Shokan

The Flood has been mentioned in many cultures around the world, making me think that something catatrophic must have happened. But I have a theory.

To ancient people, lets say their territory was a 30 mile perimeter from a central city. Most people developed their cities on or near a water source, for reasons such as agriculture, bathing, etc. Now if one year this area got more rain than usual, resulting in their land being flooded, such as when the Missisippi floods. This seems like a possible common occurrence that could happen virtually anywhere.

Could it just be that their rivers flooded, and having no way to explain it other than their God(s)? Is this plausible?

Or is there some sort of evidence supporting a worldwide flood? Is there even enough water to cover the entire planet?

Shokan's mind must know.

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happyraul

this site pretty much says it all:
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

an excerpt from there:
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Where did the Flood water come from, and where did it go? Several people have proposed answers to these questions, but none which consider all the implications of their models. A few of the commonly cited models are addressed below.

Vapor canopy. This model, proposed by Whitcomb & Morris and others, proposes that much of the Flood water was suspended overhead until the 40 days of rain which caused the Flood. The following objections are covered in more detail by Brown.

* How was the water suspended, and what caused it to fall all at once when it did?
* If a canopy holding the equivalent to more than 40 feet of water were part of the atmosphere, it would raise the atmospheric pressure accordingly, raising oxygen and nitrogen levels to toxic levels.
* If the canopy began as vapor, any water from it would be superheated. This scenario essentially starts with most of the Flood waters boiled off. Noah and company would be poached. If the water began as ice in orbit, the gravitational potential energy would likewise raise the temperature past boiling.
* A canopy of any significant thickness would have blocked a great deal of light, lowering the temperature of the earth greatly before the Flood.
* Any water above the ozone layer would not be shielded from ultraviolet light, and the light would break apart the water molecules.

Hydroplate. Walt Brown's model proposes that the Flood waters came from a layer of water about ten miles underground, which was released by a catastrophic rupture of the earth's crust, shot above the atmosphere, and fell as rain.

* How was the water contained? Rock, at least the rock which makes up the earth's crust, doesn't float. The water would have been forced to the surface long before Noah's time, or Adam's time for that matter.
* Even a mile deep, the earth is boiling hot, and thus the reservoir of water would be superheated. Further heat would be added by the energy of the water falling from above the atmosphere. As with the vapor canopy model, Noah would have been poached.
* Where is the evidence? The escaping waters would have eroded the sides of the fissures, producing poorly sorted basaltic erosional deposits. These would be concentrated mainly near the fissures, but some would be shot thousands of miles along with the water. (Noah would have had to worry about falling rocks along with the rain.) Such deposits would be quite noticeable but have never been seen.

Comet. Kent Hovind proposed that the Flood water came from a comet which broke up and fell on the earth. Again, this has the problem of the heat from the gravitational potential energy. The water would be steam by the time it reached the surface of the earth.

Runaway subduction. John Baumgardner created the runaway subduction model, which proposes that the pre-Flood lithosphere (ocean floor), being denser than the underlying mantle, began sinking. The heat released in the process decreased the viscosity of the mantle, so the process accelerated catastrophically. All the original lithosphere became subducted; the rising magma which replaced it raised the ocean floor, causing sea levels to rise and boiling off enough of the ocean to cause 150 days of rain. When it cooled, the ocean floor lowered again, and the Flood waters receded. Sedimentary mountains such as the Sierras and Andes rose after the Flood by isostatic rebound. [Baumgardner, 1990a; Austin et al., 1994]

* The main difficulty of this theory is that it admittedly doesn't work without miracles. [Baumgardner, 1990a, 1990b] The thermal diffusivity of the earth, for example, would have to increase 10,000 fold to get the subduction rates proposed [Matsumura, 1997], and miracles are also necessary to cool the new ocean floor and to raise sedimentary mountains in months rather than in the millions of years it would ordinarily take.
* Baumgardner estimates a release of 1028 joules from the subduction process. This is more than enough to boil off all the oceans. In addition, Baumgardner postulates that the mantle was much hotter before the Flood (giving it greater viscosity); that heat would have to go somewhere, too.
* Cenozoic sediments are post-Flood according to this model. Yet fossils from Cenozoic sediments alone show a 65-million-year record of evolution, including a great deal of the diversification of mammals and angiosperms. [Carroll, 1997, chpts. 5, 6, & 13]
* Subduction on the scale Baumgardner proposes would have produced very much more vulcanism around plate boundaries than we see. [Matsumura, 1997]

New ocean basins. Most flood models (including those above, possibly excepting Hovind's) deal with the water after the flood by proposing that it became our present oceans. The earth's terrain, according to this model, was much, much flatter during the Flood, and through cataclysms, the mountains were pushed up and the ocean basins lowered. (Brown proposes that the cataclysms were caused by the crust sliding around on a cushion of water; Whitcomb & Morris don't give a cause.)

* How could such a change be effected? To change the density and/or temperature of at least a quarter of the earth's crust fast enough to raise and lower the ocean floor in a matter of months would require mechanisms beyond any proposed in any of the flood models.
* Why are most sediments on high ground? Most sediments are carried until the water slows down or stops. If the water stopped in the oceans, we should expect more sediments there. Baumgardner's own modeling shows that, during the Flood, currents would be faster over continents than over ocean basins [Baumgardner, 1994], so sediments should, on the whole, be removed from continents and deposited in ocean basins. Yet sediments on the ocean basin average 0.6 km thick, while on continents (including continental shelves), they average 2.6 km thick. [Poldervaart, 1955]
* Where's the evidence? The water draining from the continents would have produced tremendous torrents. There is evidence of similar flooding in the Scablands of Washington state (from the draining of a lake after the breaking of an ice dam) and on the far western floor of the Mediterranean Sea (from the ocean breaking through the Straits of Gibralter). Why is such evidence not found worldwide?
* How did the ark survive the process? Such a wholesale restructuring of the earth's topography, compressed into just a few months, would have produced tsunamis large enough to circle the earth. The aftershocks alone would have been devastating for years afterwards.
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CSflim

"The" flood?

Given that cultures tend to last quite a long time, isn't it likely that at some point in their history each would come across a devestating flood? No indictation of a date, therefore no indiciation that there was a "The Flood".

Further more, why is it that only one of these cultures talk about an animal lover and his big wooden boat?

As for trying to rationalise the possibility of a flood...don't bother. If we are to accept what we are told in the bible, that the enitre earth was covered in water (10,000-20,000 feet of water = approx half a billion cubic feet of liquid) after it rained for 40 days and 40 nights (960 hours), we realise that the claim is that rain was falling at 15 feet per hour! This is certainly more than enough to sink any modern aircraft carrier...never mind a flimsy wooden ark.

Of course all of this doesn't matter. Ultimately any christian who want's to take this story as historcally accurate will simply tell you: God was in charge, so he made it happen. The ark was magically protected by a divine force-field, and if God can create the universe out of sheer will-power he can sure as FUCK create a few liters of water! (and subsequently unmake them a few weeks later).

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asaris

While I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, most flood myths also have a handful of survivors (Deucathalion (sp?), Utnapishtim, probably among others).

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"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

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KellyC

i have a thought:
The last ice age was around 10,000 years ago, then the globe became warmer and thus ice melts and causes great floods every where in every corner of the world. I forgot when exactly did civilization start, but it should be around that time too, and given the knowledge of people at that time, they really explain so they make up some kind of stories or myths to help explain why or how. Keep in mind that this happens globally so it effects every culture, therefore they all have some kind of stories or myths about this "great flood". Just a thought....

Does it help?

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smooth

asaris, those stories also tell of a wooden boat (or some have posed a type of submersible or unsinkable craft) and animals/specimens/etc.

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nate_dawg

huh?

it's my understanding that civilization began in the Mesopotamian region around 4000-3000 bc

the mesopotamian "epic of gilgamesh" has its own version of the flood story, and it has it's begininnings circa 2000 bc, predating the bible

didn't the indians (as in, natives from India) have a flood story of their own? and same goes for the chinese?

smooth

I have read the exerpts of the stories you reference, nate_dawg.

But my understanding is that mounting evidence suggests we have been around much longer than 4000 years.

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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

nate_dawg

we've obviously been around much longer

man most definitely was NOT created during this time period, but CIVILIZATION began to form, which is what I gather KellyC was talking about

smooth

Cool, should have made myself more clear:

I've read a few books that question the dating of the Sphinx and place it an extra 8-10K earlier by speculating that the damage around its base was actually caused by flood erosion.

IIRC, one of them is called The Serpent in the Sky

EDIT: fixed my book title tag

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

nate_dawg

yeah, I heard about that theory

complex "man" made structures pre-dating any sort of civilized culture by 10,000 years?

wow

wasnt it the official giza plateau archeology guy that came to that theory? zawi hawass is his name? all I remember is he looked EXACTLY (to me, anyways) like erik von danniken......

I'm thinking all these flood stories stem from one flood event many, many years ago, and the story has just been passed on, and embellished upon (gee, sounds like the bible.....)

gotta love the mysteries of the world..........

Journeyman

In the far, distant regions of my memory, there lies an ancient tale of some Discovery Channel documentary that displayed some researchers trying to figure out whether it was the Black Sea that gained some measure of water in a short period of time, both pre-dating the flood story AND some unrecallable tribe that dwelled in the middle of a region that's linguistically different.

Essentially they were trying to show that this tribe fled from the flood and brought their language into a region that was significantly different (thus segregating them from everyone else) which, if I recall, was somewhere near the middle east.

They ended up testing something about the groundwork under water in the black sea and found A) evidence of a period of dryness surrounding the large middle area of the sea (ie an ancient shoreline) and B) archeological artifacts underwater. So the conclusion was that the theory has evidence backing it up now.

Really neat stuff.

Edit: Google is my friend.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/bl.../ax/frame.html

KellyC

i forgot the word "CAN'T" between "really" and "explain" sorry about that

__________________
Him: Ok, I have to ask, what do you believe?
Me: Shit happens.