In 2012 David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote The Rocks Don’t Lie, which he says is a geologist’s investigation of the Noahic flood.  I talk about the flood at least every month, sometimes every week.  It’s important enough for evangelism and apologetics to talk about all the time.

Peter in his second epistle and chapter three uses the flood as a historical argument for Divine interventionism and against uniformitarianism in a defense of the second coming of Jesus Christ.  He writes in 2 Peter 3:4-6:

4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. 5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: 6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:

Peter is saying that things don’t continue as they were from the beginning of creation.  The world, that then was, perished, because of a worldwide flood.  Ignorance is a willing ignorance, so volitional, not intellectual.

The second coming is a problem for unbelievers, because they will not get away with whatever they do.  They will give an account to their Lord.  They may try to explain it away with uniformitarianism (things just continue as they are without divine intervention), but the Bible (2 Peter 3:1-2) and flood history (2 Peter 3:5-7) discount their view of the world.  God will intervene and He has intervened.

One bit of evidence outside the Bible for the flood people call, “flood lore.”  I do not know if “lore” is the best term for it, but it refers to the flood story found in numbers of cultures.

A youtube notification sent me to a Harvard speech by David Montgomery, saying that it was seven years old.  In a thirty minute drive, I listened to twenty minutes of his speech and then stopped, because I knew where he headed.

Montgomery grew up in a religious family that went to church.  It sounded like a liberal church that taught the Bible was a book of moral stories.  When someone asked him to come to Tibet to help with a project as the geologist, he went.  While there, he saw damage from a very large flood.  He knew it.  He saw it was a lake made from a glacier damming up a river.  A glacier does not do that well.  Its poor blockage ability led to a gigantic flood.

While in Tibet, Montgomery interview the locals, who already knew about the flood and talked about it.  This surprised him, because he just saw it himself.  This sent him the direction of thinking about local flood lore.  This stories occur all over the world.  At this point, I turned off the speech.  I arrived at my destination, but I didn’t want to hear any more.  I knew what he was doing.  You have maybe started reading a story where the ending becomes obvious and you can’t continue.

To discredit flood lore, explain each story away with an account of a local flood.  Or, do that enough times to say that these individual smaller events explain the stories of the big one.  They don’t, but men know how a worldwide flood hurts their world view.

Men look at the present world in a uniformitarian manner.  They know things happened, but they must use a natural explanation.  They say the world is billions of years old.  The flood can and should change that explanation.  It disturbed the crime scene, so to speak.  With tremendous power, God transformed the topography of the earth.  They are not seeing the same world as the one before the flood.  The pressure God brought on everything in the world affected what man theorizes that he sees.

The world originating by natural causes justifies men being their own bosses.  God will not intervene.  He hasn’t.  Yet, He has, and He will again.  Peter makes that argument in 2 Peter.  Flood lore agrees with this divine interventionism.  Everyone will give an account to God.