Thanks for posting that. To think, all these years I thought that Gilgamesh was the name of this Sumerian dude who built an ark.
Then elephants can fly and triangles have four sides. Once you reject reality, anything is possible.
Nope–he was a Sumerian dude who met the guy who built the big round reed basket.
You should read it. It is a damn interesting look into another culture.
The mists watering the ground was before the fall. Nowhere does it say there wasn’t any rain after the fall and away from Eden. If God was making Adam and Eve miserable, of course he would make it rain.
In any case when God told Noah about the upcoming flood, Noah did not say, “rain? What’s rain.”
(After he said “what’s a cubit?,” of course)
Cloudy.
Perhaps the thread should be in GD rather than IMHO.
How long can you tread water? 
Especially that Phil Collins guy. Liar, liar, drums on fire!!
If God promised (with the rainbow) that he would never flood the earth again, why don’t fundamentalists have trouble with the film Evan Almighty? It goes against scripture! Blasphemy!
Before the rainbow, LGBTQ persons got all confused when they marched. So it’s good that god(dess) gave them a symbol to march under.
To answer the OP’s question – it’s hard to imagine how optics could have worked before God’s making a first rainbow after the flood. You’d have to have it arranged that both geometrical and physical optics wouldn’t work. You could, in principle, have reflection and refraction present and working, but you’d have to arrange things so that there was no minimum in the plot of refracted angle against impact parameter on the raindrop.
So it could’ve been that:
a.) the refractive index of water was lower[ than that of air in those days (pretty difficult to do, from several points of view). This would’ve prevented that minimum value from being there
b.) raindrops were not shaped at all like spheres in those days
c.) raindrops were so tiny that diffraction broadened out the lines from each color, as in a mistbow (raindrops have to be significantly larger than the wavelength of light in order for you to see the colors)
d.) everyone was blind back then (causes other problems with Genesis)
e.) Everyone was colorblind back then, and they only saw the colors of the rainbow because God “turned on” our ability to see color.
Incidentally, in that XCKD cartoon he’s clearly indicating that the character is seeing not only the secondary rainbow, but also the tertiary rainbow. That’s a neat trick – it’s relatively close to the sun, it’s much weaker than the secondary bow (by the same fraction compared to the secondary that the secondary is weaker than the first). It was, AFAIK, first observed in the laboratory by Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi in the 13th century. As Theodoric of Freiburg would shortly do (independently) was to use a spherical flask full of water as a giant model raindrop, and a ray of sunlight admitted through a hole as a source. He traced the beam path for the primary, secondary, and tertiary rainbow, and was able to see it because he could exclude external light and put the screen where he needed it.
Tetiary and quarternary rainbows (also near the sun) have been seen and photographed, but I maintain it’s only because people have been looking for them – EarthSky | Triple and quadruple rainbows in 1st-ever photos
Mists are no excuse, really - you’d still have glories.
Love this bit:
And that was before we invented amplifiers! I’m now picturing the crankiest of those gods doing like my PhysChem teacher and switching their hearing aids off before any committee meetings (he did it before class; yep, not anybody’s favorite teacher).
Good point – but you wouldn’t have rainbows, interestingly enough.
It’s a profound demonstration of the difference in the way that the effects are produced that you can’t have color separation in a rainbow if the drops are so small that the diffraction spread overwhelms the color separation for a rainbow, but doesn’t for the case of the glory. That’s because the rainbow is due to diffraction phenomena occurring within a single drop, whereas glory is due to interference from multiple sources or paths and occurs outside the drops.
There you go, using facts again.
Because it doesn’t make any logical sense. It’s not bashing; it’s questioning. Any belief system worth believing in should be able to stand up to a little scrutiny. The OP asked a decent question.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has the explanation you’re looking for: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Quantum Weirdness
There’s glory for you!