I have some questions about the "Local Flood" of Noah

This is all categorically false. We do have patterns of evidence, and features we observe in reality do point to the Flood. Just as Peter said, this evidence is being deliberately ignored. It has everything to do with “scoffers” after all.

I should add, also, that the topic of this thread is answers to my questions about the ‘local flood’ idea, not a debate about scientific evidence for the global Flood.

Well that is the problem. It is great to be a Pauline purity as to literalism, and it works if you take the stance of the Bible says it…and you know the rest. But the world is obstinate in disregarding your systematic theology, and refuses to yield a reality consistent with your belief.

There is no evidence of a global flood which submerged the entire geography of the planet. There is indeed evidence, massive and pervasive; but the evidence tells a story of continuity from the present to the deep past. It also includes the story of ice ages, catastrophic impacts, volcanism, drastic climate changes, extinctions, continental collisions, and much terrestrial drama - it is not a simple story of uniformitarianism. The flood narrative is not just itself bereft of evidence, but invalidated by a coherent conciliant mountain of evidence which, in detail, tells a very different and conflicting account.

Against this, professional apologists as yourself generate a geyser of outlandish reinterpretations. For every feature of nature which unveils the earth’s history, there is an article to which you can link with some ad hoc, inconstant, refutation based on the premise of a global flood about 2472 BC. This is an exercise in fictitious world building, is incontrovertibly falsified by geology, and in fact, by eyewitness history.

I cannot help what people believe, and as far as I am concerned, if they are happy, I am fine with that. It is when truth systematically comes under attack that I feel compelled to speak up. I would love to not have to choose between the historic literalistic interpretation of Genesis and truth, but like it or not, we all do.

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No, you don’t. At best you have ad hoc excuses for some individual features but no one consilient explanation for all the observed geologic, fossil, and genetic evidence. Some physical evidence you flat out refuse to address like angular unconformities which are physically impossible to form in a one year one time flood. But that’s OK. You’ve made it clear the physical scientific evidence means nothing to you when it comes to knee-jerk defending your literal Genesis beliefs.

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Well I’m sorry, but before you can claim to have patterns of evidence, you must first make sure that your evidence, together with the interpretations that you give it, meet the same standards of rigour and quality control as everybody else. It’s one thing to be scoffed at for being a Christian. It’s a completely different matter if you are being “scoffed at” for cutting corners, fudging measurements, subverting peer review, quote mining, cherry-picking data, exaggerating, or making things up.

When I look at young earth “evidences,” I do not see anything that I can remotely identify as any form of meaningful quality control. I see tiny samples with huge error bars paraded as “overwhelming” evidence for science fiction scenarios such as billion-fold accelerated nuclear decay on a scale which, by your own scientists’ admission, would have vaporised the Earth’s crust many times over if it had actually happened. I see discrepancies in conventional dating methods blown up out of all proportion, with errors of just a few percent being paraded as evidence that all dating methods are consistently out by factors of a million. And then I see any attempt to push back and ask for better standards being denounced as “compromise” or “anticreationism” or “speaking with the voice of the serpent” or the like.

That is the problem that I have with young-earth “creation science.” It doesn’t just encourage us as Christians to lower our standards in how we approach science; it demands it – at times, even to the extent of denouncing a failure to do so as tantamount to atheism. Not only that, the standards that it demands that we adopt are so low that if we were to apply them in our workplaces, we would drive our employers out of business altogether and quite possibly even kill people in the process. That is, if we weren’t fired and sued out of our insurances for gross professional misconduct first.

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You snipped the explanation:

“Evolutionist” geologists are deliberately suppressing knowledge of the flood. It’s a worldwide conspiracy. Isn’t that clear?

No they don’t.

What they deliberately overlook are claims that purport to be evidence but that do not meet the necessary standards of rigour and quality control needed to qualify as evidence. More specifically, they overlook claims that do not obey the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest weights and measures. And they should deliberately overlook such claims, because that is what the Bible itself demands. For example in Deuteronomy 25:13-16:

¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

As I said, tiny samples with huge error bars are not evidence for absurd new laws of fantasy physics (e.g. billion fold accelerated nuclear decay) that would have vaporised the Earth if they had any basis in reality. And a minority of discrepancies of a few percent are not evidence that hundreds of thousands of other measurements are consistently out by a factor of a million. These are general rules of accurate and honest weights and measures that apply to every area of science, whether “operational” or “historical.”

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Eddie and Paul Price on the Bible and Theology

Some consider the Persian Gulf area, prior to about 10,000 BC when the ice age ended and sea level rose, to be that candidate basin. For what it’s worth, ff you utilize Google Earth and navigate to an oil platform out in the midst of the Persian Gulf you can drop the Street View and have a look around. The air is not perfectly clear so all you can see is water everywhere (some other ships), the oil platform, and haze in the distance. Make of this what you will.

Well, to name one obvious problem among many, that doesn’t come close to fitting with the biblical timeline of the Flood.

It doesn’t fit the description of the flood either. It’s similar in that way to various other claimed great floods, such as the filling of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Would you like to put forward and defend your interpretation of what you think Scripture describes pertaining to the flood? Show that you have an understanding of the language and the culture in which the flood narrative was delivered and why your interpretation should be considered.

Well, you are a young earth creationist, so you don’t accepts dating methodologies. Just think of the flood occurring at the end of the last ice age, whenever that was in your mind. The sea level rose up to 400 feet at that time creating an environment in which the Flood could have occurred.

That said, if you reject the concept of a regional flood, then it doesn’t really matter what data is presented, does it?

The ark landed on top of a mountain, and the land slowly appeared below him as the waters receded. The text is quite clear on that point. Do you disagree?

Hi John, thanks for sharing and for asking. I may see it a little differently - you can tell me if it amounts to a disagreement.

Genesis 8:4 says “…the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.” ESV

The Hebrew for mountain is “har” and its definition is provided in Strongs #02022 as “a mountain or range of hills, hill (country) or mountain” and in Brown-Drivers-Briggs as “hill, mountain, hill country, mount”.

It is also used in the plural “mountains”. It would take a pretty big ark to rest on the tippy tops of multiple mountains at the same time.

The word Ararat is Strongs #0780 referring to Armenia, or as listed in Brown-Drivers-Briggs as “a mountainous region of eastern Armenia, between the river Araxes and the lakes Van and Oroomiah, the site where Noah’s ark came to rest.”

So as the waters receded the ark came to rest somewhere in the foot hills or hill country in a mountainous region. It seems hard to claim that the Bible specifically says how high on the mountains it landed.

Next the Bible says v5 “and the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month on the first day of the month the tops of the mountains were seen.”

Here again, we have these mountains to deal with. If these are foothills, then it means the tops of the foothills. So the ark may have come to rest on a hill top that is still covered in water, as are the surrounding hill tops. It takes a long time for the water to recede to the point where a lot of little islands (other hill tops) poke out of the receding water.

Due to the curvature of the Earth and a totally unknown visibility factor that Noah may have faced, I really can’t make definitive statements about how far Noah could see in any direction. So when it says the “tops of the mountains were seen” I don’t necessarily know how far Noah could see.

So yes, the ark came to rest “on top of a mountain”, but only in the sense of being in agreement with the Biblical vocabulary that describes the ark resting “on the mountains of” - therefore implying at the top of a hill/mount that was taller than nearby hills/mounts in a hilly/mountainous area where more distant, and possibly even taller, peaks may have been out of sight.

To go beyond that would be to go beyond Scripture, in my opinion. What do you think? Is this different than your take?

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Let’s see what the text really says happened:

And the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.

No, this clearly does not mean that we were dealing with the “tops of the foothills”. Whatever that’s supposed to indicate.

No, not possible, since no land was visible. The ark had to be on the highest point within sight.

Yes, and perhaps Noah was extremely near-sighted, and had broken his glasses at the start of the flood, so he could only see things right in front of his nose. He could have been sitting on top of a little hill only 20 feet high, with a higher hill only a short walk away. Who’s to say? This makes the text absurd. Was that your intention?

I think you have destroyed Genesis in order to save it. And of course even if we accept that Noah was on a foothill, that’s still to much altitude for any real flood. Even 1000 feet would be too much. Are you trying to get down to a 30-foot flood, or what?

Biblical scholars work from the Hebrew text and not English translations. What @William_Rogers wrote will sail right over the heads of those who don’t understand why careful exegesis is necessary.

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Happy to sit back at this point and watch the 3-way dingdong between (1) those who think there was no flood at all, (2) those who think there was a local flood and (3) those who think there was a global flood.

Group (2), in particular, takes furious fire from two directions. :wink:

I want to start (4) those who believe there was a universal flood, on every planet ‘under heaven’.

And deservedly so. It’s contradicted by both scripture and science.

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You make me smile, John. Mr. Magoo Noah. :persevere: I didn’t really consider near-sightedness because there were 8 potential observers in the story. Also, even the dove could not find land at first.

There are two primary factors affecting visibility, one on a large scale and on on a nearer scale.

  1. curvature of the earth: David Senesac Visual Line of Sight Calculations dependent on Earth's Curvature

For example, even a 14,000 foot tall mountain can only be seen for 146 miles under ideal conditions. The tallest mountain in Armenia is Mount Aragats at 13,420 ft and it is about 180 miles from the Black Sea which is one of the possible locations of the Flood we are talking about. So on a large scale, there is still a horizon that factors in. The Black Sea itself is 730 miles long and quite wide so there are locations within that basin that would not be able to even to the edges of it.

  1. haze or air quality: this factor can limit visibility considerably and makes it virtually impossible to say how far one could see from the ark, be it Noah or one of his family. There are two factors in the text of the story to consider. One is the rainbow mentioned in 9:14. The implication is that this was the first rainbow seen since before the flood started (or ever according to some YEC). You need sun, rain, and some clarity of the air to get a rainbow, so at least one of those factors was missing, which could imply clouds or haze, both of which limit how far one can see. Now it could be that there was no rain and no clouds, so one can also consider the other factor in the text which is wind in 8:1. A drying wind can bring dust and produce high humidity and the combination of these factors limits visual range.

However you conceive of the flood story occurring, there are some limits to what an eye-witness to the events could report regarding those events.

Where do you think the ark landed? How far do you think Noah could see?

It doesn’t matter how far he could see as long as the “mountain” he lands on is the highest land for some distance (a few miles would be enough) and it was at an altitude of thousands, or even hundreds, of feet. There’s no way a local flood could reach that high and for a period of months at that. You seem to be envisioning a huge bubble of water a thousand feet high. But what’s happening at the edges of this bubble to keep it from collapsing quickly? Think. There is no scenario for such a thing unless you want to invoke a miracle holding up a giant wall of water.

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