Logical explanation for the flood story in the bible

It is known from ice core samples that the last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago with the southern edge of the northern ice cap extending all the way down to mid europe.

As the talk today is of the billions of tons of frozen water that will be released into the earths oceans as the result of global warming, you can imagine how much water was released as all the glaciers melted leaving behind massive boulders and u-shaped valleys all over the northern and southern hemisphere.

The sea levels around the world would have risen by tens of meters or more causing catastrophic floods, massive storms, and severe devastation to primitive fledgling civilisations just at the start of the agricultural revolution and the birth of cities.

This is what caused the many ancient cities in the Mediterranean and the Hindus valley in India to end up submerged, leading to the legends of Atlantis etc, and the other flood stories such as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the old Testament and in many other cultures from around the world at that time.

Illogical explanation for the flood story in the bible


God did it to punish mankind for living sinful.

@ mantraa.

A global flood would have left a signature. There is none.

What is known for sure is that there were regular floodings in the Euphrates valley - home of the Babylonian civilisation and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The story is based on an original localised flood. There are many signatures found in the local geology that back this up.
As I've said on the previous page: the Hebrews merely took the older myth and gave it a moral twist thus necessitating that the flood in their story be global.

@ Bastage

That is what i am saying. The global sea level rise at the end of the last ice age would have caused major localised flooding in many areas all over the world as well as catastrophic storms and changes all over the earth.  The ancient hebrews did not even know the world was round nor have any real idea of geography and how big it really is. Therefore when they experienced one of these major localised floodings they must have thought that the whole world is flooded if all you see from horizon to horizon is water. It obviously was not, because, like you said, there would be so much evidence for it all over the globe, and life would not have had the time to reach the incredibly vast levels of diversity we see today if 99.9999% of life was all killed. But to the survivors at the time, that is what they thought and that is the story that they passed on to their children. 
Some Christians say that the Grand Canyon is evidence of the biblical global flood, but when i look at it, and the evidence, what i see is a huge canyon eroded over millions of years by the Colorado river system and the forces of nature.

Geography disproves Noah's Ark.

Bastage:

@ mantraa.

A global flood would have left a signature. There is none.

What is known for sure is that there were regular floodings in the Euphrates valley - home of the Babylonian civilisation and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The story is based on an original localised flood. There are many signatures found in the local geology that back this up.
As I've said on the previous page: the Hebrews merely took the older myth and gave it a moral twist thus necessitating that the flood in their story be global.

Quoted for truth. All though I'm inclined to the taggering amounts of evidence that it was just another Hebrew lie such as the flight from Egypt.

i am very sure u are not a christian so why do this but all the same a sane man would not doubt the word of God COS I KNOW THAT IF GOD IS SET TO DO THINGS HE WILL GIVE U SRENGHT FROM NOWHERE

There's no wisdom being against God. The story of Noah is not the only unbelieveable story in the bible, they are numerous. I as a christian sometimes ponder on e.g (Samson killing 1000 with a jaw bone, carrying the gate of a city, parting of the red sea etc, ) Well Paul said 'We walk by faith and not by sight', its wise if we stick to God and when we see him face to face (1 John 3:2) ask Him these questions. Teaching a 4 year child Geometry wouldnt make sense thats just our case in the sight of God on these issues. Christians, God can fight for Himself let's not use insultive words. All I know is that LIFE ITSELF IS AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY for example how did you come to life? where were you before coming to life?who am I, where will I spend eternity? ETC, Wo God Understands jare!

@poster, any one who does not believe in God is a fool !!!!!!!!!How did you come into existence? common sense can not tell you how you came into existence>

jmoore:

@poster, any one who does not believe in God is a fool !!!!!!!!!How did you come into existence? common sense can not tell you how you came into existence>

I know your trying to say that god created us right? But then how did god create us? Dose he tell a man and woman when to have sex? And when they do out of the 40 to 400 million sperm cells that the man ejaculates into the womans virgina dose he personally select the sperm that is going to survivve all the odds to fertilize the egg which will eventually lead to a woman's pregnancy and then a baby? Is that how god creates us?

@manmustwac, I can't convince you because I see that most people in this nairaland forum can not be convinced, let me ask you this question, what happens to you when you die? where does your spirit goes? thats if you even believe that you have a spirit?

jmoore:

@manmustwac, I can't convince you because I see that most people in this nairaland forum can not be convinced, let me ask you this question, what happens to you when you die?

u came from nothing, so return to nothing.

jmoore:

where does your spirit goes? thats if you even believe that you have a spirit?

Where is your spirit? Have you seen a spirit before? Can you tell me what a spirit looks like?

@manmustwac, i just saw your profile picture. it was disgusting. i think you will know the truth when you die. here is my answer to your reply. i know you believe that air do exist, have you seen oxygen with your eyes before? there are more things than the eye can see. this is my last reply on this topic, bye

bump

That a global cataclysmic flood occurred cannot be denied by considering all the evidence. All nations and all tribes have a story about the flood which has been likely corrupted if the story was passed down orally. I feel so sorry for those who have no knowledge that people in the past (around 1600 AM or 2500 BC) had technology much better than us and we are just beginning to catch up. We still cannot cut large blocks of stone like those ancients in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. Who built the Great Pyramid?? Who built the structures on Easter Island?? One block in Lebanon is so massive NO CRANE ON THIS PLANET CAN CARRY IT!!

Noah built the ark mainly of gopher (cypress) wood but he had metal rivets and washers in the ark. The rivet contained titanium, aluminum, manganese, vanadium and chromium. He need not take the fish with him according to Genesis. He only took a pair [female and male] of every unclean kind and seven of every clean kind. If anyone tells me the dog, wolf and coyote are of the same kind, I would believe the person. The horse, zebra and donkey are the same kind of animal. If the animals could originally bring forth, then they are of the same kind. He did not need to carry massive animals. THE SMALLER ANIMALS CAME TO HIM!! READ: http://www.wyattmuseum.com/noahs-ark-07.htm and WATCH:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y5ORpMTebI .

How did clams in the closed position get to the top of Mount Everest, Mount Kilimanjaro or the rest? Might I add that clams CANNOT walk? FOSSILIZATION (the hardening of organic tissue) requires a RAPID BURIAL BY WATER to occur. Clams also open when they die so this evinces the clams were not expecting to die.

ALL ANIMALS ARE SMALL BEFORE THEY GET LARGE. Noah could easily have taken 1000's of tiny land animals which would later grow large and adapt to their environment after the flood. In humans, we have seen a White South African give birth to a Black and a Black Nigerian give birth to a White. A similar phenomenon occurs in animals at times. I would rather believe in the most high GOD through his son (Yeshua the MESSIAH) my whole life and when I die find out he is fake than scoff at him my entire life to find out he is real at RESURRECTION.

@sun god,i must confess u are intelligent humanly speaking.but your let me ask u few questions. how is the earths composition 71%water and land mass 21% without it getting flooded ?what suspends the earth ?how did man come into existence?the story of noah is real.just as we have seven wonders of the world.things have changed ,life span of man etc.dont base u argument on ur myopic reasoning of today,God is a spirit christians live by faith not by sight.i am an engineer by profeession so i understand the angle u are coming from.but as the heaven is far from the earth so are his ways higher than our ways and thoughts higher than our thought .

Study ur history and archaelogy,noah ark is real.read d genesis very well,it takes noah and his family 40years to build d ark.that is a documentary on noah ark,google it.it is produced by secular historians.

Lol..

Maybe Noah can explain the extinction of dinosaurs.

Did they get washed away by the floods?

jmoore: @manmustwac, i just saw your profile picture. it was disgusting. i think you will know the truth when you die. here is my answer to your reply. i know you believe that air do exist, have you seen oxygen with your eyes before? there are more things than the eye can see. this is my last reply on this topic, bye

Did you take chemistry in secondary school?

Sun God: Heheheeheeeeee! I knew it was just a matter of time before the DELUSIONAL CHRISTIAN SQUAD throws out one of its errant body guards and guess what its a female member! Its makes it more palatable to verbally rape you and throw you back to your delusional squad and help you and your fellow christian cohorts to come back with a more plausible argument.



Hmm, laziness and lack of skills huh! and also determination on the part of 8 people huh!

Rubbish

The ship was stated to be 450 feet long and 75 feet wide and 45 feet high? right! now see the idiocy of your claims of dtermination and skill!

1. Wood is not structurally stong enough to build a vessel of that size. Even iron and bronze are too weak. You have to have modern steels to build a ship that big that won't break in half at the first wave. Even the navy's of the world tried building larger wooden ships in the early 19th century and proved by experiment that they aren't sound talkless of 8 people in 4,350 B.C. Besides how many FORESTS not bushes did Noah and his 3 sons have to have destroyed to build this gigantic thing?

2. The Bible tells us of the way humanity was rescued from the flood by a man called Noah, who was forewarned of the flood by God, and was instructed to build a large boat, or Ark, in which he should carry two (or more) of every kind of living thing. (Genesis 6:9 et seq.). The Bible also tells us the dimensions of the Ark; "This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks." (Genesis 6:15-16). We are also told that the rain lasted for forty days and forty nights, after which the flood waters lasted a further 150 days. That makes a total of 190 days for which Noah and the animals were living inside the Ark.

Let us examine this account, and see if it is plausible. Firstly we will examine the case for building such a vessel, and then we shall examine the plausibility of gathering and storing all these animals at the story claims.


Boat building is a very difficult and skilled discipline. The Bible does not say if Noah had any profession, or indeed if he had any previous experience at boat building, but let us assume for sake of argument that he was fully proficient.

Building a boat of that size on his own would have been quite a task. Let us assume that his 3 children also helped too, reducing the time by a factor of four. Sadly the Bible doesn't tell us how long it took to build the Ark ( Contrary to stillwaters claim that it took decades) , (Another silly example of how christian apologists fabricate stories and facts and if left unchecked for the next 20 years could find its way into the bible, lol) but we could at least estimate it. Bear in mind that Noah would not have had access to any sort of advanced tools, probably not even a saw.

Now this boat has to be strong enough to hold elephants and the like. Let's estimate how much wood this would take.

Well the boat was 450 feet long. Let's assume an average tree is 30 feet tall and three feet thick. That means that, just to build the outside of the boat we would require over two hundred tree trunks. That's assuming they just use the tree trunks without splitting them - remember we're dealing with elephants here so the wood needs to be pretty strong. Now Noah didn't have modern tools, so we could probably say that it would take him the best part of a day to chop down a tree, chop off all the side branches, neaten it up and carry it back to the Ark. That means he's spent two thirds of a year just chopping down trees. That's ignoring the fact that moving all that wood a significant distance is going to become prohibitively difficult. Trees weigh an awful lot.

Building a modern ship takes years. The QE2, for example, took over two years to build in a large commercial dockyard employing thousands of people with modern equipment. Here we're considering one man and his three sons without so much as a screwdriver to their name. This is going to take an extremely long time. During that time the Ark would have needed to be waterproofed, protected from the many different kinds of problem to which wood is susceptible such as woodworm and mildew, and also protected from vandals and troublemakers intent on destroying Noah's project.

Furthermore, wood is not a particularly strong material, compared to modern ship-building materials such as steel. To build a boat of the dimensions indicated in the Genesis story seems impossible without some sort of metal framework holding it together.

Finally, the largest wooden ship ever built was the US.S. Wyoming, built in the first decade of the twentiath century with modern shipbuilding methods. It was more than 100 feet shorter than Noah's ark is claimed to have been. This ship represented a tremendous feat of engineering, and posed several substantial construction problems. Most notably, it required large iron strapping for support, just to hold the boat together. There is no possible way Noah could have built a boat 450 feet long which held together under its own weight, let alone also carried hundreds of thousands of animals, and floated on the tempestuous seas of the Biblical flood!

As an very amusing illustration of how difficult it would be for Noah to have built a boat of the dimensions given in the Bible, this page describes a modern attempt to rebuild the Ark according to its given dimensions. Note the following requirements;


3,000 tons of cement
Five bulldozers
76 cement pillars
34 sway-brace pillars
4-foot high, 9-inch wide foundation wall
Steel reinforcement rod
Anchor bolts
Substantial steel superstructure

This will take at least 29 years to construct. Then how on earth did Noah and his 3 kids plus women, heheehe construct this ark especially bearing in mind that slob Noah was probably getting old?


As you continue thinking about it, the questions keep coming.

For example, how did Noah build the boat? How could four men and four women find, harvest, season, transport, cut, shape, assemble and seal all of the trees needed for a ship 450 feet long and 75 feet wide? That is a huge ship. For comparison, the Mayflower (which brought the Pilgrims from England to America) was only about 95 feet long, 25 feet wide and displaced 180 tons. [ref] The Mayflower was a big boat able to hold over 100 people, but it was a tiny dot compared to the ark.

Using the simplest multiplication, the ark would encompass about 14 Mayflowers, and would therefore weigh at least 2 1/2 million Kilograms. However, because the ark is so much larger, it would have to be far stronger than the Mayflower, making it far heavier. The very largest ships built at the height of the wooden shipbuilding era (the late 1800s) had a maximum keel length of about 250 feet, and the ark is nearly twice that big. This was an amazing vessel. And it was all built by four men and four women.

It is impossible to imagine that eight people could build a boat that big. It is also impossible to imagine a 450 foot long wooden vessel.

The most idiotic aspect of this story has to do with the age of Noah at that time.

The first solution can be found with Genesis 5:32
And Noah was five hundred years old and Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Unless Noah had triplets we can look at this passage and determine that Noah began to have the first of these three (important) sons at the age of 500.

We can determine that Noah did not have triplets from Genesis 10:21

And children were born also to Shem, …,the brother of Japheth the elder.

The above can also be translated as ",the older brother of Japheth."
So we don't know for certain if Shem was the oldest, middle, or youngest. We do know that there was an age gap between at least two of the brothers mentioned in 10:21

We could conclude from the data that Shem was born when Noah was 502 years old, and Japheth or Ham were born when Noah was 500 years old.

Imagine a 500 YEAR OLD MAN BUILDING AN ARK THAT BIG

C'mon this has to be the greatest hocus pocus ever told to man kind and the worst part is that i havent even dwelt on the number of animals and space it would require to hold 2 animals of all kind and the feeding!

So much for still water and her laziness and determination.

Better go back to your pastors, priests or motivational speakers or who ever to educate you more and provide more ammunination to back up this biblical fallacy because so far, your embarrassing your christian community when you cant even defend what your faith preaches, lol

Another devil's incarnate on d loose!! Who re u 2 question God's power? So, u dn't knw dat it was through God's power nd guidance, dey were able 2 build d ship.... I knw in ur next thread u will come up wit something like...there is no God or who created God.

mantraa: I know how Noah might have built the ark and kept 2 of each animal alive until the flood ended and will inform all you non believers now of how it was done.



1. God helped him by suspending the laws of physics, nature and science so that the boat could withstand the immense pressures and forces placed upon it.

2. God used his angels to fly to all the furthest parts of the world and carry all of the animals to the ark location when it was ready, including the dinosaurs.

3. God shrank all the animals in size so they would all neatly fit in the ark.

4. God put all the animals in hibernation or suspended animation for the duration of their time in the ark so they didnt need food or water.

5. God then got his angels to replant all the vegetation around the world with extra fast growing seeds and fly all the animals back to their original locations when the  flood was over.




This is the best possible logical/illogical or rational/irrational explanation of how it was done. 

But is it possible or impossible?

People kick and throw stones @ wild cats and dogs in naira..the national park isn't funded properly! When god eveeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrr arrives! spiritual speaking you are NYSC for life!

We discovered half of your ministry!

The atmosphere in naija was..

It's the apostolic reformation! Worship God and people will worship!

I find the story of Noah unrealistic. On the other hand, believers will always tend to say that God had helped his Prophet to make it happen. They are not bothered weather logical or not; God is able to do anything he wants, even a virgin birth! Although I am a Muslim, I find the reasoning of the Atheist more rational and convincing. Nevertheless, we are in the age of science and technology, we have not addressed the most fundamental question regarding the Origion of the creation of the universe so far. Therefore, until that time comes, I am afraid many conservative people will have to resort to superficial and religious believes in order to guarantee a place in Paradise after death if there is one. By doing this, a peaceful feeling seems to prevail among most religious people. .