I saw a program on
Noah’s Ark yesterday. It lead me to put
some of my attention towards it. My
thoughts indicate that there is too much wrong with this document (Genesis 6-9)
to allow it to be a real historical account.
First of all, I really do not believe in miracles. If you have read the first page, you know
that I believe that God is intelligent and efficient. Miracles would indicate that God has to go into his creation and fix problems. Since God is the creator of all things, any
problems must have been His fault. I
believe that God got his creation right the first time and does not need to
muck around in human affairs all the time.
Thus for God to decide that he had to destroy man, his favorite creation
in which he must have spent the most time and attention creating. This just does not sound logical.
A flood of this magnitude, 1-2 miles above sea level, would
not put only the land animals at risk.
On the first few days, the water levels would rise to the point where
the oceans mix with the lakes. The salt
water would kill all the fresh water fish.
In the later stages of the flood, there would be so much fresh water
that many of the salt water fish would die.
The simple fact that there are fresh water fish and salt water fish that
are not tolerant to fresh water is proof against the Noah story as historical
fact.
The simple fact that the animals were gathered two by two is
a huge problem. Brother – sister
inbreeding would cause the demise of a great many species. An animal with a deadly genetic disease will
eventually pass on multiple copies of this gene and many will die.
Local populations are not taken into account at all. Animals tend to perfectly fit their habitat.
We also relocate animals all the time but they do not go back to their original
habatat. Cats do very well in Australia
however there were none there until recently.
How could animals that need specific things to live have survived so
long in order to find the habitat they are suited for? Take for instance the Koala. The Koala lives only on the leaves of one
tree. Two Koalas would surely die
before making their way thousands of miles and across an ocean to get to their
only source of food. We find that
island species cannot compete with the species of the continents. However, according to the Noah myth, these
animals would have been released at the
same time in the same place. There are
many examples of animals that cannot compete with others.
So, why would almost all marsupials decide to go to Australia
when many of them could do well in many other parts of the world? In fact the world should be much more
homogeneous with animals.
In order to carry off this world wide flood thing then, God
would not only have to open up the flood gates of heaven, but He would also have to change the
physiology of all the fish on earth, make the surviving animals DNA temporarily
immune to genetic diseases, make all the animals get along (what did the
carnivores eat for years?), lead them to their destined locations, and wipe the
memories of previous rainbows (which must have existed before because they
follow the laws of optics) from the humans to make the phenomenon seem new.
Instead of making Noah build the ark, It would have been easier to just
levitate all the animals if He was going to go through all this.
In 1853 the almost exact same myth was discovered on
Babylonian tablets dated 1700BC as part of the larger story of Gilgamesh. This dates 500 years before the book of Genesis was written. The general story is the same, a great
flood, animals on board an ark etc.
However the details are different enough to show that the story in the
Bible could not be the exact story. Since
then, there have been two other flood stories uncovered that date even older than
the Babylonian story.
There are people who think that there was a great flood and
that the Noah story was in part based on fact.
This would not be a world wide flood however, to the people experiencing
it, it would seem to be. One theory is
that the black sea was not always a sea, but a low lying plain. The Mediterranean sea was held back by a
thin piece of land which broke free and completely flooded the sea basin in a short time.
There seems to be no evidence for
this. I would like to put forth another
theory. Ten thousand years ago, the
glaciers covering a great deal of the northern hemisphere started to melt. Great lakes would pool on the tops of the
glaciers until it breaks free. From the
standpoint of the tribes living at the foot of the glacier, Heaven opened up
the flood gates right on top of them.
This deluge would be recreated all along the border between ice and
land. The survivors would pass down
their stories and when one civilization met another, the stories would match
and merge into one.
The end of the last ice age
signaled the modern era. It allowed us
to stay in one place and build cities.
This was the new beginning and rebirth of our species. Perhaps the flood that covered the earth
almost wiping all the animals out and covering mountains was frozen water? As the story of the glaciers was passed down
from generation to generation, the ice covering the earth became more difficult
for the descendents to believe and gradually changed to water in the
telling. As no other story in the
history of the earth, this one was passed down orally for thousands of
years. This is because the end of the
ice age was the biggest change humanity as a whole ever experienced. Imagine instead of talking about how you
remember the stop signs turning into stop lights, telling your grandchildren
about the time when the entire earth was covered in Ice, melting to create
millions of lakes and killing almost everyone.
It would be the greatest true story ever told. It would be passed on and on changing slightly over each
generation to become more relevant and understandable to the current listener
until it is written down, possibly in several different versions.
