Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tedster on February 6, 2009 at 12:22am

This I have heard of before. The flood story is very common around religions that are in the same general area of Asia. People also had to constantly keep moving until they were in higher ground. Part of the story of Gilgamesh, which was about 3200 B.C.E. was the same story of Moses, only that Moses was not supposedly until 1,500 B.C.E.

The earth was still warming after the previous ice age, and the water washed into Black Sea from the Bosporus.

I learned from a class about Bay Area Indians that they may have settled out as far as 30 miles off the current coast because the coast was out further until about 5000 years ago.

Anyway. I did a little cheating on wikipedea to see if part of my story was correct and you might take a look at this. Albiet it will be brief.

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Permalink Reply by Richard on August 10, 2009 at 10:54am

Thanks for the link to the Wikipedia article. It seems that the verdict is out, and that scientists don't agree. There may have been flooding but (1) some say there was repeated flooding over the millennia as the water ran into and out of the Black Sea; and (2) some say the volume of water was not what Ryan and Pittman (the two who argue for the vast, catastrophic flood) say.

As for myself, I want to repeat that I have no interest in proving the Bible to be correct. What I wanted to show was that the Bible story may have been based on a relatively local flood, so that it is not true that the entire world was flooded as the Bible says.

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Permalink Reply by Rev Hellbound Alleee on April 4, 2009 at 9:53pm

An all-over -the-earth flood is what is claimed by the bibble. Not just a big flood. A flood that actually destroyed every civilization on earth around 3200 BCE.

But we have flourishing civilizations that existed before and after these years, with no apparent rebuilding necessary. Someone should have told the Shang Dynasty that there was a Global Flood.

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Permalink Reply by Craig on August 11, 2009 at 3:06pm

HAHA Bibble go Izard

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Permalink Reply by Langston on August 10, 2009 at 9:52am

I'm also of the opinion that there has to be *some* truth to something in the Bible; a friend of mine mentioned something about 5 pools that are in the Bible and how archaeologists found these 5 pools right in the vicinity of where it says they are in the Bible (sorry so vague, can't remember too well). I didn't have a problem coping with that one.

A flood, you say? I also once recall hearing about fish fossils in the mountain tops. Don't know how much truth to that there was. Judging from the responses of other readers here, there are other explanations as to how this could have occurred rather than relying on Biblical stories.

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Permalink Reply by Mike on August 10, 2009 at 12:18pm

I think what we can get out of this is that there's scientific evidence for -a- flood. How this turns into -the- flood seems to be a matter of belief and not evidence. I see nothing to tie this particular one (or any of the other ones found in that area) to the one told about in the bible.

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Permalink Reply by Johnsky on August 12, 2009 at 12:02am

I'm pretty sure just about every area on earth has experienced a flood at different points in time... it's hardly proof of "noah's ark", or the "biblical flood"... besides, for the biblical flood to have occurred, the entire earth would have to be under-water wouldn't it?

I mean... that would require WAY more water than actually exists.

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Permalink Reply by Jo Jerome on August 12, 2009 at 6:58pm

I fail to see how anyone can NOT see through the simple fact that most all legends/myths/stories are embellishments of some real event(s).

Floods happen. Everywhere. They are often catastrophic, especially when you live off the land. If you are little podunk farmer 6,000 years ago with no knowledge of how big the world is, as far as you're concerned the little flood that is happening in your village must surely be happening everywhere, globally. In the case of desert floods and specifically one as big as the one to which you refer, the Black Sea chased people inland as much as a mile a day. Again, think like a little podunk farmer with no knowledge of geology, weather, climate, ocean systems, or any other useful science.

All you know is that the world is becoming water at the rate of a mile a day.

At that point, even if you don't have a god, you're going to make one up and immediately wonder what you or your neighbor did to piss it off.

As to other geological evidence, where I live it's quite common to find seashells and sharks teeth in the desert at 5,000 feet elevation. Once more; I am podunk farmer who doesn't know better. What conclusion am I to come to other than there must have been a worldwide flood that left all this dead sea life around here?

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Permalink Reply by Kitty on August 21, 2009 at 7:41pm

OH, that is what I was taught in High School. Yep, the fact there are to be found sea creature fossils everywhere proves the great flood.
Being the curious one, I have since found out the stuff was there before the earth was formed 6,000 years ago, lol!

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Permalink Reply by Louis on August 21, 2009 at 7:21pm

If you're into this, a few years ago James Cameron made a documentary about the 10 plagues of Egypt and how, if they happened at all, they could be explained scientifically.

Really interesting.

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Permalink Reply by Judith Bandsma on August 25, 2009 at 3:13am

The writer of the following, (Dr.) Marty Leipzig is a petroleum geologist and an atheist.

FLOOD MATH:
First- the global flood supposedly (Scripturally) covered the planet, (see that, George? If so, why are you still being so stupid?) and Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall. The diameter of the earth at the equator, on the other hand, is 12,756.8 km. All we have to do is calculate the volume of water to fill a sphere with a radius of the Earth + Mount Everest; then we subtract the volume of a sphere with a radius of the Earth. Now, I know this won't yield a perfect result, because the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, but it will serve to give a general idea about the amounts involved.

So, here are the calculations:

First, Everest

V= 4/3 * pi * r cubed
= 4/3 * pi * 6387.248 km cubed
= 1.09151 x 10 to the 12 cubic kilometres (1.09151x102 km3)

Now, the Earth at sea level

V = 4/3 * pi * r cubed
= 4/3 * pi * 6378.4 km cubed
= 1.08698 x 10 to the 12 cubic kilometres (1.08698x1012 km3)

The difference between these two figures is the amount of water needed to just cover the Earth:

4.525 x 10 to the ninth cubic kilometres (4.525x1009 km3) Or, to put into a more sensible number, 4,525,000,000,000 cubic kilometres

This is one helluva lot of water.

For those who think it might come from the polar ice caps, please don't forget that water is more dense than ice, and thus that the volume of ice present in those ice caps would have to be more than the volume of water necessary.

Some interesting physical effects of all that water, too. How much weight do you think that is? Well, water at STP weighs in at 1 gram/cubic centimetre (by definition)...so,

4.252x1009 km3 of water,
X 106 (= cubic meters),
X 106 (= cubic centimetres),
X 1 g/cm3 (= grams),
X 10-3 (= kilograms),
(turn the crank)
equals 4.525E+21 kg.

Ever wonder what the effects of that much weight would be? Well, many times in the near past (i.e., the Pleistocene), continental ice sheets covered many of the northern states and most all of Canada. For the sake of argument, let's call the area covered by the Wisconsinian advance (the latest and greatest) was 10,000,000,000 (ten million) km2, by an average thickness of 1 km of ice (a good estimate...it was thicker in some areas [the zones of accumulation] and much thinner elsewhere [at the ablating edges]). Now, 1.00x1007 km2 X 1 km thickness equals 1.00E+07 km3 of ice.

Now, remember earlier that we noted that it would take 4.525x1009 km3 of water for the flood? Well, looking at the Wisconsinian glaciation, all that ice (which is frozen water, remember?) would be precisely 0.222% [...do the math](that's zero decimal two hundred twenty two thousandths) percent of the water needed for the flood.

Well, the Wisconsinian glacial stade ended about 25,000 YBP (years before present), as compared for the approximately supposedly 4,000 YBP flood event.

Due to these late Pleistocene glaciations (some 21,000 years preceding the supposed flood), the mass of the ice has actually depressed the crust of the Earth. That crust, now that the ice is gone, is slowly rising (called glacial rebound); and this rebound can be measured, in places (like northern Wisconsin), in centimetres/year. Sea level was also lowered some 10's of meters due to the very finite amount of water in the Earth's hydrosphere being locked up in glacial ice sheets (geologists call this glacioeustacy).

Now, glacial rebound can only be measured, obviously, in glaciated terranes, i.e., the Sahara is not rebounding as it was not glaciated during the Pleistocene. This lack of rebound is noted by laser ranged interferometery and satellite geodesy [so there], as well as by geomorphology. Glacial striae on bedrock, eskers, tills, moraines, rouche moutenees, drumlins, kame and kettle topography, fjords, deranged fluvial drainage and erratic blocks all betray a glacier's passage. Needless to say, these geomorphological expressions are not found everywhere on Earth (for instance, like the Sahara). Therefore, although extensive, the glaciers were a local (not global) is scale. Yet, at only 0.222% the size of the supposed flood, they have had a PROFOUND and EASILY recognisable and measurable effects on the lands.

Yet, the supposed flood of Noah, supposedly global in extent, supposedly much more recent, and supposedly orders of magnitude larger in scale; has exactly zero measurable effects and zero evidence for it's occurrence.

Golly, Wally. I wonder why that may be...?

Further, Mount Everest extends through 2/3 of the Earth's atmosphere. Since two forms of matter can't occupy the same space, we have an additional problem with the atmosphere. Its current boundary marks the point at which gasses of the atmosphere can escape the Earth's gravitational field. Even allowing for partial dissolving of the atmosphere into our huge ocean, we'd lose the vast majority of our atmosphere as it is raised some 5.155 km higher by the rising flood waters; and it boils off into space.

Yet, we still have a quite thick and nicely breathable atmosphere. In fact, ice cores from Antarctica (as well as deep-sea sediment cores) which can be geochemically tested for paleoatmospheric constituents and relative gas ratios; and these records extend well back into the Pleistocene, far more than the supposed 4,000 YBP flood event. Strange that this major loss of atmosphere, atmospheric fractionation (lighter gasses (oxygen, nitrogen, fluorine, neon, etc.) would have boiled off first in the flood-water rising scenario, enriching what remained with heavier gasses (argon, krypton, xenon, radon, etc.)), and massive extinctions from such global upheavals are totally unevidenced in these cores.

Even further, let us take a realistic and dispassionate look at the other claims relating to global flooding and other such biblical nonsense.

Particularly, in order to flood the Earth to the Genesis requisite depth of 10 cubits (~15' or 5 m.) above the summit of Mt. Ararat (16,900' or 5,151 m AMSL), it would obviously require a water depth of 16,915' (5,155.7 m), or over three miles above mean sea level. In order to accomplish this little task, it would require the previously noted additional 4.525 x 109 km3 of water to flood the Earth to this depth. The Earth's present hydrosphere (the sum total of all waters in, on and above the Earth) totals only 1.37 x 109 km3. Where would this additional 4.525 x 109 km3 of water come from? It cannot come from water vapour (i.e., clouds) because the atmospheric pressure would be 840 times greater than standard pressure of the atmosphere today. Further, the latent heat released when the vapour condenses into liquid water would be enough to raise the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere to approximately 3,570 C (6,460 F).

Someone, who shall properly remain anonymous, suggested that all the water needed to flood the Earth existed as liquid water surrounding the globe (i.e., a "vapour canopy"). This, of course, it staggeringly stupid. What is keeping that much water from falling to the Earth? There is a little property called gravity that would cause it to fall.

Let's look into that from a physical standpoint. To flood the Earth, we have already seen that it would require 4.252 x 109 km3 of water with a mass of 4.525 x 1021 kg. When this amount of water is floating about the Earth's surface, it stored an enormous amount of potential energy, which is converted to kinetic energy when it falls, which, in turn, is converted to heat upon impact with the Earth. The amount of heat released is immense:

Potential energy: E=M*g*H, where
M = mass of water,
g = gravitational constant and,
H = height of water above surface.

Now, going with the Genesis version of the Noachian Deluge as lasting 40 days and nights, the amount of mass falling to Earth each day is 4.525 x 1021 kg/40 24 hr. periods. This equals 1.10675 x 1020 kilograms daily. Using H as 10 miles (16,000 meters), the energy released each day is 1.73584 x 1025 joules. The amount of energy the Earth would have to radiate per m2/sec is energy divided by surface area of the Earth times number of seconds in one day. That is: e = 1.735384 x 1025/(4*3.14159* ((6386)2*86,400)) = 391,935.0958 j/m2/s.

Currently, the Earth radiates energy at the rate of approximately 215 joules/m2/sec and the average temperature is 280 K. Using the Stefan- Boltzman 4'th power law to calculate the increase in temperature:

E (increase)/E (normal) = T (increase)/T4 (normal)

E (normal) = 215 E (increase) = 391,935.0958 T (normal) = 280.

Turn the crank, and T (increase) equals 1800 K.

The temperature would thusly rise 1800 K, or 1,526.84 C (that's 2,780.33 F...lead melts at 880 F...ed note). It would be highly unlikely that anything short of fused quartz would survive such an onslaught. Also, the water level would have to rise at an average rate of 5.5 inches/min; and in 13 minutes would be in excess of 6' deep.

Finally, at 1800 K water would not exist as liquid.

It is quite clear that a Biblical Flood is and was quite impossible. Only fools and those shackled by dogma would insist otherwise.

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Permalink Reply by Judith Bandsma on August 25, 2009 at 3:17am

I need to clarify, the 'George' mentioned in the first couple sentences was a raving loon on the subject of the flood. It was also his contention that no actual animals were aboard the ark, only their DNA which Noah somehow reconstituted into animals after the water went down.

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