I just watched a History Channel show on the Mt. Ararat Anomaly.
There are a bunch of posts on the topic of Noah’s Ark in the vault and endless pages on the net, but few question the natural physics involved. Where did all of the water go? The Earth is (except for some extreme cases) a closed system. The water that flows from my tap is the same water that the dinosaurs drank. Where did the 6 miles of rain that flooded the Earth drain to or come from for that matter?
You’re asking us? Ask the Young Earth Creationists.
These rooms are filled with them!!
Hardly filled. There are a few who’ve managed to hold out their willful ignorance for a long time against mountains of evidence. And there are always a few new ones every month or so that get hit with those mountains of evidence and decide it’s easier to slink back to the L e f t B e h i n d boards and commiserate with the rest of their fellow martyrs against godless atheist science. But filled with YECs? Not here, thank you.
I saw a special on Discovery or TLC or one of those type of channels a couple of years ago - it was presented strictly from a geological perspective, and they had an interesting theory, that went something like this:
The crust of the earth once floated, yes, floated, on top of a layer of water, which was in turn sandwiched between the outer crust and an “inner crust”. Some cataclysmic event caused a rupture in the upper crust, which settled out on the bottom in some places, etc. This produced oceans and mountain ranges, tectonic plates and the like.
At the time of the rupture, water was spewed miles into the atmosphere, as the weight of the upper layer forced the water up through fissures, which of course widened from the cutting effect of the water…
All of this is theoretical conjecture, but from a “mental masturbation” persepctive, I found it interesting.
- Dirk
God sent the water. When the flood was over, He took it away.
Same thing with the arc - it held all those species because God folded space inside of it. He can do that - He’s God.
That’s the thing about the Noah spiel (which I don’t believe in, BTW) - it’s too God-intensive to disprove. One you put God in any equation it immediately becomes irrational, and therefore impossible to discuss, except on its own terms. Both the Young Rarthers and us normal people keep on forgetting it, and end up falling into the same trap, debating the undebateable.
It would be easier for me to believe that a miracle caused the Earth’s crust momentarily to be turned into a sponge then to believe that the Earth’s crust once floated on some special water that was not susceptible to the heat caused by the tremendous pressure and friction that this substance would be subjected too.
Although another log for the fire is always welcome!!
Even if the water was spewed into the atmosphere it would still return to the Earth. It wouldn’t just vanish into the air. The atmosphere is part of the Earth.
I didn’t mean to imply that it vanished into the air - it came down as rain and further eroded the landscape, flooding everything and eventually returning to the seas…
Again, this was a theory proposed by respected geologists cited by the educational channels in question…
I am afraid that “quoted” does not equal “respected.” In recent years, the amount of glurge that the TLC/Discovery Channel/History Channel consortium have been broadcasting has been positively dispiriting.
Alessan is right. Once you posit an all-powerful creator who reaches into his creation and fiddles with it, there’s no sense in using science to argue over it.
I was not aware that the Noah’s Ark story had ever been sufficiently bunked where it would now require debunking.
So, you’re saying that the Ark was a TARDIS?
Then why did it have to have the dimensions it did, unless you figure that it would be diffcult to coax an elephant through the door of something that appeared to be the size of an old police call box…
Thea Logica- yeah, it could just as easily been the size of a … oh, a Wardrobe perhaps G
Seriously, while I used to be a Global Flood believer, I now believe a regional deluge (perhaps the Black Sea disaster) wiping out all the people & domesticated animals of the area (perhaps even all the people who then existed) with Noah’s family & livestock being preserved meets the requirements of the Biblical story without any challenge to science or history.
Well, if I was God, and wanted to flood the earth and kill everybody, I wouldn’t go to the trouble of creating more water, I’d just make it rain, while lowering the land.
Better yet, I’d just flood the one area the ark was in, and let it float around for 40 days and nights while zapping everything else to death.
Who’s gonna know the difference?
Why not just zap everything you don’t want out of existence by willing it?
Better yet, don’t create it in the first place.
[Captain Kirk]Uh, excuse me. Why does God need an ark?[/CK] I mean, He/She/It created everything in 6 days, why did He/She/It need 40 days to flood the world and drown everything? Why not simply “uncreate” everything that you didn’t like? Sounds to me like it’d be easier. Or hell, just send the Angel of Death down to wipe everyone out. IIRC, he and Loki hadn’t gone out drinking yet, so there’d be no problem. (After all, he’s going to be collecting all the drowned souls anyway, so why not cut out the middleman of the rain, as it were, and just let him do it.)
Friar Ted:
I think there could be something to the Black sea theory as a historical kernel at the root of the myth. Perhaps some people even loaded animals into boats. I wouldn’t count on Noah as a real person though, especially considering that the Gilgamesh legend of Utnapishtam predates it by 3000 years.
If there’s Noah, then who begat Japheth?
DtC, not only does Gilgamesh predate it, but nearly every other religion has a “great flood” myth as well. It could simply be that because early societies were located on the banks of rivers that floods naturally worked themselves into religions, or they could be collective memories of a more ancient flood. (Some Native American legends recount mammoth hunts. )