• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Noah and the flood

I read through genesis and sketched out the genealogy and life spans quote, and out of curiosity put it into MS Project.

The life spans and ages of marriage seems to form a pattern. A pattern of someone trying to reconstruct the genealogy from oral traditions arbitrarily filling in life spans. From the Oxford Bible Commentary there are issues of literal translation. In Jewish culture 40 meant for a while. JC went into the desert for 40 days. In the flood it rained for forty days. It is like 3,000 years from now trying to translate 'a New York Minute' literally. Or trying to understand a Leno monologue literally.

Add to that the books of the bible were not necessarily written in the chronological order of events.
 
So what are the rules in this game? All scientific evidence doesn’t dispute the Flood?

No geological evidence of a flood, but all evidence against the flood doesn’t dispute the flood like massive varved clays deposits, interbedded shale and conglomerate formations, huge buried valleys in sedimentary rock formations.

Continental drift isn’t, as it all happened real quick (Peleg means to divide after all) or Avalonia doesn’t prove one part was attached to Africa and the other North America and there was no drift.

Evolution is fake news, microevolution has never been proven, but there have been substantial changes in animals and mankind in just thousands of years. That whole gene difference (among all the similarities) with man and other apes that led to weaker jaws also led to larger craniums, but you know... evolution is fake news.

China has exist for thousands (perhaps up to 4000) of years.
 
Here's a good (and quite short) article about the actual catastrophic flood that IMO gave rise to the tale of Noah; the breakthrough of the Mediterranean Sea into what is now the Black Sea, some 7,500 years ago.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/evidence-for-a-flood-102813115/

Interestingly, there are theories the Black Sea flood also could have spawned the Tower of Babel tale; though the evidence for that is not nearly as solid as that for the flood itself.

Lion, are you a Biblical literalist? Would you insist that Noah's Flood actually covered the entire land surface of the world? Or would you be willing to accept that those parts of the Biblical tale are fictional embroidery on the story of a considerably more ancient- but quite real- flood?
 
I watched a show that came up with a basis for the original original flood story, mostly conjecture of course. They identified a potential culture and river. A trader possibly upper class, family, cargo, and livestock aboard a boat got caught in 100 year storm and ended up out on a sea. Ended up in a new place and started anew.The Noah tale is an almost complete plagiarism of the earlier Babylonian tale.

If you think it is impossible Thor Heyerdahl and others crossed the Atlantic and Pacific demonstrating sea worthiness of ancient boats.

https://www.bajanthings.com/the-ra-expeditions-thor-heyerdahl/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_Expedition
 
Lion IRC said:
*plagiarism alert*

Tracing the origins of viruses is difficult because they don't leave fossils and because of the tricks they use to make copies of themselves within the cells they've invaded.
Click to expand...

That deosn't answer the question. My question was; if these diseases did not exist before the Flood or during the Flood, where did they come from?
 
Sarpedon said:
Thank you, someone who believes in Biblical Chronology.

Do you find it at all strange that the tower would happen so soon after the all destroying flood?
Click to expand...
What do you mean by strange?
Sarpedon said:
What do you think Earth's human population was at that time?
Click to expand...
Assuming you mean at the time of Babel.
Noah had 16 grandsons.
If we assume the same number of granddaughters to get the population started.
This is an average of 10.7 children per couple (Noah's 3 sons and daughters-in-law).
Shem had 14 grandsons, Japeth 23 and Ham 28 = 65 grandsons of Noah's sons.
This is an average of 8.2 children per couple.
Averages out as 8.53 per couple from Noah's sons to his great-grandsons.

There is about 130 2nd generation people (not forgetting Noah and his wife. We assume that Noah had no more children after the flood) = 65 couples with and av. of 8.53 children = 554 3rd generation children.
They would in turn produce about 2,365 4th generation children (Peleg's generation).
There is still the long life for these people (>100 years) so nay of the 1st, 2ng and 3rd generation would still have been alive. Some would have died of disease, accidents, killing etc.
Thus there could have been > 3,000 people at the time of Babel.
 
3000 at the time of Babel? A story that speaks wonder at how the people of Babel could make tall towers out of stone instead of the bituminous buildings from the area the author is from?

That doesn’t jive.
 
I was using non-specific terms, like 'strange' in order to provoke thought. I was hoping you would think about what I could have meant by strange rather than simply asking about it.

As alluded to, the idea of making such a huge tower, especially in an area (Babylon) where there are no stone deposits, with so few people is 'strange.'

Furthermore, the language of the story, which refers to cities, nations, a king and so forth, seem 'strange' when applied to a small community of 3,000 people.

By comparison, many medieval gothic cathedrals, which were built with a number of labor saving devices and technologies that wouldn't have been available to the tower builders, took much larger communities more than a century to build. The tower of Babel is alleged to have been partially built (presumably on a scale massive enough to attract God's attention and fear) within the lifetime of Nimrod, as he goes on to do other things afterwards. This story does seem 'strange,' given my knowledge of construction.
 
Family members have kids, those kids interbreed....we call that inbred. Probably tje source of all our gentic based diseases and defects?
 
The problem I have (theologically speaking) with the Flood story is that, if God is omniscient, He would know that wiping out everyone with one fell swoop and starting the human race over wouldn't change anything in the long run. Man would still be sinful by nature and corruption would return. So why all the fuss and bother?
 
WAB said:
The problem I have (theologically speaking) with the Flood story is that, if God is omniscient, He would know that wiping out everyone with one fell swoop and starting the human race over wouldn't change anything in the long run. Man would still be sinful by nature and corruption would return. So why all the fuss and bother?
Click to expand...
It could possibly answer the religious question, ‘If we are pissing off god so much, why doesn’t god wipe us out?’
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
WAB said:
The problem I have (theologically speaking) with the Flood story is that, if God is omniscient, He would know that wiping out everyone with one fell swoop and starting the human race over wouldn't change anything in the long run. Man would still be sinful by nature and corruption would return. So why all the fuss and bother?
Click to expand...
It could possibly answer the religious question, ‘If we are pissing off god so much, why doesn’t god wipe us out?’
Click to expand...

Exactly. And I had thought of saying something to that effect. Then I remembered the Covenant. I believe the Big Kahuna promised not to do it again - which makes me wonder why later on God blasted Sodom & Gomorrah into tiny bits.
 
WAB said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
WAB said:
The problem I have (theologically speaking) with the Flood story is that, if God is omniscient, He would know that wiping out everyone with one fell swoop and starting the human race over wouldn't change anything in the long run. Man would still be sinful by nature and corruption would return. So why all the fuss and bother?
Click to expand...
It could possibly answer the religious question, ‘If we are pissing off god so much, why doesn’t god wipe us out?’
Click to expand...

Exactly. And I had thought of saying something to that effect. Then I remembered the Covenant. I believe the Big Kahuna promised not to do it again - which makes me wonder why later on God blasted Sodom & Gomorrah into tiny bits.
Click to expand...
He promised to never kill all life again, not exact vengeance here and there. God has a good lawyer.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
WAB said:
Exactly. And I had thought of saying something to that effect. Then I remembered the Covenant. I believe the Big Kahuna promised not to do it again - which makes me wonder why later on God blasted Sodom & Gomorrah into tiny bits.
Click to expand...
He promised to never kill all life again, not exact vengeance here and there. God has a good lawyer.
Click to expand...

Imagine what he charges per hour?




:rimshot:



(I had to add the rimshot guy.)
 
God said right up front that the reason he wanted to punish mankind was for wickedness. So his plan was to flood the entire world (however you define the word 'world'.)

Isn't that overkill? Why kill animals? Why destroy entire ecosystems? Isn't that like ridding your house of carpenter ants by setting the whole house on fire?

Why destroy children in their mother's wombs? Were they hopelessly wicked too? It took Noah up to 100 years to build the ark--surely not every person that hadn't even been conceived yet when God laid out his plans to Noah would have been so wicked as to deserve the death penalty.

Is this really the best that God could do? Where was the influence of the Holy Spirit that Christians talk about, the one that draws hearts to God? Why didn't God incarnate and show mankind how to be a righteous person?

Inerrantists (Hey, I used to be one) bend themselves into knots to explain how kangaroos got back to Australia after the flood, or how eight Middle-Eastern people evolved into the many racial varieties we see today in only 100 generations, but they can't explain how in the world such a horrific genocide could be the well-reasoned and best plan from a God who "so loved the world." Inerrantists can wave away criticisms all they want about genotypes and "vegetation mats". But if we take this account at face value (and inerrantists always insist that we should) then God is a moral monster.

Look, every time there's an earthquake or hurricane, some preacher says it happened because God is punishing someone for something. The 'who' and the 'for what' change over time, naturally, but it always comes down to God using a big hammer to smash a tiny bug. Why wouldn't Noah's flood be the same? We're a species with a propensity to live on shorelines on a world that's three-fourths covered with water. Flooding is by nature a common occurrence. So way back when, a flood caused a huge hullabaloo, and someone said, "God was punishing those wicked people that I don't like." And like most more-or-less decent stories, it took hold in the human mind and has hung on for dear life in the face of counter-evidence.

Inerrantists have to defend the Genesis flood because they know a camel's nose in the tent when they see one. If we chuckle to ourselves and set aside Noah's Flood as nothing more than an amusing story, then we open the door to other possibilities. What other amazing stories in the Bible can set aside as nonsense--the Ten Plagues of Egypt? The stopping of the sun in the sky--twice? The Virgin Birth? Maybe...the Resurrection? But from there Christianity won't have much to support it, and inerrantists will either have to find other work, or they'll have to swallow hard and admit that they were wrong.

Having done exactly the second option, I can confidently say that it ain't easy.
 
God creates Earth, god becomes unhapy with human he created, god destroys all surface life but for on the Ark.

God seems like a psychopath.
 
Anyone else here a fan of Randall Carson?
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jVZKw521HU[/YOUTUBE]

Carson is a professor of geology, and a great speaker; I've watched any number of his videos, and learned a hell of a lot from them, particularly the ones on the great ice-age floods of the Pacific Northwest- Glacial Lake Missoula, and the like. He's a real scientist- but Lion, you should watch that video. His opinion is that many of the ancient tales of floods- and that of Noah is only one among hundreds- have hard geological evidence to back them.

Of course, if you're a literalist who insists the whole Earth had to have been drowned, he won't satisfy you. But not too long before humans started leaving simple records- only a moment ago, on the geological scale- sea level rose some three to four hundred feet!
 
An Indian Ocean island was devastated after the last big seismic tsunami.

I remember a native being interview after the event. He said there is an old island myth about god periodically destroying the Erath with a flood to renew it.

Part of the myth was when you see water rapidly receding from a beach run for high ground which he did.

As it is said myths often have a basis in reality.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom