Apologetics · Creation — the water question, answered without overselling the verse everyone cites
It is the first objection anybody raises, and it is a fair one.
If the whole earth was underwater, where did all that water come from — and more awkwardly, where on earth did it go? Oceans do not evaporate into nothing. Water is conserved. You cannot drain a planet.
Most Christians have never been given an answer, so they do one of two things. They quietly reclassify the flood as a regional event and hope nobody asks about the ark. Or they repeat an argument they picked up secondhand, get a detail wrong, and hand the skeptic a win.
There is a better answer, and it starts by noticing that Genesis does not treat the water as a disappearing act at all.
Genesis Tells You Where It Came From — Twice
Two sources, named in one verse, in this order:
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. (KJV, Genesis 7:11)
The fountains of the great deep come first, and they are listed first for a reason. The text is not describing a rainstorm that got out of hand. It is describing the earth rupturing — subterranean and subocean water released violently — and only then the heavens opening. The rain is the second actor, not the lead.
That matters, because the whole “where would the water come from” objection usually assumes the flood was rain. Forty days of rain over the entire planet would not come close. Genesis never claimed it would.
Then watch how the flood ends. The same two sources are shut off, in the same pairing:
The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated. (KJV, Genesis 8:2-3)
Returned from off the earth continually. The Hebrew idiom behind that phrase carries the sense of going and returning — a sustained, repeating motion, not a single drain. And “abated” and “decreased continually” in the verses that follow describe a slow process measured in months, not a plug being pulled.
So Genesis’s own answer to “where did it go” is: it went down, off the land, over a long time, back to where water sits.
The Answer Is That It Did Not Go Anywhere
Here is the argument, and it is simpler than people expect: the water is still here. You are looking at it. It is in the ocean basins.
Roughly seventy percent of the planet’s surface is already underwater, to an average depth of something over two miles. The Pacific alone holds about half the world’s seawater. The relevant figure is this one: if you took the earth’s present topography and smoothed it — leveled the continents, filled the deep trenches — the water already on this planet would cover the entire globe to a depth of around a mile and a half. No extra water required. None.
Which means the real question was never how much water. It was where the high ground and the low ground were. A flood that covers everything does not need a bigger ocean. It needs a flatter planet.
And that reframes the whole debate. The young-earth position is not that an extra ocean’s worth of water appeared and then vanished. It is that the flood year was a tectonic event — that the ocean basins went deeper and the mountain ranges went higher during and after the catastrophe, so that the same water that covered a flatter earth now sits in basins below a mountainous one.
There is one piece of physical evidence both sides accept without argument: there are marine fossils near the top of the Himalayas. Seashells at twenty-nine thousand feet. Everybody agrees that rock was once under water and is now in the sky. The disagreement is entirely about how fast — whether sediments laid down over tens of millions of years were uplifted slowly, or whether a catastrophic year laid them and rapid orogeny lifted them. The datum is not in dispute. The timescale is.
Now the Part Where I Take a Verse Away From My Own Side
You will hear Psalm 104 cited as the proof text for all of this — as Scripture explicitly teaching that the mountains rose and the valleys sank at the end of the flood. I think that argument is weaker than the people making it realize, and a man who will not say so about his own position has no business asking anyone to trust his other arguments.
Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them. Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth. (KJV, Psalm 104:6-9)
Read verse 8 as the KJV has it: they go up by the mountains, they go down by the valleys. In the King James rendering, the subject of those verbs is the waters, running up over the high ground and draining down through the valleys. That is a drainage picture, not a mountain-building picture.
The Hebrew genuinely permits the other reading — the grammar allows “mountains” and “valleys” to be the subjects, giving “the mountains rose, the valleys sank down,” which is how a number of modern versions render it. It is a real ambiguity, not a translation error in either direction. But if you are quoting the KJV, you do not have the mountain-building reading in front of you, and you should not pretend you do.
There is a second honest problem. Is Psalm 104:6-9 even about the flood? Look at the psalm’s structure: light in verse 2, the heavens stretched out, the waters set in their place, then the earth bringing forth grass and herb in verse 14. The psalm is walking through the creation week in order. The deep covering the earth in verse 6 lands right where day three belongs — the day God gathered the waters and let the dry land appear. On that reading, verse 9’s bound is the creation decree of Job 38, not the Noahic covenant.
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? … And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed. (KJV, Job 38:8, 11)
I think there is a layered allusion in verse 9 — “that they turn not again to cover the earth” sits very close to the language God uses after the flood — and Isaiah later speaks of “the waters of Noah” in exactly that covenantal key. But “I think there is an allusion” is the honest strength of that claim. It is not a proof text, and the tectonics case does not need it. The case stands on the basin arithmetic and the geology, not on a contested psalm.
What the Young-Earth Position Still Owes
Two unpaid bills, named plainly.
Heat. Moving tectonic plates across a planet in a year, rather than over millions of years, releases a staggering amount of energy. The models that propose rapid subduction have to explain why the oceans did not boil and the crust did not melt. Young-earth researchers know this; it is discussed openly in their own technical literature, and the proposed cooling mechanisms remain speculative. That is an outstanding problem, not a solved one.
The canopy. For decades the popular explanation for the windows of heaven was a vapor canopy surrounding the pre-flood earth. It has largely been abandoned by young-earth researchers themselves, because the heat released when a canopy that size condensed would have cooked the planet. I mention it as a credit rather than an embarrassment: that is a movement correcting its own argument on the evidence. But if you are still teaching the canopy, stop.
The Brothers Who Read It Differently
Plenty of believing, Bible-honoring scholars read the flood as regional rather than global, and their argument deserves its strongest form, not a caricature.
It runs like this. Scripture routinely uses universal language for a limited scope — “all countries came into Egypt” to buy corn, devout Jews in Jerusalem from “every nation under heaven,” the gospel “preached in all the world” by the time Paul wrote Colossians. Nobody reads those as planet-wide inventories. So “all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven” may describe the whole of the observer’s world: an overwhelming, civilization-ending inundation of the Mesopotamian basin, which to Noah was every horizon there was. On that reading the text is true and the geology is uncontroversial.
That is a serious argument made by serious Christians, and the phenomenological point about biblical language is correct as a general rule.
Here is why I am still persuaded otherwise, and I will give reasons rather than volume.
- The ark makes no sense. A vessel of those dimensions, built over decades, to survive a flood you could escape by walking? Noah had a hundred and twenty years and a pair of sandals.
- The covenant breaks. God promised there would never again be such a flood. If “such a flood” means regional, that promise has been broken repeatedly and tragically ever since. Only a global referent leaves the promise intact.
- The birds. Gathering flying creatures onto a boat is pointless if there is dry land over the next ridge.
- Peter treats it as cosmic. He calls it the perishing of “the world that then was,” and makes it the pattern for a coming global judgment. A local event is a thin type for that.
And let me say the thing that ought to be said in every one of these conversations: this is a family argument. The man who reads the flood regionally and holds to a real Adam, a real Fall, a real Christ and a real resurrection is my brother, and I will stand beside him long before I stand beside anyone who agrees with my geology and denies my Lord. Romans 10:9 does not mention Genesis 7.
Willingly Ignorant
Peter saw the modern argument coming and named its real mechanism, which is not geology at all:
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: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. (KJV, 2 Peter 3:5-6)
Willingly ignorant — the not-knowing is chosen. And Peter says why in the next verse: the same word that drowned that world has reserved this one for fire and judgment. The flood is not primarily a geology problem. It is a precedent. It is the historical proof that God has, at least once, drawn a line and kept it.
Which is exactly why the detail you should not get past is a door.
And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in. (KJV, Genesis 7:16)
Noah did not hold the door. He could not have. The Lord shut him in, and the thing that saved eight people was not the carpentry and not their grip — it was being inside something God had provided and God had sealed.
Peter calls that whole scene a figure, and points to the One it was a figure of. So argue the basin arithmetic. Learn the geology. Concede the heat problem. But do not lose the point in the mechanism: the water is still here, the promise still holds, the judgment still comes — and there is still exactly one ark, and His name is Jesus Christ.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist