If We Were to Take the Flood Account Literally.. (page 5)

Yan Bibiyan

Technically, the mosquitos are not taking a life!

Technically, only because of the size of their reservoir .... notwithstanding malaria, or course...

Has anyone thought of all the difrent types of people are on earth? I meen like nationalities. How Could Noahs family create the vastness of culture on this earth. How could on family in the middle east create Whites and Blacks, Japanese and Indians ect. ect. They are all people but different species. For example, if you take two German Shepard Dogs how can you get a poodle?

hamsterbait

Wooden vessels longer than 150 ft break up in high seas.

Thats why the bigger ships started being built with iron struts, and eventually all metal hulls.

Over the 120 years that Noah took to build the ark, the wood would be full of fungus dry rot wet rot woodworm.

When the deluge came it was a rotting heap of logs.

HB

letsslatejws

Noah built this Ark... Id like to know how he expected all the remaining members of mankind to fit in it.... He had clearly judged them & made up his mind that nobody else other than his family of 8 would get on it. Maybe the fact that it couldnt possibly house all of the others stopped them from getting on it in the first place.... !

Just my mindless rabblings but it does make me wonder !

Leolaia

We all know now in ecology what happens to species when they have their habitats destroyed and when an endangered species nears extinction and does not have enough genetic variability to sustain itself (the ability of a species to cope with environmental change depends on its genetic variability, which itself depends on the species' population size). The Flood story, as commonly interpreted, involves a worldwide destruction of habitats and involves a genetic bottlenecking of every terrestial species on earth to a population of just 2 or 7 individuals. If something like the Flood actually happened, the ark would not have been the salvation of land-dwelling species; it would have done little to prevent the extinction of almost all terrestial animal life.

believingxjw

Leolaia,

What you wrote makes sense but only if the world as we have it today, with its genetic makeup being what it is, was the same in times past. For instance, it is my understanding that in the deep past there have been multiple die offs and geologically speaking "sudden" resurgence of many species. This I believe has not yet been satisfactorily explained for many scientists. They still grapple with trying understand these events. How it was that after such a great die off, so many species rebounded so quickly, geologically speaking.

I'm not saying the flood story is literal only that we do not know the genetic makeup of species who long ago were yet to have, let us say, evolved, to the various finite species we have today. Evolutionists point to the similarities of species, bird with dinosaur, as an example. Is it so off the mark for a Christian to believe that perhaps in the deep past the species were not as differentiated as they are today?

Now, I say this not to prove the literalness of the flood account, only to enter another thought into the mix.

TD

We've driven enough species to the brink of extinction and then attempted (With various degrees of success) to bring them back via captive breeding programs to have plenty of empirical evidence for how severe a genetic bottleneck higher mammals can survive. Fifty breeding pairs is considered pretty close to the bare minimum.

There are a few species that have experienced severe genetic bottlenecks in past and recovered. (Although not as severe as that described in the Flood story) and we knew this even before DNA sequencing because the evidence screams at you.

A good example is the Cheetah. (Acinonyx jubatus) Members of this species are so closely related today that skin grafts between one animal the next are never rejected. The Cheetah is much more suseptible to disease than the other big cats as a result and as a species is in decline.