Do you believe the story of Noah? If so, answer this, assuming you do not believe science is the devil.?

Question

"[The waters] rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet."
No ambiguity here. And there is no reason for God to lie about it. Mt. Everest was 20 feet underwater.
The peak of Mount Everest rises about 29,000 feet above sea level -- nearly five and a half miles high. That means that the earth was covered, in its entirety, with water 5.5 miles deep. This creates several important problems:

Where did all this water (approximately 10 times more water than there is on earth today) come from, and where did it all go?
If you assume that God magically imported the water from somewhere and then took it away again, you still have a problem with the fish. If God imported 5.5 miles of fresh water, the fresh water would have killed all of the salt water fish species.

Then there is the immense water pressure. Five miles of water creates more than 12,000 PSI of water pressure at sea level.
Finally there's the problem with Egypt and other ancient cultures. The Great Pyramid, for example, was built between 2600 BCE and 2500 BCE. Noah's flood occurred 200 years after that. It is obvious that the Great Pyramid never was flooded underneath five miles of water.
And so on...
To handle the fish, the ark would need immense fish tanks. If you have ever been to a big public aquarium, or Sea World, or even a pet store, you know that: a) there are a lot of different kinds of fish, and b) fish tanks need a lot of sophisticated filtration equipment. How, exactly, did Noah build all the tanks, and power all the filters? Not to mention how the fish got there -- did they walk onto the ark two by two? Or did they swim through the air?

Answer 1

Nice job. I doubt anyone who believes in the story will be able to comprehend your logic, though.

Answer 2

I wasn't there, so I don't know the answers for sure. We can't prove historical things with science, because we can't repeat the experiment. Can you prove scientifically what I had for breakfast a month ago? This is longer than that by far!

There are some interesting theories though.

The best theory I have heard to date is that the earth used to have a water canopy surrounding the whole earth.

This would cause the earth's atmospheric pressure be six times what it is now. It's thought pterodactyl's might be able to fly in this condition. They've done some studies and wounds heal better also.

It would filter out more of the sun's UV ray's. With the additional pressure, things could live longer. Some reptiles grow their whole life. If they lived a long time, they would get really big and so that's one possibility for dinosaurs. Have you noticed that before Noah's flood the Bible says that people lived a long time (500 - 900 years) and after the flood, they lived for about 100 years?

It would cause the earth to have more of a tropical atmosphere and be warm all of the time. This would be handy since Adam and Eve didn't wear clothes in the beginning. It would also help explain why we see tropical fossils in cold climates.

It also means that it might never have rained before Noah's time. The Bible never mentions rain before the flood happened.

The water canopy would also not have rainbows. Now we have rainbows along with the promise of no more world floods. No more water canopy would help ensure that too!

Today's mountains are too tall to support a water canopy. The theory states that one of the taller mountains could have pierced the canopy as it grew (volcanic eruption?) and then came the rain.

Kid's art with the ark show a small boat with animals poking out all over makes it seem harder to believe. The actual ark was a BIG BOAT!

Also, remember that Noah only had to have 2 of each KIND. For example, he just needed 2 dogs. We used breeding to get German Shepherds and Chihuahuas and lots of different kinds of dogs later.

When I get to Heaven, I'll ask Noah about the fish ;-)

Answer 3

Are we sure that the mountains and continents were at the altitude that they are now-if the earth were the same diameter at every point you could cover the world with less than a centimeter of water..and there is plenty of water to be able to do that in existence today even? It sure does seem hard to beleive that Noah could have put all those animals and enough food for them to last while the ark was on the water. Noah and his kids were at least busy shoveling manure out the window for the time that they were floating around.

It is interesting that many cultures in the old and new world-'christian' and 'non-christian' have legends of a great flood in the past.

Answer 4

Where in the Bible does it say that the highest peak at the time of Noah was Mt Everest....or any other mt for that matter.
God created the earth....it does not say what the terrain was or what the highest mountain was at that time.

You are forgetting that God is the Almighty...as far as the fish are concerned, He could have had the fish adapt for that length of time.

Answer 5

You have many questions that is good!
1- The water came as rain.
2- God made a strong wind for the water to evaporate.

3-Geologists have shown there was a world wide flood!
One of the most fascinating scientific discoveries in recent times regarding a universal flood came from some scientists who were not searching for any evidence of the Flood. It came from oceanographers in the Gulf of Mexico who were doing some rather routine research on coral and sediments of the ocean floor.

Their two oceanographic vessels had pulled from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico several long, slender core samples of the sediment, which includes the fossil shells of one-celled plankton called foraminifera. While still alive, these organisms lock into their shells a chemical record of the temperature and salinity of the water. When they reproduce, the shells fall away and drop to the bottom. A cross-section of that ocean bed carries a record of climates that the oceanographers say go back more than 100 million years.

The cores were analyzed in two different investigations-by Cesar Emiliani of the University of Miami, and by James Kennett of the University of Rhode Island and Nicholas Shack of Cambridge University. Both analyses pointed to a dramatic drop in the salinity of the water providing compelling evidence of a vast flood of fresh water into the Gulf of Mexico thousands of years ago.

Cesar Emiliani explains the results: "A huge amount of ice-melt water rushed into the Gulf of Mexico and produced a sea-level rise that spread around the world with the speed of a tidal wave." He adds, "We know this because the oxygen isotope ratios of the foraminifera shells show a marked temporary decrease in the salinity of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It clearly shows that there was a major period of flooding from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, with a peak about 11,600 years ago. There is no question that there was a flood and there is also no question that it was a universal flood" ("Noah, the Flood, the Facts," Readers Digest, U.S. edition, September 1977, p. 133).

It is also worth mentioning that the radiocarbon dating used to establish the number of years is imprecise after 4,000 years, so the time of this universal deluge could be closer to the 4,300 years described in the Bible as the time of the biblical Flood.

Another recent discovery that could have a relation to the inundation of the Gulf of Mexico is the finding by geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman of the sudden flooding of the Black Sea basin around 6,000 to 7,000 years ago (according to their dating). "The salt water," says Smithsonian magazine, "poured through the deepening channel, creating a waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. In a single day enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan to a depth two times the height of the [former] World Trade Center, and the roar of the cascading water would have been audible at least 100 miles away" ("Evidence for a Flood," April 2000, electronic version).

An additional evidence of the Deluge being global and not local is the literally thousands of flood stories from around the world. One enterprising historian, Dr. Aaron Smith of the University of Greensboro, North Carolina, became obsessed with classifying all the flood accounts. "As a result of years of labor, he has collected a complete history of the literature on Noah's Ark. There are 80,000 works in seventy-two languages about the Flood, of which 70,000 mention the legendary wreckage of the Ark" (Werner Keller, The Bible as History, 1980, p. 38).

It is hard to believe that if the Flood were only a local event, there would be 80,000 different accounts of it from around the world that describe it as universal in scope.

Answer 6

The fresh water fish would have been flooded with salt during the beginning of the flood.

That much water in the atmosphere would have drowned most of the mammals.

Answer 7

Uhh fish don't need to get on the ark Kid Genious. They live in the ocean, it is not as if flooding will hurt them. It just gives them a bigger home.

Answer 8

The story of a great flood seems to cross over religious boundaries so it is one of the few stories that seems to have something to it...

I also like the old idiom how an amateur, Noah, built an arc to carry millions of animals for forty days...whilst a team of engineering professionals built Titanic...go figure.

Answer 9

not sure where you are getting you time tables from, but if we figure that abraham was around 6,000 b.c. and the flood was before abraham by a good 1,500 to 2,000 years, you are now looking at 8,000 b.c. so your egypt theory is shot. and there is geological eviedence showing that a major flood did happen thus dispersing the strata of rock.

Answer 10

You forget, God can do ANYTHING! He could have willed the fish to be fine. He can defy gravity, walk on water, split the oceans. With God, all things are possible.

Answer 11

I would site the Bible and tell you that the waters came from within the earth, but it is much easier to say that with God anything is possible. That also comes from the Bible.