About the Flood

[LtCmd.Lore]

Hey everyone.


I need information about races and nations that continued uninterupted during the time the flood was supposed to have happened.
Any nation or country or something that existed before, and after the flood.

Wouldn't that be pretty convincing evidence that the global flood was a myth?

Lore

[coloradoatheist]

Here is a place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_history

Also, check out any "Atlas of World History" at a library and you can find all the scientific evidence that's needed.

However, in regards to "convincing evidence". There is plenty of evidence about various topics (think evolution, etc) that continues to be ignored by x-tians. Show them anything that is truly compelling, proven, irrefutable evidence and they still wouldn't believe it.

So I'm not sure it really matters whether we'd have perfect evidence, it still wouldn't be believed by them. But they sure as shit take the bible as "perfect evidence". Maybe the best way to do it is to create your own translation of the bible and refer to the flood as a myth.

Later,
Scott

[Erik]

The Egyptians would have been around for most dates of the flood, although some interpretations might push the flood back further. You don't see a big disruption in the types of artifacts found starting way before the flood, but I suppose that argument also runs into the problem of artifacts found before the world existed.

[Kazim]

The Egyptians would have been around for most dates of the flood, although some interpretations might push the flood back further. You don't see a big disruption in the types of artifacts found starting way before the flood, but I suppose that argument also runs into the problem of artifacts found before the world existed.

Yeah, and also my favorite fun fact about the Egyptians:

Young earth chronology has the flood happening about 100 years before some of the pyramids were build. But at the time of the flood, all but eight people in the world were dead. So:

1. How many people built the pyramids?
2. What percentage of all people on earth were living in Egypt?
3. What percentage of Egyptians were building the pyramids?
4. How fast would Noah's family have to reproduce in order to create this many people in 100 years?

[Sans_Deity]

Here's a great timeline that demonstrates the absurdity of many Biblical timelines:

http://atheism.about.com/library/chrono ... on_ot1.htm

However, you don't have to even leave the fantasy world of the Bible to disprove the flood...

The tower of Babel.

The Bible isn't clear about how much time elapsed between the flood and the tower, but fundamentalist estimates range from just over 100 years to nearly 400 years. One population study used the following, very generous, criteria in order to account for miraculous population growth:

- The maximum human lifespan is over 120 years old
- 1 year = 53 weeks
- All women who are between the ages of 13 and 55 have sex once every single week that they do not have their period or are currently pregnant, on average 90% of all potentially pregnant women are pregnant at any given time
- Their odds of successful fertilization per attempt are 1 in 3
- As soon as a girl turns 13, she begins producing children, no exceptions and she stays active producing children until the age of 55
- There is no infant mortality
- There are no deaths during childbirth
- Death rates in general are dramatically lower than in modern times

180 years after the flood, this miraculous expansion results in a total population of 61,162. That may seem pretty good, until you realize that only 47, 435 of them are under the age of 12. Of those 12 and over, 5,291 of those are pregnant women. That leaves about 7,000 men over the age of 12.

This society is going to be busy taking care of children, not building expansive cities or towers to heaven. The mundane tasks of feeding and clothing every one may be more than this particular civilization could manage. Adjusting the population model for more generous population expansion only exacerbates the problem, resulting in more kids than the civilization could possibly support. A nation full of infants.

If we leave the fantasy world of the Bible and start looking at what else was going on around the world at this time, we're forced to acknowledge that this population, in addition to beginning work on the tower of Babel, was also busy spreading out across the globe, forming nations, building pyramids, discovering and emulating (exactly!) the civilizations that existed pre-flood.

We're forced to conclude that it was a world full of super-babies.

The flood myth is, essentially, a 'reset' button and the post-flood state of the world demonstrates that it wasn't pressed.

Some apologists opt for a local flood, rather than a global one. That's fine - but it completely destroys all of the meaning behind their myth. Others choose to explain it all away with miracles...miracles that have God going out of his way, just a few years after the flood, to help grow civilizations that he must know are going to require another cosmic smack-down.

If the Old Testament is anything, it's a comedy. Yes, the god of the Old Testament is a monster, but he's also a particular inept one. The OT is a chronicle of his failures. He has to 'reset' in Eden, again with Noah, again at Babel...and this continues into the NT. He contrives a loophole for his mistakes with Jesus - yet he already knows none of this is going to work and he's going to end up destroying the world anyway.

Why wait? Why not just hit the reset button again? Let's have that apocalypse today! Why should he sit around waiting for the failure that he already knows to be unavoidable? Oh yeah, because he's a monster as well as inept.

It's all just too absurd.

[LtCmd.Lore]

Great link Sans Deity.
So basically, in order to accept the flood as a literal, the theist would pretty much have to believe that 90% of our knowledge of history is completely incorrect.

And the population statistics are also good, I never thought of that before.

So the flood story fails on every level.
Historically, Geologically, Logically, Mathematically and even Philisophically.