[Mike C.]

Newbie Zed Bee created a thread titled Where has Noah’s deluge water gone? in Newbie Central which nobody responded to. I thought I'd give it a go. I feel the topic more appropriately belongs in this forum instead, so I'm starting a new thread.

Originally Posted by Zed Bee

I have done the maths to save you time, but if you wish to do it yourself then here are the basic facts for you to work out the volume of the biblical deluge water. Yes I know the biblical story was plagiarised from Tablet XI of the Babylonian translation of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamish, which the Hebrew scribe exaggerated beyond madness, but there is no harm in doing a bit of maths for fun:

Earth’s mean diameter: 12,742 kms
Earth’s surface area: 510,064,472 square kms
Land mass area: 148,939,063 square kms
Land mean height: 840 metres.
Height of Mount Everest: 8,848 metres
Height of Mount Ararat: 5,160 metres.
Height of my bungalow: 7.5 metres
Height of land with all mountains squashed flat: 840 metres
Rainwater density: 1000 kg per cubic metre
Air density (at STP): 1.248 kg per cubic metre
Saturation point of air (at 100% RH): 4.84 grams of water vapour per cubic metre of dry air

If,, according to the Old Testament, “all the mountains were covered”:
Volume of water to cover Mount Everest: 4,394,212,229 cubic kilometres
(3.2 times more water than there is in all the oceans of the world)
Mass of air supporting Noah’s rain-cloud: 1,131,782,406,930,000,000 tons
Atmospheric pressure in Noah’s time: 1,414 tons per square inch

Or if only Mount Ararat was covered:
Volume of water to cover Mount Ararat: 2,634,064,905 cubic kilometres
(1.8 times more water than there is in all the oceans of the world)
Mass of air supporting Noah’s rain-cloud: 646,211,707,572,000,000 tons
Atmospheric pressure in Noah’s time: 807 tons per square inch

Or if the deluge water only covered the top of my bungalow:
Volume of water to cover my bungalow: 432,337,146 cubic kilometres
(22.4% more water than there is in all the oceans of the world)
Mass of air supporting Noah’s rain-cloud: 79,130,338,904,856,400,000 tons
Atmospheric pressure in Noah’s time: 98.9 tons per square inch

Or if the deluge water covered a dry land with all the mountains squashed flat:
Volume of water to cover a billiard ball Earth: 428,510,649 cubic kilometres
(22.1% more water than there is in all the oceans of the world)
Mass of air supporting Noah’s rain-cloud: 78,144,778,781,276,400,000 tons
Atmospheric pressure in Noah’s time: 97.3 tons per square inch

First, it is ridiculous to claim all that water was stored in the air. Why would you resort to that anyway, when the Bible even claims it didn't all come from the air?

Genesis 7:11
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

Some extraordinary event occurred referred to as "the fountains of the great deep [breaking] up," providing the main quantity of water.

Secondly, you're assuming the earth had the same distribution of land mass then as it does today. The magnitude of events needed to cause the whole Earth to be covered with water would be catastrophic; we can expect then that there were major land shifts occurring at the time and afterward. I won't conjecture on the exact land distribution before the flood. It is enough to note that if all the land on Earth was smooth the water would cover it to a depth of 2.7 km. Here is how I calculated this value:

Volume of Earth: 1,083.210 x 10⁹ km³
Volume of water: 1.386 x 10⁹ km³
Sources: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary...earthfact.html (found on Wikipedia)
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

Assuming that the total Earth volume includes water, we subtract total water volume to obtain total land volume.
1,083.210 - 1.386 = 1,081.824
Solid land volume: 1,081.824 x 10⁹ km³

To get the radius of just the land, we multiply land volume by 3/(4*pi) then take the cube root. The error introduced by treating the Earth as a perfect sphere is insignificant.
(1,081.824 * 10^9 * 3/(4*pi))^(1/3) = 6368.288
Land volume radius: 6368.288 km

Now we calculate the radius of the Earth including water.
(1,083.210 * 10^9 * 3/(4*pi))^(1/3) = 6371.006
Total volume radius: 6371.006 km

To get the total height of the water, we subtract the radius of the Earth without water from the radius with water.
6371.006 - 6368.288 = 2.718
Depth of water: 2.718 km

Please answer these simple questions, and no miracles please, because that would be childish:

We are dealing with a special act by God, so there is no reason to rule out miracles.

1) Where has Noah’s deluge water gone?
2) How did Noah, and the rest of the animal kingdom, manage to stand an atmospheric pressure of: 1,414 or 807 or 98.9 or even 97.3 tons on every square inch of their bodies. For your information it is now merely 0.00656 tons per square inch, or, if you prefer, 14.7 pounds per square inch in Imperial Units. Oy Veigh

Both rendered irrelevant by my observations.

Hope that helps

[steko]

The LORD simply shoved up the mountains and spread the depths of the ocean basins so that the water had a place to go. It's really very simple, when one accepts the fact of His awesome power.
It's said that the continents are still moving, the mountains still being thrust up. It's just that it's at a slower pace now than it was at the conclusion of the flood.

Psa 104:6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
Psa 104:7 At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
Psa 104:8 The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them.
Psa 104:9 You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.-ESV

[I aint no monkey]

Good job explaining in the OP.

When evolutionists look at the global flood, they do so with uniformitarian glasses on. Which of course would make anybody skeptical. If we remove those glasses and put on the catastropic glasses then things can be seen more clearly.

[Flipper]

Uniformitarian assumptions like the Chicxulub meteor impact, the Oxygen Catastrophe, Snowball earth, the great Permian extinction, etc? Those assumptions?

[fool]

Originally Posted by Flipper

Uniformitarian assumptions like the Chicxulub meteor impact, the Oxygen Catastrophe, Snowball earth, the great Permian extinction, etc? Those assumptions?

Nuthin uniform there.

[I aint no monkey]

Originally Posted by Flipper

Uniformitarian assumptions like the Chicxulub meteor impact, the Oxygen Catastrophe, Snowball earth, the great Permian extinction, etc? Those assumptions?

We can assume uniformitarianism to some degree. For example, since the global food and subsequent ice age I assume that the earth as been uniform.

[Zed Bee]

Thank you Mike C for transferring my thread to this location, which I noticed today. I would answer some of your comments as follows:

1) I am, of course, well aware that the biblical scribe mentions the “fountains of the deep” in addition to the 40 days of rain causing the biblical version of the deluge, but the OT is not specific about the proportion which gushed out of the “fountains”, and it cannot be significant because any geologist would stake his reputation asserting that the crust of the earth and the oceans of the earth do not float, and never have floated on a pool of water, but if anyone hazards a guess as to the quantity of water that gushed out of the “fountains” then I would be more than happy to calculate the quantity of water that came from “on high” and the atmospheric pressure caused by the water vapour and (more importantly) the air supporting the rain cloud.

2) It does not make any difference what the “distribution of land” was above mean sea level. The surface area of all land, whether in the form of tiny islands or one continent is 148,939,063 square kms, and the mean height is 840 metres. This works out as 125,108,813 cubic kilometres of dry land which must be subtracted from the volume calculated between the mean sea level and any height above dry land, in order to obtain an accurate volume of the deluge water. But even if we were, for the sake of argument, to take your round about figure of deluge water rising 2.7 kilometres above sea level, then (ignoring the fountains) the volume of water required to cover dry land up to your figure would be 1,252,648,984 cubic kilometres, and the combined mass of air and water would be 323,887,405,767,695,000,000 tons, causing an atmospheric pressure of 230 tons per square inch. The OT cannot be taken seriously by any reasonable person.

3) We are not dealing with a miraculous “act of God” which ignores, willy nilly all the consequences, but with the assertion of an ancient and very ignorant Middle Eastern scribe who plagiarised the original Sumerian story of a local flood in southern Mesopotamia, and exaggerated it beyond madness in terms of the duration of the flood, the volume of the flood, the size of the gopher Titanic, and the number of domestic animals rescued.

Try again

[Zed Bee]

Flipper,
May I add the "uniformity" of the 18 fossil specimens of eurypterid, a sea scorpion, showing evolutionary changes over a timescale from about 460 to 248 million years ago, roughly from the Upper Ordovician to the Upper Permian periods

[Guildenstern]

I am thankful for folks like Zed Bee. Without critical thinkers like this, people would still be believing in the absurdity of a global flood. The truth is that defending a global flood is not only scientifically unintelligible, but also contradictory to the Hebraic language of the Biblical account.

Here's what the account states:

Then God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the land is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the land.

The original word used for "land" in Hebrew is eretz. Eretz is used over 2,000 times in the Bible. And while eretz is translated as earth over 600 times in some translations, it is translated as land over 1,500 times. This is because the literal English word "land" is the most identical to the Hebrew word. This is the truthful context of the passage.

God brought destruction upon a particular civilization, a region of humanity that was, for the most part, the "majority" of the world's inhabitants at the time. It is speculated that this was a region within the boundaries of Mesopotamia. Also of note is that the animals collected were regional animals since the word "land" is applying to Noah's region (not the entire Earth).

The Bible lists other descendents from people not listed from Noah's lineage that survived onward after the flood (for they were outside the region). Flavius Josephus (first century Jewish historian) testifies to this in his own writings (Antiquity of the Jews, Book I, Chapter 4). There's not getting around this. The flood was regional, not global.

[Zed Bee]

Guildenstern,
You raise a very pertinent point, namely the difficulty in translating a Semitic language (be it Akkadian, Arabic, or Hebrew) into Latin-based languages with several letters of the Semitic alphabet missing.

I don’t want to labour the point too much, but in addition to language, there are also mischievous translators (I won’t put it stronger than that) who “bend” the language to suit the dogma. The example you gave is one, but there is also the case in Isaiah, where a young Hebrew woman of marriageable age, is translated as a perpetual Christian “virgin” (even after 7 kids).

Also in the same book where a hoped-for anointed leader (a Messiah) called Yemanu-El, that Isaiah addressed in the middle of the 8th century BC who was expected to lift the Assyrian yoke off the Israelite neck, becomes a first century AD Jesus who yells the ancient Israelite cry of “Eli, Eli, lama shabakhteni” while offering himself as a sacrifice to wipe out the sins of future generations of goyim yet to be born, simply by believing in the blasphemous 4th century AD Nicaean claim (by a democratic vote of 300 bishops) that Jesus was the physical son (filioque) of Ha-Shem, through the agency of a ghost.

I won’t mention the mental gymnastics involved in translating the plural name of gods (Elohim) as being a singular name of one particular nameless god (an El or Eloh), lest we fall out with each other prematurely

[Guildenstern]

^I understand. The English translations that exist today have many faults. This is why I'm studying Hebrew & Aramaic and why I use Strong's concordance while reading.

What a lot of people do not do is open their eyes beyond the box of an English Bible. They're outsourcing their thinking, putting their trust in people that are fallible. It's not that hard to do the research on one's own, there are so many resources and it's easy to filter through truth and falsity. They believe their context is the most factual, but when examined empirically, it is obvious something like a GLOBAL flood epoch is completely nonsensical.

Through moral reasoning, we can also find many other premises completely weak. To boot, the "hell" of Christian tradition is grossly malignant upon actual, Hebraic & Aramaic theology. I've been studying this stuff for years and I am incredibly versed. It saddens me how unintelligent the vast majority of Christians are.

[Mike C.]

Originally Posted by Zed Bee

1) I am, of course, well aware that the biblical scribe mentions the “fountains of the deep” in addition to the 40 days of rain causing the biblical version of the deluge, but the OT is not specific about the proportion which gushed out of the “fountains”, and it cannot be significant because any geologist would stake his reputation asserting that the crust of the earth and the oceans of the earth do not float, and never have floated on a pool of water, but if anyone hazards a guess as to the quantity of water that gushed out of the “fountains” then I would be more than happy to calculate the quantity of water that came from “on high” and the atmospheric pressure caused by the water vapour and (more importantly) the air supporting the rain cloud.

Forty days of straight rain across the whole world would only contribute water in measures of feet to the flood. Your air pressure calculations are a red herring. The majority of the water had to have come from the "fountains of the deep" and the existing water in the oceans. The floating land concept is misguided. Maybe you think the "deep" simply means deep underground, but actually the deep is used in the Bible as a synonym for the oceans depths. So the fountains of the great deep would be oceanic volcanoes and other underwater land formations. That extra water would contribute significantly to the flood, but most likely the existing water made the greatest contribution. If we assume that parts of the bottom of the oceans were pushed up and parts of the land masses pushed down (more realistically, an unbalanced world-wide disruption of land height), great quantities of ocean water would begin to flood inland.

2) It does not make any difference what the “distribution of land” was above mean sea level. The surface area of all land, whether in the form of tiny islands or one continent is 148,939,063 square kms, and the mean height is 840 metres. This works out as 125,108,813 cubic kilometres of dry land which must be subtracted from the volume calculated between the mean sea level and any height above dry land, in order to obtain an accurate volume of the deluge water. But even if we were, for the sake of argument, to take your round about figure of deluge water rising 2.7 kilometres above sea level, then (ignoring the fountains) the volume of water required to cover dry land up to your figure would be 1,252,648,984 cubic kilometres, and the combined mass of air and water would be 323,887,405,767,695,000,000 tons, causing an atmospheric pressure of 230 tons per square inch. The OT cannot be taken seriously by any reasonable person.

It seems you are assuming that the same volume of land currently above water was above water back then and would have stayed above water. There's no reason to think so. The ocean bottoms would have been pushing up, displacing great quantities of water. Likewise some of the land would be broken up and fall into the oceans. My figure of 2.7 km was not above sea level. It's what the height of the water would be if all land, both above water and underwater, were smoothed out. There doesn't need to be any extra water calculations. Even out the land height enough and the earth would be flooded.

3) We are not dealing with a miraculous “act of God” which ignores, willy nilly all the consequences, but with the assertion of an ancient and very ignorant Middle Eastern scribe who plagiarised the original Sumerian story of a local flood in southern Mesopotamia, and exaggerated it beyond madness in terms of the duration of the flood, the volume of the flood, the size of the gopher Titanic, and the number of domestic animals rescued.

Try again

If your argument against the story is that it was "plagiarised" (a purely academic concern, mind you), then you should stick to that. But we are arguing about the likelihood of a global flood being able to occur, as evidence for whether the Genesis story is true or false. God was the cause of such an alleged flood, so miracles are in fact in play. But I haven't resorted to any yet, have I? I'm just noting your arbitrary conditions.

[Guildenstern]

Originally Posted by Mike C.

But we are arguing about the likelihood of a global flood being able to occur, as evidence for whether the Genesis story is true or false. God was the cause of such an alleged flood, so miracles are in fact in play. But I haven't resorted to any yet, have I? I'm just noting your arbitrary conditions.

There is no likelihood of a global flood. It was a regional flood. You don't even need science to debunk this, for the original Hebrew account specifically outlines it as a regional flood. Not only does every ancient civilization agree it was regional, but even the Qu'ran agrees.

By insisting it is global, you are heaping coals upon the heads of us Christians. Out of ALL commonly accepted facts, ignorant people just happen to cling to the one that is the most absurd. How do you think this makes YHWH look? It is one thousand times more difficult in this day and age than it was fifty years ago to defend the Bible b/c people keep insisting on terrible translations & interpretations of it. The Bible says "land" not "Earth". This is fact.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by Zed Bee

1) I am, of course, well aware that the biblical scribe mentions the “fountains of the deep” in addition to the 40 days of rain causing the biblical version of the deluge, but the OT is not specific about the proportion which gushed out of the “fountains”, and it cannot be significant because any geologist would stake his reputation asserting that the crust of the earth and the oceans of the earth do not float, and never have floated on a pool of water, but if anyone hazards a guess as to the quantity of water that gushed out of the “fountains” then I would be more than happy to calculate the quantity of water that came from “on high” and the atmospheric pressure caused by the water vapour and (more importantly) the air supporting the rain cloud.

There's an ocean underneath China today. Why is it so difficult to conceptualise a lot more water once before?

2) It does not make any difference what the “distribution of land” was above mean sea level.

Of course it does! If the highest mountain was only a few hundred meters high then far less water need be made available.

The surface area of all land, whether in the form of tiny islands or one continent is 148,939,063 square kms, and the mean height is 840 metres. This works out as 125,108,813 cubic kilometres of dry land which must be subtracted from the volume calculated between the mean sea level and any height above dry land, in order to obtain an accurate volume of the deluge water. But even if we were, for the sake of argument, to take your round about figure of deluge water rising 2.7 kilometres above sea level, then (ignoring the fountains) the volume of water required to cover dry land up to your figure would be 1,252,648,984 cubic kilometres, and the combined mass of air and water would be 323,887,405,767,695,000,000 tons, causing an atmospheric pressure of 230 tons per square inch. The OT cannot be taken seriously by any reasonable person.

Flat terrain the globe over, no ocean basins, same amount of air and water, same pressure - yet a global flood.

[Mike C.]

Originally Posted by Guildenstern

There is no likelihood of a global flood. It was a regional flood. You don't even need science to debunk this, for the original Hebrew account specifically outlines it as a regional flood. Not only does every ancient civilization agree it was regional, but even the Qu'ran agrees.

By insisting it is global, you are heaping coals upon the heads of us Christians. Out of ALL commonly accepted facts, ignorant people just happen to cling to the one that is the most absurd. How do you think this makes YHWH look? It is one thousand times more difficult in this day and age than it was fifty years ago to defend the Bible b/c people keep insisting on terrible translations & interpretations of it. The Bible says "land" not "Earth". This is fact.

Are you saying the word "land" is not able to encompass the idea of the whole Earth? You'll need a better argument than that, since all the other details point toward a global flood.