The story of Noah is like the litmus test for me when it comes to Christians... if they can look at me straight-faced and say they believe the story is true... we can't hang out. Your lack of logic is so far gone that you aren't even much of a person anymore. If they explain that it is a parable used to explain God's power, God's wrath, etc. and that is not meant to be taken literally... we can be friends.

But of course with the second people... you have to ask the question... why believe at all if you can see that some of the bible was obviously made up?

so jib accepts defeat in this thread? that his religion is refuted? he can no longer take bible literally? if he can't take it literally, it's no use because anyone can interpret it a billion different ways. if he takes it literally, boat is too small for the elephants to **** on?

??What??

tell us how noah's ark work or tell us you don't know much about bible

If it was a local flood then collecting 2 of every species just because a pointless exercise, since animals would return from the surrounding areas once the flood recessed.

Also- there are so many problems with the Ark story that go beyond the "local earth vs global earth" issue. Unless there was endless magic involved, the idea that Noah could collect even a few hundred species onto a boat and all the fresh water and food it would require to keep them alive for 40 days and 40 nights is preposterous. His family would also have to be incredibly large.

The most logical way to look at the store is as a metaphor. Its no surprise that many religions throughout the world had great flood stories since early man thrived when he lived near rivers. All societies had experience and were afraid of floods so they naturally became part of their lore.

There is evidence throughout the world for flooding.

But to believe the literal description in the Bible is laughable.

I haven't read through the whole thing, but I plan on getting to it in parts throughout the day.

I have a problem with the first part which says that clearly the story refers to a global flood because of Psalms. Psalms mentions that after the creation the earth would never be covered with water again. The problem with this argument is that it assumes there can be no contradictions between books in the Bible. It's basically saying, "well Genesis can't have meant a global flood because that contradicts what is said in Psalms." I agree that it's a contradiction, but that says nothing about what is meant by the Genesis story.

I'll get to more later.

good reason to doubt that any of the Bibles we read got it right. Seems pretty easy and common to have many different interpretations of the same passages depending on how you translate the Hebrew.

another reason to have problems trusting that the Bible is the literal truth when people can't even agree on what the bible says.

I will admit that the article makes a compelling case for the idea that crappy English translations have lead to the idea of a global flood. However, I found a really big problem for you Jib. I definitely want to hear you thoughts on this. Here's a quote from the article:

This contradicts archeological evidence we have. According to wikipedia, native Americans crossed the land bridge at least 12,000 years ago, and most likely long before that.

Another related point is that DNA evidence shows that there was never a genetic bottleneck that we'd expect if the entire human population was once only eight people. I don't have a source for it right now, but I remember reading that the worst it got for humans in fairly recent history was a bottleneck down to about 15,000 humans, and that was about 70,000 years ago. The book I got this from is at home so if you want me to find it tonight and find the original source I will.

Edit/ Ok I finished the article. I have more stuff to bring up but I'll wait for you to respond to this first.

But what date are we putting for the flood?

I would like to see the cite, and hopefully be able to read something on the internet. Let me know.

In my experience though, these types of claims are typically very speculative and very presumptuous. I will read whatever you find for me.

http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.asp

Here is another article. Now I do not agree with everything that he says, but he does make some decent points about the animal issue.

I almost died laughing while reading that article.

Every source I've looked at has it somewhere in the third millennium B.C.E.


I'll do what I can but it may be hard to find an internet source.

What do you mean by "these types of claims"?

Nevermind wiki is all over this stuff. Here's the specific claim I was talking about:

Toba catastrophe theory

This part is interesting: "These estimates do not contradict the consensus estimates that Y-chromosomal Adam lived some 60,000 years ago..."

Y-chromosomal Adam is the most recent common ancestor for all descended y-chromosomes in the human population. According to the Bible Noah's Y-chromosome would have been passed to every male on the planet, and so you'd need Noah to have lived around 60,000 years ago.

General population bottleneck page: Population bottleneck

Reading one of the first links in that article you posted lead to an article where the one guy was explaining how all the DINOSAURS would fit on the ark.

And this quote for a vague reference to a study-
I would love to see this study.

In response to this I'm going to post something I researched for a previous Noah's ark thread. (edited slightly) Jib, I would love your thoughts.

Unlike the claims in the links you've posted, right?

FTA:

Another mutation prevented the toes from dividing properly during its embryonic development, resulting in webbed feet — one of many examples of a defect that is useful in certain environments.

Yeah...polar bears just all happen to have the same defect that coincidentally helps them out a great deal where they live.

Umm, obv Noah was nice enough to drop all the animals off in the environments most suited by their oddities.

You can learn a lot when you live to be 900. Pretty sure his son adopted his techniques and became Santa Claus.

rofl

there are 350,000 species of beetles alone.

are you seroius with this claptrap?

astonishingly, yes, he still is

That article agrees the bible does literally mean all humans not on the ark were exterminated in the local flood, since all humans were in the local region, according to the article's interpretation of the bible.

That interpretation is completely falsified by overwhelming DNA and archeological evidence that human hunter-gatherers had migrated at least to East Asia and Australia by 40,000 years ago. That means the local flood must have happened well before then, which makes no sense at all, since the type of civilization described in Noah's time (capable of building an ark, having agriculture, etc) didn't even exist until 10,000 years ago.

In fact, there is conclusive evidence that by 10,000 years ago humans had migrated over most of the globe, including having a permanent presence in the Americas. So any claim that a local flood which occurred within the last 50K years could have caused a mass human extinction is complete nonsense.

a beetle is an insect, not an animal.

what i would like to know is how noah lived to be 950 years old?

wow.

ummmm...you realize that beetles don't have gills right?

Seriously? What's your definition of animal, "cute furry thing you can keep as a pet"?

For real.

I basically assumed that this thread would end up being a case of the theists just declaring the ark story a metaphor and leaving it at that. I overestimated them greatly.

If you are capable of believing in such obvious bull****, you need to reevaluate everything you believe, seriously.

One theory I heard is that the holy-crap-that's-old ages are actually months. Meaning Noah would have lived to be around 80. Dunno how credible it is.