[Carrie]

This entire forum seems to be dedicated to debating whether things are true or not www.investigatemagazine.com

Check out this post about the great flood I found there
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/_IDdisc...c2/0000012a.htm

Skeptics have tended to focus on several points they believe show the flood story is bogus: chief among them, where did all the water come from and how could Noah have collected all the animals and saved them?

To tackle the water question first, there are some scholars who interpret the ancient Hebrew to mean that the Flood was localised, that it affected the known world at the time, which was the Middle East-Mediterranean area.

There is certainly scientific and archaeological evidence of major cataclysmic events in the past in that area that do substantiate the possibility of a regional flood. In fact the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic has led a National Geographic expedition and found entire villages hundreds of feet underwater on the bottom of the Black Sea. National Geographic magazine has itself postulated that this could be related to Noah’s flood.

Then there’s the Mediterranean Sea. We know that at some point in the past ten thousand years, the Atlantic ocean broke its banks at Gibraltar and poured into the ancient valley system that we now know as the Mediterranean. We also know, courtesy of archaeology and more recently the movie The English Patient, that ancient caves deep in the Sahara Desert contain cave paintings of people desperately swimming.

So there’s plenty of supporting evidence for the theory of a massive regional flood in the area.

But that isn’t the only possibility.

Quite apart from the Bible, stories of a massive flood, and a hero who built a boat and saved the human race, can be found in cultures right around the world. Not only are similar stories told by the Babylonians, the Sumerians and the Greeks, but the Hindu people in India have a similar legend starring a man named Manu, rather than Noah.

To the Chinese, he is Fah-he, and to the Aztecs and other Indian tribes of Mexico he is known by a range of names, the easiest to pronounce being Tezpi.

Likewise the American Indian tribes record a flood that covered the world and a hero with a boat, Manabozho, while closer to our part of the world Noah is remembered as Nu-u to the Hawaiian Maori people...and of course New Zealand has the story of Maui fishing the land up out of the sea.

Yeah but, I hear some people saying...every culture has probably experienced seasonal floods and that’s where these legends are traced from.

Not so fast. Let me read you this summary of the Mexican legends.

"The most important among the American traditions are the Mexican, for they appear to have been definitively fixed by symbolic and mnemonic paintings before any contact with Europeans. According to these documents, the Noah of the Mexican cataclysm was Coxcox, called by certain peoples Teocipactli or Tezpi. He had saved himself, together with his wife Xochiquetzal, in a bark, or, according to other traditions, on a raft made of cypress-wood (Cupressus disticha). Paintings retracing the deluge of Coxcox have been discovered among the Aztecs, Miztecs, Zapotecs, Tlascaltecs, and Mechoacaneses. The tradition of the latter is still more strikingly in conformity with the story as we have it in Genesis, and in Chaldean sources. It tells how Tezpi embarked in a spacious vessel with his wife, his children, and several animals, and grain, whose preservation was essential to the subsistence of the human race. When the great god Tezcatlipoca decreed that the waters should retire, Tezpi sent a vulture from the bark. The bird, feeding on the carcasses with which the earth was laden, did not return. Tezpi sent out other birds, of which the humming-bird only came back with a leafy branch in its beak. Then Tezpi, seeing that the country began to vegetate, left his bark on the mountain of Colhuacan.”

If you want to read some of these ancient flood stories from other cultures yourself, simply enter the words Noah and Tezpi into the google search engine on the internet.

Don’t even get me started on the lost civilisation of Atlantis, which is another piece in the flood legend jigsaw.

Some geologists do argue that there is evidence of a worldwide flood, and point to massive volcanic and seismic changes during the Cenozoic era as evidence of tectonic movement caused by the weight of the water involved.

Which brings me to the question of where did all the water come from? Firstly, if you’re dealing with a supernatural God who created the universe in literally a split second...snapping his fingers again to flood the planet is a much smaller issue.

In Genesis, chapter seven says God did two things...first...he made it rain for forty days non stop. But it also says he opened the floodgates of the great springs of the deep oceans. That reference alone is surprising, because scientists have only confirmed in the last hundred years that the oceans are indeed fed by “great springs of the deep”. Another example there of the Bible being 3000 years ahead of science.

To flood the entire planet, enough water had to be produced to cover the top of Mt Everest, which is a little under six miles high. It sounds like a lot of water, and it is, but think on this for a moment. The Earth is actually eight thousand miles in diameter, so raising the oceans to a total depth of twelve miles is still very minor in comparison with the overall volume and capacity of the earth...it’s akin to having water only half a centimetre deep in the bottom of your bath...and doubling it to one centimeter deep. Big deal.

To my way of thinking, ignoring all the similar Noah’s flood stories from around the world, as the skeptics try to do, is virtually burying your head in the sand in denial. If no major Flood ever happened, why of dozens of cultures have stories about it...and a Noah-like character with a boat and animals.

Ok, now for the second part of the listener’s question...how could Noah save all the animals and are we really to believe the kiwi migrated to NZ from the mountains of Turkey?

Scientists have estimated, based on the measurements in the Bible, that Noah’s Ark had a storage capacity equivalent to a train hauling two thousand cattle wagons...each wagon capable of carrying 20 cows or up to 100 sheep. So in rough terms, the Ark could hold 40,000 cows or 200,000 sheep.

At the present time, there are only 290 species of land animal larger than a sheep. There are a further 757 animal species ranging in size from a sheep down to a rat, and nearly 1400 different species smaller than rats. Even with two of each species, you’re only talking 5000 animals all up...well below the Ark’s carrying capacity of 40,000 cows or 100,000 sheep, and with plenty of room for food.

What happens if some of the animals died on the voyage? Silly question really. The whole idea was God’s. For the same reason, why didn’t the Ark sink? It is also entirely conceivable that any creatures Noah and the team missed would be accounted for by God regardless. Did the Australian kangaroo live near Iraq in order to hitch a ride with Noah. I personally don’t know, but I can tell you fossil marsupials have now been found as far apart as China and the America’s, so perhaps they did. Ultimately we just don’t know, but “not knowing” is not the same as proving something wrong.

As for the kiwi migrating to NZ...remember that New Zealand was at an earlier time in history part of Gondwanaland, which joined us to Turkey, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North & South America and India...all lands where Flood stories can be found. We don’t truly know why the biggest landmass the world has ever known broke up and flew apart...scattering itself across half the globe.

More to the point...although we make educated guesses...we don’t truly know when these major events in world history took place, or how long they took to happen once it began. If we eventually discover that humans were alive during the time of the Gondwanaland supercontinent, that would turn science on its ear.

No one has ever proven the Bible story of the Flood to be wrong, and given the enormous weight of circumstantial evidence supporting it...I’m more than happy to accept Noah’s Flood as a reality...even if four or five thousand years later we can only guess at the exact details of what took place.

And there’s nothing wrong with giving the Bible the benefit of the doubt. What would you prefer to trust if your eternal salvation hinged on it? The book that claims to be the word of God and has never been proven to contain error...or the opinion of a man in a white coat who doesn’t believe in God because his parents forced him to sing in the church choir as a child and he still nurses a grudge...in fact, it’s the real reason he became a scientist...his personal rebellion against the idea of God.

I know which source I’d be more inclined to believe.

And that quote is from the 25th of last month (xmas day), so the discussion is pretty active (unlike most forums you find in google).
Edit: PS the title of this forum post is "Did the Kiwi migrate from Mt Ararat?" if you want to go dig it up yourself.



Last edited by Carrie at Jan 22 2004, 12:24 AM