From: kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu (Dr Nancy's Sweetie)
Subject: Noah's Ark Apologetics (was Laura questions)
Summary: Do any of you people own calculators?
Keywords: flood, water, rain, amounts, mountains, stories, fables, `Woof!'
Organization: Glassboro State College (But Not For Long!)
Disclaimer: Brandy the WonderDog likes the idea of being on a boat full of
            soft, chewy, tasty animals.  It's a good thing he wasn't there.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 16:53:05 GMT


There have been way too many articles about Noah's Ark lately, and I think
the people posting them are not thinking clearly about what they are saying.

If we take the story (found in Genesis 6-9) as exactly literally true, and we
use Mt Everest as our highest mountain, that means that 29,000 feet of rain
fell in 40 days -- over 30 feet of rain *per hour*.% This is enough to destroy
virtually anything.  We can postulate an extra miracle to explain how the ark
survived, but how do we explain other man-made artifacts?  How did the
Egyptian pyramids, or all the topsoil on the mountains, survive?  Do we
suppose that God preserved all of that stuff he was trying to destory, and
the artifacts of people he thought were irredeemably sinful?
 --
% For scale, the wettest place on earth is Mt Waialeale, Hawaii, which gets
  only 38 feet of rain per YEAR.
 --

Faced with problems like this, some people "shrink" the flood.  They say that
it only covered all the mountains the Noah knew of, not all the mountains on
earth.  All right, let's use Mt Ararat at 17,000 feet -- it still had to have
rained at over 17 feet per hour, which is still enough to pulverise virtually
anything.  Well, we say, maybe it only half-covered Mt Ararat; that's where
the ark landed, after all.

Those who have been observant will have noticed by now that for every thousand
feet of rain in 40 days, you need over a foot of rain per hour.  (Since
40 days * 24 hours = 960 hours.)  Half of Mt Ararat requires 8 feet per hour,
which might leave you part of a pyramid but will still remove all the topsoil
from Mt Ararat itself, not to mention every other place you can think of.


If we keep down this trail, shrinking the flood as needed to fit the evidence
available to us (the ice cores drilled out of the poles, the pyramids which
still exist, the cultural records which show no sudden disappearance of people
at one time, and so on), we'll eventually end up reducing the story so much
that it isn't interesting.  Noah built the ark and a big rain washed him out
into the Mediterranean; he couldn't see any mountains so he assumed the whole
world was flooded, and when he came to rest near the Taurus mountains in
Turkey he assumed that the water had dried up.  By this point, we've made the
details in the Bible so inaccurate that there's no reason to believe he really
had that many animals, or that he'd built an ark so big.  In sum, we've taken
everything miraculous out of the story!  You don't need a miracle to get a
major storm to wash you out to sea, and you don't need a miracle to get a few
dozen animals into a boat.

 --

The Bible gives us the story of Noah without much commentary; there is no
"this is a true story, the names have been changed to protect the innocent"
appended, and there is no "this is a parable told by Aaron".  The story is
just there.

There is some scientific evidence which calls the details of the story into
doubt.  Some people respond by concluding that the story is a fable, and that
earlier assumptions of its literal truth were a mistake on the part of the
human interpreters.  Many similar mistakes have been made -- people used to
claim the sun went around the earth based on Psalm 104:5, using poetry as if
it were expository text.

Some people, however, respond by continuing to believe the story is exactly
correct -- there is evidence against it, but eventually we may find evidence
FOR it.  As for the pyramids and so on, we don't know how they survived but
we'll figure it out.  (Some people respond to the pyramids by pushing the
flood farther and farther back in time -- which results in similar
disparagement of Biblical accuracy.)  They believe there was a flood by faith,
and that's all they need.


So far as I'm concerned, I leave both of those groups to themselves; I don't
think it does any damage to the Bible to have it include unlabled# fables,
nor can I really complain about someone who isn't interested in the latest
scientific theories -- scientific theories change a lot.
 --
# This is a variant spelling of `unlabelled'; I'm the one who varied it.
 --

What I can't fathom (pun intended) is the approach which tries to preserve the
literal accuracy of the Bible by rewriting it to fit whatever scientific data
we have on hand.  Firstly because this take God out of the story, since it
tries to make a purported miracle seem non-miraculous.  (Who cares about some
guy who made a boat, got lost at sea, washed up later and thought he'd
survived a planetary flood?)  But also it takes the supposedly reliable Bible
texts and rewrites, revises, or discards them as needed.  Why defend the
Bible's accuracy by discarding most of the details from any story that gives
a few problems?

[ There is an alternative approach, which is to claim that the scientific
  data supports the Bible's account of the Flood.  Usually this relies on some
  scientifically illiterate assertions, or even intellectual dishonesty.  Any
  attempt along these lines to reconcile the Scriptures with scientific data
  must, in my view, proceed along painstakingly careful lines with thorough
  research.  If your beliefs are The Truth, then there is no need to be either
  sloppy or inaccurate in defending them. ]


Darren F Provine / kilroy@gboro.glassboro.edu
"The Hebrews were not the greatest sailors.  There's only one boat mentioned
 in the Old Testament, and it ran aground.  In a planetary flood."
                                                               -- David Joyce
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA