llDayo

Alright, I think I have a new question for the "believers" regarding the flood story (at least, I haven't found anywhere where it's been asked before):

Assuming there was scientific evidence to back up the claim that flood gates opened under the earth and that it was able to rain more than an inch per minute, that all the animals were able to be gathered up and were fed during the 40 days, assuming there's a way to prove everything about the flood is true there's another question I think is critical. The flood waters are said to have crept up about 30 cubits (not sure if this is entirely correct but it's around there) above the highest mountain. From what I know about Mt Everest, the air is VERY thin at that height. How was Noah, his family, and all the animals able to survive on this barely breathable air? Once you're inside the ark, with all the animals breathing the same air (and it's doubtful there was a ton of windows open to allow air flow because of the ferociousness of the rain), there'll be even LESS oxygen supply. A lost of animals would end up suffocating, especially the bigger ones. How exactly can this be accounted for?

Nice Squirrel

Well since you assumed so much, lets further assume that the water pushed up the atmosphere making it just thick enough for the air pressure to be tolerable. I'll even assume an atmospheric "ceiling" exists to build pressure up. Hmm what could it be made out of? Clustered water? Heavy clouds? A world wide vapor cloud? Magnetic fields?

But all this is assumptions based upon assumptions based upon things that ain't neccessarily so.

Sturmrabe

a: the noah flood was a bastardization of the flood of gilgamesh... a sumerian tale... and abraham was born in sumeria, so you'll find other sumerian ripoffs in hewbrew mythologies

b: even if their was a post ice age flood it would have been along coasts and in low sealevel area, NOT the WHOLE WORLD (planet)... BUT, human civilization has a tendancy to settle near water sources and often in history when things effect the "known world" aka civilization it is extrapolated to being the WHOLE WORLD (planet)

funinspace

Allot of YEC types also assume that the earth was vastly different before the mythical flood. So the Mountains may not have been so high...blah blah. It's part of explaining things like the animals getting back, the fresh water fishies some how surviving/being put back, different races typing to the Tower of Babel...

Sturmrabe

i think my B covered it a bit better

llDayo

I don't know a whole lot about how the atmosphere works or how pressures affect the human anatomy but wouldn't squeezing all that air into a much smaller area also have some sort of negative effects that the animals or humans wouldn't be accustomed to? On top of that, would there be 100% humidity? The rain coming down at such a rate would also push more air upwards on its way down. Most likely, until the rains ceased, a lot of the air would end up being pushed above the clouds. Are there any weatherologists or chemists in these forums that could explain how this would work better?

[ADDED]

I'm just asking one question here guys/gals. I'm not looking for the history of where the flood story originated or how YEC think the earth was back then (geologists have no problem showing how fast mountains rise with the understanding of plate tectonics and can basically prove the mountain levels weren't much different in those times so we'll assume a height around Mt Everest for this question)

Sven

Since the expertise of geologists doesn't matter to creationists anyway, and since the "lower mountains"-"argument" is their well-established standard explanation (for other problems, but it also works here), you are simply arguing against a wall.

llDayo

Good point :banghead:

Roland

The thing I don't get about the "lower mountains" argument is wouldn't the moutains rise at the BEGINNING of the flood anyway, when the crust opened and allowed all those "fountains of the deep" to spew their water onto the earth? So the "lower mountains" argument really makes no sense because the YECers have no mechanism to explain how Mount Everest got to its present height AFTER the flood was over.

Jack the Bodiless

Nice Squirrel is correct: our current air pressure is the weight of about a hundred miles of air above our heads (a very approximate figure, as the atmosphere gets progressively thinner rather than just ending at a specific altitude). Presumably, adding water would just push all that air a few miles further up: as there's no actual "lid" on the atmosphere, the pressure would not increase or decrease. There are plenty of other problems, but that isn't one of them.

...Unless you're talking to actual Biblical literalists, who should believe what the authors of the Bible did: that the Earth is small, flat, and covered with a solid sky-dome which would compress the air...