Noah's Ark

[Infinity Blade]

I've decided to create a thread dedicated to discussion regarding the story of Noah's Ark. I'm going to guess at least most of us here believe it is a flat out impossible myth, so those who believe so can give explanations here. Or for those who actually do believe the story of the Biblical flood, they can try and defend it here.

I shall make the first contribution with two videos that sum up the animal problem.

[creature386]

AronRa has a very elaborate video series on the topic:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMJP95iZJqEjmc5oxY5r6BzP
This one is a bit more condensed:

[Life]

We cannot (and should not) rule out the possibility of occurrence of a Great Flood in the past due to inaccuracies of ancient Biblical accounts. Please keep in mind that ancient biblical accounts are not scientific and/or archaeological research works but a collection of traditions passed down from generation to generation. However, they must be inspired by 'certain events in the past' because they are (not) alone in describing them.

The legend of a great flood is not restricted to Middle Eastern landscapes (and biblical accounts) only; similar legends were prevalent in other parts of the world as well but they did not get much publicity? For example: news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/china-yellow-river-great-flood-xia-dynasty-yu/

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Below is a fascinating read:

Biblical-Type Floods Are Real, and They're Absolutely Enormous

Geologists long rejected the notion that cataclysmic flood had ever occurred—until one of them found proof of a Noah-like catastrophe in the wildly eroded river valleys of Washington State.



Washington scablands: Hundreds of square miles of Washington State were gouged by the great Missoula Floods 15,000 years ago.

After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I had become embarrassed that I hadn’t yet seen the deep canyons where tremendous Ice Age floods scoured down into solid rock to sculpt the scablands. So I decided to help lead a field trip for students to see the giant erosion scars on the local landforms.

We drove across the Columbia River and continued eastward, dropping into Moses Coulee, a canyon with vertical walls of layered basalt. We gathered the students on a small rise and asked them how the canyon had formed. They immediately ruled out wind and glaciers. The valley was not U-shaped like a typical glacial valley, and none of us could imagine how wind might gouge a canyon out of hard basalt. But neither were there rivers or streams. After a while I pointed out that we were standing on a pile of gravel. I asked how the rounded granite pebbles came to be there when the closest source of granite lay over the horizon. Silence.

Hiking through eastern Washington canyons littered with exotic boulders is a standard field trip for beginning geologists. It takes a while to register what you see. A dry waterfall hundreds of feet high in the middle of the desert. Giant potholes where no river flows today. Granite boulders parked in a basalt canyon. Gradually the contradictions fall into place and a story unfolds. Where did wayward boulders the size of a car or house come from? What was the source of the water that moved them around and carved the falls? Today, even novice geologists can conjure up eastern Washington’s giant floods.

Long before the discovery of the scablands, geologists dismissed the role of catastrophic floods in interpreting European geology. By the end of the 19th century such ideas not only were out of fashion but were geological heresy. When J Harlen Bretz uncovered evidence of giant floods in eastern Washington in the 1920s, it took most of the 20th century for other geologists to believe him. Geologists had so thoroughly vilified the concept of great floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence of one.

Bretz was a classic field geologist and a controversial figure throughout his career. In 1925 he presented the story of the region’s giant floods, seeing what others at first could not—and then would not—see. He spent his lifetime piecing together the story of how a raging wall of water hundreds of feet high roared across eastern Washington, carving deep channels before cascading down the Columbia River Gorge as a wall of water high enough to turn Oregon’s Willamette Valley into a vast backwater lake.

Bretz found exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above the highest recorded river level. In the scablands, a desolate region stripped of soil, he came across dry waterfalls and potholes hundreds of feet above the modern river. Gigantic gravel bars deposited within dry valleys implied deep, fast-flowing water. Streamlined hills rose like islands, extending more than 100 feet above the scoured-out channelways.

He realized the chaotic landscape had been carved by an enormous flood that chewed deep channels through hundreds of feet of solid basalt. The ancient flood deposited an enormous delta around Portland, Oregon, backing up flow into the Willamette Valley. The waters, he eventually realized, could have come from catastrophic drainage of Lake Missoula, an ancient, glacier-dammed lake in western Montana.

Bretz was ridiculed until 1940, when geologist Joe Pardee described giant ripple marks on the bed of Lake Missoula. The 50-foot-high ripples, he said, were formed by fast-flowing currents and not by the sluggish bottom water of a lake. Only sudden failure of the glacial dam could have released the 2,000-foot-deep lake. The catastrophic release of 600 cubic miles of water through a narrow gap would sweep away everything in its path. In 1979, when Bretz was 97 years old, the Geological Society of America awarded him its highest honor, the Penrose Medal.

Recognition of the Missoula flood helped other geologists identify similar landforms in Asia, Europe, Alaska, and the American Midwest, as well as on Mars. There is now compelling evidence for many gigantic ancient floods where glacial ice dams failed time and again: At the end of the last glaciation, some 10,000 years ago, giant ice-dammed lakes in Eurasia and North America repeatedly produced huge floods. In Siberia, rivers spilled over drainage divides and changed their courses. England’s fate as an island was sealed by erosion from glacial floods that carved the English Channel. These were not global deluges as described in the Genesis story of Noah, but were more focused catastrophic floods taking place throughout the world. They likely inspired stories like Noah’s in many cultures, passed down through generations.

Since devastating floods were a fact of life on the margins of the world’s great ice sheets, people in those areas probably witnessed them. Early missionaries in eastern Washington reported stories of a great flood among Yakima and Spokane tribes, who could identify locations where survivors sought refuge. An Ojibwa Indian legend from around Lake Superior tells of a great snow that fell one September at the beginning of time: A bag contained the sun’s heat until a mouse nibbled a hole in it. The warmth spilled over, melting the snow and producing a flood that rose above the tops of the highest pines. Everyone drowned except for an old man who drifted about in his canoe rescuing animals. The native inhabitants of the Willamette Valley told stories of a time the valley filled with water, forcing everyone to flee up a mountain before the waters receded.

Did survivors of such events pass their stories down through the ages? Could the biblical story of Noah, on some level, be real?

Tsangpo Gorge Flood, Tibet

The Legend: Local folklore describes a traditional Buddhist pilgrimage that circled a small peak ringed by lake terraces. The pilgrims commemorated how Guru Rimpoche brought Buddhism to Tibet by defeating a powerful lake demon, draining its home to reveal fertile farmland. A local temple, which sits on top of a stack of ancient lake sediments, has a striking mural of Guru Rimpoche above a lake at the gorge entrance. The Temple’s head lama believes the ocean once covered all of Tibet.

The Evidence: During a 2002 expedition, geologist David Montgomery studied how the Tsangpo River once sawed through rock, carving the world’s deepest gorge. His team discovered ancient shorelines and 1,200-year-old wood fragments in lake sediments dating to around the time Rimpoche arrived in Tibet. At the head of the gorge, glacial debris was plastered on both sides of the valley, confirming that a massive tongue of ice once plunged down a nearby 25,000-foot-high peak. Two levels of terraces extending upstream indicated a wall of ice and mud had dammed the river, backing up a lake that filled the valley. Once the lake filled enough to breach the dam, a rush of water roared down the gorge, scouring out everything in its path.

Grand Canyon Flood

The Legend: A local Native American tribe, the Havasupai, attributes the canyon’s carving to a catastrophic flood down the Colorado River that occurred when the god Ho-ko-ma-ta unleashed a tremendous rainstorm. A more benevolent god, Pu-keh-eh, put his daughter in a hollowed-out log to save her from the monstrous current. After the flood receded, she crawled out and became mother of all humanity.

The Evidence: The rocks exposed in the canyon walls could not have settled during a single flood because they alternate many times in color, grain size, and composition. Although floods did not create the canyon, evidence suggests they helped shape it. Huge boulders are perched hundreds of feet above the river. Floods capable of stranding boulders so high would have been spectacular. The breaching of cooled lava dams that impounded the river may have launched these catastrophic floods. But these deluges occurred at least 400,000 years ago, long before people made it to the continent. The Native American tale of how the canyon formed is apparently an attempt to make sense of mysterious landforms.

Black Sea Flood

The Legend: In the story of Noah’s Ark, the book of Genesis says Noah lived during a time when all other people on Earth were evil. God became angry and decided to create a giant flood to kill everyone except Noah and his family. God told Noah to build a boat called an ark, big enough for himself, his wife, his sons, their wives, and at least two of every animal. Once the ark was built, God sent a rainstorm that lasted 40 days. The deluge rose higher than the tallest mountain. When the waters receded, Noah’s family and animals left the ark and repopulated the Earth.

The Evidence: After refuting the possibility of a global flood, geologists dismissed suggestions that the story of Noah’s Flood might be rooted in some sort of fact. Then, in 1993, oceanographers Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman of Columbia University used sonar to survey the floor of the Black Sea—and found evidence supporting the story after all. Submerged beneath the surface were ancient streambeds, river-cut canyons, and shorelines. High-resolution seismic reflection profiles showed a former land surface buried in the seafloor sediments. Drill cores from the seafloor contained roots of shrubs covered by marine mud. Ryan and Pitman argued that over 7,000 years ago, the Mediterranean began to rise, breaching rocks along the Istanbul Strait, a waterway that helps form the boundary between Europe and Asia today. The event caused the Mediterranean to spill into the Black Sea, triggering a catastrophic flood.

Source: discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-biblical-type-floods-real-absolutely-enormous

The aforementioned article brings another fact to our attention: scientific communities are susceptible to biases and narrative-building much like less-informed people:

Long before the discovery of the scablands, geologists dismissed the role of catastrophic floods in interpreting European geology. By the end of the 19th century such ideas not only were out of fashion but were geological heresy. When J Harlen Bretz uncovered evidence of giant floods in eastern Washington in the 1920s, it took most of the 20th century for other geologists to believe him. Geologists had so thoroughly vilified the concept of great floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence of one.

Bretz was a classic field geologist and a controversial figure throughout his career. In 1925 he presented the story of the region’s giant floods, seeing what others at first could not—and then would not—see. He spent his lifetime piecing together the story of how a raging wall of water hundreds of feet high roared across eastern Washington, carving deep channels before cascading down the Columbia River Gorge as a wall of water high enough to turn Oregon’s Willamette Valley into a vast backwater lake.

Bretz found exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above the highest recorded river level. In the scablands, a desolate region stripped of soil, he came across dry waterfalls and potholes hundreds of feet above the modern river. Gigantic gravel bars deposited within dry valleys implied deep, fast-flowing water. Streamlined hills rose like islands, extending more than 100 feet above the scoured-out channelways.

He realized the chaotic landscape had been carved by an enormous flood that chewed deep channels through hundreds of feet of solid basalt. The ancient flood deposited an enormous delta around Portland, Oregon, backing up flow into the Willamette Valley. The waters, he eventually realized, could have come from catastrophic drainage of Lake Missoula, an ancient, glacier-dammed lake in western Montana.

Bretz was ridiculed until 1940, when geologist Joe Pardee described giant ripple marks on the bed of Lake Missoula. The 50-foot-high ripples, he said, were formed by fast-flowing currents and not by the sluggish bottom water of a lake. Only sudden failure of the glacial dam could have released the 2,000-foot-deep lake. The catastrophic release of 600 cubic miles of water through a narrow gap would sweep away everything in its path. In 1979, when Bretz was 97 years old, the Geological Society of America awarded him its highest honor, the Penrose Medal.

Isn't it sad? If scientific community is prone to such behaviors, imagine the amount of disinformation they have been feeding us all these years with their biased narrative-building.

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The legend of Noah's Ark might be grounded in true events. Noah might be a real person who was probably good at exploring landscapes and probably noticed the signs (build-up of conditions that may lead to flooding of his settlement) and warned his community about it, only to face rejection. However, he might have build a large boat and stockpiled it with a large amount of resources [including animals] with support of his friends and family members. Think about it.

Scientific communities are susceptible to biases and narrative-building much like less-informed people. A bold few who challenge the status-quo with out-of-the-box ideas, risk the prospects of alienation and rejection much like Harlen Bretz. Nobody can take a look at modern composition of landscapes and tell everything about them and what happened there throughout the ages. Criticism should be constructive, not biased.

[creature386]

To be fair, there have been many claims of localized floods in the Near East to account for the Noachian and Sumerian flood myths, so I won't call the scientific community close-minded to huge floods:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Claims_of_historicity
And similar floods have been proposed as a result of deglaciations to explain flood myths of other cultures.
The only thing where you could call the scientific community dismissive towards is the idea of a global flood.

[Life]

Jun 11, 2017 15:50:27 GMT 5 creature386 said:

To be fair, there have been many claims of localized floods in the Near East to account for the Noachian and Sumerian flood myths, so I won't call the scientific community close-minded to huge floods:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Claims_of_historicity
And similar floods have been proposed as a result of deglaciations to explain flood myths of other cultures.
The only thing where you could call the scientific community dismissive towards is the idea of a global flood.

Really, my friend?

Story of Harlen Bretz suggests otherwise:

Formed by Megafloods, This Place Fooled Scientists for Decades

Geologists couldn't account for the strange landforms of eastern Washington State. Then a high school teacher dared to question the scientific dogma of his day.

In the middle of eastern Washington, in a desert that gets less than eight inches of rain a year, stands what was once the largest waterfall in the world. It is three miles wide and 400 feet high—ten times the size of Niagara Falls—with plunge pools at its base suggesting the erosive power of an immense flow of water. Today there is not so much as a trickle running over the cataract’s lip. It is completely dry.

Dry Falls is not the only curiosity in what geologists call the Columbia Plateau. Spread over 16,000 square miles are hundreds of other dry waterfalls, canyons without rivers that might have carved them (called “coulees”), mounds of gravel as tall as skyscrapers, deep holes in the bedrock that would swallow entire city blocks, and countless oddly placed boulders. All across southeast Washington, fertile rolling hills border eroded tracts of volcanic basalt, as if Kansas farmland and Utah canyon land had been chopped up and sewed together into a topographic Frankenstein.

The first farmers in the region named the rocky parts “scablands” and dismissed them as useless as they planted their wheat on the silt-rich hills. But geologists were not so dismissive; to them, the scablands were an enigma. What could have caused this landscape? It was a question hotly debated for several decades, and the answer was as surprising and dramatic as Dry Falls itself.

For that matter, so was the source of that answer: a high school science teacher named Harley Bretz. In 1909, the Seattle teacher visited the University of Washington to see the U.S. Geological Survey’s new topographic map of the Quincy Basin, a large area on the west side of the Columbia Plateau. He was 27, with no formal training in geology, but when he looked at the map, he noticed a striking feature: a huge cataract (much like Dry Falls) on the western edge of the basin, a place where water appeared to spill out of the basin and into the Columbia River, gouging a canyon several hundred feet deep. The falls would have been bigger than Niagara, but there was no apparent source of water for them—no signs whatsoever of a river leading to the cataract.

Bretz asked faculty in the department about the feature, called Potholes Coulee, but they had no answers for him. Nor could they explain many of the other unusual features of the region. That’s when, as legend has it, Bretz decided to become a geologist. He earned his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Chicago four years later, changed his professional name from Harley to “J Harlen” to sound more respectable, and in 1922 returned to eastern Washington to take a closer look at the plateau and its scablands. And after two seasons in the field, his conclusions shocked even himself: The only possible explanation for the all the region’s features was a massive flood, perhaps the largest in the Earth’s history—“a debacle which swept the Columbia Plateau,” ripping soil and rock from the landscape, carving canyons and cataracts in a matter of days. “All other hypotheses meet fatal objections,” he wrote in a 1923 paper.

It was geological heresy. For almost a century, ever since Charles Lyell’s 1830 text Principles of Geology set the standards for the field, it had been assumed that geological change was gradual and uniform—always the product of, as Lyell put it, “causes now in operation.” And floods of quasi-Biblical proportions certainly did not meet that standard. It didn’t matter how meticulous Bretz’s research was, or how sound his reasoning might be; he seemed to be advocating a return to geology’s dark ages, when “scientists” used catastrophic explanations for the Earth’s features to buttress theological presumptions about the age of a Creator’s divine handiwork. It was unacceptable. How did canyons and cataracts form? By rivers, of course, over millions of years. Not gigantic floods. Period.

So in 1927, after Bretz had published yet another paper about the “Spokane Flood” and the landscape it carved, the nation’s geological bigwigs invited him to Washington, D.C., to present his findings—and receive his beatdown. Bretz was game, and explained to the expert assemblage how a massive ice-age flood had carved three parallel tracts of flood channels south of the Cordilleran ice sheet (which covered Canada and the northern United States), pooled in a temporary lake twice the size of Rhode Island at the southern edge of the scablands, and then drained like an overflowing tub into the Columbia River Gorge. On the way, the floodwaters carved the famous Grand Coulee, a canyon up to three miles wide with walls up to a thousand feet high, cut hundreds of waterfalls, washed away entire hillsides, deposited gravel bars hundreds of feet high, carried rocks the size of cars and even small houses, and created a terrain of braided channels across eastern Washington.

Rivers and streams could not have done this, Bretz said. The landscape bears none of the marks of riverine systems, with smaller tributaries joining into larger ones, forming tree-like, branch-and-trunk patterns. Instead, you see a pattern of braided channels—the crisscrossing pattern that flowing water creates when it makes its way across fresh terrain. The difference between the channels we typically see—say, after a rainfall or on the margins of a flooding river—and the channels in the scablands is simply scale. These are just much larger, and were carved into rock instead of sand or silt.

The key to the rapid erosion, Bretz said, was the volcanic basalt that forms the bedrock of the Columbia Plateau. When basaltic lava cools into rock, it forms vertical hexagonal pillars that have weak bonds to each other. Compared to, say, granite, which erodes grain by grain, basalt can erode chunk by chunk as these pillars separate. So a massive, high-energy flood could pluck apart the bedrock so quickly that a canyon like the Grand Coulee might be formed virtually overnight.

Bretz’s research was thorough, and his map of the channeled scablands was so accurate that it’s a virtual tracing of modern-day satellite images, creating the immediate impression of channeled floodwaters. But his audience—none of whom had visited, much less studied, the scablands—was having none of it. Bretz’s hypothesis was not just “wholly inadequate,” in the words of one critic, but “preposterous” and “incompetent.” Compounding the problem of his unlikely hypothesis was the question of where all this water would have come from, and Bretz had no convincing answer.

For more than a decade afterward, Bretz was on the losing side of a pre-ordained conclusion, as the other geologists who began studying the area concocted one labored hypothesis after another for how the scablands’ features might have been created by gradual erosion. Then, in the early 1940s, the other shoe dropped: Joseph Pardee, a geologist for the USGS, reported that he’d discovered strong evidence of a massive flow of water in western Montana: a swath of current ripples 30 to 50 feet high—like the sand ripples that might form in river or tidal water, but made of gravel and orders of magnitude larger. Their source? A giant ice-age lake—Glacial Lake Missoula—that formed when the Cordilleran ice sheet progressed south and blocked the Clark Fork river valley, forming a dam of ice 2,000 feet high.

Behind that dam, water from the Clark Fork gathered, forming a lake with as much water as Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined, stretching for hundreds of miles in Montana’s mountainous river valleys. Then the dam broke, and a torrent of water with ten times the combined flow of all the world’s rivers barreled into eastern Washington, reaching speeds approaching 80 miles an hour, decimating the terrain and leaving giant current ripples and gravel bars in its wake.

It would take another two decades to win the establishment over, but for many geologists this was convincing evidence that Bretz’s flood was real. The impossible had happened after all.

SEEING LIKE A GEOLOGIST

It takes practice to see the world as a geologist does. When I got my first glimpse of the Channeled Scablands more than 20 years ago on Interstate 90 west of Spokane, I was struck by their strange beauty, by the way rolling fields of wheat could suddenly yield to a landscape of rocky buttes. I had no explanation for the terrain, and I didn’t need one—I had that primitive eye that looks at rocks and just sees rocks. But when I returned to the scablands with Bretz’s story in mind, suddenly I was in an entirely different world.

Standing in the middle of a broad swath of scablands extending from horizon to horizon, my mind’s eye could clearly see the floodwaters blasting through, like a raging inland sea, ripping up everything not strong enough to stay moored. Driving through what’s known as the Ephrata Fan, a broad open area where floodwaters left the confines of the Grand Coulee and spread out and slowed as they neared what would become Ancient (and very temporary) Lake Lewis, I easily understood why the landscape was riddled with boulders: As the water lost speed, it began dropping all the rocks it was carrying. And when I stood on the lip of the dry falls of Potholes Coulee, looking at this immense canyon with farmland on three sides and a precipitous drop on the other, I felt what Bretz was thinking when he looked at that map a century ago: If a river didn’t carve this, what did?

With the flood story in mind, it all seems so obvious—so obvious, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to see the terrain and not see the floodwaters that shaped it. Why, then, were the experts in Bretz’s day so blind to what now seems like a self-evident geological record? I posed that question to Vic Baker, a geologist with the University of Arizona who became the pre-eminent scablands expert in Bretz’s wake, when we met to tour several of the region’s features. “It’s the mistake people have made most in the history of science,” he said. “They forgot that nature has the answers, not us.”

“Bretz was making arguments, and no one was going into the field to see anything,” Baker said. “They were just countering his arguments with theory.” And because scientists are first and foremost human beings, they’re loathe to change their theories or their minds because of mere data.

Baker told me a story as we looked out at Palouse Falls, another dramatic cataract at the head of a massive canyon, with a stream running through it that seems comically out of scale, like a toddler wearing a grown man’s boots. Sometime in the late 1950s or early ’60s, a geologist named Aaron Waters brought one of Bretz’s most vocal critics—James Gilluly, the one who’d called his ideas “preposterous” and “incompetent”—to the scablands for a first-hand look. As they took in the sight of the falls and the canyon, Gilluly was dumbfounded by their scale. “Gilluly was just quiet the whole time,” Baker said, “and as they were leaving, he broke out into this immense laugh and said, ‘How could anybody be so wrong?’” After resisting Bretz’s theory for decades, simply seeing the landscape with his own eyes had changed his mind.

Of course, for some of Bretz’s most stubborn critics, even eyewitness experience wasn’t enough. Bretz’s arch-adversary, Richard Foster Flint, a Yale geologist who remained a premier authority in the field until the 1970s, spent years studying the scablands and resisted Bretz’s theory until he was virtually the only one left who did. He finally acknowledged the scablands flooding (grudgingly, with a single sentence in a textbook in 1971), but as philosopher Thomas Kuhn observed, new scientific truths often win the day not so much because opponents change their minds, but because they die off. By the time the Geological Society of America finally recognized Bretz’s work with the Penrose Medal, the field’s highest honor, it was 1979 and Bretz was 96 years old. He joked to his son, “All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.”

It is tempting to see this story as a simple morality tale, with “good guy” geologists lining up against “bad guy” geologists in a battle between open-minded inquiry and closed-minded dogmatism. But that might just compound the error, because it neglects the fact that scientists almost always favor their own theories over others’, and rarely are those theories completely right. Enter Richard Waitt, a geologist with the USGS. In 1977 Waitt was exploring the Walla Walla valley in southern Washington when he noticed that one of the 40 sediment layers from the temporary flood lake contained ash from an eruption of Mt. St. Helens. It had been assumed that all those layers had been laid by one flood event—but if only one of them had the volcanic ash, it meant that each of those layers must have represented a separate flood.

“I knew right away that there couldn’t have been just one flood,” Waitt said. But when he published his findings in 1980, arguing that there had been at least 40 ice-age floods in the scablands, he faced such stiff resistance that he felt like Bretz himself. “Baker and his students were totally against it for years,” he said. And the irony for Waitt is that the lines seemed to be drawn just as they had been during the initial controversy. The authorities in the field were invested in a particular theory, and contrary evidence was dismissed without an adequate hearing.

It turns out that Waitt was right. In fact, subsequent research indicates that 80 or more floods ravaged the scablands near the end of the last ice age. Repeatedly over a two- to three-thousand-year span ending roughly 13,000 years ago, the Cordilleran ice sheet advanced to block the Clark Fork river, a new iteration of Glacial Lake Missoula formed, and then the ice dam broke, each time unleashing such a torrent of water that if it were to happen today, most of Portland’s skyline would be submerged by the floodwaters. What’s more, something similar might have happened during previous ice ages—meaning that perhaps the most dramatic features of the scablands, like Grand Coulee and Dry Falls, didn’t form in the blink of a geological eye after all, but were shaped by catastrophic erosion over an extended period of time. Which would make both Bretz and his early critics right—Bretz about the flooding, and his critics in their skeptical assessment of his timetable.

This wouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to Bretz. By the early 1950s he’d noticed that some scabland features appeared to be more weathered than others, and in his last paper on the subject, in 1969, he argued that there had been at least seven scabland floods. But by then the controversy that had defined his professional life had already come and gone. When I asked Waitt about the irony of Bretz’s story, he said, “I think if Bretz could have made the argument in the 1920s for several floods, it would have muted the opposition a great deal.”

Perhaps it’s just as well that he didn’t. That sort of neat resolution might obscure what’s arguably the most important lesson of the scablands’ story—the caution that “nature has the answers, not us.” Just when we think we’ve got nature figured out, we find that among her many powers is the power to confound us, again and again and again.

Source: news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/channeled-scablands/

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Here is another confession: nautil.us/issue/25/Water/the-real-landscapes-of-the-great-flood-myths

I find the conclusion interesting:

Gradually, however, the ties binding biblical narratives and geological science began to unravel. Steno showed that rocks could tell their own stories, thereby guiding, constraining, and ultimately refuting religious doctrine. Subsequent generations of geologists and paleontologists established that the history of our planet, and its flora and fauna, was much too long and complex to map neatly onto a literal interpretation of scripture. By the time Darwin published his controversial ideas on evolution, the geologically literate clergy had largely abandoned faith in a global flood.

Now geomythology is reweaving empiricism and symbolism, ferreting out kernels of fact buried in fable. Humans have always toiled to make sense of the world and our place in it. And for most of our history as a species, oral traditions were the only way to safeguard knowledge for posterity. In this sense, science can be seen as an extension of folklore—a new way to pass on the same stories. Only with better data.

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Experts/Scientists are prone to dogmas and biases much like normal people; some are hellbent on discrediting ancient sources of knowledge that shaped civilizations in earlier times and advancing theories that give the impression that creation does not happens, intelligent design is improbable and all developments are random. This dogma continues to hamper efforts to achieve a more balanced understanding of developments/events and resultant narrative-building contributes to confusion of less-informed people. Some people mistakenly assume that scientific studies can capture all realities; they cannot. Even scientific theories cannot. Even with science in the picture, it is all the same.

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Now that skepticism begrudgingly gave ground to assessments of massive flooding events in regional context, global flood hypothesis should remain an impossibility nonetheless. Again, global-flooding might seem improbable in the light of shortcomings in evidence at hand but are we considering all possibilities and clues for it? I don't think so.

Global-flooding might also be a possibility under the right set of circumstances; appropriate conditions with some sort of extraterrestrial intervention added into the mix. Chances of this happening might be slim but should we rule out the possibility altogether?

Here is an interesting read: news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/01/comet-new-years-eve-newton-flood-bible-gravity-science/

[creature386]

Hm, this story sounds like a perfectly normal paradigm shift. If you looked at the history of the acceptance of heliocentrism, plate tectonics, the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, evolution, general relativity or plate tectonics, you will notice similar patterns. It does take some decades to overturn the scientific consensus, but this is not a problem limited to religion-related topics. Also, his ideas got accepted after all. When I said that the geologists are not particularly dismissive of local floods, I was largely talking about 21st century geologists. Uniformitarianism is not the consensus anymore. It's actualism. Actualism is like uniformitarianism ("The present is the key to the past"), but it allows for catastrophic events (think of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs; it was among the reasons for the final dismissal of uniformitarianism).
Remember that the idea of a global flood itself was for a long time the prevailing view among scientists as well and they tried hard to preserve it.

As for your points about possibilities:
While we should always be open for possibilities, not everything that is possible has the potential of scientific acceptance. Think of Last Thursdayism (if you've heard of it). The purpose of science is to explain the world. For that, models with predictive and retrodictive capacity are preferred. This is one of the pitfalls of Intelligent Design and some global flood theories ( rationalwiki.org/wiki/Flooddidit#Flooddidit ).

[Life]

Jun 12, 2017 23:05:04 GMT 5 creature386 said:

Hm, this story sounds like a perfectly normal paradigm shift. If you looked at the history of the acceptance of heliocentrism, plate tectonics, the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, evolution, general relativity or plate tectonics, you will notice similar patterns. It does take some decades to overturn the scientific consensus, but this is not a problem limited to religion-related topics. Also, his ideas got accepted after all. When I said that the geologists are not particularly dismissive of local floods, I was largely talking about 21st century geologists. Uniformitarianism is not the consensus anymore. It's actualism. Actualism is like uniformitarianism ("The present is the key to the past"), but it allows for catastrophic events (think of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs; it was among the reasons for the final dismissal of uniformitarianism).
Remember that the idea of a global flood itself was for a long time the prevailing view among scientists as well and they tried hard to preserve it.

As for your points about possibilities:
While we should always be open for possibilities, not everything that is possible has the potential of scientific acceptance. Think of Last Thursdayism (if you've heard of it). The purpose of science is to explain the world. For that, models with predictive and retrodictive capacity are preferred. This is one of the pitfalls of Intelligent Design and some global flood theories ( rationalwiki.org/wiki/Flooddidit#Flooddidit ).

I see.

Lesson in that is the fact that 'scientific consensus' is [not] an infallible source and humans tend to be stubborn in coming to terms with information that challenge their inherent beliefs. Another thing is that scientific studies should not be used as the basis to dismiss the validity of biblical accounts and/or even existence of God. We only need to broaden our way of thinking and try to piece together information to see the bigger picture.

In connection with this topic, watch this series of videos about a massive flooding event in North America: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTRcDAFHjDShPBNvyJyWgieqHqUQtF_y8

Video number 8 is conclusive and very telling.

A comet strike about 13000 years ago is believed to have triggered a chain of events that include a massive flooding event in North America; signs of this massive flooding event visible in different parts of USA but nobody suspected them as such until very recently.

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So what could trigger a global flooding phenomenon? Extraterrestrial forces under the right conditions.

Answers often lay in extraterrestrial interventions to address a wide range of mysterious occurrences across the world - the God factor.

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Coming back to the main point: it is shortsighted to dismiss Noah's legend as a hoax on the grounds that we didn't find remains of his boat. Really shortsighted.

[prehistorican]

I don't think it actually happened, maybe it was some sort of figurative metaphor of some sort. But you can't absolutely completely rule out anything, and if it did happen to be well designed enough, it would be more towards the plausible side of things. Also, when people first heard of incredible things (ex: other planets/stars than our owns, discovery of cells) they will not believe it, or at least have doubt. Same thing in our modern day and age, if it is too incredible humans tend to not believe it. 

[creature386]

The problem is not so much that the flood story is incredulous, rather that it fails Occam's razor.

[Life]

Research paper: Noah's Flood and the Associated Tremendous Rainfall as a Possible Result of Collision of a Big Asteroid with the Sun

Abstract

A good correlation between the growth rate of the cave speleothems and the annual precipitation at the cave site allow quantitative reconstruction of the precipitation. Measuring the growth rate of a speleothem from Duhlata Cave, Bulgaria we found that around 7500 B.P. the speleothem growth rate (averaged for 120 years) exceeds 53 times its recent value suggesting that enormous precipitation flooded the Black Sea basin at that time. Its possible connection with the Bible (Noahs) Flood is discussed. We propose a possible mechanism of the flooding of the Black Sea during the Flood involving production of a super- Tsunami by pushing of the Black Sea water towards the Crimea cost by Mediterranean waters. We propose also an Astronomical Theory of the origin of the Bible Flood. We attribute higher water evaporation and rainfall to be caused by rapid increasing of the solar radiation resulting from a collision of a large asteroid or comet with the Sun.

Citation: Shopov, Y. Y., Tsankov, L. T., Georgiev, L. N., Damyanov, Y., Damyanova, A., Ford, D. C., & Yonge, C. J. (2009). Noah's Flood and the Associated Tremendous Rainfall as a Possible Result of Collision of a Big Asteroid with the Sun. arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.1681.

LINK: arxiv.org/abs/0909.1681

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This paper was published in 1997 and I am surprised that it didn't receive much attention.

[Infinity Blade]

So, I was wondering exactly how many species would have to be on Noah's Ark, given how not all species are animals, and not all animals are unable to survive indefinitely underwater (though, of course, leaving out those that could raises whole other problems).

According to Grossberg et al. (2012), terrestrial environments account for 80% of all species. Table 1 provides the distribution of biodiversity among the three major realms of life (terrestrial, marine, and freshwater). So I did the math and added every terrestrial species of animal and got 25,054,400 species of terrestrial animal (terrestrial nematodes and arthropods account for the vast majority, 25 million, of those species), giving us more than 50 million beasts on the Ark. And I was trying to be as conservative as I possibly could, using the minimum bounds for any ranged estimates and just taking numbers at face value (e.g. the 10^6+ estimated species of terrestrial arthropod was just counted as 10^6). The only group I may have overestimated to any extent is the number of terrestrial amphibians and reptiles (including birds), which according to Grossberg et al. number less than 20,000 species*. Note too that I haven't considered whether or not any of the species they included in aquatic environments are still contingent upon land (read: can't survive indefinitely underwater) for survival.

What do you all think of this?

*Interestingly, their total number of species of amphibians and reptiles (including birds) is around 27,500. I think this is likely a significant underestimate. There are now a little over 10,000 described reptile species (link), currently over 8,000 species of amphibian (link), and a 2016 study suggests there may actually be a little over 18,000 species of bird as opposed to the often cited figures of 9,000 or 10,000 (Barrowclough et al., 2016), which would actually put that number at over 36,000 species. Corresponndingly, that probably suggests that the number of terrestrial species for these groups goes up.

Edit: I checked a more recent estimate in the scientific literature. Larsen et al. (2017) estimate a combined total of 163.2 million arthropod and nematode species (of course, they're not the only animals, but they doubt the rest of the animal kingdom would comprise much more than a million species). Going by the aforementioned distribution of species across land, freshwater, and the oceans, the majority of those will still be terrestrial.

sci-hub.tw/10.1086/693564

[creature386]

I have not checked your research, but it seems spot on.

What I'm more interested in are the assumptions between determining the species number. Specifically, two questions.
How many animals did Noah take on his Ark which are now extinct?
Created kinds or not, how many new species could have evolved since such an event?
When we assume he did not take two of each species, but rather two of each baramin, it of course becomes more difficult.

It is actually disputed if insects were on the Ark at all. Amusingly, Answers in Genesis claims most (even those not adapted to saltwater, I presume) of them could have survived the harsh conditions for a year on floating mats of vegetation:
answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/were-insects-on-the-ark/

[Life]

Apr 10, 2019 19:45:35 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

So, I was wondering exactly how many species would have to be on Noah's Ark, given how not all species are animals, and not all animals are unable to survive indefinitely underwater (though, of course, leaving out those that could raises whole other problems).

According to Grossberg et al. (2012), terrestrial environments account for 80% of all species. Table 1 provides the distribution of biodiversity among the three major realms of life (terrestrial, marine, and freshwater). So I did the math and added every terrestrial species of animal and got 25,054,400 species of terrestrial animal (terrestrial nematodes and arthropods account for the vast majority, 25 million, of those species), giving us more than 50 million beasts on the Ark. And I was trying to be as conservative as I possibly could, using the minimum bounds for any ranged estimates and just taking numbers at face value (e.g. the 10^6+ estimated species of terrestrial arthropod was just counted as 10^6). The only group I may have overestimated to any extent is the number of terrestrial amphibians and reptiles (including birds), which according to Grossberg et al. number less than 20,000 species*. Note too that I haven't considered whether or not any of the species they included in aquatic environments are still contingent upon land (read: can't survive indefinitely underwater) for survival.

What do you all think of this?

*Interestingly, their total number of species of amphibians and reptiles (including birds) is around 27,500. I think this is likely a significant underestimate. There are now a little over 10,000 described reptile species (link), currently over 8,000 species of amphibian (link), and a 2016 study suggests there may actually be a little over 18,000 species of bird as opposed to the often cited figures of 9,000 or 10,000 (Barrowclough et al., 2016), which would actually put that number at over 36,000 species. Corresponndingly, that probably suggests that the number of terrestrial species for these groups goes up.

Edit: I checked a more recent estimate in the scientific literature. Larsen et al. (2017) estimate a combined total of 163.2 million arthropod and nematode species (of course, they're not the only animals, but they doubt the rest of the animal kingdom would comprise much more than a million species). Going by the aforementioned distribution of species across land, freshwater, and the oceans, the majority of those will still be terrestrial.

sci-hub.tw/10.1086/693564

From where you getting the impression that Noah brought every type of organism onboard? Did he even need to? This is utterly absurd criticism.

So We inspired to him, "Construct the ship under Our observation, and Our inspiration, and when Our command comes and the oven overflows, put into the ship from each [creature] two mates and your family, except those for whom the decree [of destruction] has proceeded. And do not address Me concerning those who have wronged; indeed, they are to be drowned. - Holy Quran (23:27)

Noah only saved the organisms within his reach and capacity to handle. The term MATES indicate organisms which reproduce sexually - animals. Which animals to be precise? Not clear to anybody.

Biblical accounts are openly 'attributed' to JESUS - Prophet Isa (as) - but NOT his words exactly - these writings are from [other] individuals, and far from perfect. Nevertheless, Biblical accounts can be cross-checked with others to construct more refined themes for our understanding of numerous developments in history.

[Infinity Blade]

Apr 12, 2019 2:26:17 GMT 5 Life said:

Apr 10, 2019 19:45:35 GMT 5 Infinity Blade said:

So, I was wondering exactly how many species would have to be on Noah's Ark, given how not all species are animals, and not all animals are unable to survive indefinitely underwater (though, of course, leaving out those that could raises whole other problems).

According to Grossberg et al. (2012), terrestrial environments account for 80% of all species. Table 1 provides the distribution of biodiversity among the three major realms of life (terrestrial, marine, and freshwater). So I did the math and added every terrestrial species of animal and got 25,054,400 species of terrestrial animal (terrestrial nematodes and arthropods account for the vast majority, 25 million, of those species), giving us more than 50 million beasts on the Ark. And I was trying to be as conservative as I possibly could, using the minimum bounds for any ranged estimates and just taking numbers at face value (e.g. the 10^6+ estimated species of terrestrial arthropod was just counted as 10^6). The only group I may have overestimated to any extent is the number of terrestrial amphibians and reptiles (including birds), which according to Grossberg et al. number less than 20,000 species*. Note too that I haven't considered whether or not any of the species they included in aquatic environments are still contingent upon land (read: can't survive indefinitely underwater) for survival.

What do you all think of this?

*Interestingly, their total number of species of amphibians and reptiles (including birds) is around 27,500. I think this is likely a significant underestimate. There are now a little over 10,000 described reptile species (link), currently over 8,000 species of amphibian (link), and a 2016 study suggests there may actually be a little over 18,000 species of bird as opposed to the often cited figures of 9,000 or 10,000 (Barrowclough et al., 2016), which would actually put that number at over 36,000 species. Corresponndingly, that probably suggests that the number of terrestrial species for these groups goes up.

Edit: I checked a more recent estimate in the scientific literature. Larsen et al. (2017) estimate a combined total of 163.2 million arthropod and nematode species (of course, they're not the only animals, but they doubt the rest of the animal kingdom would comprise much more than a million species). Going by the aforementioned distribution of species across land, freshwater, and the oceans, the majority of those will still be terrestrial.

sci-hub.tw/10.1086/693564

From where you getting the impression that Noah brought every type of organism onboard? Did he even need to? This is utterly absurd criticism.

So We inspired to him, "Construct the ship under Our observation, and Our inspiration, and when Our command comes and the oven overflows, put into the ship from each [creature] two mates and your family, except those for whom the decree [of destruction] has proceeded. And do not address Me concerning those who have wronged; indeed, they are to be drowned. - Holy Quran (23:27)

Noah only saved the organisms within his reach and capacity to handle. The term MATES indicate organisms which reproduce sexually - animals. Which animals to be precise? Not clear to anybody.

Biblical accounts are openly 'attributed' to JESUS - Prophet Isa (as) - but NOT his words exactly - these writings are from [other] individuals, and far from perfect. Nevertheless, Biblical accounts can be cross-checked with others to construct more refined themes for our understanding of numerous developments in history.

I only added up all species of terrestrial animal, not literally every single type of organism.

Some animals indeed have the option to reproduce asexually, but then, if we omit any animal with such an option, even those that would be unable to survive the conditions outside of Noah's Ark, then I suppose that would leave them to cope with the flood.

[theropod]

Well well, I forgot we even had this thread.

Since most people who believe in a literal interpretation of the myth of Noah's ark are probably also young earth creationists who don't believe in evolution, the fact that without evolution (even if only within that vague, definitionless kind-thingy) there is no way all extant biodiversity could have descended from animals saved on a boat from a global flood is certainly a pertinent criticism. Nobody is saying nobody in prehistory ever built a boat and loaded it with supplies to escape a flood, heck perhaps even living biodiversity was on board. But a global flood within the time humans have been existing (as well as basically the entire phanerozoic) is simply a geological and biological impossibility.

On a side note, I'd be careful about those esrimates of total species numbers. How far the numbers diverge tells us something about reliability, the value can easily be off several-fold. Besides, biblical literalists would probably just deny the existence of any undiscovered species.
The number of species already known is easily high enough anyway to maks the biblical myth impossible without accepting what is essentially macroevolution (just at a crazy pace).