H2Ohyeah

I'm working on a paper on the Noachian deluge (focusing on its impossibility, of course), and wanted to peer-check to see if two of my lines of argument are viable.
No. 1: Atlantis
Basically, this one's meant to disprove the creationist "all cultures have flood myths, therefore a flood must have happened." In short, while a lot of cultures have flood myths, more have Atlantis myths (the paper's complete with Inca word origins and Egyptian records), and hardly anyone thinks there was at Atlantis. And the movie sucked, but that's entirely off topic.
No. 2: Food
Genesis 6:21 tells that Noah should "Also take with [him] every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for [Noah]and for [his menagerie]."
I could use some help with this one. Anyone know any way I could find an estimate of just how many "kinds" of food there were? And would it be unreasonable of me to offer doubt as to whether Noah had to take meat as well as plant-type food (throwing off the pairs or sevens or whatever of each animal)?

tgamble

Atlantis isn't mentioned in GOD'S WORD! The flood is and is therefore fact.

god provided, animals hibernated. not a problem. vile atheist. you'll burn in hell.

Answerer

I think MR tgamble had a serious problem.

nogods4me

I think a local zoo might be able to give you basic info on the types of food they stock for their own little menageries, as well as an estimate as to the quantities of food a pair of a given species might consume in a year (how many tons of hay for 2 elephants for example). In fact they might also be able to give you an estimate on how much fecal matter might be generated in the course of a year.

Oolon Colluphid

<a href="http://www.animalsoftherainforest.com/africanelephant.htm" target="_blank">http://www.animalsoftherainforest.com/africanelephant.htm</a>

Elephants need up to 500lbs of food per day, and up to 6 gallons of fresh water. (Don't forget drinking water! Once the rain stopped, where did they get it from?) Put them of Spartan half-rations, and you'd get away with just 91,000lbs of food for a year.

It's anyone's guess how much yer average pair of Argentinasauruses might need, since at 50 tons they were around 20 times the size of an African elephant.

I also want to know about things like anteaters, aardvarks and aardwolves. How many termite colonies do you need to feed them for a year? Come to that, are termites clean or unclean -- one pair or seven?

But don't forget, either, that Noah rounded up babies of the larger animals (or in some cases, embryos -- hey, the sauropods could have been as eggs!), so these calculations are all redundant anyway. 'Ludicrous' just isn't in the cretinist vocabulary.

Oolon

babelfish

So all those creationists who speculate on a mass hibernation of ark denizens are being totally un-biblical, huh?

ohwilleke

I'd say this is a pretty poor argument for this purpose.

The principal source in Western Culture of the Atlantis myth is Plato, who is hardly a crackpot, and there are several rather plausible theories regarding a grain of truth to this myth that got spun out of proportion. In the most plausible of these, a volcano in a relatively advanced Minoan island destroys a city-state a few hundred years before Plato, and it is understandable that nearby Egypt would share this story of an actual event in the Mediterranian sea. A previous thread in Science and Skepticism that I am too lazy to look up discusses the matter.

I am certainly not aware that all cultures have Atlantis myths.

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]</p>

H2Ohyeah

Straight from the paper:
Ancient societies in Wales, England, Greece, Babylonia and Egypt believed in earthly “paradises” in the Atlantic Ocean. The Egyptians, in fact, referred to it as being “far to the west in the middle of the ocean” (Berlitz 13). Archaic North and South American tribes had legends telling that they came from the east, or at least were founded by near-supernatural beings from a great continent in the Atlantic (Berlitz 13).
Berlitz goes so far as to suggest Adam (broken down into Ad-am, which retains some of the phonetic devices of ‘Atlantis&#8217 could be a reference “not to the first man, but to the first race?” (Berlitz 13) He also states, a page later, that the Greek story of Atlas itself was an allegory of power, “perhaps the power of the Atlantean empire.”
"Legends of a great flood and the disappearance of an advanced civilization are common to almost all races, nations, and tribes with written records or oral traditions" (Berlitz 14).
(The "Berlitz" citations refer to Charles' Berlitz's "The Mystery of Atlantis." He adds that tribes in Spain and the original Gauls of France say their cultures originiated in the Atlantic, and their ancestors came to Europe fleeing a great disaster. North Africans and Aztecs (both of which use the word "atl" for water) each had legends, as did people of the Canary Islands, who, Berlitz says, claimed Atlantean ancestry even in Roman times. The Mayans referred to an ancestral eastern paradise destroyed by an angry god's flood.)

Coragyps

Hmmm. Would anyone else vote for all the now-Continental Shelf around Great Britain and Ireland? Surely that was mostly dry land up till the last deglaciation. We need to do more underwater archaeology - it sure is a good thing that grad students will do anything- I hear the water gets cold in the North Sea.

Oh, back to the thread: All that elephant dung was the food supply for the pair of the Dung Beetle Kind (TM) - surely they were unclean, so there weren't fourteen of them. And maybe koala dung, being eucalyptus based, could be used for chest rubs to alleviate rhinovirus outbreaks without killing all the viruses?

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

H2Ohyeah

All the viruses?
Don't you mean both the viruses?