SecularFuture

"The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?"
- Judith Hayes, In God We Trust: But Which One?

CX

This is the beginning of an utterly pointless and irrefutable argument. If one believes in an omnimax deity, said deity can do anything he pleases. For all anyone knows he could have magically teleported all the animals directly to the ark, shrunk them to the size of microbes and placed them in a kind of stasis until the flood subsided. It's totally implausible, but also totally unfalsifiable. Of course this same omnimax god could have saved a lot of time by simply vaporizing everything on the planet and recreating it. Or, since he's ominiscient and omnipresent, he could have simply made his creation right the first time and avoided the whole mess. We're dealing with mythology here. As such trying to argue about it rationally is completely impossible.

SecularFuture

Its so amazing that people (adult men and women) actually believe that! BRB - I need to go vomit.

Good point. If you're a super powerful god, why waste time on a flood?

Hahaha - Yeah!

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just harder to do than others, thats all.

CX

I disagree. Logical debate only works if we observe certain rules. If you start with an "argument" predicated on faith and appeal to unfalisifiable claims it is literally impossible to have a logical debate.

Vinnie

Who said it was a waste of time?

Maybe it made God feel better to give the people a long time to repent?

Vinnie

Erik Tyrrell

Heck, why waste time with anything pre-flood at all? Why not just start the universe immediately after the suppossed flood and just implant memories of the flood in all of the living critters? You get to skip all of that dreary Garden of Eden and tower of babble stuff and you could cut down on your water bills too.

SecularFuture

SecularFuture

Without any evidence for a "Noah's Flood", there is no reason to believe in such concepts, and such concepts can only be believed through blind-faith.

ExChild

It seems that this is more of a biblical criticism thread and not an archaeology thread, but..I've been discussing this with my mother recently.. she's a fundy.

The Epic of Gilgamesh has come up.. .does anyone know of evidence that it is older than the Canaanite people who would have handed down the ark story? I've been told that before, but I can't really find anything on it. I'm trying to actually disprove it from a historical angle rather than just bash it to smithereens.

Thanks.

Mageth

We're dealing with mythology here.

Exactly - just like most of, or more likely all, of the rest of Genesis, and a large part of the rest of the bible. The writers intended the stories as mythical accounts, not historical accounts.

The problem comes when people insist on interpreting the myths as history. In so doing, they totally muck up history and destroy whatever real lessons might be found in the myths.