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Debunking Noah's Flood

Johnny Pneumatic

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J
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Oct 15, 2003
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Ok, I need to know ALL the problems with The Flood story. I'd post in R.P. but it might be derailed quickly. I've thought of a few;
carring for polar bears(they overheat in conditions that would kill us), how would all the land species that have ever lived fit on the ark(remember YEC have everything living together), all the food and water for the animals. Much thanks:)
 
You don't need to debunk the arc story itself. Debunking the idea of the "firmament" is quite enough since the story hinges on it.

Last I checked, Xians stopped believing the world was flat quite a few years ago. Problem is, they keep updating their bibles to work around this problem.
 
The total amount of water present on the surface of Earth can raise the level of the oceans with less that 300 meters. Most of the area Noah is supposed to have been sailing over is above 500 meters, the Mount Ararat area is much higher.

Ice cores from Antarktis and Greenland reach back over 100.000 years with no signs of a disruption that would have bee ncaused by a global flood.

Even the most reduced estimates of the animal stock on the ark still stand at thousands of animals, many of them quite large. It would be totally impossible for the few persons onboard to feed and muck out around so many animals.

The present distribution of animals on the planet contradicts the idea of them having spread from a single source only a few thousand years back.

These are the arguments I find most pertinent, since they are impossible to refute even if you want to denounce any or all archeological evidence.

Hans
 
bewareofdogmas said:
Ok, I need to know ALL the problems with The Flood story. I'd post in R.P. but it might be derailed quickly. I've thought of a few;
carring for polar bears(they overheat in conditions that would kill us), how would all the land species that have ever lived fit on the ark(remember YEC have everything living together), all the food and water for the animals. Much thanks:)
Click to expand...

Part of the problem is that not all believers in the flood believe the same thing.

If we're talking about "creation science", others here will doubtless answer you better than I could.

But there are certain Orthodox Jews who take the line that creation and the flood were simply miracles.

They will selectively reject parts of science ("where it doesn't apply"), and know that is what they are doing. And are often knowledgeable about science. And are not trying to convince you.

So it can't be scientifically refuted, though I think it can be refuted philosophically.
 
Then again...

There is evidence that there was a massive flood in the middle east at about 6000 BCE in the Black Sea.

More and more people are believing that this flood in of itself is where the Noah myth developed in the first place.

Remember, the Sumarians were the first to put it down, the Jews just copied it and put it in the Torah.

Here is a link for more info:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html
 
A very thorough and scientific debunking of the Biblical story of Noah's Flood in the literal sense can be found in Prof. Ian Plimer's book Telling Lies For God.
 
A wooden ship with the dimensions described in the Bible is structurally unsound and would not survive storm-tossed seas. cite


On the other hand, it really doesn't matter because once you add "God did it" to the equation, it is not necessary to make the story conform to the laws of physics or biology. I don't understand why some fundamentalists insist that a wooden boat of that size could hold that many animals for that amount of time while that amount of rain fell. A miracle doesn't have to to fit with our understanding of the world. Once one accepts a story in which the sun stood still, a flood story is not hard to swallow.
 
Another point often overlooked is that the ark contained the animals for about 13 months, and not just the 40 days the rain fell.
 
Ah, another Noah's ark thread. I smile a little at each one. Rarely in the course of human history has anybody concocted a story that is less likely to be true. But plausibility doesn't seem to be a necessary criteria to get a religious myth to catch on, as the Noah's Ark story proves categorically.

I kind of like the image of old Noah figuring out ways to determine the sex of various organisms so he can get one male and one female unless of course the animals are unclean and then maybe Noah could forget the sex thing and just hope that with seven animals the chances were that at least he got at least one of each sex. Crocodiles would have been fun, apparently you have to stick your arm in them and feel their sex organs to figure out what's what. Unless they are small then you can use a speculum:
http://www.dght.de/krokodil/sexing.htm

But maybe Noah just used one of those home pregnancy tests like Matthew Brroderick in Godzilla to look for pregnant crocodiles?

For what it's worth, I think most secular biblical historians think that pretty much all of the old testament that takes place before Saul is pure fantasy. That's not to say that the part that goes from Saul forward is all that reliable, but at least there is occasional archeological corroboration for it, especially for the stories that take place in the time that the bible was actually written.

Nobody, seems to have brought up the fact that the Noah story appears to have been strongly influenced by the Babylonian Gilgamesh story that probably dates back to at least 2000BC as per this web site:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/noah_com.htm
 
I am sorry, but all you need to know is that there is no firmament. Even mainstream christian fundmentalism knows the ancient hebrew model of the world is not correct. The sky is not a hard shell. The earth is not flat. The flood itself in the biblical account hinges on that myth.

Now, there was a flood caused by glacier runoff that is thought to be the "inspiration" of the story. However, the biblical account is obviously only true in that A. there was a flood and the world as they knew it was flooded badly (they believed the world was only as large a ways past the eye could see) and that B. some people survived.
 
I didn't know what Corplinx was talking about with this firmanent stuff but I figured somebody better respond to him before he brought it up again.;)

Here's the relevant passage from the New King James Version of the Bible:

Then God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." 7 Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
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Apparently, exactly what the firmanent was is debated and the word "firmanent" doesn't appear in some modern versions of the Bible.

From the New International Version
6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning-the second day.
9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.
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Apparently all this stuff was lifted from a Babylonian source as described by this quote from a skeptical web site

Why was the firmament formed in the "midst" of earth's "waters"(1:6)? Clearly, this is an image of a dome-like firmament over flat waters of a flat earth. Had earth commonly been known to be round then, the writers wouldn't need to have God set the domes in the sea, a notion likely conceived to keep seas from draining off over the "edges" or "ends" of the earth.
The Bible's scribes exactly copied the ignorant inventions of Babylonian firmament astronomy of that time, including its words and concepts of windows and doors in the firmament for rain!
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Source for above:
http://www.webster.sk.ca/greenwich/bible-a.htm

So I guess Corplinx is hypothesizing that a firmanent doesn't exist (now there's a stretch) to hold the water above the earth that is used for the flood and therefore the flood story is bogus.
 
One might start by asking what is the evidence for a global flood. I suppose if you take all the rocks of subaqueous origin and make believe they were all laid down at about the same time...No, that won't work because their environments of deposition are too inconsistent. I guess "debunking" Noah's flood is like debunking alien abductions.
 
davefoc said:
So I guess Corplinx is hypothesizing that a firmanent doesn't exist (now there's a stretch) to hold the water above the earth that is used for the flood and therefore the flood story is bogus.
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More than that, when the Bible says that floodgates in the sky literally opened, this refers to the firmament.
 
I am a little sceptical that the firmament is a good counter to Noah's Ark - too abstract and subject to interpretation.

My favourite is the idea of a small family gathering up the millions of species on the earth, classifying them, identifying diet and transporting them back to the middle east, somehow keeping them alive, given that with modern technology are thousands of people working in the field we still have not identified all of them today. Even if they gathered one each day it would still have taken longer than the 6,000 years old the earth is supposed to be.

The entries here have covered the scientific problems with the Ark story. There is of course the matter of morality. God changes his mind twice during the story, but not before violently murdering every man, woman and child on the planet.
 
How deep was the "Flood"?
Shall we say 20,000 feet? that would cover almost all of the earth.

How long did it rain?
40 days & nights

A little math:
20,000 feet / 40 days & nights = 500 ft per 24 hours
500 feet per day / 24 hours = 20.83 feet per hour
or 250 inches of rain per hour for 960 straight hours.
That's a lot of rain. I've seen a calculation of how much heat that much falling mass would generate, but I guess that god kept the waters from boiling.



That would be a good segment for a Penn & Teller BS show.

Have a Fundi stand in a tank for an hour while while they fill it up with rain at a rate of 250 inches an hour. We would have to be sure that they got the velocity correct by using fire hoses.
 
MRC_Hans said:
The total amount of water present on the surface of Earth can raise the level of the oceans with less that 300 meters. Most of the area Noah is supposed to have been sailing over is above 500 meters, the Mount Ararat area is much higher.

Ice cores from Antarktis and Greenland reach back over 100.000 years with no signs of a disruption that would have bee ncaused by a global flood.

Even the most reduced estimates of the animal stock on the ark still stand at thousands of animals, many of them quite large. It would be totally impossible for the few persons onboard to feed and muck out around so many animals.

The present distribution of animals on the planet contradicts the idea of them having spread from a single source only a few thousand years back.

These are the arguments I find most pertinent, since they are impossible to refute even if you want to denounce any or all archeological evidence.

Hans
Click to expand...

Dang it, you didn't leave me anything to post. This was pretty much exactly my list.

The geological evidence is quite clear as well, no global flood in the last few thousand year. But, that also is "ignorable" by someone who is determined enough.
 
The Noah's Flood story is so obviously false on the face of it, I am shocked that so much time and effort is spent debunking it. I understand it is necessary, but it is still shocking. The fact that anyone over the age of 12 actually believes that
  • God was so "mad" at sinners that he destroyed everything in the entire world, regardless of whether it sinned or not
  • Used his magical powers to keep the fish and plants on the earth's surface alive during the flood
  • Used his other magical powers to make sure the animals on board did not fight/eat each other
  • Used his other other magical powers to see to it that all the animals in the world made it to Noah's house just before the rain started and were able to fit on a single boat.
  • Didn't realize he could have saved time by just using his magical powers to give all the animals he wanted to keep the ability to breathe underwater temporarily
  • Or even better, just zap the offending parties with lightning or preferably some much cooler destructo-ray.
Then -- my favorite part -- at the end, he realizes he may have overreacted slightly, and since there are no such thing as anger management classes, he instead creates a rainbow as his promise to humanity that he will never be mean again. That's right folks... God is Ike Turner!

Just telling the story should be enough to debunk it. Shocking that it isn't.
 
Rocky said:
How long did it rain?
40 days & nights
Click to expand...

It didnt just rain. In the biblical account holes in the sky opened up and water came out. this is why i go back to the firmament as the root of debunking the ark myth.
 
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