Literal Genesis AND a local flood?

[Dark Matter]

We are talking about Genesis 1:6, right? God made a firmament to hold the waters above the earth. If we want to refer to what the Hebrews believed about this, they thought God created a solid base to hold the waters above what we call sky.

What the Hebrews believed about many, many, many things was wrong. Their interpretation of scripture was limited to their understanding, even in regards to the Messiah. I don't quite see good rational reasons to base what cosmological and scriptural beliefs on 4,000 year old Israeli cosmology. It will lead us down a path of absurdity. You fail to recognize the role that advancement in understanding the world around us has played in interpreting scripture historically.

Do you believe that everything before the flood was the same as we see it today? That nothing has changed, due to the global flood? If you do think something has changed, what changed?

I am saying that there is not enough water on the planet to accomplish a global scale, over the mountain tops flood.

Well if there is a third heaven, isn't it logically to conclude there is a second and a first? Paul does state a third heaven. Do you believe heaven is three levels?

Paul's reference to a third heaven means that he believed in such a place. It does not define the first two levels at all, and this is what I am arguing with you and stating that you are over-reading Paul for your own set of beliefs. At best, Paul's reference supports a view of "third heaven". It does not build the cosmology you wish (which may or may not be accurate). It also does not mean that heaven is divided into three levels. In Paul's view there could have been 10 levels, but he was taken to the third. You need extra biblical support to make your case. You cannot make it from Paul. This is my point.

I am of the belief that Paul saw the third heaven as the place of where God's throne is. He speaks of this in 2 Corinthians 12. I don't believe heaven is seperated into three levels, as other religions do believe. I believe Paul saw the sky to be a heaven, space to be a heaven, and then God's dwelling to be a heaven.

Do you disagree?

With your interpolation of Paul? You're point may be correct that Paul's cosmology was in three levels as you state, but you cannot infer all of what you say above from Paul's quote. That is what I disagree with. You must provide evidence from other Hebrew writings, otherwise your entire argument is based upon speculation.

I didn't speak for you, I spoke for myself. Would you rather I speak for you? ... In post #31 you said the following:

"Playing with Hebrew words and meanings does not help your case, neither does reference to Pauline theology 1500 years later."

Referring to Paul's teaching some 1500 years later doesn't help my case. This seemed to me to be saying referencing Paul isn't good for what I am saying. Did I misunderstand?

If so, I apologize, but what did you mean by saying Paul is not a good reference to help my case?

I responded so strongly because I tire of the self righteous YEC attitude which pervaded this statement. I told you that a non-contextual reference to Pauline theology 1500 years later is not a valid way to interpret Genesis 1. It had to do with proper hermeneutics. Now if you didn't understand me, then I'd expect you to ask why Paul's words didn't apply. However, you immediately inferred that I was saying that Paul's words are not relevent on a grand scale which is a common view of liberals and non-Christians. Think of the ludicrousy, I am arguing the relevance of Genesis 1, but I don't find Paul relevant?? The fact that you wrote this reveals what is in your heart and what you think of people that are not YEC. I am a conservative evangelical who confesses Biblical inerrance as per the statement of faith of the Evangelical Theological Society.

I accept your apology and offer my own for the accusation. Please use it as an opportunity to reflect why you would have so quickly assumed I was otherwise, simply because I disagree with you on YEC issues.

Dark Matter

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

what if the water is under the crust of the earth below the mantle?

It isn't. The speed and path of vibrations from earthquakes would indicate its existance and they don't.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

Personally, I’m not concerned about the flood being global or not, but the Bible is abundantly clear that every living creature was killed. So, if you can come up with a model for a local flood that still killed every land creature on the earth, then I’m willing to listen.

Every creature on the Earth?
or every creature in the Land where Noah lived?

The Hebrew is not entirely clear.

As to the second, I rather suspect that every living creature in the path of the flood that emptied that glacial Lake Missoula died. That path covered hundreds of square miles.

At the less extreme end various rivers, including the Red River in Minnesota, the Dakotas and Canada, and the Mississippi have had catastrophic floods within living memory that would have been far more so with even minor divine intervention.

The sediments of the Euphrates river valley shows signs of a number of large floods over the centuries.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

If it was local, why waste hundreds of years building an ark if he simply could have walked a hundred miles to safety?

Usually when God tests us, He doesn't ask us to spend a vast amount of years designing a specific object to specific configurations.

Could you provide some scriptural evidence for the number of years it took to build the Ark?

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

In Genesis 6 verse 1 we read that, When mankind had spread all over the world. The Bible clearly says that mankind was spread all over the world!

And you know the proper translation of the word is what you say it is because...?

Adding proof to this is the fact that it was at least 1,500 years after creation that the Great Flood happened. In 1,500 years, mankind would have been more than capable to spread throughout the Earth.

The Tigris-Euphraites (sp?) valley is pretty big, and if people only started having kids when they were 100 or so years old and generally had fewer than 10 kids then it is within the realm of possibility that they hadn't gotten out of the valley by then. They were after all evil and likely unwilling to put up with the discomforts of frontier life.

On a more general point, it strikes me as highly unlikely that in 1500 years you could get the population growth necessary to spread from the Middle East all the way to the backwaters of South America.

Ross brings up the following objections to a global flood:
[...]
2. it contradicts a vast body of geophysical data, at the same time requiring such cataclysmic effects as to render highly unlikely Noah's survival in an ark; [Noah's ark was created by God to survive the conditions that He knew that it would encounter. Also Noah's ark is not the small ship with a Giraffe's head sticking out the top of it that many may think; no, no, no, it was a super massive retangularish sturdy boat

Actually its very size argues against it. With the land masses gone you get essentially full time hurricanes around the earth with massive waves and swells that would snap ark in half.
(I haven't been able to find a reference to it, but I have read of a destroyer that was suspended between two waves and snapped. Destroyers are about the same length as the ark.)

However, what really dumbfounds me is how these supposedly Christian people miss the fact that this was an event that God purposefully intervened in!

I don't know about Ross, but I certainly didn't miss that fact. My point is that the interpretation of the Noah flood provided by YECists requires many, many miracles not mentioned in the Bible and can not be reasonably used to account for the geology we observe today.

It must be taken on faith, and not with a claim that the physical evidence supports it.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

the point of the world is also for that quoted from Romans. the World exists to give God glory, not so that evolution (i use that word in Darwin's sense) can be employed and thus have a totally 'naturalistic explaination' with no Creator God

Neither Vance and most certainly not Hugh Ross are doing what you are arguing against here.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

In 1,500 years, you would not know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nuked.
In 1,500 years, you would not know that Chenobyl exploded.

Ever heard of long lasting radioactive isotopes?

In 20 years you would not know that the twin towers were attacked.
Even now, you would not know that the whole world was in a Depression only 1/2 a century ago.

Without our written history you simply would not know.

Ever heard of archeology?

You should look at what has been learned by digging through layers of ancient cities. When they were occupied, when they flourished, who they traded with, when they were destroyed by fire or conquest...

You do not know the species that existed in Palestine 2,000 years ago.
You do not know the climate of Palestine 2,000 years ago.
[]
You can guess. You can hypothesize. But you cannot know, because you cannot test it, because you were not there.

I don't have to be there any more than a Medical Examiner has to be at a death to test for the cause of death.

Take a core from the bottom of a lake and do a pollen and sediment analysis, look at the droppings at the bottom of the Dead Sea Scroll caves, dig through garbage piles dated to that time by C14 or ceramic styles or style of script.

Written records are very valuable, but they are far from necessary to know beyond any reasonable doubt a great deal of what was going on.

That's why it is called history. That is how this discipline of "science" is not like that of Chem, Physics and Genetics.

[snipped and pasted from earlier in post]
You can not know the rate of fusion 2000 years ago.

Uniformitarianism is flawed. On so many levels with gaping holes the size of the Andromeda galaxy.

The constancy of physical constants has been debated and tested by the scientific community for over 50 years.

Lake varves from Poland, Japan and the United States, tree ring sequences for pine, oak and bristle cone pine, in Europe and the United States, ice core layers in Greenland and Antartica, all independently provide evidence of business as usual back well past 10,000 years.

Carbon 14 dating demonstrates that the various tree ring and varve sequences from all around the world are in sync. Getting C14 dates off ice cores is difficult though it is being worked on and looks reasonable, I haven't seen the actual results. Other dating methods for ice cores are very much in sync with tree rings and varves back past 10,000 years.

Comparison between C14 and Uranium/Thorium ratios in a stalagmite from the Bahamas agrees with the C14 calibration done via varves and dendrochronology (tree rings).

Various other tests, including the star light you see every night, spectral analysis of supernova SN1987A, the natural uranium reactor at Oklo, Gabon, spectral analysis of quasars all demonstrate that physical constants have not changed within the limits of the tests (which are on the order of no worse than 1 part in 100,000).

If physical constants had changed, we would see a difference between star light produced before the change and star light produced after the change. If the change occured 5000 years ago then we would see different spectra from stars farther than 5000 light years away as compared to stars closer than 5000 light years away.

We can see stars in our galaxy at just about any distance between 8 light minutes and 80,000 light years. There is no change. SN1987A is 180,000 light years away. Its spectra is as expected, moreover, to the limits of observation, the decay constants of the various elements produced by it when it went supernova are as expected.

 

[SBG]

The "firmament" is literally raqiya (or raqiya shamayim, "firmament of the heavens" or "firmament [called] Heaven" from 1:7), whereas the sky is referred to in Genesis 1:20, referring to the birds and ostensibly the atmosphere in which they fly, as "paniym raqiya shamayim": "on the surface of the firmament of the heavens". From this I would understand that "raqiya shamayim" is referring to outer space.

In Genesis 1:7, which you are stating above, does not contain the Hebrew word heaven. So it is incorrect to say raqiya' shamayim, since shamayim is not even mentioned in 1:7.

Paniym can mean a few different things. If taken by itself, it means either face of something/someone or a position of something. When used in context, such as it is in Genesis 1:20 it means open.

Raqiya shamayim would mean firmament of the heaven(s). Put it all together it means in the open firmament of the heaven. So to understand this, one must look at where God put this firmament. Genesis 1:6-8 tell us this.

Is it your suggestion that God created this firmament in outerspace?

In Genesis 7, though, the "floodgates (windows) of the heaven" are "arubbah shamayim". Does the lone shamayim refer to the sky, or to outer space? Bear in mind that the "outer water" is beyond outer space, not right outside the atmosphere.

The lone shamayim refers to either sky, outerspace, or where God sits on His throne. It all depends on the context. To me the context suggests either in the earth's atmosphere or right above it. This would have created a green house effect and made the entire earth tropical like rain forests.

I think it could be possible that the firmament talked about could be right above the earth's atmosphere. I have doubts about it being beyond outerspace, but of course I can be wrong. Saturn has particles of ice orbiting around it.

Honestly, it is an intriguing thought.

[size=-1]'Arubbah[/size] simply means window as well, so we can see that God created an opening in the firmament to allow the waters that were previously seperated to flow upon the earth.

So if shamayim is the atmosphere alone, and the windows of heaven are draining a source of water just outside the water, then where was that water in Genesis 1 and when was it created?
And if shamayim is outer space, how did the water get from the edge of the universe to earth?

Genesis 1:6-8 tells about the waters being seperated. It can be assumed that when God created the earth, Genesis 1:1, it was originally just water.

Again, shamayim can mean either sky, outerspace, or where God sits on His throne(heaven).

I believe the water rested on the firmament. God made a window in the firmament and the waters flowed through.

 

[SBG]

Could you provide some scriptural evidence for the number of years it took to build the Ark?

There are estimates, but there is no exact number given. It is less than 120 years. Genesis 6:3.

I would imagine to build an ark of that size, by hand, it would take atleast a year or more.

 

[SBG]

The Tigris-Euphraites (sp?) valley is pretty big, and if people only started having kids when they were 100 or so years old and generally had fewer than 10 kids then it is within the realm of possibility that they hadn't gotten out of the valley by then. They were after all evil and likely unwilling to put up with the discomforts of frontier life.

Is there Scripture that says people first started having kids after they were 100 years old?

 

[Marshall Janzen]

Is there Scripture that says people first started having kids after they were 100 years old?

In Genesis 5, from Seth to Lamech, the average age of the father when they had their first son is 116. The ages range from 65 to 187.

 

[gluadys]

The lone shamayim refers to either sky, outerspace, or where God sits on His throne. It all depends on the context. To me the context suggests either in the earth's atmosphere or right above it. This would have created a green house effect and made the entire earth tropical like rain forests.

I think it could be possible that the firmament talked about could be right above the earth's atmosphere. I have doubts about it being beyond outerspace, but of course I can be wrong. Saturn has particles of ice orbiting around it.

From the standpoint of both the bible and physics, it would be more sensible to place the firmament past outer space. This makes sense biblically as Gen. 1 places sun, moon and stars "in the firmament" and none of them are in the atmosphere.

It also makes more sense physically as a firmament at the upper level of the atmosphere with a large amount of water (or water vapour) immediately above it would indeed produce a greenhouse effect, but not a tropical climate. The temperature at earth's surface when this amount of pressure is weighing down on the atmosphere would be much, much higher--enough to boil off all the liquid water on earth and render it uninhabitable by any life whatsoever. (Think of the temperature which currently exists in the earth's mantle.)

However, any introduction of outer space to a conversation about Genesis is necessarily trying to interpret an ancient text to fit modern knowledge. The biblical authors had no concept of outer space in the first place.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

In Genesis 5, from Seth to Lamech, the average age of the father when they had their first son is 116. The ages range from 65 to 187.

Thanks.
Hmmm if 64 = 16, well, 900 = 225, which is almost reasonable

 

[shernren]

In Genesis 1:7, which you are stating above, does not contain the Hebrew word heaven. So it is incorrect to say raqiya' shamayim, since shamayim is not even mentioned in 1:7.

My mistake. But as I look at the passage, in 1:6 and 1:7 God creates a firmament, and in 1:8 God calls it "Heaven" i.e. shamayim. So it would be reasonable for raqiya to appear alone in v6 and 7, since at that point God hasn't named this firmament yet. But note that "raqiya shamayim" is mentioned in the creation of the sun and stars and moon - exactly fitting the idea of "raqiya shamayim" being outer space. And I don't think this "raqiya shamayim" is mentioned anywhere else - I could be wrong though.

Paniym can mean a few different things. If taken by itself, it means either face of something/someone or a position of something. When used in context, such as it is in Genesis 1:20 it means open.

Where other than in Gen 1:20 is paniym used as open?

My understanding is that "paniym raqiya shamayim" in v20 gives information on where the birds were "assigned to" relative to the "raqiya shamayim" i.e. outer space. And so "paniym" fits perfectly here as "face" i.e. the birds are to fly on the surface of outer space. The atmosphere is so thin that compared to the magnitude of outer space, it is indeed just a "face".

Word study on paniym:
http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/6/1115606386-2513.html

I can see most of the references in Genesis being to "face", either a person's face (the "surface" of his personality) or to the "face" of the earth (the "surface" of the earth).

To me, within a literalist framework of Genesis 1, it is not that God creates an outer space, and then mounts some sort of separate "firmament" in it. I believe that the firmament is outer space.

The lone shamayim refers to either sky, outerspace, or where God sits on His throne. It all depends on the context. To me the context suggests either in the earth's atmosphere or right above it. This would have created a green house effect and made the entire earth tropical like rain forests.

Shamayim: http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/8/1115606645-4202.html

Come to think of it, wherever shamayim is used alone it seems to refer either to the sky ("birds of the air") or to the part of creation separate from earth, in "lord of heaven and earth" so as to indicate lord over everything created whether the earth or outside the earth. So I think it would probably be consistent to assume that "shamayim" alone is the visible sky / atmosphere and "raqiya shamayim" is the firmament of the sky i.e. outer space.

Therefore the "arubbah shamayim" would be "holes in the sky", to be colloquial. Which again raises my question: where in Genesis 1 was this third layer of water created?

Hmm. Somebody should do some math on the Floodwaters. Start with the area of the Earth, compute the volume of Floodwaters required to submerge the whole world, assume that half (to be charitable) of the Floodwaters come from the "floodgates of the heavens", and see how much additional atmospheric pressure that causes. My hunch is that you'd get at least 30% more atm. pressure than you have today. But the calculations should be done.

 

[shernren]

Oh - and to be clear, I think the "raqiya shamayim" would have to be outer space, not something separate created in outer space.

 

[shernren]

Hmm. Somebody should do some math on the Floodwaters. Start with the area of the Earth, compute the volume of Floodwaters required to submerge the whole world, assume that half (to be charitable) of the Floodwaters come from the "floodgates of the heavens", and see how much additional atmospheric pressure that causes. My hunch is that you'd get at least 30% more atm. pressure than you have today. But the calculations should be done.

Hmm - being in uni has made me forget my elementary physics!

The current atmospheric pressure is 1 atm ~= 1.01 x 10^5 Pa. 1m of water exerts a pressure of 9.8 x 10^3 Pa. So the current atmospheric pressure in meters of water is 10.3m.

Now, let's say you need 500m of water to put the whole world underwater. (This is extremely conservative. After all, Everest is 8.85 km tall.) If you put that 500m worth of water in the atmosphere, you will have increased the atmospheric pressure by 50-fold.

Oh dear.

 

[gluadys]

Therefore the "arubbah shamayim" would be "holes in the sky", to be colloquial. Which again raises my question: where in Genesis 1 was this third layer of water created?

Hmm. Somebody should do some math on the Floodwaters. Start with the area of the Earth, compute the volume of Floodwaters required to submerge the whole world, assume that half (to be charitable) of the Floodwaters come from the "floodgates of the heavens", and see how much additional atmospheric pressure that causes. My hunch is that you'd get at least 30% more atm. pressure than you have today. But the calculations should be done.

Actually quite a few people have taken this on, even on this forum. Here is one thread, with links to other articles as well.

http://www.christianforums.com/t1479920

And there are quite a few more listed in the 2nd post on this thread

http://www.christianforums.com/t1161676-the-ce-thread-archive.html

 

[shernren]

And that is why i've stopped posting on the open forums. It's ridiculous to have to bash brothers and sisters in full view like that. But anyway.

Here's another problem. Let's be kind and say that you need only 1km of water (to simplify the calculation) over the whole earth. 1km of water x (area of earth to be submerged) 5.1 x 10^14 m squared = 5.1 x 10^17 cubic meters. Now, at a density of 1000kg per cubic meter this is 5.1 x 10^20 kg.

How much water struck the ark itself? Using Biblical dimensions the ark's surface area (lxw) is 3200 sq.m. If 1km of water struck the rest of the earth's surface then 1km of water also struck the ark. That's 3.2 x 10^9 kg of water.

A day has 8.64 x 10^4 seconds, and 40 days has 3.5 x 10^6 seconds.

So that mass flow rate of water striking the ark is about 900 kg per second.

Now, for convenience's sake, let's take the initial position of the water to be at the troposphere-stratosphere boundary. (because the higher up it goes, the more painful it is for Flood theorists)

That's 10km up. Now, using conservation of energy as our guide, we can define the final velocity v of an object accelerating under gravity as follows:
v = sqrt(2kgh)
where h is the initial height, g is the gravitational constant acceleration (9.8 N/kg on earth) and k is a convenient number between 0 and 1 to allow for some of the energy to be dissipated by frictional heat. Taking h = 10km and k as 0.5 (to be charitable to Flood theorists) we get the final velocity of the water striking Noah's ark to be 313m/s. That's slightly less than the speed of sound in the atmosphere, or 1,100+kph. Now, the Ark is being struck by a swarm of sonic-speed raindrops ... for 40 days. Hmm.

Can anybody get the total pressure of the water striking the ark from this? Should be interesting, but I don't know enough of the physics to continue.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

And that is why i've stopped posting on the open forums. It's ridiculous to have to bash brothers and sisters in full view like that. But anyway.

Here's another problem. Let's be kind and say that you need only 1km of water (to simplify the calculation) []

The fonts of the deep could have produced the majority of the water.

My preference is to go with 1" to 4" per hour rainfall. The first is sort of a minimum if we are talking about a heavy rainfall, which is certainly what appears to be described. 4"/hr is the max recorded rainfall I could find.

1"/hr nonstop over 40 days and nights yields 80 feet of water which has two effects, one it adds two atmospheres of pressure, and two it blocks out a lot of sunlight.

Furthermore the "vapor barrier" has to be ice, very cold ice, because the release of potential energy as it dropped is very large and if you want the water to be rain when it hits and not turn to steam before hand ...

If you go with most of the water coming from rain and assume that the water was stored as water or vapor and not ice then that release of potential energy renders the surface of the earth unlivable. Noah et al would be par broiled. (I haven't done those calculations personally but it certainly makes sense).

 

[shernren]

You Americans and your feet and inches! i hate those units. sigh. But still, turning a common argument around, why would God have mentioned the floodgates of the heavens if the fountains of the deep were the main source?

So basically, the potential energy of falling from 10km can either be converted to heat, in which case we have "steamfall" instead of rainfall, or to kinetic energy, in which case we have sonic rainfall. Ouch.