The Flood

by chappy 16 Replies latest jw friends

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  Aculama

  Aligators in Australia? Maybe they should call him Aligator Dundee, or Steve Erwin "The Aligator Hunter".
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  easyreader1970

  Your success or failure in debating the flood issue depends on who you are talking to. If you are talking to an indoctrinated JW, you are going to fail whether he proves his point or not. Here is why.

  Regarding the Flood story, there are only four possibilities.

  1. It never happened but the story is allegorically used by God so that the people of that time period could understand him.

  2. There was a flood, but it was regional but biblical writers used artistic license to achieve a greater effect and to tell a good story.

  3. There was an earthwide flood and the story is to be taken literally.

  4. It never happened and no deity had anything to do with any of it.

  A JW takes option 3, that the story is to be taken as literal because that's what they are told to do by the WBTS. It doesn't matter if it is scientifically impossible. Jehovah makes all things possible. (What that means is--and the WBTS have SAID this--if science disputes with what THEY say, SCIENCE is wrong.) Therefore the argument is not winnable or even debatable with a JW. The JW can go as far as the Creation book allows them to run with the Flood story scientifically. But when you get to the point where the JW science falls apart, theism kicks in and fills the rest of the gaps. Have a hole that doesn't make sense? Jehovah can do anything! He can stop the earth from spinning for an entire day, why can't he flood the earth and get the DNA of every living animal on the ark?

  Ideological totalism at its best.

  er
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  Leolaia

  Actually, in order to believe the Society's fundamentalist doctrine of a worldwide Flood occurring in 2370 BC, you have to disregard almost every branch of science:

  Anthropology and Archaeology: The extensive evidence that cultures and civilizations existed uninterrupted in the third millennium BC and developed from earlier cultures in their respective locales.
  

  Astronomy and Astrophysics: An enormous water canopy suspended in orbit above the earth is not even gravitationally viable, let alone be sustained in the face of orbital friction, tidal tugging from the moon, and heat received from the sun.

  Biology and Evolutionary Biology: The impossibility that the speciation of animal life on this planet occurred incredibly rapidly in the last 4,000 years from a very small number of "kinds" of animals (limited by the number that could fit on the ark), and that the bottlenecking resulting from the selection of two members of a "kind" retained enough genetic diversity to ensure the viability of a species.

  Botany: The extreme unlikelihood that specific cresote bushes and bristlecone pine trees (which have lived continuously for 10,000 and a little less than 5,000 years respectively) could survive after being subjected to catastrophically violent flood waters and then a year-long submergence under water.

  Chemistry: The radioactive decay of isotopes of certain elements is completely inconsistent with the required recent age for geological, paleontological, and archaeological evidence relating to the antiquity of human cultures and features attributed to the Flood.

  Climatology: The extensive evidence from ice cores, ocean sediments, tree rings, and many other sources that disprove any notion of a drastic change in climate about 4,370 years ago, and which show that the climate was not uniformily tropical from the formation of the planet to 4,370 years ago but which embraced many different cycles of glaciations and warmer climates.

  Ecology: The study of habitats and ecosystems decisively refute the notion that a tiny population of animal life sensitive to local habitats can first survive a year in captivity in cramped quarters and then find their way to new habitats in a world that had undergone a global disaster that had destroyed all preceding habitats. This is especially the case if, as the Society claims, the Flood brought a drastic change in climate.

  Engineering: The extreme likelihood that an ark with the dimensions, wooden materials, and features described in the Bible was seaworthy in conditions violent enough to alter global geology and that such a vessel rivalling the size of the Titanic was possible with Bronze Age technology. Food storage (which had to be sensitive to the specific diets of individual species, survive humidity and spoilage, last for a whole year, and yet not take up too much space) and waste removal would have potentially posed insurmountable engineering obstacles.

  Entomology: Social insects like bees, wasps, and termites require a whole nest rather than a pair to have been on the ark in order for their species or "kind" to survive (cf. colony collapse disorder in contemporary bee populations). It is very implausible that multiple bee and wasp populations could survive for a year in captivity without the ability to gather pollen and nectar from living flowering plants; the ark would had to have had a greenhouse in its already cramped quarters. Other insects, such as those of the order Ephemeroptera, have a lifecycle of only a few days and require bodies of fresh water to live in.

  Genetics: The mitochondrial and Y-chromosome evidence that proves that the genetic diversity of the human race cannot be derived from a pair of individuals (e.g. Noah and his wife) living 4,370 years ago.

  Geology: The utterly overwhelming evidence that the planet's geology was not created recently in a catastrophic deluge, including palaeomagnetism, sedimentation rates, angular uncomformities, correlations of ice cores with known volcanic events, the depositing of ore and carbonates, glacial weathering, the existence of confined aquifers, river erosion of uplifting rock, and especially the gradual formation of mountains through volcanism and plate techtonics. It should be recalled that the Society argues that the existing water could have covered the surface of the earth if mountains and higher geological features did not exist 4,370 years ago.

  Linguistics: With the "Tower of Babel" event supposedly occurring a hundred years or more after the Flood (as there had to have been enough people born to build the city and tower), the Society requires that all languages other than Hebrew date to after 4,270 or less years ago, but this is not borne out by the linguistic and historical facts. Hebrew is a northwest Semitic language that reflects linguistic changes much later than found in older Semitic languages (such as Akkadian, Eblaite, and Ugaritic), and Akkadian was certainly in existence earlier than 4,270 years ago, and the ancestor of all the Semitic languages was itself a descendent of an even older Proto-Afro-Asiatic which was the ancestor of Egyptian, Hausa, and certain other African languages. Evidence from lexicostatistics shows that the ancestors of the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, and Astronesian languages were spoken between the eighth and fourth millennia BC. And in the middle of the third millennium BC we already have writings from a multiplicity of languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Egyptian, Elamite, and the (undeciphered but probably Dravidian) language of the Harrapan civilization.

  Meteorology and the Atmospheric Sciences: The air pressure resulting from an orbital "water canopy" would not have been condusive to planetary life and there is no meterological mechanism for converting such a high atmospheric canopy into rain without clouds, much less resulting in global monsoon weather with steady rainfall for 40 days and nights.

  Microbiology: Since diseases need hosts to survive, the sheer number of diseases in the animal kingdom requires that every animal was host to multiple infections and diseases, which would have impacted their survivability in the closed quarters of the ark where the possibility of contagion infection would have been very high.

  Paleontology: The stratigraphical sorting of fossils in the geologic record is not explainable via the mechanism of a worldwide deluge and the ages of extinct animals in the fossil record far exceeds the chronological requirements of the Society for the history of life on earth (in the tens of thousands of years). Fossil sealife on mountain tops have ages in the tens or hundreds of millions of years and thus could not have been deposited during the Flood. Taphonomy shows that the conditions under which remains were fossilized varied according to the climate, contrary to the claim of a uniform tropical climate before the Flood.

  Physics: Aside from the physical impossibilities of a vast water canopy being suspended in orbit in the thermosphere (as claimed in the 15 July 1968 Watchtower, p. 420, and 22 July 1976 Awake!, p. 19), the same region in space that the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle orbit, it is against the laws of physics for a mass of many hundred million tons of water to fall to earth from orbit without having an effect similar to that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs (an 800-foot asteroid weighs about 25 million tons), and if the water fell on a global scale, the surface of the whole planet would probably have had temperatures as high as such impacts (i.e. hotter than the sun's surface) and the wooden ark would have had to have survived such temperatures.

  Seismology and Plate Techtonics: Since mountains like the Himalayas and the Alps were created through gradual continental shift, the Flood would have also had to have rapidly buckled the crust of the planet and produced greatly increased magna flow inside the earth's mantle; this is physically impossible and the record of seafloor spreading in the oceans can be dated and shown to be far, far older than 4,370 years old.

  Zoology: Aside from the already discussed evidence from biology, ecology, entomology, genetics, microbiology, and paleontology, the evidence from physiology and ethology decisively disproves the notion that carnivorism is a behavior and diet that existed only in the past 4,370 years and that the diet of presently carnivorous animals before this was vegetarian in nature.
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  stillajwexelder

  bookmarked for Leolaia summary
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  Leolaia

  easyreader1970.....I would say that the evidence actually points to your option #2 as being closest to correct:

  2. There was a flood, but it was regional but biblical writers used artistic license to achieve a greater effect and to tell a good story.

  There is quite a lot of historical and archaeological evidence of a series of devastating floods in Mesopotamia in the Uruk, Jemdet Nasr, and Early Dynastic periods (i.e. in the fourth and early third millenia BC, due to mid-Holocene climate instability) -- which was remembered mythologically in the late third millennium BC as a single enormous flood that immediately preceded the Early Dynastic period. The evidence is particularly convincing with regard to the city of Shuppurak, the city of Ziusudra (the Sumerian "Noah"). The biblical story almost certainly is literarily dependent on the older Akkadian story (which was known in the Levant).

  This evidence is far better than the theory that the Black Sea inundation lies behind the flood myths of the ANE. The Mesopotamian flood myth has details that specifically correlate with archaeological evidence of major Mesopotamian floods (which deposited silt layers of several feet thick, and which sometimes correspond to changes in material culture), which were also historically more proximate to the writing of the Ziusudra myth. The Black Sea disaster is thought to have occurred in 5600 BC; that requires a time depth of 3,500 years between the event and its recall in myth, and over 2,800 years between the event and the invention of narrative writing. Even if there was still a glimmer of a memory of this catastrophic event, the more recent floods would have surely dominated the flood tradition.
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  Vinny

  http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Seely.pdf http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html I've always had questions/doubts about a global flood even when a JW. Here are two links that laid out to me some of the most compelling evidence against it. The top link is the one that I found most convincing, and pursued further, contacting leading ice cores scientist Richard Alley (used on many Nat Geo television specials) and corresponding through e-mail for some time. Even Ray Franz concedes that a global flood is highly unlikely and suggests biblical language used could support a localized one. http://www.commentarypress.net/cpn-essays/English/6E9A71B2-FAF2-47F9-9F75-097C7517839E.html
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  PrimateDave

  Excellent links Gopher and Vinny. Thank you for that concise scientific summary Leolaia.
  
  I found an old post of mine about the two separate Flood accounts combined in the Bible's text: here.
  
  Dave