Did Noah's Ark actually happen? (user search)

Question for jmfcst:

Since you brought up the Table of Nations, where do the Native Americans come from?

don't know, the bible doesn't say. some speculate from Ham-Canaan

1. Fossil evidence and genetic studies establish that humanity had its origins in Africa -- eastern Africa. The idea that people propagated Africa from the Levant is bass-ackwards; the Semitic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant are from one of the latest waves of emigrants from pre-historic East Africa. Caucasoid populations of modern Europe, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent were apparently the second-to-last prehistoric waves to leave eastern Africa. (An aside to any white racists: Caucasoid peoples are really East Africans gone pale, and lesser divergence from African peoples than some others -- such as Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and the Sinitic peoples of China and nearby countries are longer separated from Africa than are 'de-colored' Caucasoid peoples).

2. The biggest flood in human experience came at the end of the Ice Age. That was before any written history, but its effects would sear memories of then-living people. Any survivors would have tales to tell, and those tales would be better than anything that anyone could have put directly into writing. One likely place for such a flood is the shallow Perso-Arabian Gulf, an area that became inundated as the giant ice sheets of the Pleistocene Epoch melted. Seas rose everywhere, and such a long low plain as that of the Persian Gulf would have disappeared under water very quickly. Climate change was abrupt.

The Persian Gulf was likely a comparative paradise with water flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates River into a warm desert. It may have had some early agriculture and supported (by standards of the time) a fairly-large population. At the end of the Ice Age that ended as melt water from a few mountain glaciers in eastern Turkey and western Iran melted just as the sea water of the Indian Ocean rose. A world that might have been compatible with prehistoric peoples would have vanished underwater very abruptly.

3. Someone like Noah, clever enough to put together a reed boat to ride out the flood and have a little food on board and the foresight to take some animals, would have thrived in the aftermath. Non-survivors who didn't imitate him could be shown as fools at first, and sinners later as the story got incorporated into the Torah. Early patriarchs could express an important message for Jews: those who obey God thrive, and those who don't face severe retribution.

4. The stories of animals (two of each species) is absurd. Bears, cats of all kinds, hyenas, wolves and dogs, crocodilians, and the Komodo dragon are very nasty killers that would have found some of the herbivores easy prey in an enclosed place. Noah would have had to have traveled around the world to get such creatures as pandas, raccoons, kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, the Komodo dragon, vicunas, Kirtland's warblers, and Emperor penguins. He would also have needed a large, temperature-controlled fresh-water aquarium for all the fresh-water fish that would have been killed in any incursion of sea water. Does anything indicate that Noah kept a large, temperature-controlled aquarium on board?

5. There is no evidence of any worldwide flood that inundated the entire world at the same time. Had it come from rain, then the energy released from the precipitation of rain from water vapor would have created conditions of a pressure cooker. From some open canopy? The energy released from falling water would also have cooked every living thing alive.

Let's try the evidence that sea shells are to be found in high mountains. There's a better explanation: a universe and an Earth much older than 6000 or so years, one old enough to have had violent uplifts of sea floor due to plate tectonics and slow erosion and deposition of highlands.

Oh, no, no, no. You see, my faith is so shallow that, if it didn't happen exactly the way it says in the Bible, then there is no point to this whole thing.

All that "evidence" that you bring up about genetics, and archeology... that is just God/Satan's way of trying to trick the non-believers. Obviously, the full facts (and not just truth, as it were) are in scripture, and what we see about the world is just hog wash.

Also, somehow, believing that something didn't happen exactly the way it is told in the Bible is somehow connected to belief in God's impotence. If you think that it might have happened another way, you are suggesting God couldn't do it.

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