The Biblical Flood Perspective

Skeptics claim that it is impossible for the chalk beds to have been rapidly deposited during the yearlong biblical Flood. They say it would take a long time for the trillions of foraminifers and coccoliths to breed, grow, die, and be buried to produce these thick chalk beds all around the globe.

When they say this, they assume that ocean water conditions have always been like they are today. But during the global Flood cataclysm, water conditions were very different—hot volcanic waters and nutrients changed the water temperature and chemistry, which caused the rapid blooming of foraminifers and coccoliths in just hours, days, or weeks, not millions of years.6

These skeptics also ignore the fact that these chalk beds were deposited across the continents by ocean waters that rose high enough to completely flood the continents.

Meanwhile, the chalk beds are not found under the ocean floor where the limey ooze is today. And today’s limey oozes are nowhere near as pure in calcium carbonate as the chalk beds formed in the past.

Where do we see limey ooze slowly accumulating on the continents today—and burying and fossilizing huge ocean dwellers (like the extinct plesiosaurs and mosasaurs) together with large land dwellers (like the extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs)? Or what about the fossil found in the Kansas beds of the voracious predatory fish Xiphactinus audax, 13 feet (4 m) long with a nearly perfectly preserved 6-foot-long (1.8 m) fish Gillicus arcuatus inside of it?

Nowhere! We simply do not see such burial and fossilization happening today on such a massive and catastrophic scale.

To fossilize such large creatures, ginormous amounts of sediments had to bury them instantly before the creatures had time to escape. Fish are known to decompose quickly unless they are completely buried within a few days. Yet the fish found fossilized in the chalk beds show no signs of decay. So the claim that the chalk beds accumulated slowly—one grain at a time falling to the bottom of a placid sea—is demolished by the evidence of all these catastrophically buried fossils.

Now also remember that these chalk beds stretch around the globe. So a global distribution of the chalk beds required a global Flood cataclysm, just as the Bible describes.

Chalk It Up to Assumptions

So what is the underlying message we have dug up? Never be discouraged or dissuaded from believing what God’s Word teaches just because a few skeptics raise what seem to be difficult questions or insist they have evidence that contradicts the Bible. As in this case, closer examination reveals that what they claim as “evidence” is really their interpretation of the data based on their assumption that the Genesis Flood never occurred.

Like the scoffers Peter warned about in 2 Peter 3, they are willfully ignorant or deliberately rejecting God’s Word, and thus they refuse to consider any interpretation of the evidence that would point to the Genesis Flood having occurred. Instead, they are trying to prove what they have already assumed.

But for those of us who seek to know the Lord and understand His work, good answers can be found. Just look at common chalk. It offers phenomenal evidence for the veracity of the biblical Flood—yet another testimony that we can trust God and His Word. Chalk another one up to God’s Word.