Noah's Flood: Revisited

[Andrew]

The carnivores went into hibernation! duh!

And they might have also eaten turtle fodder or something (says in the silly link I provided.)

As for all the water, my guess to their answer is that they turned into the ice caps at the poles.

[GUNWOUNDS]

What did the carnivores eat? Remembering that some big cats will only eat fresh meat there must have been animals kept aboard for that alone. Where did he get the food for pandas, koalas and so on, which only eat food from their native countries, or did they bring it with them when they made the trek. How long was this trek that the animals made, must have taken years for lots of animals, especially sloths what did they eat on the way there?

Where did all the water go to after the flood ending, considering if there was that much water in the atmosphere at one time we'd drown just from breathing in.

If the continents were one landmass (pangea i believe) then things would have been much closer... also many animals can go days without food, we dont know the exact time of the trek but if the sloth had a faster "representative" (different "kind" remember) that made it first then the sloth wouldnt have been needed.

here is some more info:

About the Pandas and koalas...

A need for unique or special conditions to survive may be a result of specialization, a downhill change in some populations. That is, it may result from a loss in genetic information, from thinning out of the gene pool or by degenerative mutation. A good example is the many modern breeds of dog, selected by man (although natural conditions can do likewise), which are much less hardy in the wild than their "mongrel" ancestors. For example, the St. Bernard carries a mutational defect, an overactive thyroid, which means it needs to live in a cold environment to avoid overheating.

This suggests that the ancestors of such creatures, when they came off the Ark, were not as specialized. Thus they were more hardy than their descendants, who carry only a portion of that original gene pool of information. In other words, the koala's ancestor may have been able to survive on a much greater range of vegetation. Such an explanation has been made possible only with modern biological insights. Perhaps as knowledge increases some of the remaining difficulties will become less so.

Such changes do not require large time periods for animals under migratory pressure. The first small population that formed would tend to break up rapidly into daughter populations, going in different directions, each carrying only a portion of the gene pool of the original pair that came off the ark.

Sometimes all of a population will eventually become extinct; sometimes all but one specialized type. Where all the sub-types survive and proliferate, we find some of the tremendous diversity seen among some groups of creatures which are apparently derived from one created kind. This explains why some very obviously related species are found far apart from each other.

The sloth, a very slow-moving creature, may seem to require much more time than Scripture allows to make the journey from Ararat to its present home. Perhaps its present condition is also explicable by a similar evolutionary process. However, to account for today's animal distribution, evolutionists themselves have had to propose that certain primates have traveled across hundreds of miles of open ocean on huge rafts of matted vegetation torn off in storms. Indeed, iguanas have recently been documented traveling hundreds of miles in this manner between islands in the caribbean.

And a very cool explanation about why ape fossils would be found below human fossils... tricking us into believing that we evolved from primates:

The Bible suggests a pattern of post-flood dispersal of animals and humans that accounts for fossil distribution of apes and humans. In post-flood deposits in Africa, ape fossils are found below human fossils. Evolutionists claim that this arose because humans evolved from the apes, but there is another explanation. Animals, including apes, would have begun spreading out over the earth straight after the flood, whereas the Bible indicates that people refused to do this (Genesis 9:1, 11:1-9). Human dispersal did not start until Babel (remember the tower?), some hundreds of years after the flood. Such a delay would have meant that some ape fossils would be found consistently below human fossils, since people would have arrived in Africa after the apes.

[Dante]

Pangaea hasn't existed since before the days of the dinosaurs. Even by the Triassic it had split into Gondwanaland and Laurasia. So some dinosaurs might have made the crossing, in fact they certainly did, but others did not. Mainly because they did not exist at the time. The only way the 'animals moved about from the ark and then evolved into modern forms' theory might work using Pangaea, or the narrow strips of water between early Gondwanaland and Laurasia, would be to have very early mammalian ancestors instead of modern species. These would then evolve into the different 'representatives' of mammal kind. Of course there is one glaring error with this theory. Man was not around 200 million years ago. He was one of those rat-like early mammals.

If any later date is taken, as in when man was actually around to do some bobbing about in divine floods, then most animals had already evolved into their modern forms, or very close to them. Too late to have 'representatives' on the ark.

[GUNWOUNDS]

Pangaea hasn't existed since before the days of the dinosaurs. Even by the Triassic it had split into Gondwanaland and Laurasia. So some dinosaurs might have made the crossing, in fact they certainly did, but others did not. Mainly because they did not exist at the time. The only way the 'animals moved about from the ark and then evolved into modern forms' theory might work using Pangaea, or the narrow strips of water between early Gondwanaland and Laurasia, would be to have very early mammalian ancestors instead of modern species. These would then evolve into the different 'representatives' of mammal kind. Of course there is one glaring error with this theory. Man was not around 200 million years ago. He was one of those rat-like early mammals.

If any later date is taken, as in when man was actually around to do some bobbing about in divine floods, then most animals had already evolved into their modern forms, or very close to them. Too late to have 'representatives' on the ark.

[Dude_Doc]

Now, if the flood really happened, why couldn't this "ark" be of unnatural origin? Maybe it is some form of metaphor, while many people today believe that it literally was an ark. It's just like the ancient myths of elves, dwarwes, fieries and demons - did people literally believe in this, or did they make out, as good as they could with that age's thinking, metaphors of their visions and experiences?

Oh, and about the Japanese "catch" - it was revealed later that it apparently was a shark - one that had been eaten and ripped apart for some time before the fishermen found it.

[Dante]

This is becoming ridiculous. How many theories currently accepted as fact are going to be railed against in order to prove a point? Age of the earth, continental drift, extinction of dinosaurs, basic metabolism (some animals just don't hibernate, and are incapable of surviving without regular food or at least water)... What I find most amazing is that the theory depends heavily on the truth of evolution. Macroevolution, even. After all, how is a faster species supposed to change into a slow sloth without it? How are these 'representatives' going to change into modern varieties, if not by evolution? And yet it is being used as part of what is essentially a creationist theory. It boggles the mind.

Besides which, movement of water caused the very plates of the earth to shift? I think not. Continents aren't just floating on the oceans.

Oh, and an extra point on the 'dinosaur.' Before basking sharks were discovered, their carcasses were sometimes washed up on shore. And a basking shark that has been dead for more than three days or so has almost collapsed on the inside, the most preservable parts being the mouth, spine and tail. The huge areas of the gills just crumple. And so instead of the basic triangle shape of the shark, the carcass resembled nothing more than a snake with small appendages, or at least that's what those at the time claimed. They believed that an entirely new species had been discovered.

This link provides some interesting parallels. There is a diagram after the photographs to show show a decomposing basking shark could resemble a plesiosaur. Even more importantly though, it shows this table:

                  1977 Carcass  Known Sample of basking

Amino Acid          Sample      Shark Elastoidin

4-Hydroxyproline        45      45

Aspartic/acid          54      55

Threonine              25      25

Serine                  39      40

Glutamic acid          80      80

Proline                130      125

Glycine                291      290

Alanine                109      110

Cystine (1/2)          7        6

Valine                  25      24

Methionine              10      10

Isoleucine              20      20

Leucine                19      19

Tyrosine                43      41

Phenylalanine          12      12

Hydroxylysine            5      6

Lysine                  25      26

Histidine              11      13

Arginine                51      53

(Amide-N)              (57)    (62)

Gross amino acid analysis of the carcass samples gave results that closely matched elastoidin from a known basking shark. Elastoidin is a collagenous protein known only from sharks and rays (not reptiles or even other fish). The match was especially impressive when known basking shark elastoidin was treated with an antiseptic sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) solution, as were the Zuiyo-maru samples (Obata and Tomoda 1978, p 52; Omura, Mochizuki, and Kamiya 1978, p 58). The correspondence was virtually identical on all 20 amino acids tested (Table 1). In discussing this "striking similarity," Kimura, Fujii, and others (1978, p 72) noted that a statistical test called the "difference index (DI)" gave the extremely low value of .95 indicating a tight match. They also noted that the high tryosine content (43 and 41 residues for the samples) is especially characteristic of shark elastoidin as compared with other collagens, which typically have 5 or less residues. ceratotrichia.

The similarities there are far too close to be coincidence.

[Acriku]

I have a question, how did the marine life who require salt water and the animals who require fresh water survive?

Also, is there such wood that can withstand the pressures of an enormous ship such as that? Also, how did Noah and his family take care of the animals on board for 40 days? The amount of feces, food, and room required by the animals is an impossible logistic.

Is there such a wood that can survive 40 days of pounding water being poured onto it nonstop? There was a mathematical number of how much pressure required to flood the entire world (including mountains) in 40 days, and it was enormous. Wood cannot survive that.

[Andrew]

Those Q were answered in a link I provided. Sea life was "expected" to live/survive.

Noah and them took care of animals because they went into "hibernation".

Of course I don't see how any of those answers occured without God making it happen.

Good Q you brought up was how the wood survived. My Q is how did noah make it waterproof for a year.

[Acriku]

Those Q were answered in a link I provided. Sea life was "expected" to live/survive.

Noah and them took care of animals because they went into "hibernation".

Of course I don't see how any of those answers occured without God making it happen.

Good Q you brought up was how the wood survived. My Q is how did noah make it waterproof for a year.

From the wikipedia site:

There would be different places of different salinities in the Flood. Fresh water can float on salt water for extended periods. Many species can tolerate different salinities if they have time to acclimatize. Some intolerant species are likely the result of specialization which involves loss of genetic information.[7]

So, fish learned to deal with the massive decline in salinity due to the flood, and the ones that couldn't didn't exist back then and actually evolved after the flood? This is filling in the gaps.

Let's go further than fish. How about coral? All coral would've died after the flood due to the silt laid down after the flood, and yet we have coral that have been living for millions of years (according to calcium deposits made by the coral, a well-known rate for coral). Did God put a sheet over the coral so they could survive the flood?

As for hibernation, many if not most animals do not go into hibernation, how does Noah provide for them? The ones who do, require calm areas in order to kick into hibernation. Does a ship rocking back and forth to the waves, and being pounded by rain for 40 days seem calm to you?

Also, isn't it funny how Egypt - a civilization that kept records dating even before the flood - shows no indication of a global flood?

I have a serious question for pro-Noah's Arkers. Did Noah take insects upon the ark?

[Andrew]

Just had to add the image I mentioned earlier that I was looking for.

[Caid Ivik]

you won't stop...

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17162341-13762,00.html

[Khan]

Funny how it took scientific method to disprove the creationism theory for the church to say it's not meant to be taken literally.

What did the carnivores eat? Remembering that some big cats will only eat fresh meat there must have been animals kept aboard for that alone.

Where did all the water go to after the flood ending, considering if there was that much water in the atmosphere at one time we'd drown just from breathing in.

Still waiting for an answer to this one.

[Caid Ivik]

Why? Teilhard de Chardin, who himself was a known paleontologist, conjoined both ways already a half century ago. Anywhere but in America, there is no ideological tension between so called creationism and evolutionism. About the flood, the discourse is also the same: a conflict based on protestant, dh unallegorical reading of Bible. Why should we say that whole world was flooded; enough for such a statement would be, if it was so for the centres of civilization. Be it or not, there was a big flood in that area...

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/archives/vol26/vol26_iss2/2602_Flood_Theory.html

...and perhaps it wasn't such a bullshit, as it is a widespread myth.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html

[Anathema]

Just had to add the image I mentioned earlier that I was looking for.

Lol, that's great, and so true! I immediately had to think of Intelligent Design (what a mock science that is), but it fits Noah's tale superbly.

Caid: there was some tension here in the Netherlands a while ago, when our minister of education suggested that creationism should be taught in school as a plausible alternative to evolution. Basicly the exact opposite of the sort of things happening in the US, lol.

[GUNWOUNDS]

Yea its totally possible that God set the world in motion so that evolution of single celled organisms could have become complex organisms... and that when God "created" Adam what he actually did was endow the "Man Beast" with intelligence to know and worship him.

[nemafakei]

I can understand that, of course. But why would god create a world 10,000 years ago and add what appear to be remains of creatures that lived millions of years ago? Why not just leave them out?

[Acriku]

Being a part of the same book that dictates what is required of salvation, I would think the debate over Noah's Flood and Genesis is highly relevant. It bleeds over into every other area of the Bible. If Noah's Flood is merely a local flood exaggerated into a world flood, with no indication of this in the text itself, then where else are there exaggerations, falsities, and misinformation without indication in the text? Perhaps there's an item of doing required for salvation that was omitted (in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a passage that was originally the beginning of the story of King Sumer or whoever in the bible that was lost). Perhaps not. I would look at the debate more closely GUNWOUNDS, the credibility of the Bible hangs in the balance (not to say it has much to begin with).

[GUNWOUNDS]

I can understand that, of course. But why would god create a world 10,000 years ago and add what appear to be remains of creatures that lived millions of years ago? Why not just leave them out?

for fossil fuel.... for something to explore.... heck why would he do anything.  Whats the point of us being in meatbags?  it is this way just because it is.

[nemafakei]

"heck why would he do anything."

Well, quite. Why make the universe the perverse way it is, why create such deception?

"it is this way just because it is" works if you've got a universe that's developing through applying virtually random data to fixed laws, but we're talking intelligent design here. It's that way because HE created it, in full knowledge of the result, with unimited power to decide how it will turn out.

Parallel to what point Acriku (I think) is saying: if one part of the Bible is found to be false, contradictory, or spurious, the credibility of the rest seriously goes down. It's all very well having a 'message' from the guy up top which we're expected to follow to the letter, but if that message is interspersed with nonsense, there's no way we can be expected to pick up the right message from all the wrong ones.

[GUNWOUNDS]

"heck why would he do anything."

Well, quite. Why make the universe the perverse way it is, why create such deception?

"it is this way just because it is" works if you've got a universe that's developing through applying virtually random data to fixed laws, but we're talking intelligent design here. It's that way because HE created it, in full knowledge of the result, with unimited power to decide how it will turn out.

Parallel to what point Acriku (I think) is saying: if one part of the Bible is found to be false, contradictory, or spurious, the credibility of the rest seriously goes down. It's all very well having a 'message' from the guy up top which we're expected to follow to the letter, but if that message is interspersed with nonsense, there's no way we can be expected to pick up the right message from all the wrong ones.

in respose to first paragraph... wolfwiz posted a good answer to this... i will see if i can find the link.

[Acriku]

in response to your second paragraph ... i understand that.. however certain parts of the bible are more detailed than others.  Why focus so much on an event that gives very little detail (creation of universe, flood details) and try to extrapolate so much ... when there are parts of the bible that give copious amounts of detail regarding something else.

Being a part of the Bible, everything has significance to it. Every word, every story. Otherwise, why would God have had the gospels write it? If it came from God, it has to be extremely significant. Especially if he's perfect, and therefore what he says is perfectly relevant and appropriate to us, the readers.

The word "day" in herbew has multiple meanings... it could mean a full solar day (24 hours),  a work day (~8 hours),  dusk till dawn (12 hours), or an age or era like we say "back in the day".  basically God does not give us exact detailsin regards to creation or the flood.... any story you hear about creation is just an extrapolation from a few lines of scripture.  Arguing how he created us is silly when the information is just not given. 

The ambiguity of the word day can be cleared up a bit by how the word is used in the context of other parts of the bible, where it might be easier to discern which definition it means. However, with the word day we can actually look at Genesis 1:5 to see what he most likely meant by the word "yom" (day in hebrew):

1:5  And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

It is clear this means a single day/night cycle. If this was the first "day", then the days thereafter most likely mean the same thing - a single day/night cycle. There is no indication of a changed meaning.

Also, it would've been more clear to be meant as a long period of time if God used the words "qedem" or "olam", which are translated to mean "ancient" and "everlasting" respectively.

Therefore, it is most likely to be meant as a single day/night cycle. This points to a Young Earth model of creation.

Perhaps the guy upstairs is being subtle about what is important and what we should focus on.  Perhaps he didnt give alot of detail about floods or creation of the universe because perhaps thats not what is important to him.  I would say that at this stage in our lives he is more concerned with our spiritual health than our ability to understand exploding singularities that started the universe and quantum physics and his ability to manipulate the ice caps.

Than why talk about it at all? Why bring it up? There's a lot God left out of the bible as far as our history goes, so why include such topics as Noah's flood and such at all if he doesn't explain it further? He knows people are going to question it, especially Noah's flood and its incredible account (using 'incredible' is appropriate, wink wink). It doesn't make sense. However, if you look at it from the perspective of human beings making this up and writing it down as the Holy Word, it makes perfect sense. They didn't know how it could have been done, they just wrote that it happened.

Like whenever they came upon a part in the story where they can't think of a way it could have been done  such as where the waters came from to flood the earth, and where it all went) they become ambiguous and vague and left a lot of details out.

[gunner154]

God didn't write the bible, but He approved it. It would be unnecessary to try and go into detail for everything - even details that really tell us nothing. And even then, people then were not as critical as the people today, so why would such details be necessary?

If you want to analyse something that came directly from God, why not try the untranslated Ten Commandments?

Or perhaps it could be juxtaposition. We won't really know. Maybe we can send a representative upstairs to clarify this a bit? ;)

[Caid Ivik]

You take it by some weird protestant way. While since the beginning there were calls for allegorical reading of Bible. Ie you can read Name of the Rose as a criminal story, it looks so in the basic definition; but a historian would focus on the perfect knowledge of medieval franciscan order, so he would take it as a historical book; well, and nothing (but own knowledge) limits you to go deeper and discover fascinating semiotic patterns. Which are there consciously made. Some writers, ie Nietzsche or Crowley, write purely in allegory, without a 'corpular' structure, which could be read easily as ie Danielle Steel. Yet every book may have some anagogical meaning, for the transcendent or eschatological truth, uncoverable in 'normal life', but I would leave this for holy books  ;)

[exatreide]

God didn't write the bible, but He approved it. It would be unnecessary to try and go into detail for everything - even details that really tell us nothing. And even then, people then were not as critical as the people today, so why would such details be necessary?

If you want to analyse something that came directly from God, why not try the untranslated Ten Commandments?

Or perhaps it could be juxtaposition. We won't really know. Maybe we can send a representative upstairs to clarify this a bit? ;)

How did God approve the bible? The Catholic church approved the bible, the bible was written by men, not by god.

[gunner154]

Okay, my mistake then. No problem then, all the more there is reason that there are certain details that are considered "unimportant" then. What matters is the essence of the bible.