154 thoughts on “Noah

  1. Even without anteaters, how are there still ants? Need more than two to found a new colony after the ark reaches dry land.

  2. hotshoe_,

    Indeed. The story is full of flaws.

    When I first thought about it, as a child, the problem of not enough zookeepers for that many animals was enough to persuade me that it was just a story.

  3. I didn’t care about its veracity. I worried about those who would worship such a god.

  4. I’ve always wondered how the deciduous trees and the clams outran the velociraptors and out-flew the pterosaurs to higher ground as the waters rose.

  5. Noahs flood is the most documented historical claim across so many ancient peoples oral/written histories.
    Its sooooo unreasonable to deny common mankinds beliuef a flood wiped out everyone.
    Then modern research now admits to a sudden extinction of flora/fauna. They dream up space rocks and call it the k-t line but its a real thing.
    Its the great flood change in flora/fauna. Different dominaces before and after the flood.
    Then the whole fossilization of so much flora/fauna, below the k-t line, is so obvious from a great overpowering movement of sediment by water.
    Nothing in geology, biology, human history makes sense except with a flood event.
    Then the true word of god settles it.
    Noah was real and all humans come from him and hios wife.

  6. Robert Byers,

    That’s some quite distilled wrongness there. I think one sentence was true, “Then modern research now admits to a sudden extinction of flora/fauna.” – It actually shows it happened a few times, much longer ago than 6,000 years.

  7. Robert Byers,

    Nothing in geology, biology, human history makes sense except with a flood event.

    You couldn’t get much farther from the truth if you tried. Remove that word ‘except’ and you’d be bang on.

    If the K-T was the upper limit of the Flood, why would the sedimentary pattern both above and below be the same? Would we really expect Flood waters and post-Flood-something-else to produce exactly the same result?

    Why are there at least 5 other discontinuities of similar extinction pattern below it – 5 Floods?

    If animals from below the K-T went on to the Ark, why are they ALL extinct? One would expect to find at least one example of ‘bear kind’, ‘cat kind’, ‘cattle kind’ etc below the K-T – or a house brick, or a boot … something. As far as mammals are concerned, it’s mainly ‘shrew kind’ or ‘platypus kind’.

  8. How did the Ark avoid being sunk by the weight of the birds and pterosaurs, to which it represented the sole perch on the planet?

  9. petrushka:
    I didn’t care about its veracity. I worried about those who would worship such a god.

    That’s what my son said (age about four, maybe less). It’s a favorite story for children because of the animals. I don’t know why the writers of Bible Stories For Children would think that a story about God drowning all except one family would be suitable for children.

    My son was horrified.

    He was also horrified by what happened to the Egyptians when the Red Sea rolled back. He said: “it wasn’t THEIR fault, Mum, was it?”

    He thought God was mean.

    At the time, his view was that the bible must simply be wrong about what God was like He later concluded that there was no reason to think that even a non-mean God existed.

  10. Despite having been a believer into my early twenties, I’m also rather proud to say that my very first response when my mother started telling me about god when I was 4 or 5 years old, was to ask where god was? Then she had to try to and explain to me that god was everywhere, but invisible. The thing instantly lost some credibility with me (how the hell could she then know that he was everywhere?) and I’ve always had doubts about it beginning with that ludicrous proposition.

  11. Robert Byers:
    Noahs flood is the most documented historical claim across so many ancient peoples oral/written histories.

    Flood myths among ancient cultures are ubiquitous on account of almost all ancient cultures having built settlements near water or experienced heavy rain.

    Legends of volcanoes erupting are also found all over the world, but no rational human being would interpret this to mean there was once a single massive eruption that spawned all volcano myths.

  12. fmm,
    Perhaps if you wrote out the flood section from the Bible but re-written in a way that it’s meaning is then plain perhaps that would clarify matters?

    I.E. what did “land” actually mean if not the world?

  13. One of my favourite books as a kid was based upon the Noah story. Great to read tucked up in bed with the rain clattering the windows. The massive amounts of death and destruction, the floating corpses everywhere … they were all kind of glossed over.

  14. I heard that theres evidence that the Flood legend comes from the filling of the Black Sea about 7000 years ago.
    The Black Sea was originally a small freshwater lake, and then water broke through the Bosporus from the Mediterranean.
    I know Robert Ballard has found the remains of settlements hundreds of feet below sea level in the BS

  15. If one interprets the Flood in terms of ancient Israelite cosmology, the Flood is not just a lot of rain but the unmaking of Creation.

    If one reads Genesis 1 carefully (and preferably in Hebrew or in an English translation straight from Hebrew and uncorrupted by Christian bias), one can see that what God does when He creates is he creates light and separates the lower waters from the upper waters, and the create of light. (For in the beginning all was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.) The narrative of Genesis 1 is not creation ex nihilo — a concept that would have been unintelligible to the Biblical authors — but the transition from chaos to order, just as we find in the creation myths of other ancient near eastern civilizations.

    Since the habitable world is pictured as suspended between two waters — the upper waters beyond the sky and the lower waters, of which the seas and rivers are the visible portion — the unmaking of the world then takes place as the unmaking of the boundary between them, i.e the sky. And hence the rain, and the Flood.

    Like much of the Hebrew Bible, it helps to understand the story in light of the world-view of ancient Israelite civilization, esp. their cosmology.

    Whether the Flood has any basis in fact is besides the point — even if it does, it takes on mythical significance in light of the Israelite worldview. Without that, it’s just something that happened, and not something that deserves to be incorporated into a religious text.

    It also should be emphasized that the unmaking of creation is occasioned by God’s disappointment in our propensity for violence and hate. He is, it seems, so disappointed that He decides to unmake creation and start over — an act that He comes to regret.

    (As many have pointed out, the God of the Hebrew Bible is not a mere abstraction like the Unmoved Mover but a fascinating literary character, and one who has to learn how to be in relation with humanity. Hence He is clearly not omniscient, since an omniscience being cannot learn anything, by definition.)

  16. To me, the initial response and questions from children when told about the Noah story speaks volumes (sorry for stealing your word KF) about the veracity of the story. The initial response by young children is disbelief. They often see the most obvious flaws in the narrative. But it takes adults, people that they have been told by their parents to trust, to convince them that they should ignore the obvious and believe it anyway.

  17. Kantian Naturalist: the God of the Hebrew Bible is not a mere abstraction like the Unmoved Mover but a fascinating literary character, and one who has to learn how to be in relation with humanity.

    And as you have pointed out, the god of the hebrew Bible is just a bigger, badder version of Jove, having all the quirks and flaws of the Greek gods.

    Taking this seriously would be comic if people were not killed and imprisoned or persecuted by believers.

  18. petrushka: And as you have pointed out, the god of the hebrew Bible is just a bigger, badder version of Jove, having all the quirks and flaws of the Greek gods.

    Though YHWH, unlike Zeus, isn’t a serial rapist, so . . . win?

    More to the point, one could think, as indeed liberal Christians and Jews do, that Scripture is the written expression of the encounter with the divine presence as it was refracted through the world-view of the ancient Israelites (for the Old Testament) and Hellenized Jews (for the New Testament). Its value lies in teaching us how to experience that presence for ourselves, should we be temperamentally inclined to do so, and that experience will be for us also refracted through our worldviews.

    My point, then, is that one can take the Bible seriously without taking it literally — just as one can learn considerable wisdom from reading, say, the Illiad or the Republic. (And understanding the Republic as, among many other things, a critique of the Illiad will help one understand one dimension of why the Gospels are so different from Genesis.)

    This is not say that anyone is under any obligation to take the Bible seriously — but rather to point out that Biblical literalists do not have a monopoly on Biblical interpretation. Quite frankly I think that literalism stands in the way of learning anything of genuine spiritual significance from reading Scripture or any other religious text.

  19. Kantian Naturalist: Though YHWH, unlike Zeus, isn’t a serial rapist, so . . . win?

    I don’t recall anyone asking Mary for consent. But I suppose gods are allowed one rape, as long as they learn something from it.

    I do not blame theology for the troubles of the world, but I do think theology and ideology have been harnessed to rationalize a couple of millennia of rape and pillage and war and oppression.

    Take away the hocus pocus, and raw savagery is a bit less palatable.

    I will probably be laughed at, but I think the modern teachers of morality are folks like Miyazaki, Disney, the folks at Pixar. These are the people influencing children, and they are secular. They isolate things like bullying and injustice without all the god baggage.

    I personally think that Jehovah is an obstacle to mystical religion. It takes quite a bit of imagination and denial to make a creator out of a bumbling and clueless warrior god.

  20. petrushka: I will probably be laughed at, but I think the modern teachers of morality are folks like Miyazaki, Disney, the folks at Pixar. These are the people influencing children, and they are secular. They isolate things like bullying and injustice without all the god baggage.

    I agree. My son’s all time favorite movie is Up. He says it taught him a lot of things (and touched him because he and his grandfather were very close when he was small).

  21. I think that popular culture reflects as well as shapes our predilections. By and large, we want heroes to triumph and villains to suffer. We want to see kindness rewarded and cruelty punished in the fictional world, even if it is not in the real one. It’s our nature.

  22. Children’s movies and literature reflects pop culture, but they actually shape children’s thoughts and feelings. They do what Sunday school dreams of doing.

  23. Richardthughes:
    Robert Byers,

    That’s some quite distilled wrongness there. I think one sentence was true, “Then modern research now admits to a sudden extinction of flora/fauna.” – It actually shows it happened a few times, much longer ago than 6,000 years.

    Baby steps to truth.
    First the sudden change, and so extinction revealed, and then the weird sudden cause.
    it didn’t happen a few times. its a misinterpretation of deposition events. It did happen 4500 years ago.
    the k-t line is one of thye best things to come along for yec.
    Baby steps to truth.

  24. Allan Miller:
    Robert Byers,

    You couldn’t get much farther from the truth if you tried. Remove that word ‘except’ and you’d be bang on.

    If the K-T was the upper limit of the Flood, why would the sedimentary pattern both above and below be the same? Would we really expect Flood waters and post-Flood-something-else to produce exactly the same result?

    Why are there at least 5 other discontinuities of similar extinction pattern below it – 5 Floods?

    If animals from below the K-T went on to the Ark, why are they ALL extinct? One would expect to find at least one example of ‘bear kind’, ‘cat kind’, ‘cattle kind’ etc below the K-T – or a house brick, or a boot … something. As far as mammals are concerned, it’s mainly ‘shrew kind’ or ‘platypus kind’.

    Above the k-t line most sedimentary deposits are from volcanoes. the rest special cases in limited areas. its not general over the dry land.
    below the k-t line 75% of dry land has sedimentary deposits and rest is volcanic upheavel areas. That knocked it off or prevented sed deposition.
    It works very well just looking at the geology.

    below the k-t line its just deposition layers. Its a error to think they are separate.

    The bible is clear there was a 7:2 clean/unclean ratio on the ark. So its a option to expect it was before the flood the opposite ratio. So dino were unclean etc etc.
    It works.
    The clean could not live withy the unclean as too violoent. so probably segregated with the people. Also few creatures would look like the “mammals” we have today,
    It works.

  25. TristanM: Flood myths among ancient cultures are ubiquitous on account of almost all ancient cultures having built settlements near water or experienced heavy rain.

    Legends of volcanoes erupting are also found all over the world, but no rational human being would interpret this to mean there was once a single massive eruption that spawned all volcano myths.

    HEAVY RAIN!! Floodplains? The people of the past knew the land and were never drowned out by overflowing water. not that dumb.
    its unreasonable to say all the people groups drew the same conclusion of a unique flood killing all. Its against probability odds.
    There was few volcano stories across mankind.
    If there was a flood it would be just as it is now found in the old ones oral/written works.
    If they could find a ancient people with no flood story they would go AHA. Why not them if there was this flood memory?
    Good point. Yet all have the memory. A better point.

  26. Robert Byers: its unreasonable to say all the people groups drew the same conclusion of a unique flood killing all. Its against probability odds.

    These people that drew these conclusions, who where they and how many of them were there and when did they live?

  27. Robert Byers,

    Above the k-t line most sedimentary deposits are from volcanoes.

    Are they hell as like!

    its not general over the dry land.

    Of course not. I’m not suggesting you get much sedimentary deposit on dry land.

    below the k-t line 75% of dry land has sedimentary deposits and rest is volcanic upheavel areas.

    How do you determine where the ‘dry land’ ends and the overlaying sedimentary deposit begins?

    below the k-t line its just deposition layers. Its a error to think they are separate.

    You are the one saying they are separate, not me. You account for the entirety of the below-k-t sedimentary column (including its stratification) as the result of the Flood. The exact same stratification and sedimentation above the k-t cannot be due to the Flood. If you are placing your marker at the k-t, you are invoking separate processes to explain the same thing – an apparent serial deposition over many years, one global and catastrophic, the other multiply local but equally catastrophic.

    The bible is clear there was a 7:2 clean/unclean ratio on the ark. So its a option to expect it was before the flood the opposite ratio. So dino were unclean etc etc.

    It works.
    The clean could not live withy the unclean as too violoent. so probably segregated with the people. Also few creatures would look like the “mammals” we have today,
    It works.

    Yeah, keep repeating that mantra. It works, it works, it works … no, it does not.

    Who says the clean and unclean could not get along? Are they notably in conflict today? Why would ‘clean’ animals segregate with people? Where are their remains, clean or unclean? Should we not find at least one fossil of a human at or below the k-t?

  28. Robert Byers,

    it didn’t happen a few times. its a misinterpretation of deposition events. It did happen 4500 years ago.
    the k-t line is one of thye best things to come along for yec.

    ‘fraid not. The pattern at every discontinuity, including the K-T, is the same. The K-T has no special position among these discontinuities. There is a sudden and widespread change in fauna and flora above and below at every single one.

  29. Robert Byers: HEAVY RAIN!! Floodplains? The people of the past knew the land and were never drowned out by overflowing water. not that dumb.

    They were also story tellers. You have to be a confused YEC to not recognize that it is a story.

  30. We do know that no one in the history of the world has ever been killed by a flood, except perhaps by The Flood.

  31. petrushka:
    We do know that no one in the history of the world has ever been killed by a flood, except perhaps by The Flood.

    You mean floods not associated with windstorms?

  32. KN said:

    Quite frankly I think that literalism stands in the way of learning anything of genuine spiritual significance from reading Scripture or any other religious text.

    One wonders what is of “genuine spiritual significance” to any atheist/naturalist?

  33. William J. Murray: One wonders what is of “genuine spiritual significance” to any atheist/naturalist?

    I wouldn’t know — I’m neither an atheist nor a naturalist.

    More precisely, I’m a humanist (with qualifications) and a secularist (with qualifications). But I don’t consider myself an atheist, because I think that atheists and theists make the same mistake: they both misunderstand the pragmatic force and semantic content of religious vocabulary because they treat it as a kind of assertoric vocabulary instead of as a kind of disclosive vocabulary.

    And I’m not a naturalist, actually. Though I do think that scientific methods for arriving at empirical knowledge are more reliable than non-scientific methods, and I’m skeptical of the idea that phenomenology is a source of knowledge comparable to empirical explanation, I do not think that either metaphysical naturalism or methodological naturalism is ultimately defensible. And I say that as someone who has been thinking about these issues consistently for the past ten years. This is a not a trivial, off-the-cuff remark on my part.

  34. Kantian Naturalist,

    But I don’t consider myself an atheist, because I think that atheists and theists make the same mistake: they both misunderstand the pragmatic force and semantic content of religious vocabulary because they treat it as a kind of assertoric vocabulary instead of as a kind of disclosive vocabulary.

    😉

  35. Fifthmonarchyman sez:

    Where did you get the idea there was a boat involved? The text says ark. There is a huge difference between an ark and a boat and understanding the difference is important in understanding the story

    Any idea what that nonsense is about?

    I’ve heard pretty much every stupid claim christians can make about what their bible “really” means, and all the different ways they contradict each other about it. But I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard anything as crazy as “ark not a boat”.

    Anyone else heard this one before?

  36. It was made of wood, floated, contained animals and people and eventually settled on a mountaintop…

  37. hotshoe_:
    Fifthmonarchyman sez:

    Any idea what that nonsense is about?

    I’ve heard pretty much every stupid claim christians can make about what their bible “really” means, and all the different ways they contradict each other about it.But I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard anything as crazy as “ark not a boat”.

    Anyone else heard this one before?

    No, I don’t think I have, and it’s particularly inept scholarship. Tevah is the word used, and it is only used in one other place, for the little “ark” that Moses was put into on the Nile. Aron is the word used for the ark of the covenant. To be sure, tevah may stem from an Egyptian word meaning “chest” or “coffin,” however it’s certainly a long stretch from the likely etymology of a little-used word (the root means about the same as “vessel” anyhow, a common word used for a boat) to claiming that “boat” is somehow wrong for a floating refuge.

    I was just using the term loosely anyhow, but Fifth certainly is trying to make a literalistic claim that it’s just entirely wrong to write “boat” for it, when there’s nothing to justify such a claim.

    Glen Davidson

  38. hotshoe_,

    ‘Huge difference’—-like the difference between ‘erets’ and ‘erets’ depending on the result one is looking for in any particular passage. I’m guessing ‘ark’ here means something like ‘seaworthy vessel built exactly large enough to house and sustain one Hebrew family plus all the local animals and vegetables for as long as necessary to make the Old Testament true.’

  39. Mung:
    Glad to see “The Skeptical Zone” turning into “The Bible Scholarship Zone.”

    Well it’s way more fun than actual research or thinking. Easy too. I think I could be pretty good at it. What’s it pay?

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