I thought of a possible means of debunking the biblical flood story for my stubborn cousins, but I need help with the concept.
Would the tallest mountains actually end up underwater if:
the rainfall over 40 days was continuous and at the maximum flow that a liquid could possibly move. (waterfall? firehose?)
you pretended that no water would seep into the earth or evaporate.
God had some way of creating more water than actually exists on Earth before or after.
…
So: if the whole world was a big swimming pool, would the maximum possible rainfall even fill it up in the first place? I would guess no.
There has never been a rainfall that would flood the earth to the tops of the highest mountains even given the allowances you did. The greatest rainfall ever recorded anywhere in 24 hours was about 73 inches. That is still only about 1460 feet if it rained that hard for 40 days straight.
Ok, maybe the Great Flood was even more than that. That still doesn’t work. Maximum rainfall in short bursts has been recorded at a little over an inch a minute but that is just about as much as possible. Even at that rate, that still less than 6,000 feet even if it rained that unbelievable rate for 40 days straight. That is still way lower than even most moderately high mountains.
This is absolutely essential to the premise, since (according to some numbers that I googled) there are about 3,000 cubic miles of water in the atmosphere and about 333,000,000 cubic miles of water on the earth. If you could somehow make all of the water in the atmosphere drop out as rain it wouldn’t make the oceans rise all that much. It certainly wouldn’t even come close to covering mountains.
The premise is a little silly, but you’ve made it easy enough to calculate.
You need a bit over 29,000 feet of water to cover the tallest mountains, so let’s call it 30,000 feet for the sake of simplicity. So for every cubic foot on earth, you need to rain 30,000 cubic feet of water directly on top of it. 30,000 cubic feet over 40 days is 750 cubic feet per day or 31.25 cubic feet per hour or .52 cubic feet per minute. There are 7.48 gallons of water in a cubic foot, so you need 3.89 gallons per minute of water. So roughly 4 gallons per minute of water over every square foot of the earth (actually it will be a bit less since the mountains themselves and higher bits of land will take up some of that volume, but it’s a good rough estimate).
So how do you think that record rain compares to Niagara Falls? Imagine standing under Niagara Falls, and then imagine that the entire atmosphere “rained” like that for 40 days. Then?
(I want to push the idea to beyond absurdity!)
Some of you guys need to get over this. I doubt many Christians really take that as being literal when they talk about the great flood. I am sure there are those who just accept it but I doubt it is as many as some of you seem to think.
Persons who believe the Biblical deluge is scientifically possible speak of something called a “vapor canopy”–a massive amount of water vapor which, they say, floated above the atmosphere between the time of Creation and that of Noah’s Flood. (It says in the first chapter of Genesis that God separated the waters.) Such persons have also been known to claim that there was no rainfall before the Flood, and possibly that the ocean basins were more or less empty before that time.
kickerofelvis, I wouldn’t bother with the debate you’re trying to have with your cousins. They will trump any data or reasoned argument you present with “God did it.” And in a sense they’re right. The Flood myth presupposes an omnipotent entity, and once you stipulate that, anything else is possible.
so what if god caused the earth to compress? this would both squeeze out all the subsurface water and not allow any new rain to soak in as well as lessen the size of the earth to be covered to a certain depth (and additionally lower the mountains a bit). now this would just have to affect geological matter and not biological matter.
Note that the Biblical story does not say that all of the floodwater came from rain: Some of it also came from springs in the ground. How much? It doesn’t say. Maybe half and half, maybe 1% rain and 99% springs.
Right. A version of the Great Flood is also gaining widespread acceptance among researchers. At the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea pushed into the Black Sea because of tremendous amounts of water flowing from the melting glaciers. This flooded settlements in the area where civilization first developed and became the basis of the Great Flood tale that was spread to cultures all over the world as the descendants of people from that region migrated all over the globe.
It is generally accepted among scientists that this great flow of water did occur but there is some controversy about how sudden or cataclysmic it really was.
Sorry - I did search the boards for “Noah” before asking. :rolleyes:
I thought I was SOOOO original.
You guys are awesome, though. Thanks for the responses so far!
Are there negative springs? Because even if you find a reasonable source, you have to account for where it went afterwards. I don’t know anyone who says it went back into a canopy.
And since the OP began…
…I think disposal of the water is as important as the source and well within the proper scope of consideration in this thread.
This has been brought up before, but here goes again… Rain comes from water vapor which comes from water on the ground (or ocean or whatever). So to get massive rains, you have to take massive amounts of water from the surface of the earth. Now, we have hard rain all the time and there’s plenty of water in the ocean to fuel it, but it’s a closed system. You can’t make the ocean rise 30,000 feet using only the water that is in the ocean. You have to introduce 30,000 feet of new water from somewhere.
If the entire ocean magicaly rose into the sky and started comming down on the earth at the rate of 1 ocean per 40 days I doubt you could flood over a few hundred feet deep before it flowed back into the ocean.