Fiach

The fact is that certain animals are found only in certain isolated location. For example, Kangaroos have never been found outside of Australia and New Guinea. Certain species of fresh water fish have been found nowhere outside of the Amazon Basin. Lemurs are only on the Island of Madascar in the last 20 million years. Emus, Koalas, Marsupial wolves, wombats, and marsupial lions are found only in Australia. Many other animals while on the Eurasian mainland are found only at great distances from Palestine, Mt. Ararat, and Mesopotamia. These include: polar bears, tapirs, aardvarks, Meercats, Irish Elk, Reindeer/Caribou, Moose, the Ice loving Macaques of Northern Japan. There are a few thousand other animals found far from Mesopotamia.

These represent animals never found in Mesopotamia/Ararat. How did Noah and his sons gather all of these animals from the far reaches of the left and right hemispheres and polar areas? How did they fit in the approximately 3.8 million species into the Ark if it was the wee little boat described in Genesis? How could they store enough food for the entire long journey aboard the tiny boat? When it landed on Mt. Ararat how did they return all of these animals back to their places of origin?

How did they transport some 3000 species of delicate fresh water tropical fish back to the Amazon Basin across thousands of miles of salt sea? How did they transport the Koalas, Wallabies, Kangaroos, Wombats, Marsupial wolves, Emus, and Marsupial lions back to the island continent of Australia? How did they get South American Tapirs back to South America along with Jaguars, sloths, prehensile tailed New World Monkeys, Armadillos, Alpacas, Llamas, as well as a million species of South American insects? (A fourth of all species live in the Amazon Basin.) How did they get the 9 types of Lemur back to Madagascar?

The amount of water needed to flood the Earths highest mountains would have to be enough to cover Mt. Everest at 29,000 plus feet or over 5 miles higher than present sea level. Can we even begin to imagine the immense quantity of water that would require? If Earth had been covered over 5 miles deep it would require 980 million cubic miles of water or 2.55 billion cubic kilometres of water. That water would have to be obtained and then carted away somehow. There are no empty spaces within the Earth for all of that water.

So, you see, it is a scientific impossibility that Noah’s Legend could be true. The size of the boat is far too small for the number of animals and their food supply. The gathering of the animals from all over the world and delivering them back to their places of origin would have taken many years and hundreds of ocean going vessels to accomplish that task. The obtaining and disposing of many hundred thousand or millions of cubic miles of water is impossible without divine magic, which I don’t accept.

If you postulate miracle, i.e. magic, you must show me proof that magic exists. You must prove that magic ever occurred in any time or place. Other than magic, the Noah’s Fable was not physically possible.

Fiach

echidna

Odd, I have a similar theory that Kipling’s “Just So” stories and Aesop were full of shit as well.

BTW, which are the marsupial lions ?

Oh and another thing, how come everyone got a mention except for the monotremes ?

[ June 24, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

fwh

The narrative of the flood found in Genesis ch 6-8 consists of two interwoven accounts. One "Yahwistic" which is vivid and and picturesque. The other "Priestly" which is precise and sophisticated but also more prosaic. There are several Babylonian stories of the flood which are in some respects similar to the Hebrew narrative. The Babylonian and Hebrew narrative seems to draw upon the same source which is the memory of one or more disastrous floods in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. Tradition enlarged the flood to the dimensions of a world-wide catastrophe.

There are some fundamentalist groups who insist on interpreting this narrative literally which is ludicrous for many reasons. If there is any value in this account in Genesis, and I think there is, it has to be taken as an allegory/myth/cultural story and analyzed accordingly. To get into the game of pointing out the impossibility of the facts means looking at the narrative literally and losing sight of the excellent source of ancient accounts of prehistorical events found in the Bible.

Late_Cretaceous

BTW, which are the marsupial lions

Thylacoleo from australia
Thylacosmilus from south america (well actually that is a marsupial sabre tooth, which ironically went extinct after the arrival of smilodon - the real sabre tooth)

Oolon Colluphid

Hey L_C, that's great! Over in E/C, I had Ed telling me that without the soft tissues, you couldn't tell that a thylacine wasn't of the 'dog kind' So here's a parallel example: how do we know that Thylacosmilus isn't the same kind as Smilodon (ie that it was marsupial not placental)?

Cheers, Oolon

[ June 26, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

echidna

Thanks for that, but assuming that a Thylacoleo is related to the Thylacine, the thylacine is generally referred to as a marsupial dog, if that’s not a contradiction. Is it more correct to refer to it as a marsupial lion ?

Given that mammals and marsupials are quite different (insert apprioriate dichotomy here), associating it with a dog would be purely figurative rather than literal & I would agree that it closer resembles a dog than a cat.

You’ll have to excuse my ignorance. I can sometimes cope with inanimate dead things, but I really have very little idea about alive stuff.

Mike H

A recent news story found at <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org" target="_blank">Science</a> magazine....

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24 June 2002

Questions About Noah's Flood Theory


Many scientists accept the idea that the biblical story of Noah's flood was inspired by a sudden inundation of the Black Sea by the Mediterranean 7500 years ago. But new research suggests no such flood occurred.

Geologists Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman of Columbia University crafted the "Noah's Flood Hypothesis" in 1997 to explain the sudden appearance of saltwater mollusks in 7500-year-old Black Sea sediments. They proposed that during the last Ice Age, some 18,000 years ago, sea levels dropped enough to isolate the Black Sea from the Mediterranean Sea. Rain and rivers then turned the Black Sea basin into a brackish lake. As the climate warmed, melting glaciers slowly refilled the Mediterranean. When it burst through the Bosporus Strait, the Black Sea was suddenly flooded with saltwater.

Now a group of geologists led by Ali Aksu of Memorial University of Newfoundland suggest in an upcoming issue of Marine Geology that the Black Sea was already full of fresh water, and that the saltwater flood was more of a trickle. The team looked at seismic profiles taken midway between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. At least 10,000 years ago, according to the profiles, fresh water flowed out of the Black Sea forming a delta. And cores drilled into the Bosporus sediment hinted that the water at the bottom of the strait lacked oxygen. When this happens in modern estuaries, it's because the salty bottom water is trapped below fresh water.

Aksu's team reasons that around 9000 years ago, the rising global sea levels pushed an undercurrent of salt water through the Bosporus into the Black Sea--replacing the fresh water still flowing out. Because the salt water would sink below the fresh and fill the Black Sea from the bottom up, Aksu believes mollusks arrived 7500 years ago when the level of salty water rose to the hundred meter depths where mollusks thrive.

The new scenario has convinced David Piper of the Geological Survey of Canada in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. "It seems to me these observations make the flood hypothesis impossible," he says. But Bill Ryan and others aren't persuaded. Ryan points out that there are 9000-year-old beach deposits 100 meters beneath the surface Black sea, which suggests that the sea dried up again after the delta formed.

--BETSY MASON

Related sites
<a href="http://www.esd.mun.ca/index.shtml" target="_blank">Earth Sciences at Memorial University of Newfoundland</a>
<a href="http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/" target="_blank">Lamont-Doherty Earth observatory of Columbia University</a>
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Vewy intwesting, as Elmer Fudd would say.....

Michael Ledo

I was chatting with a geologist at the world atheist meeting in Atlanta a few years back about said flood. It seems Mt. Ararat is an extinct volcano. However UNDER the volcanic layer is a layer of sedimentary rock. According to the Christian Fundies all sedimentary rock was made during the flood. Which means the volcano had to be have created a mountain range AFTER the area was covered with water, during a very short period of time, before Noah landed his ark there. Now for the rub. It seems scientist can study the rock and know if the volcano was made under water or in the air. Turns out Ararat is an aero type of volcano, meaning the waters would have had to subside, then the volcano would be made, all at the same time Noah was attempting to park his ark on an active volcano. If that isn't enough for you- I suggest Robert Ingersoll's "Some Mistakes of Moses"

Bill

The main story that has been looked at for parallels with the Flood of Noah is the Epic of Gilgamesh. If you believe that Abraham was, in fact, from Ur, then it makes all the sense in the world that the Torah would end up with some Summerian and Babylonian legends buried at some level within it.

As for the Tigris and Euphrates being the source of the "catastrophe," many attempts have been made to link various floods of those rivers to the legends of the region and, so far as I know, all have failed. The best thesis I know of is from the book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=641" target="_blank">Noah's Flood</a> by Ryan and Pitman, two oceanographers from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. They've produced strong evidence of a flood from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea; a flood which drove the people out of the Black Sea area and caused them to scatter in all directions. In their theory, all people who share Indo-European languages have this common flood myth and a shared history of their ancestors surviving this flood of the Black Sea.

At least with this theory, Ryan and Pitman have a catastrophe which might well seem to be "worldwide" to an illiterate hunter/gatherer people. This makes it less taxing for the myth to develop between 5600 BCE and roughly 2000 BCE when Abraham is supposed to have set forth from Ur to settle the Middle East.

I take it as a reasonable thesis based upon scientific findings.

== Bill