Question: I believe in the Noahic flood and believe that the fossil record testifies to it. However, I struggle with the fact that although the fossil record shows many species that were destroyed during that cataclysmic event, there is no testimony in the fossil record to the millions of people that also perished during the flood. Why?

Response: Over 95% of all fossils are marine. There are very, very few fossils of land animals. Of those land animal fossils, an incredibly tiny proportion are of hominids of any classification. So the first part of this response is that we don’t have very much to go on here, and there may be hominid fossils we simply haven’t found yet in other strata. But, and most important, fossilization requires very specific circumstances.

Something must be covered completely and drained off in time for the cementing of the remains and subsequent fossilization to occur. I personally doubt that the flood fossilized anything other than marine organisms. Everything else would have been drowned and rotted and/or scavenged. We have references in the Bible, and many more in extra-biblical histories and legends, of subsequent catastrophes of enormous proportions: the dividing of the land in Genesis 10:25, massive volcanism is Psalm 18, references to the hills and mountains “skipping” in Psalm 29 and 114.

There are records of meteorite impacts both in legend and geology, and these could have caused enormous catastrophes. Geology and Job both include an ice age, and geologic evidence (such as the Columbia River Gorge which separates the states of Oregon and Washington in the United States) are indications of the rapid and catastrophic melting of some of the ice sheets as well as the breaking of natural dams. Given all of these indications, I would suspect that most of the non-marine fossils we have are remnants of these other catastrophes.