OnceConvinced wrote:
I haven’t gone through the rest of the thread, but just wanted to share a thought I had recently. A Christian friend of mine was making a claim that one of the best proofs there was of a worldwide flood was that there were cultures all over the world that had flood stories similar to Noah’s Ark. An argument I’ve heard many times by Christians. (Funny he mentioned the Epic of Gilgamesh, which if was real would prove that the Noah’s Ark story was just a rip off of that).
I get that all the time and there are much easier ways to dismantle the flood ark story.
From thethinkingatheist website:
Genesis 7:6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.
Eight Bronze-Age humans over 500-years-old built a watercraft the size of a football stadium with only felled trees and pitch?
Genesis6:19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.
Answers In Genesis posits that Noah gathered "kinds" of animals and not all "species," an estimated 16,000 pairs, which raises a few animal-related questions:
• How, exactly, did eight extreme senior citizens load, manage and care for 32,000 animals?
• What about specialized diets (bamboo for the giant panda, meat for the carnivores, fresh vegetation for the herbivores)?
• Who cleaned each stall and shoveled the tons of daily excrement through the huge ark’s single window?
• How did they separate the predator and prey animals? Did the lion lay with the lamb?
• How do you explain the acquisition and loading of animals not indigenous to the Middle East (many separated by oceans), like the polar bear, the sloth, the crocodile, the fruit bat, the anaconda, etc? And how did the penguins and other cold-climate creatures survive in the blistering desert heat?
• Wouldn’t freshwater rains from the sky have made the saltwater deadly to ocean marine life? And wouldn’t saltwater have proven equally toxic to all freshwater fish? If water boiled up from beneath the earth’s crust, wouldn’t water temperature changes in the delicate ecosystem have also had a deadly effect?
• Dinosaurs on the ark. Did they exit the boat and THEN get hit by a comet?
Genesis 7:19-20 {the waters} They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.
This would require steady, planet-wide rainfall at the rate of 6 inches per minute, 360 inches an hour, for 40 days and 40 nights, covering Mount Everest under 22 feet of water. How, exactly, did Noah measure this for the record? Where has all of the water gone since? And why is there no legitimate geological evidence of a global flood?
Genesis 8:8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.
Why did Noah require a dove to find land (Genesis 8) if he and God were on speaking terms in Genesis 6?
Genesis 8:15-16 Then God said to Noah, "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it."
When the ark landed, what did the carnivores eat? All other animal life had been drowned. And vegetation would’ve also been wiped out in the flood, so what did the herbivores eat to survive?
Genesis 9:1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.
8 people of middle-eastern descent practiced incest to produce over 5,000 of today’s ethnic groups in only a few hundred generations?
------------------------------
I like to use the following also:
A global flood would have produced evidence contrary to the evidence we see.
How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?
Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?
How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.
Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up?
Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time.
Trees that were completely submerged in salt water would have died, so when we look at trees that are say 10,000 years old, and not only did they live past the "mythical flood' but they show zero evidence of a flood. can you find trees with evidence ? sure, that shows there was a local flood, not worldwide, submerged flod that killed all life including vegetation. you are familiar with barometric pressure of course so you understand introducing that much magical water into our system would have wrecked it right?
The conventional flood story states that the flood waters came from rain that lasted 40 days and 40 night right? Rain appears when the atmosphere can no longer support water in the vapor phase and it becomes saturated. So normally, the atmosphere is on the brink of saturation, and the variations in temperature and pressure caused by weather fronts are capable of altering the threshold at which precipitation will form quite easily. What about the amount of water vapor suspended in air needed for the 4.5 billion cubic kilometers of water needed for the global flood? The water vapor currently in the air is only around 2-3% on average, with a maximum of 4% limited by temperature and pressure.
The change in atmospheric conditions required to support enough vapor for 112 million cubic kilometers of rain per day - about 120,000 times more than the current daily rainfall worldwide - would have rendered the air unbreathable. You do see the problem right?
Indeed, the atmosphere really couldn't sustain that much water even under the most extreme temperature and pressure conditions the planet can produce. If the conditions were right for that much water to be in the atmosphere, humans and virtually every other animal would have drowned through the simple act of breathing, as well as turning the earth into the equivalent of a pressure cooker with atmospheric pressure at nearly a thousand psi instead of the standard 14.7 or so that we have today.A bit of a problem, ah science, designed to wave away myth and fable.
and then my absolute favorite bomb for the flood is I say, lets wave the magic wand of belief and pretend everything in the flood story happened, god waved a wand and got all the animals (or "kinds" if you listen to their most recent attempt to answer this issue) from seven dif continents across the ocean, shrunk them, suspended their life cycle so they wouldnt drown from the unbreathable water saturated air....lets just wave the wand and make that happen...okay
The global flood story requires that only eight people were left alive in 2349 BCE. This does not allow enough time for humans to repopulate the earth. In 2000 BCE only 350 years after the flood the population of the world was 27 million. To go from a population of eight to a population of 27 million in 350 years would require a population growth rate of 136.07%. That is 133% more than the fastest growing portions of the world today.
The Bible also places the date of construction on the Tower of Babel roughly 100 years after the great flood. Saying a population could go from 6 people (Noah and his wife don't count, they didn't have any more children) to enough people to build the Tower of Babel as it is described in the Bible is absurd. This tower was so great that it threatened God, so it must have been greater that the pyramid of Khufu which took 30,000 people to build. Even a growth rate of 500%, which is absurd beyond all imagination, would only produce about half the required people to even begin to think about such a construction project.
Ark, no wooden vessel over 350 feet has ever floated without massive amounts of steel or metal support beams and brackets and continuous dewatering. There is a story easy to find, just google ark replica, and you find a story about a rich guy with too much time on his hands, who built a full size replica of the ark, and it floats...what all the creationist websites fail to reveal t their fans is yes it floats....because it has steel support beams.
Noah's Ark was a great rectangular box of gopherwood, or perhaps some combination of other woods colloquially referred to as gopherwood. Its dimensions are given as 137 meters long, 23 meters wide, and 14 meters high. This is very, very big; it would have been the longest wooden ship ever built. These dimensions rank it as one of history's greatest engineering achievements; but they also mark the start of our sea trials, our test of whether or not it's possible for this ship to have ever sailed, or indeed, been built at all.
Would it have been possible to find enough material to build Noah's Ark? When another early supership was built, the Great Michael (completed in Scotland in 1511) it was said to have consumed "all the woods of Fife". Fife was a county in Scotland famous for its shipbuilding. The Great Michael's timber had to be purchased and imported not only from other parts of Scotland, but also from France, the Baltic Sea, and from a large number of cargo ships from Norway. Yet at 73 meters, she was only about half the length of Noah's Ark. Clearly a ship twice the length of the Great Michael, and larger in all other dimensions, would have required many times as much timber. It's never been clearly stated exactly where Noah's Ark is said to have been built, but it would have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, probably along either the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. This area is now Iraq, which has never been known for its abundance of shipbuilding timber.
Whether a wooden ship the size of Noah's Ark could be made seaworthy is in grave doubt. At 137 meters (450 feet), Noah's Ark would be the largest wooden vessel ever confirmed to have been built. In recorded history, some dozen or so wooden ships have been constructed over 90 meters; few have been successful. Even so, these wooden ships had a great advantage over Noah's Ark: their curved hull shapes. Stress loads are distributed much more efficiently over three dimensionally curved surfaces than they are over flat surfaces. But even with this advantage, real-world large wooden ships have had severe problems. The sailing ships the 100 meter Wyoming (sunk in 1924) and 99 meter Santiago (sunk in 1918) were so large that they flexed in the water, opening up seams in the hull and leaking. The 102 meter British warships HMS Orlando and HMS Mersey had such bad structural problems that they were scrapped in 1871 and 1875 after only a few years in service. Most of the largest wooden ships were, like Noah's Ark, unpowered barges. Yet even those built in modern times, such as the 103 meter Pretoria in 1901, required substantial amounts of steel reinforcement; and even then needed steam-powered pumps to fight the constant flex-induced leaking.
Thoughts? In the face of that onslaught of facts, how does one say the flood happened worldwide? Another constant I get is, "there are fish fossils on mountain tops" no...you dont say.
Mountains, by no means, have always been mountains. Mountains take enormous geological time to form. On the grand scale of the Earth's existence and as fish are incredibly old creatures, it should be no surprise that fish are found on or even at the top of mountains. Once again, mountains grow and fish that may have been alive before the mountain exists as presently may have died and their skeletons fossilized in a place where a mountain grew. Also, mountains grow as plates are pressed together by tectonic forces and the land is pushed upward. Any fossil deposited would necessarily move up the mountain as the mountain formed. This is why we find dinosaur fossils of all sorts in the sides of mountains more than we find them in flat land. Theres nothing about finding fish fossils on or in mountains that necessitates a world wide flood. Such a flood is proved to never have happened and to not have been possible in the first place. Fish fossils on mountains lend nothing to the creationists' argument.
So again, anyone like to submit a counter that "floats"?
