True Science Confirms The Account Of Noah's Ark In The Word Of God [Spirituality & Religion]

@spjennifer [quote]So based on the so-called facts presented in this fantasy,[/quote]

How do you know the account in the Word of God was never real?

@GodSpeed63 Maybe because even modern biblical scholars say it is not a literal historical account of anything. New or old testament.

@GodSpeed63 How do you know it was, can you prove it? I'll stick with my drunken sailor theory!

@spjennifer ... and if all descendants of just one couple...

Whether Adam and Eve or Noah and Mrs. Noah. Gorged on apples (do they grow in the Middle East?) or pickled on wine. The former discovering learning, obviously against God's will, as the scriptural literalists tell us. The latter finding little else to do but feed animals, bale out the leaky bilges, clear dung, bale the bilges, feed themselves, get drunk on rough wine, try blaling the bidges, and have sexual intercourse, when cooped up on a crude barge drifting aimlessly for several weeks in rather unseasonal weather.

Ah, OK, let's just think about that for a moment... [i]One couple. No other humans in the world,[/i] supposedly. (Though didn't Noah and his missus have their own children on board?)

The first couple were all alone in the world because God had just brought everything else into being from nothing, then made 'Im in the same way, and 'Er from the bits left over from making 'Im.
The later couple, evidently descended from the former, had watched all their other relations, friends, neighbours and boat-builders drown in a [i]Waterworld[/i]-style flood.

Obviously both couples had children otherwise the human race would have died out with that couple.

Obviously too, those children of those couples, each alone in the world, would have had to have been male and female, otherwise they instead would have been the last humans.

So those sons and daughters of that progenitor and later survivor couples, had to breed among themselves.......

Siblings breeding? Isn't that a sin?

@ArishMell Based on the bible incest is not exactly frowned upon but they do seem to conveniently ignore the issues of a gene pool of exactly two people.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Indeed, the modern literalists do ignore anything that shows the flaws in their rigid doctrine.

It is inconvenient to them to remember the nature of what to us are obvious but genuine ignorance and outright fables about creation-from-nothing, incest, man-eating whales (in the Mediterranean?) and floods of the scale described*.

These tales hold sway with literalists only by being in the Bible, and not those of the contemporary Egyptians, Greeks, etc.

They would were recorded some 2000 - 3000 years ago by the largely-unknown priests and shamans of just one, quite small society. Those priests might have invented them, or they may have adapted at least some from elsewhere or from their own people's previous beliefs, and only for their own society. If the Ancient Hebrews did practice incest at all, they are unlikely to have known the physical risks.

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* Severe floods are common enough around the world for some of the worst to have become enshrined in folk-lore; but are all regional. The Biblical flood myth seems to pre-date the Hebrews who adapted it. I think it was first known, in a different form, from the Babylonians or Sumerians.

I don't know if anyone has worked out what [i]if any[/i] real event it commemorates, seriously distorted by and since originally-oral history. My candidate would be devastating floods in the Tigris - Euphrates Marshes, driving out and dissipating the contemporary, indigenous population. The victims might have escaped on reed-rafts, and many may have settled elsewhere in the Middle East; but timber arks? No. That version with its improbably large vessel and fanciful Mt. Ararat ending, seems to have been a Hebrew religio-romantic invention.

More seriously, some do ask if the Biblical [i]"Red" [/i]Sea, is that marsh-land, muddled by later Bible translators and editors with the [i]Reed[/i] Sea. A marsh might be opened by occasional drought, and friendly locals would know safe crossing routes, but the Red Sea is far too deep for the Exodus story.

These marshes are or were the long-time home of a distinct Arab society deliberately attacked in our own times by Saddam Hussein, ironically by trying to drain and dry the marshes.


I gather some have hypothesised the Noah fable being inspired by the sea-level rise after the Last Glacial Maximum, filling the Mediterranean, but that is as fabulous as the Noah's Ark story itself. The rise would have been at its most rapid several millennia too early, and been too slow anyway, to survive oral history among its witnesses. They would have been in cultures probably with wildly-differing social and religious beliefs; largely-itinerant, and able to adapt to the change rather more easily than our huge, advanced(?)society could. "They say that little island was a low hill in Great-Great-Grandad Ogg's life". Further, applying school-level knowledge of physical geography to any decent atlas with sea depths will soon reveal whoever follows that desperate hypothesis cannot read maps!

@ArishMell Even in the new testament we now know Mark 16: 9-20 were added as embellishments by monks hundreds of years later. Heck most bibles even make note of that for a few decades now. These people don't even read the footnotes of their own bible.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow @ArishMell [quote]Even in the new testament we now know Mark 16: 9-20 were added as embellishments by monks hundreds of years later.[/quote]

According to whom?

@GodSpeed63 Again. According to biblical scholars who literally devote their lives to studying this. And again read the footnotes of your own bible.

Also archaeologists have found older copies of those texts where those additions are conspicuously absent.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow To be more accurate, the earliest extant manuscripts don't have it. They are second century. There is no evidence that it wasn't present earlier, and it was clearly present in manuscripts as early as the 2nd century because the passage was referred to in several other manuscripts throughout the 2nd century (eg, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, Tertullian...)

@Abstraction So back to claiming the absence of evidence is evidence something is true. 🤦‍♀️

If the earliest text do not have it then obviously they were added later. As for something being referenced in the 2nd century all you have done is potentially narrowed down when the creative license was taken.

@Abstraction Also the texts that do not have those verses are not just older but considered far more accurate because there are fewer translations in between. More translations between copies are inherently less accurate especially when translating from very different languages. This is why you have for example dozens of slightly different translations of the Art of War just in English.

@Abstraction We also know Justin Martyr, Tatian were aware of different versions.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Yes, there were multiple manuscripts around.

But it's not correct to infer the earliest manuscripts of Mark we hold (second century) are necessarily older content, because in the other second century references I mention, [u]they quote from these same passages[/u]. So these verses definitely existed in other manuscripts of Mark at the same time (held by Justin Martyr, etc,). There are good cases either way - so it is entirely correct to raise the uncertainty about the verses.

The new testament has far more manuscripts and references from other texts than any other ancient text. By a long way, nothing comes remotely close. And some of the manuscripts we hold are far closer to the time of writing than most other ancient manuscripts. There are variations in the text across these manuscripts, but no major doctrine is really under question because of them. It also does well on internal and external evidence tests. From a purely objective historicity perspective, it's very strong.

Now what anyone makes of the content is entirely another matter. That's an issue of belief. I don't subscribe to the 'let's prove God exists' argument at all.