if you got human... Explain that. Well, igneous rocks, which would be like granite,

it contains uranium and thorium. So we put these on our counters in our houses and we're frying ourselves? Yeah, you are. Do you have any granite in your house, you? We do. I'm not worried about, I mean, California's loaded with granite. Yeah. Colorado's loaded with granite.

It's going to make sense, actually. Well, there's a lot of paranormal stuff associated with granite. There is, and I recognize that because I live in a state where there's a lot of granite and because I hike a lot in the mountains with a lot of granite in it, that's going to shorten my lifespan by about three months. Well, that's where the most missing people go. It's in the Yosemite Valley, where all the granite is. It's where, like, the people that talk about people just going through almost like the

granite opens portals and they're just walking through them from our, I don't know, that's like a weirder uranium, though, is uranium? Yeah. It reminds me of Back to the Future where you're just, you've got a suitcase full of pinball parts instead of uranium, right? The granite's got to be a lot of back to future jokes here. The whole point is you're living in a sedimentary plane. You're not exposed to quite the uranium and thorium that people who live in high mountains are exposed to.

Yeah. And like I got relatives that live in Colorado, I say because you're living at a higher elevation, that's going to shorten your lifespan by three months. But also what they tell me is, hey, we in Colorado like to exercise because we exercise. We live several years longer than you. So you live in Nebraska, is what you're saying? Like find the great plains and live out there. and you don't have to exercise as much. That's what I'm getting out of this.

I will say, Hugh, like to skip kind of back into the time of things. A lot of people have come on our show. Obviously, we talk about the Nephilim and the Giants and all that stuff here a lot. But a lot of people theorize these were dynasties, and these took a long time to build. The men of renown in Genesis wasn't just, oh, they were famous for a few years. They built empires that were around a while. And you would need more time to kind of cultivate those. Well, yeah, and you think about things like the Sumerian king and the West Tamian kings that they reign for these thousands and thousands of years.

Now we can talk about fantasy literature and that could be part of this, but also if we're talking about... Just a pyramid to build some of those pyramids. If you expand your timeline now to like 100,000 years as you're postulating or more, then you actually have space for not only the building of these massive structures, but also... That's an excellent point. It has to be several thousand years. between the Great Migration events and Noah because of what you see in Genesis 11. I mean, there has to be a lot of generations. They're building all these cities.

I mean, it's a sophisticated community. Yeah. So it's not just a few years. And I would argue you're probably looking at about 10,000 years between the Great Migration Events and Noah's Flood, which is why I say, hey, 60 to 90,000 years ago. And also, if you put it back 60 to 90,000, years ago, you eliminate the genetic challenges. Because people say, hey, how do you can get all the humanity to send it from eight people on board Nora's Ark? Look at the genetic diversity

we have today. But if you put the flood early enough, you eliminate the genetic challenge. And so a lot of unbelievers say, hey, you Christians have to be crazy to believe that the Bible is anything special. But it's because they're thinking the Bible is putting humanity at 10,000 years ago, and they're saying, we have genetic evidence that refutes that kind of nonsense. Hugh,

what ways have you had to emotionally rearrange the furniture to something you were certain? This is how it was for a long time in your... Obviously, you probably have changed your mind a lot in your life. What are some things that were the hardest to change your mind about?

Well, even when I picked up the Bible for the first time at age 17 and began to look at the flood text, the interpretation I developed isn't a whole lot different from what I hold today. I mean, I've read through the text and one thing I did is a young man

that says, I'm not going to draw any conclusions about what I'm reading until I've read the whole book. So for an 18-month period, I was going through the Bible, chapter by chapter, looking at all the details, waiting until I got to revelation

before I drew any conclusions. And that's where I began to see all the pieces fitting together. Oh, what we see in Psalm 104 is relevant to Noah's flood. Psalm 104 has a statement, never again will water cover the whole face of the earth. Interestingly, it's addressing creation day three, because Psalm 104 is a creation psalm,

goes through the events of the six creation days of Genesis 1. And in verses 6, 7, and 8, it's addressing creation day three when God transforms our planet from a water world to a world where there's oceans and continents coexisting. So until creation day three, water cover the whole face of the earth, then that forward we have oceans and continents. Verse 9 which immediately follows says,

never again will water cover the whole face of the earth. Well, that right away eliminates a global flood for Noah. And moreover, it's not the only time. text. It's addressed again in Job 38. It's addressed again in three other creation Psalms. And it's addressed in Proverbs 8. So you go multiple texts telling us, once the continents are in place, the water will never again cover the whole face of the earth. Now, the pushback I've gotten from people who believe in a global flood, they say, Hugh, you're citing the wisdom books. Those books are all poetry. And we have to interpret the poetry.

the Bible in light of the narrative that we see in Genesis. But that's not what I learned in hermeneutics classes. What I learned in hermeneutics classes, we interpret the narrative in light of the didactic text. Didactic being a technical term, the texts that teach straight doctrine. And a good example of that, almost all of Isaiah is poetry.

And the texts that deal with the doctrine of the Trinity in Isaiah are all poetry. those are the most explicit texts in the entire Bible teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. So I'm arguing you can't discount Job and Proverbs and the Psalms because it's poetry. It's just the vessel, right? It's the vessel which the doctrine or the truth or the theology is delivered. Yeah, and I also argue it's an English language bias. In English, our poetry is not the tool we use to teach didactic truth. We use prose, but in Hebrew it's different. Hebrew poetry is a powerful tool for communicating, you know, specific truths.

And so, again, it's people who have large vocabulary languages that tend to get really upset about this issue. What do you think is the most common objection you get from believers, you know, when you talk about scientific things, as you will, talk about the flood. We talk about the creation of the earth. to talk about astrophysics and the creation of the universe. These are things you've all written on. What is the most common objection when you are, and you said this in our first interview, that God gives us a book of theology, the Bible, and then gives us a book of science, those things we can measure and observe, right?

What's the biggest objection you get from Christians, I would say, that you're doing too much science in the Bible? They say I'm putting science over the Bible, that only the Bible gives us. a trustworthy revelation of the past. And I'm ignoring what the Bible says and I'm claiming that science trumps the Bible. That's never been my position. But I do believe that God has revealed himself through two books, the book of nature and the book of scripture, and that both God has rendered utterly trustworthy and reliable. However, science is not the same as the record of nature. It's our interpretation of the record of nature. And likewise, our theology, our interpretation, is not the same as the words of God in the Bible.

And so I'm saying to my friends who claim that I'm using science to trump scripture, hey, if your theology is not consistent with your science, you know you've made a mistake in interpreting out of the book of nature, the book of scripture. And it's quite possible you're misinterpreting both. So this is a signal that God is giving you. You need to re-examine the revelation and see if you made a mistake in misinterpretation or if you're bringing a human bias into bear here. Yeah.

That's why God gave us two books because the books are designed to corroborate one another. So it helps us identify where we've made an interpretation error. If he only gave us one revelation, we would be constrained in our capacity to identify her misinterpretations. It's why God gave us 66 books in the Bible, is that we see that we have a conflict between how we interpret Genesis and how we interpret Hebrews. We know we've made an interpretation error. There used to be an element of humility throughout the whole process. And I think sometimes people say, well, you don't read the Bible. And I'm like, well, a lot of people come to different conclusions when they read it, you know, and they everyone says that their way

of reading it's the correct way and it's it requires a lot of stepping back and like you said reading the whole thing first but even then we've come up with some wild conclusions that christians don't have a unilateral cohesive agreement on anything well that's one motivation for reading the book because i run into so many people who are not followers of jesus christ yeah who think every christian believes that the flood happened less than 6,000 years ago and it covered the whole planet. So one of the things I'm trying to do in saying that's not correct.

If you look at people who lived thousands of years ago, they had different views. Yeah. What is interesting, though, is when you look at, say, the early church fathers or the Middle East scholars and what they thought about the flood, they had different ideas,

but they treated one another with grace, humility, and love. Sure. You don't see the kind of attacks that are so common in our era where Christians are going at one another and to say, wait a minute, non-Christians are watching us? If we're this hostile to one another, are they going to trust us? Well, I think the same spirit of religion that existed in the religious elite in Jesus' day is still here. They're still here, you're right. And I think the spirit of religion is definitely one of the first thing that attacks you when you become a Christian, forces you back into the box. And I think that we've seen a lot of evidence of that.

Just doing the show, what we've experienced. You can't be emotionally connected to a lot. You have to be teachable and you have to be able to let God teach you. You know, that's a good thing. What I tell people that are reasons to believe staff. Yeah. If nobody is persecuting us, we're having no impact. Yeah.

And if we're only being persecuted by unbelievers, we're out of balance. Yeah. If we're only being persecuted by Christians, we're out of balance. Yeah. It were being persecuted equally by people who claim to be Christians and people are not Christians are probably in a good place. And we say that about like, to your point a minute ago, about like how the ancients, how they viewed things and they had a little bit more humility with each other and disagreements. I mean, for a long time, the Genesis 6 narrative that, you know, angels and humans were in relations with each other was accepted amongst the early church.

And then it like later became this divisive part of the church when they were like, now that's impossible. We're going to rewrite that and say the sons of Seth was in that was the line of of the sons of God and we're going to really kind of rewrite this whole story and it kind of requires to just speak to our audience a lot of open-mindedness to go back to Genesis 6 and kind of read it like an ancient and be like, no, there was this time when they were when they were hanging out with each other and or Genesis 1 or Genesis 10 and 11 that we've just covered in this. It's like there's a you know, I think to your point two wasn't to make a joke, but I think like if you just disagreed with someone theologically as an early church father, you had to write a long letter. You couldn't just like send off a little trolling tweet where you had instant gratification. You actually had to like collect your thoughts, provide an argument and think about it. And I think we live in this sort of instant gratification period where someone has a visceral response. People have response to books, to hypothesis, that they can just fire off that visceral emotional response without having to like draw it out.

If you're just an Africanus or you're Clement and you disagree with theologian. with one of the other church fathers, you would have to write it out and explain it and then you have to think through it. It was a, it was a letter. It was a process. Excellent point, Luke, because what I've seen is that people who really go after me and call me all these nasty names, none of them have read the book. Yes. None of them ever heard me give a lecture on the topic. They assume I believe something I don't believe. Well, it will happen in this episode. Without fail, we'll create clips from this and we'll put them out there and people will watch a 30-second clip. Maybe watch five seconds of a 30-second clip, not listen to the episode, not listen to the episode,

not listen to a hypothesis or your argument that you've built or your data, just take that on its face and say, I wholly reject this based upon five seconds or based upon it's Hugh Ross. I don't even need to listen to it, right? And I think that's, gosh, that's the frustrating part. But to your point, though, I think the real disservice would be to not put out sound theology and sound science in your work because the pushback is the fact that you're making waves, right? The pushback is the fact that people are having to rearrange their furniture. We're having to rethink the presuppositions they've brought to the table when it comes to the flood or the creation of the earth or the creation of the universe.

Well, every time we do an episode, something rattles loose and you have to kind of make more room for it. Just saying the dynasties of the Nephilim and how long they were around pushes back in the narrative. or you're talking about metallurgy, you know, how do they know how to do that? Well, a lot of the guys that come on our show say that the angels taught us how to do those things. Like, we traded information technologies back in the day because there's this technology that's ancient. They knew how to do things beyond cooking food way long ago.

And the technology to build these things. Some of these megalithic structures are advanced building techniques out of stone. How do they know how to do all that? So anyway, the knowledge is as much older and how long they were. But I want to flip that question, though, and I'll ask you this. Like, what pushback do you get from the scientific community when you write about something that's in the Bible, like the Noahic flood? Well, the first pushback I get is why even trying to defend the Bible? We all know the Bible teaches nothing but nonsense.

Right. So I get that right away. And then when I get them to calm down a little bit and say, hey, is it possible your misreducing? the text because they're the same people to say, well, I'm not going to read that book. Genesis teaches the world is flat. I said, well, give me the chapter in the verse. And of course, nothing in the Bible talks about the world being flat. In fact, what's interesting is the Bible actually gives us a lot of content teaching us that

the world is a spherical body, not a flat body. The problem is that we live in an age, and I'm sure it's just our age, where people are biblically illiterate. Or they claim to have read the Bible, but they've read pieces of it over a couple of decades. They've never taken the time to read through the Bible, cover to cover, you know, in a short period of time. And if you do that, then you see how all the pieces are linked together. I think that Pharisees did the same thing that we do. They rolled by, they heard something Jesus said for 30 seconds, and then they freaked out. They freaked out. They didn't actually listen to the whole body of what he was teaching.

It's like, wait, this guy says this. And then they get visceral, they get mad and angry because their paradigms challenged. Or, or to the use point, they didn't actually sit and experience and listen to it. They heard, they got it from someone else. I think this is also the problem. People don't read their Bibles. They let someone else read it for them. Right.

And then they take that person's information. Or they bring the emotional baggage into it already. Right. They know exactly how the flood happened. Then they read it. And they cherry pick the verses. So they think. the world is flat. Then they read the Bible. And they go, see, it's saying it's flat. And they don't

read the parts. Because every other guest blows, blows holes in a lot of these narratives. And just as hosts, you kind of have to make room, like I said, and you have to. Then you got someone like Nicodemus that says, you know, what Jesus said really shocks me. Yeah. I'm going to try to talk to him to see what else he's got to say. Yeah. And, you know, so a very different response. Yeah. That's the response I'm hoping to get from the book. Yes, they're going to be shocked by what the book says, but it's like, you know, I really need to look at this. I really need to study this. Can I clarify one thing, though? Like, and I wanted to ask you this. I think you've said this, but just to people listening is that you argue there's a real historical flood that happened.

That we can find in an Ice Age event, but this flood was supernaturally, the causation was supernatural. Like, God caused this to happen. We're not just, we're not, you're not cherry picking. or in a sense of a specific ice age event and saying this has to be it because this happened. I think people talk about the same thing when they postulate on the younger dryest, even though you believe the dating is different. They'll just say, like, well, God allowed this happen and the causation is here and here. That's the only example I have. But you're saying that God said there was going to be a flood.

He told no, to tell people what had happened and build a boat. And we can find the scientific evidence based upon human migration patterns and based upon sedimentary or geological evidence that there is this that we believe these periods a number of events could have been the actual noeic flood and there we've got evidence for it right is that is that am i surmising that pretty well yeah you are and uh you know one of the things i i told our staff please hold the press run there's a paper it just came out we got to get it in the book because one of the big pushbacks i get is the ancients couldn't build boats that big well what happened was a paper got published where they said, we have found evidence that the ancients were making these really long,

thick ropes in the southern islands of Indonesia 40,000 years ago. And what the paper said is the only reason why they'd be making ropes like that is they were using them to be able to steer large ships. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how people got from the islands of Indonesia to Australia 40 to 50,000 years ago, they could see because the sea levels were lower. So they could actually see Australia, but it was still quite a bit of seawater they'd get across and they needed to build a big boat. A bigger boat. We're going to need a bigger boat. So I mean, yeah, I mean that. So they were building big wooden boats that had to be steered. Yeah. Interesting about Noah's Ark, it didn't have to be steered. Didn't have sails. Didn't need a rudder. It just was built for survival.

A big old tar box. And people argue, hey, you know, we built big wooden boats during the sailing era of the 19th century. Yeah. And none of them were bigger than 300 feet. Well, they did build one 400 feet long. Wyoming was 400 feet. Yeah. But they discovered, yes, we can cross the Atlantic if we have no cargo.

Yeah. But if we fill it up with thousands of tons of cargo, we have to reinforce the wood with steel bars. So people said, no way Noah could have built a boat of the wood, 450 feet long. Interesting thing, the Bible addresses 21 different kinds of hardwood, and yet it says the arc was built at a gopher wood. It's the only place in the Bible doesn't really identify what the wood was, but the fact that it did identify 21 other specific kinds of hardwood tells us the wood that was used to make Noah's ark had a stronger tensile strength than the 21

mentioned elsewhere in scripture, which means, hey, if it was that strong, you can easily build a wooden ship 450 feet long. Yeah. It's not out of the technological capability of Noah and his sons to build something like that. It's an old, old wooden ship. I mean, our listeners are already there, Hugh, like, Luke and I went to downtown Kusko and looked at what they built out of stone. Like wood seems like elementary compared to what those agents could build with rock.

Yeah. Cyclopean architecture. Soxia woman, you see these giant stones that are fit together like puzzle pieces. You know, like they knew how to build stuff a long time ago. We don't even know how to build today. And there's evidence that the pyramid was underwater, too. Well, one summer, in fact, just two summers ago, I took my wife to Scotland. Yeah.

And as an astronomer, I wanted to see all the stone observatories. We visited six different sites in Scotland alone. They weren't quite as, you know, built up as Stonehenge, but they were way older than Stonehenge, showing that people 10,000 years ago were building these sophisticated stone observatories because they didn't have telescopes like we have today. They were building these stone structures in using them as gun sites where the astronomer would stand back several miles away

and use the stone structures to accurately measure the positions of the moon, the planets, and stars. Those are their telescopes. And we now know the ancients built over 5,000 minimum of these stone observatories all over the world. And you're right. They would haul the stones from a quarry 200 kilometers away along a road where they would use logs to roll these stones,

where they dug holes and use their tools to actually put the stones exactly where they wanted them. Yeah. So the astronomers could stand back and use those stones to make accurate position measurements. You know, when you're in Cusco. I'm Scottish, so that makes me proud. When you're in Cusco, though, Hugh, you can see how the base is a technology they don't understand. And then when humans come along again, they build, they try to emulate it. And it's getting worse.

It's not getting better. The base of, you know, Machu Picchu, Soxaywama, and then they kind of have this rude, crude way of doing the stonework later. So earlier they had some sort of knowledge. I think they ripped off heaven personally. Like they got this information from entities. Well, you might not like reading, rescuing an erranty then, because I got a chapter there making the point. Ancient peoples didn't need any help from outer space or from angels. Yeah.

They had everything they needed to build these structures. What we overlook is how motivated they were to make these structures. So, for example, we now know that there was a thousand-year period in ancient Egypt where the astronomers were given about 25% of the gross national product. You know, how much we astronomers get from the U.S. government money, we get way less some 0.025%. Oh, sure. So, uh, so they were well funded to be true that. I think, they were well funded.

And given their funding and given their knowledge, they could easily build these structures, especially when the king said, hey, you need 100,000 slaves, no problem. I'll give you the 100,000 slaves. But I think, I think both can be true, you because if your lust for knowledge is so great, you're going to go to any extent you can to get it, which means you'll do any kind of divine, uh, you know, occultic magic to get information. Well, they were certainly doing that because astrology was rife in ancient Egypt as well. But what you notice is that the people who were going the occult route,

they were not doing the accomplishments of people who avoided the occult route. Well, sure. I think God is the best source of light, truth, knowledge, and love. And I think that we've seen that a thousand times. I'm just saying if you have these dynasties that are all evil, then it's like a whole country of Alistair Crowley. they're going to do whatever they want to do. And I think that's when the judgment comes.

Man, there is nothing good about this whole region of people. And the evil is inventing evil. It's like AI going like what we're going to see in our lifetime with dark magic and all kinds of stuff. So I'm just saying that like you have to make room for these. You have to make more room. You can't have a rigid black and white thinking when you do this kind of work. because there's so many things to present themselves every day. Well, you guys might like the book I just finished writing.

It's being edited right now. What's always going to ask you about? It's like, you know, what's next to you? I've been asked to write a book on E.T. E.I. And UAPs. Yeah. So the book is finished, but it's now being edited. But again, the point comes up.

Okay. Can these aliens traverse interstellar space? What's going on with the UAPs? and I run into a lot of skeptics to say, hey, you Christians are nuts to think that they're angels. Well, we talk about the evidence. There really are two distinct species of intelligent life. One constrained by the laws of physics and one not constrained.

And so when we see violations of the laws of physics, we shouldn't immediately say, this is out of bounds. I mean, I had Carl Sagan as briefly as a professor, and that was his position. was, hey, these UFOs, it has to be something that's naturally explained because we know there's no such thing as non-physical reality. Well, that's his worldview. Right. My worldview is able to accommodate non-physical reality.

And now we got space-time theorems, which basically leave that on the scientific table. These space-time theorems prove that the cause of the universe has to be an agent or agency. outside of space and time. So it tells us things, non-physical reality, and not all UFOs fall into that category, but about 10% do. They don't have a physical explanation, they don't have a human connection, but they're real.

But when you look at the physics that they demonstrate, it violates the laws of physics. Yeah, like the TikTok, the stuff they can do, even on the Nimitz video is like, we don't have anything that can do any of that. Nor could you have a pilot They'd be turned to applesauce Or less because of the G's pulling

Which is wild stuff to try to like Okay, what's something here is not This isn't a black military project Because no human can be in there Nothing alive can survive Well not only no human can be in there We can't build an aircraft That can withstand those G forces

Right, exactly So it's got to be something non-physical Some of that comet steel that flew down The stainless steel It's better You've kicked the flat earth bees nest. You've kicked the aliens bees nest. You've kicked the young earth bees nest.

You've kicked the local flood. Or the global flood. Global flood bees nest. You just love hunting those bees nests across the, across the blur universe, do you? I think my one last question for you on Noah's flood. We talked at the beginning of the episode about why you chose and thought it was so important to revisit. But if you were going to, if you wanted folks to take maybe one, if they were to read your book, which we talked about the importance of reading the volume of, the volume of, you know, and the hypothesis and the information.

What do you think is the most important? What would be the most important thing you'd want people to take from revisiting Noah's flood? Well, we talked about how there's flood stories and flood legends all over the world. Yeah. But when you compare them with the Bible, none of them have scientific credibility.

The reason I wrote the book is to say, hey, we can read the Genesis flood text literally, historically, and it's scientifically credible. You don't have to choose between the science and the Bible. God gave us two books, the book of nature, the book of scripture. I bring both them to bear on the flood and hay. We can defend the entire Bible as being inerrant and inspired. Because people say, well, you're claiming the Bible is inerrant.

How do you fit the flood in? We can do it. We can pull it off. I love it. So just for like my last thought is visually, that's kind of how my brain works, there could be evidence of a global flood in that the world was covered with water initially. Day three, you mean?

Yeah. Before day three. Yeah. Yeah. And then the second flood, so to speak, the Noah's flood could be like an understanding. Do you believe it rained before Noah? I didn't. Yes.

Okay. It has to because the two words used for rain in Genesis, Ed and Matar. Mm-hmm. The only difference is one is tiny drops of water. Okay. One is larger drops of water. You get rainbows with both. And you get water falling from the sky.

Kind of like a mist, like a greenhouse. Yeah. I mean, uh, I grew up in coastal British Columbia. Yeah. If the rain drops were less than an eighth of an inch across, we call it a mist. Okay. Yeah. So, but, but we can understand maybe Noah's flood as if like, like, uh, ancient lake town just does.

And then all of a sudden, the lake fills up and it covers this whole region. Like we understand that water can stay in one location based on like, like a big lake. Notice it says 40 days and 40 nights of torrential rain. People say, hey, couldn't the birds have just flown away? Again, I grew up in coastal British Columbia. When the rain is torrential, the birds are not flying. They're not flying. They can't.

They'll lose body heat and they die. Yeah. And so the birds look for shelter. With the rain coming down that intensely, with the underground aquifers coming up, they're not able to escape the water. And then it's just too torrential. So they're all trying to hide on that. I'm actually about a bunch of this storm in the ark.

trying to get in. And then the last thing you said that's rattled around on my brain is that there's species of animals in certain parts of the world that wouldn't have been able to get on the arc that had to have survived somehow. Plants too? Are there certain plants that how did those, if they were all covered, they would have died and there would have been no way for them. I think how we got hot peppers in Mexico didn't get touched.

Like seed bearing plants, I could get how those could come back. Like a seed just comes back and goes down. and gets dried out or gets wet again and grows. But there's got to be some species that can't come back from a flood. Yeah. And animals too. Well, that's the problem with the global flood interpretation. Now, how the global flood people deal with it, they say, well, all life, landlife came

from the life that was on board, Noah's Ark. Yeah. And so, but now you got the problem. Okay, Noah's Ark, even if they weren't eating and they're all hibernating, you can only house a few thousand pairs. And you're claiming these millions of species of life came from a few thousand pairs in a few hundred years. They have to appeal to a rate of naturalistic evolution that's 10,000 times greater than what any atheist biologist has ever proposed. Now, what's interesting, they say, oh, we're not believing in biological evolution. We're believing in

biological diversification. Well, as a scientist, I can tell you, there's no different between the two terms. It's the same. But if you have the flood simply taking the animals associated with humans and see, God's goal was that when Noah came off the ark, they could rapidly recivize.

So he said, you need to take on board all these pairs of animals. Notice some, he said, take seven pairs. The ones where he said seven, those were the most important for launching civilization. They also had him take on board equipment, stores, food.

So I argue that probably a maximum number of pairs of animals on board the ark was about 300. Those would be the animals that were in close contact with humans. All the delicious animals too. Yeah. All the good ones to eat. And the friendly ones. Yeah. I don't know we just left snakes out and just let them.

Well, I mean, say the flood covered several million square miles. you will get, you know, a recolonization of the plants and animals, but it's going to take time. God said to know, look, I don't want you to have to wait centuries. Take on board everything you need

to relaunch civilization. So notice he was planting a vineyard right away. So he had the seeds on board of the arts, right? He's like, I've got to make some vino. Yeah. He's plant this vineyard. I like how you present it all,

and I appreciate, like, you're having the conversation. And I know that you run into a lot of hostility, anger, frustration, nothing that we don't either. Well, you know what really drives me? If I can get the skeptic pass, these few chapters in Genesis, chances are I can get them through the rest of the Bible and get him into a relationship with Jesus Christ. And that's the goal. Also, I love about this. It's not, the end goal is to reach people with Christ. Right. At the end of the day, it's whether it's your secular,

scientific community that you are a part of, or whether it's Bible-believing Christians that you just want to say, hey, all of this is here, and it makes sense. And while it's important, it all ultimately leads to Jesus, right? Well, so often when I talk to unbelievers, I say, okay, what is the biblical text that's holding you back? And I can't tell you often, they cite the Genesis flood text. So it's like, if I can get them past that barrier, I think I can get them all the way. I love it, Hugh.

And I appreciate what you said about the book of nature and the book of scripture. I think you encapsulated that in like a minute, something I've been pondering in wrestling my whole life of growing up with some of different Christian communities, you know, just seeing the level of disagreements that these groups, I mean, just going to Christian school as a kid. Every kid in school is from a different denomination. And we're arguing about theological stuff in sixth, seventh grade. What excites me about you?

I can tell you're enjoying this. Yeah. I spoke on this in the church just a week. ago making the point, please don't leave it up to us scientists to study the book of nature. It's way too much fun. And likewise, don't leave it up to your pastor to study the book of scripture. It's way too much fun. God wants all of us to be scientists.

He wants all of us to be theologians. Yeah. And we don't have to go through a whole system of religious acts to get to God. I think that's the beauty. Then we go through Jesus to get to God. and we all are, we all have access to the truth. But the truth is something that we can manipulate and twist, but you're saying like, no, it's there.

It's just we have to go through a long process to actually see what it's saying. And thanks to you. Thanks for coming on the show. This is the book. Get out there and just rattle your paradigm and get mad. But it's a good thing to get frustrated and try to figure out what's going on in the world. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's been my pleasure.

You guys are great. Thank you. All right. We try. We're not very smart, but we have fun.