Welcome QuiteRational! You're clearly an informed and intelligent poster, hope to hear more from you.
Did the Global Flood of the Bible really happen? Please give evidence
by The Quiet One 39 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
-
Leolaia
The Quiet One...Oh I totally believed it! 100%. And I expended a lot of mental energy when I was 13 and 14 trying to prove that the chronology of the Flood was correct.
-
Leolaia
I wrote this several years ago, resposting...
Actually, in order to believe the Society's fundamentalist doctrine of a worldwide Flood occurring in 2370 BC, you have to disregard almost every branch of science:
Anthropology and Archaeology: The extensive evidence that cultures and civilizations existed uninterrupted in the third millennium BC and developed from earlier cultures in their respective locales.
Astronomy and Astrophysics: An enormous water canopy suspended in orbit above the earth is not even gravitationally viable, let alone be sustained in the face of orbital friction, tidal tugging from the moon, and heat received from the sun.
Biology and Evolutionary Biology: The impossibility that the speciation of animal life on this planet occurred incredibly rapidly in the last 4,000 years from a very small number of "kinds" of animals (limited by the number that could fit on the ark), and that the bottlenecking resulting from the selection of two members of a "kind" retained enough genetic diversity to ensure the viability of a species.
Botany: The extreme unlikelihood that specific cresote bushes and bristlecone pine trees (which have lived continuously for 10,000 and a little less than 5,000 years respectively) could survive after being subjected to catastrophically violent flood waters and then a year-long submergence under water.
Chemistry: The radioactive decay of isotopes of certain elements is completely inconsistent with the required recent age for geological, paleontological, and archaeological evidence relating to the antiquity of human cultures and features attributed to the Flood.
Climatology: The extensive evidence from ice cores, ocean sediments, tree rings, and many other sources that disprove any notion of a drastic change in climate about 4,370 years ago, and which show that the climate was not uniformily tropical from the formation of the planet to 4,370 years ago but which embraced many different cycles of glaciations and warmer climates.
Ecology: The study of habitats and ecosystems decisively refute the notion that a tiny population of animal life sensitive to local habitats can first survive a year in captivity in cramped quarters and then find their way to new habitats in a world that had undergone a global disaster that had destroyed all preceding habitats. This is especially the case if, as the Society claims, the Flood brought a drastic change in climate.
Engineering: The extreme likelihood that an ark with the dimensions, wooden materials, and features described in the Bible was seaworthy in conditions violent enough to alter global geology and that such a vessel rivalling the size of the Titanic was possible with Bronze Age technology. Food storage (which had to be sensitive to the specific diets of individual species, survive humidity and spoilage, last for a whole year, and yet not take up too much space) and waste removal would have potentially posed insurmountable engineering obstacles.
Entomology: Social insects like bees, wasps, and termites require a whole nest rather than a pair to have been on the ark in order for their species or "kind" to survive (cf. colony collapse disorder in contemporary bee populations). It is very implausible that multiple bee and wasp populations could survive for a year in captivity without the ability to gather pollen and nectar from living flowering plants; the ark would had to have had a greenhouse in its already cramped quarters. Other insects, such as those of the order Ephemeroptera, have a lifecycle of only a few days and require bodies of fresh water to live in.
Genetics: The mitochondrial and Y-chromosome evidence that proves that the genetic diversity of the human race cannot be derived from a pair of individuals (e.g. Noah and his wife) living 4,370 years ago.
Geology: The utterly overwhelming evidence that the planet's geology was not created recently in a catastrophic deluge, including palaeomagnetism, sedimentation rates, angular uncomformities, correlations of ice cores with known volcanic events, the depositing of ore and carbonates, glacial weathering, the existence of confined aquifers, river erosion of uplifting rock, and especially the gradual formation of mountains through volcanism and plate techtonics. It should be recalled that the Society argues that the existing water could have covered the surface of the earth if mountains and higher geological features did not exist 4,370 years ago.
Linguistics: With the "Tower of Babel" event supposedly occurring a hundred years or more after the Flood (as there had to have been enough people born to build the city and tower), the Society requires that all languages other than Hebrew date to after 4,270 or less years ago, but this is not borne out by the linguistic and historical facts. Hebrew is a northwest Semitic language that reflects linguistic changes much later than found in older Semitic languages (such as Akkadian, Eblaite, and Ugaritic), and Akkadian was certainly in existence earlier than 4,270 years ago, and the ancestor of all the Semitic languages was itself a descendent of an even older Proto-Afro-Asiatic which was the ancestor of Egyptian, Hausa, and certain other African languages. Evidence from lexicostatistics shows that the ancestors of the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, and Astronesian languages were spoken between the eighth and fourth millennia BC. And in the middle of the third millennium BC we already have writings from a multiplicity of languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Egyptian, Elamite, and the (undeciphered but probably Dravidian) language of the Harrapan civilization.
Meteorology and the Atmospheric Sciences: The air pressure resulting from an orbital "water canopy" would not have been condusive to planetary life and there is no meterological mechanism for converting such a high atmospheric canopy into rain without clouds, much less resulting in global monsoon weather with steady rainfall for 40 days and nights.
Microbiology: Since diseases need hosts to survive, the sheer number of diseases in the animal kingdom requires that every animal was host to multiple infections and diseases, which would have impacted their survivability in the closed quarters of the ark where the possibility of contagion infection would have been very high.
Paleontology: The stratigraphical sorting of fossils in the geologic record is not explainable via the mechanism of a worldwide deluge and the ages of extinct animals in the fossil record far exceeds the chronological requirements of the Society for the history of life on earth (in the tens of thousands of years). Fossil sealife on mountain tops have ages in the tens or hundreds of millions of years and thus could not have been deposited during the Flood. Taphonomy shows that the conditions under which remains were fossilized varied according to the climate, contrary to the claim of a uniform tropical climate before the Flood.
Physics: Aside from the physical impossibilities of a vast water canopy being suspended in orbit in the thermosphere (as claimed in the 15 July 1968 Watchtower, p. 420, and 22 July 1976 Awake!, p. 19), the same region in space that the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle orbit, it is against the laws of physics for a mass of many hundred million tons of water to fall to earth from orbit without having an effect similar to that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs (an 800-foot asteroid weighs about 25 million tons), and if the water fell on a global scale, the surface of the whole planet would probably have had temperatures as high as such impacts (i.e. hotter than the sun's surface) and the wooden ark would have had to have survived such temperatures.
Seismology and Plate Techtonics: Since mountains like the Himalayas and the Alps were created through gradual continental shift, the Flood would have also had to have rapidly buckled the crust of the planet and produced greatly increased magna flow inside the earth's mantle; this is physically impossible and the record of seafloor spreading in the oceans can be dated and shown to be far, far older than 4,370 years old.
Zoology: Aside from the already discussed evidence from biology, ecology, entomology, genetics, microbiology, and paleontology, the evidence from physiology and ethology decisively disproves the notion that carnivorism is a behavior and diet that existed only in the past 4,370 years and that the diet of presently carnivorous animals before this was vegetarian in nature.
-
The Quiet One
The brother who gave our public talk claimed that 50,000 species was all that was needed to represent all the species that we have today, and that there would have been plenty of room to spare for food etc...
-
QuiteRational
Welcome QuiteRational! You're clearly an informed and intelligent poster, hope to hear more from you.
Why thank you, you probably will.
-
The Quiet One
" Origins of the Genesis Ark story The story of Noah's Ark in Genesis is considered by modern scholars to be directly dependent upon the Babylonian version, [ 35 ] which it parallels point by point, in the correct order, from beginning to end. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ark#cite_note-35
-
-
The Quiet One
LEOLEIA-- That comprehensive post of yours has absolutely blown me away.. I'm sat here slapping myself for ever being so blind as to not see the Flood myth for what it is.. How I didn't think of bee/wasp colonies needing more than two to survive, let alone the issue of genetic diversity, I really don't know. Thank goodness for Jwn and people like you..
-
Star tiger
Hi,
I think that with all the empirical evidence against the building of an Ark that could support all these animals and man, could have only occured by something that was once mentioned in a Simpsons episode by Lucy Lawless when answering desrepences in the Xena warrior princess episodes anything that could not be explained by the writers a wizard did it!!!!!!!
Regards,
Star Tiger
-
badseed
Leolaia, that would deserve to be a sticky (If we had stickies).