Implausibility of the flood tale

[Zzyzx]

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In a thread discussing the different lengths of time Genesis assigns to the Earth being flooded, mention was made of other implausibilities of the flood tale -- including:

1) A wooden boat much larger that any known to exist and built by a 500 year old man
2) Millions of animals gathered from all over the world and redistributed afterward
3) A billion cubic miles of water sudden appearing -- then disappearing afterward
4) Eight people providing for millions of diverse animals (some carnivores) for a year
5) Repopulating all the continents with humans and other animals in a few thousand years (and producing the great genetic diversity known to exist).

Are those (and other) implausibilities sufficient grounds to conclude that in all likelihood the flood tale is fable, legend, myth, folklore or fiction?

If not, why not? What rational explanation can be made for them?

[Danmark]

The question of marsupials in New Zealand raises an interesting point that ultimately reveals a kind of philosophical definition of 'native' as used in native species. At one time there were no mammals of any kind in NZ, except marine mammals and some bats. There were no homo sapiens there either. Animals and plants move. They migrate. The first mammals probably only lived on one continent. Actually, only one place in one continent.

Man tends to think anthropocentrically and to set homo sapiens aside as if it is a separate species. Are there marsupials in NZ today? Yes. How did they get there? The same way every thing else got to NZ, or Australia, or South America. They migrated; some with the aid of homo sapiens, some by other means.

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 56 by 1213]

If modern people are not good boat builders,

There you go again, using an If statement. If I had ten million euro, I'd be living in a mansion. Does that mean that simply by saying this "If" statement, that I can go around saying "Yes, I, rikuoamero, do live in a mansion" and expect to be taken seriously?
No it does not. My friends and family would want to see this mansion.
Same here with you and I. You say this "If" statement, that the ancients were great boat builders, yet do not provide the slightest bit of evidence. I also have to remind you that we have the dimensions and materials of the Ark from the Bible. Master shipbuilders from modern times have said on more than one occassion that such a ship is not seaworthy.

If we take for example ancient great and heavy stone structures, modern people don’t understand how they were made, yet they exist. In my opinion those prove that ancient people should not be underestimated.

Are you handwaving away all the problems I indicated before? Of the impossibility of a WOODEN ship not sinking in flood conditions? Of the impossibility of 8 people caring for thousands of animals without the benefit of a support network, of those animals surviving cooped up on a boat for a year, and then later on surviving on a desolate dead planet?

I would say that sound a bit contradictory.

It isn't. When a scientist does science, such as when working on the problems in the Ark story, they provide their calculations or show evidence You don't. At all. None whatsoever. You say something like "Well, the ancients were probably better shipbuilders than what we have today" and then just stop there. You don't provide evidence of such a ship, you don't provide calculations showing how a wooden ship could survive in a flood.
Probably =/= probability. They are two different things. I'll chalk this up to a language barrier, if you want.

It is not necessary to tell all possible scenarios, but it would be wise to tell, this what I say now is one point of view, there are also others, and then help the kids get the best possible tools to think by themselves and evaluate matters to make best possible conclusions.

This would of necessity mean wasting class time. Evolution is the ONLY theory in science that even comes close to explaining the origin of life (with its relation to abiogenesis). Once the door is open to teaching Biblical Creationism, that means (to be consistent) we'd have to waste time teaching all the other creation stories too from other cultures.
Again, I have to remind you, evolution is the ONLY one that has evidence supporting it. Can you imagine if this entire thread happened in a classroom? I'd have laughed you out of the building. I'd have provided fossils, and measurements and calculations, and there you'd be holding a Bible and nothing else.

We have to remember, if the Bible is correct, at Noah’s time, people were better, they were not yet as degenerated.

What is it with you and "if" statements? Are you ever going to provide data that these "if" statements are actually true? Or are you just going to assume that they are?
You can make as many of these "if" statements as you want, and say "if" this, "then" that, but that doesn't mean you're actually providing a convincing argument.
As I said before, if I had ten million euros, then I'd be living in a mansion. That doesn't indicate, that I actually HAVE ten million euros.

Rudiments are one evidence for corruption, or degeneration.

Except such a thing was not able to be predicted using creationism. There is no account of someone saying "I believe in Biblical creationism. If this is true, then I predict that animals have unused body parts" and then later going out to dissect an animal.
Even if I were to grant your rudiments argument, there's still ALL the other problems to deal with. The lack of a viable population, the storage of food on the Ark, the lack of life on the planet after the flood, the impossibility of 8 people caring for thousands of animals while fixing a boat etc.

No. I try to help you and other people to understand.

I understand already your case. However, by saying you're not trying to convince me, this means you don't have confidence in your own arguments. Why should I or anyone give time to what you say when you yourself don't have confidence in it?

But I believe, if person understand well, he sees eventually the evidence for the Bible.

That evidence being...? You have yet to provide one iota of evidence for the flood story on this thread. None. All you've done is say "maybe" "could" or wishy washy words of that type. When pressed, you've linked to your own website, on a page about the flood, and that page is just you speculating using literally nothing more than the words from the Bible. You don't have data, evidence, measurements, nothing at all.

I have no reason to believe that. There could easily have been suitable environments for different water creatures. For example water forms layers by different salinity levels.

*Facepalm*. What does the Bible indicate the purpose of the flood WAS? Go on, remind me. If I'm not totally mistaken, I think it's something to do with WIPING OUT ALL LIFE (except for what's on the ark). This would include the fish.
And again, you say "could", but don't provide any evidence that this "could" might actually be true. Where's your data to suggest that fish that survive in one environment of water (such as seawater) could survive in a worldwide flood where rainfall was at 30 feet per hour for a year?

ou don’t seem to read my posts. If you would read, you would know that assumption is not correct. There was no need for that much rain, if it was the dry land that sunk, as the Bible suggests.

I'm ignoring those parts because there is no evidence to support this contention, that the land sunk. Not only no evidence, but it also totally contradicts the story you're trying to support, in that the story mentions RAINFALL. Not a sinking of land.

Now typically air gets warmed on top of land. That means, if there was just one continent,

Notice how many "if"s you work on, ALL with no data.
If there was just the one continent 6,000 some years ago...then the environment would have been different.
If the environment was different, all sorts of animals could have lived there.
If animals could have lived there, then Noah could have gotten penguins on his Ark.
If penguins were on the Ark, then they could have survived and later on travelled to Antarctica.
If Noah was a better shipbuilder than even the most highly educated shipbuilders of today.

If if if if if.
Are you ever going to provide data that any one of these "if"s is true? Or are you going to continue throwing this "if" onion at us?

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 54 by OnceConvinced]

Thanks for the correction on Maui vs Maori.
I have to ask - is that Maori culture taught in the same vein as science, as if it were true? Or was it like my Islamic Studies classes, where we were taught "These are the tenets of the Islamic religion, the Five Pillars of Islam, what Muslims believe" with no confirmation that these things are actually true?

[rikuoamero]

1213, I've gone through your website and I found this text

And I understand if you don’t believe what Bible tells, if you have not seen it to be true.

But I also think it is not necessary to have anything more than Bible, in this subject.

http://www.kolumbus.fi/r.berg/Bible.html

So basically, if I, a non-believer don't believe what the Bible says (such as Noah's Flood), you don't think it necessary to provide anything more than just the Bible alone. You're quite content to just use the Bible and the Bible alone.
I expected to find that. I said to myself "I bet 1213 has something like AnswersinGenesis's Statement of Faith, something where they say the Bible is correct and that to prove the Bible, they just need the Bible".

[Danmark]

[Replying to post 45 by 1213]

rikuo said

There's also the fact that the Ark as described would not have been seaworthy, even in sea conditions a hundred times less as violent as a worldwide flood would have been.

to which 1213 says

I have no reason to believe it would not be possible

I have to question the honesty of this statement. Earlier in this thread, information was given to you about other wooden ships that have been constructed, large and made of wood, using modern shipbuilding techniques. By and large, they were not seaworthy. Most of them sank. So if we have a collection of ships that were better built than Noah's Ark, by trained shipbuilders with more knowledge on the topic of shipbuilding than Noah would have had, with far better materials, and these ships sank in conditions much less violent than a worldwide flood...why would one think that Noah's Ark would be seaworthy in a worldwide flood?
Why would you say that you have no reason to believe it's not possible? Did that list of other wooden ships not get processed by you?

I haven't read every post on this thread, so ... this list?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... oden_ships

The ark would have been at least 100 feet longer and built 3000 years earlier, at least. As rikuoamero points out, these ships, mainly built in the 19th Century, were barely seaworthy in the best of conditions despite being held together with iron straps. Any wooden boat of half the size of the Ark is going to need massive pumps constantly working to keep the bilge from flooding the boat, sinking her. No way this could be done by a single family, not to mention the other technical problems with the boat and the animals.

[Bust Nak]

[Replying to post 45 by 1213]

Why is it important that there is a plausible explanation for how the ark could be seaworthy, how the animals could survive and so on, when you are talking about a worldwide supernatural event? Why jump through so many hoops when for once "God did it" would actually suffice as an answer?

[tfvespasianus]

[Replying to post 45 by 1213]

Why is it important that there is a plausible explanation for how the ark could be seaworthy, how the animals could survive and so on, when you are talking about a worldwide supernatural event? Why jump through so many hoops when for once "God did it" would actually suffice as an answer?

This has always been a puzzling point to me. That is because, in part, the omnipotence implies a being that could completely remake the whole of creation, the whole of our reality a billion times in a billionth of a second. Please – that should soak in. At no cost (i.e. infinite power) our entire universe with all of its laws and history could be remade and completely re-configured (including our perceptions, our history, etc.) again and again, ad infinitum. However, in contrast to this what we have is a very Rube Goldberg mechanism filled with improbabilities and based on observable data, impossibilities. If one takes it literally, it’s ludicrous and ostentatious in equal measure.

Take care,
TFV

[Danmark]

Agreed, the "God did it" answer is the ultimate answer that ultimately is plugged in. Part of the "God just did it" scenario involves God creating all the fossils in many strata of earth just to fool the natural man. This claim also involves tricks like fooling scientists and their instruments and planting 'false' light that appears to be starlight from 13 billion years ago.

In this view, God does not want to make his presence obvious, for reasons I have never appreciated. But, whatever, this is why God has never just come down and cut off the top 10,000 feet of a mountain with laser like precision, leaving a perfectly flat and smooth surface inscribed with letters 100 feet deep, perfectly scripted in all languages [or at least in Hebrew] declaring his presence.

Apparently this alleged God wants us to have reason to doubt his presence. Apparently this God considers it the highest morality to believe in something unlikely, AKA to have 'faith.'

The corollary thought is that the actual god, if there is one, has much greater respect for the people who don't believe in this absurd version of 'him.'

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 45 by 1213]

rikuo said

There's also the fact that the Ark as described would not have been seaworthy, even in sea conditions a hundred times less as violent as a worldwide flood would have been.

to which 1213 says

I have no reason to believe it would not be possible

I have to question the honesty of this statement. Earlier in this thread, information was given to you about other wooden ships that have been constructed, large and made of wood, using modern shipbuilding techniques. By and large, they were not seaworthy. Most of them sank. So if we have a collection of ships that were better built than Noah's Ark, by trained shipbuilders with more knowledge on the topic of shipbuilding than Noah would have had, with far better materials, and these ships sank in conditions much less violent than a worldwide flood...why would one think that Noah's Ark would be seaworthy in a worldwide flood?
Why would you say that you have no reason to believe it's not possible? Did that list of other wooden ships not get processed by you?

I haven't read every post on this thread, so ... this list?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... oden_ships

The ark would have been at least 100 feet longer and built 3000 years earlier, at least. As rikuoamero points out, these ships, mainly built in the 19th Century, were barely seaworthy in the best of conditions despite being held together with iron straps. Any wooden boat of half the size of the Ark is going to need massive pumps constantly working to keep the bilge from flooding the boat, sinking her. No way this could be done by a single family, not to mention the other technical problems with the boat and the animals.

Yes, that is what I was referring to, and what 1213 appears to have ignored entirely.

[tfvespasianus]

[Replying to post 69 by rikuoamero]

And not to quibble, but the word ‘ark’ means something like ‘box’ (e.g. the ark of the Covenant). So, the ark was meant to be something like a box and not a boat or ship (things there were both words for if that was what was meant).