The Antitheist
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Older Than the Flood

The flood account requires every land surface on earth to be under water for months. A tree standing in California right now was already old on that date, and its ring record contains no drowned year.

Doctrine usually arrives as a package. This is one claim, taken out of the package and examined by itself.

The claim is that the flood was a physical event. Not a regional river event, and not a story about obedience with the water added for weight. Water over every mountain on earth, at the same time, for the better part of a year, somewhere around 2500 BC. The organizations that teach it work to keep it specific, because a specific flood is history and a vague one is literature. They print a date. They mean it as history.

Taken at their word, the claim makes one demand that has nothing to do with theology. For roughly a year, nothing living on land was in open air.

There is a tree in the White Mountains of California that was already several centuries old on that date. It is still alive.

Bristlecone pines add one ring a year. Wide in a wet year, narrow in a dry one, so a run of rings is not only a count. It is a weather record with a shape to it, and the shape is distinctive enough that two pieces of wood from the same slope can be matched against each other the way a torn page matches its other half. The living trees carry close to five thousand rings. The dead trunks lying around them carry more, and their patterns overlap the living wood. Match one to the next, and the record at that single site runs unbroken for roughly eight thousand years. The archived ring measurements reach back to 6000 BC. The chronology as extended in the literature since reaches nearer to nine thousand. The exact total depends on which collection and which publication, and it does not matter here, because every version of it clears 2500 BC by thousands of years. It is among the longest continuous tree-ring records from any single location on earth.

There is no drowned year in it.

No dead interval. No band of nothing. No scar where twelve months underwater would have to sit. The pattern crosses 2500 BC and continues, in the living tree and in every trunk matched to it. A tree cannot spend a year submerged and go on adding rings. If the water came, the record has to break. It does not break.

The obvious next move is to argue about the tree: that the counting is sloppy, or that the strange weather after the water drained pushed the trees to lay down extra rings, so the record only looks long.

That argument was made. It has also been given up, in print, by the people who most needed it to work.

They still teach the flood. So the position is not that the tree is wrong. The position is that the tree does not count.

That is a different problem than the one most people expect to find, and it is worth sitting with, because nobody has to be lying for it to be true. Almost nobody teaching the flood has seen this record, and almost nobody teaching it was told there was anything to see. What gets handed on is what was handed over. That is not the thing under examination here.

The thing under examination is a published document, and it can be read directly. The sources are listed below, theirs included. Theirs is the one to start with.

Sources

– The Antitheist

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