Noah's flood: What happened to all the other people who knew how to make boats? [Spirituality & Religion]
Like none of them managed to float on a boat with supplies? Seems like it'd be a lot easier for a couple or a family to survive with 40 days of supplies if you weren't filling your boat with all the animals.
I think the story of the flood is just that, a story. It doesn’t make a lot of sense 😀 There may have been a flood but most likely it was a local one and how did Noah collect all the animals 😀 the overwhelming majority wouldn’t have lived in Palestine so how did they get there
@GodSpeed63 It’s a bit unlikely that there was a world wide flood, a local flood maybe. Assuming that there were 2 of every animal what did Noah feed the animals on. Everything on earth would have drowned, so how did they survive afterwards. Where did all the wood come from to build the ark it must have been enormous How did all the animals get to the Ark
Yeah i mean, the plants wouldn't have survived 150 days under water either so what do the herbivores have left to eat? And with only a pair (or 7 in the case of livestock) of each herbivore around, the carnivore population would have immediately decimated their population. If even on of the pair was killed then that "kind" is gone.
@SomeMichGuy Not of macro species, I agree. Millions and billions applies to creatures like diatoms. But thousands are possible with ape and human forebears. Yes, I'm hypothesising, and should have made that clear from the start - guesses based on loose evidence. I agree that major finds would be and are splashed across the media. But on the other hand, minor finds are not, yet collectively they add strong support to the argument for evolution, because they are so many, and because none of the finds has yet disproved evolution. As for the creationists, their beliefs are so strong that any missing link, no matter how miniscule, will always count for them as lack of sufficient proof.
@hartfire Lol Then why bring up numbers a thousand & a million times larger than what you are arguing?
And let me make it, as RMN said, "perfectly clear", that I am not arguing evolution, but claims of vast genetic diversity of a pool of unknown size.
I am familiar with consilience, and agree with its power with regard to various big questions, including evolution, climate change, the age of the Universe.
However, your characterization of Creationism is based upon the weakest minds parroting what they do not understand. I went to a debate years ago, at my alma mater, where a guy from Berkeley gave some reasons to support Creationism which I'd never before heard, and which the other professor [sadly, from my own university!] never addressed, and the assembled students merely laughed at, derisively. I had gone for the chance of hearing a guy whom I'd figured would be simply foolish; I listened, and found he was anything but that.
Long ago, it was observed to me that Martin Luther would not now, in modern times, lead an attempt to reform the Roman church, as it had, over the years, mostly come into agreement with his major criticisms.
In a different--but not entirely other--fashion, the evolutionary theory confronting Creationists now is not the theory proposed by Darwin, but an updated form, modified as necessary by the realities of what had been discovered...or NOT discovered. The progression of forms stands as the salient observation when the historical method is applied to biological archaeology; and of course observations of otherwise seemingly serendipitous specific adaptations... But the theory of the working of the mechanism is completely different.
@SomeMichGuy I like the open-minded and rigorous way you think.
I acknowledge that evolutionary theory has evolved and modified since Darwin's day, but I don't see it as something fundamentally different from the original thesis. Now it's not merely competition that drives natural selection, but also cooperation, biomechanics, biochemistry, erratic phases or bursts, and interspecies symbiosis.
Do you remember the Creationist's ideas? I wonder how people can argue Creation because, for me, the existence of a non-material but conscious entity (spirit) is not possible given the laws of physics as we now understand them.
I'm not sure about what you say about Martin Luther. From Jaques Barzun's analysis of what sparked the Protestant or Lutheran revolution, it seems that Luther struck the spark on a piled-high tinder of widespread resentment against the Catholic Church's financial corruption.
Well, part of the point of the first part of the story is that God told Noah, who believed Him, that this would happen, and planned & acted accordingly.
Tools being what they were, one does not merely knock out a boat in short order, and, even with rain, you can imagine that months of laughing at the village idiot for making a huge-ass boat, you would be inclined to think "it's just rain" until it is far to late to do that.
But a reasonable question, and interacting with a text is important...learning is not a spectator sport.
Yeah. I am saying that some boats would probably survive. Or groups of boats.
[quote]The notion that SOME rafts have survived SOME oceans [/quote]
Well there i'm not even talking about rafts. I'm talking about the fact that animals are able to cross oceans and colonize new areas by clinging to scraps floating across the ocean.
If a monkey can survive an ocean voyage on a log, surely SOME humans SOMWHERE other than Noah and his family would survive on actual boats.
@Pikachu Again, arguing that SOME animals have SOMETIMES done this is not proof of your claim.
You have a conjecture which you consider to be plausible, but I think you are being incredibly naïve.
Just look at what happens to MODERN boats when they are subjected to sudden hurricanes, tsunamis, etc., even when at modern harbors. They look like flotsam & jetsam...
Consider boat tech coeval with Noah...not fiberglas, not metal...the strength of materials, etc., was very different. No, I am not making the mistake so often made that ancient peoples were idiots; your point about ppl being resourceful problem-solvers, [b][i]within the constraints they have,[/i][/b] is truly amazing. And yes, you can point to examples of things we don't understand about ancient peoples.
But the emphasized phrase is something you seem to be glossing over...
And, in the story, the rest of the people weren't followers of the God who was to become the God of Abraham, didn't listen, etc.
So--within the sphere of the story--all could have been destroyed.
You make points the story doesn't address/is silent about. Sure, people not part of the flood in the part of the world involved in that story would have had fewer effects the further they were, but the original query was about the content of the story, not the content of alternate stories, all stories, etc.
Yup. That's that argument i'm making. I'm not pretending it's proof. Just saying that i find it unlikely given what we can observe in the real world that no other humans would survive.
I mean don't pretend you're bringing proof either, right? All you're saying is that it would have been incredibly taxing circumstances which i don't doubt. The odds of survival are low....but so are the odds of rats traveling across oceans on a scrap of wood. But it happens.
Dont know and dont care .It didnt happen , its a bloody book of fairy tales man , it might be a good read but never to be taken literally .It came out of the minds of very imaginative people but not an ounce of truth .Like any well written book its got to be taken as it is or maybe if you like that sort of thing a entertaining read but thats it .
[image=Did an Asteroid Impact Cause an Ancient Tsunami? https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/science/14WAVE.html]
Most likely the thing that happened was there was a large meteor impact in 2800 BC in the Indian ocean. The waves generated would have channeled up the gulf of Oman and wiped out everything in that part of the world.
Corrections Appended
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.
The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.
@Tastyfrzz That's so cool. I hadn't heard that explanation before. That would be terrifying an no wonder that people would make a world ending legend about it.
I didn't ask that. Sorry for the misunderstanding. You said that "where they were" (Noah and his family) people didn't need to make boats. But people in other places did. So if the whole world was flooded then other people in other places would have had boats. Do you understand now?
I understand. I don't know how many people were alive on the earth at that time of the flood. All I know is that Noah and his family survived to repopulate the earth.
For one thing they weren't expecting a flood. Even if a few people had a boat and managed to get into it when the flood waters began to rise, the boat would have sank during the intense rain (can't bail water that fast). Noah took a lot more than 40 days of supplies. Noah and family were in the ark for 150 days - that's 5 months. What person keeps 5 months of supplies on their boat at all times "just in case"?
Yeah but seriously. NO ONE else in the world managed to put a tarp over the boat or salvage enough food or continue to fish and collect the rain water. No one else on the planet? Seems unlikely.
People are very [i]good[/i] at surviving. Hell, even animals can raft over oceans on pieces of scrap.
@shuhak the *thousands of fishermen that had boats wouldn't need to take food, they could live off fish.
*I'm not saying all fishermen had boats, obviously most didn't and of the communities on the planet today that live entirely off meat, the meat is mostly fish, the amount of rain needed would sufficiently desalinate the water to make it drinkable or they could collect rain water.
It is a great story, partly, it appears, based on an oral history of a great flood. Hopefully I won't be struck down by a bolt of lightning saying that.
@spjennifer lol Again, the rain is said to have been 40 days & nights; the slog was 150 days.
But if you follow the story line, I believe people were supposed to eat animals only after the flood.
The real question would be: how did you keep them from eating each other? But if God can bring you two of everything, I guess He didn't do it to have a Colosseum-like blood spectacle, and you can count that as covered. [There is an interesting movie with the Aussie [i]Gladiator[/i] dude--called [i]Noah[/i]--which has lots of extra-Biblical conjecture; they show Noah & his wife essentially using censers to spread a special inhaled sleep smoke? concoction? made from a recipe from God, but which doesn't affect the people. lol]
lol exactly, right? Same thing with the denial of evolution. As if salvation depends upon a literal interpretation of biblical events instead of the spiritual directives.
