Posted on 12/21/2012 3:25:31 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.
In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world's best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah.
Tune in to Christiane Amanpour's two-part ABC News special, "Back to the Beginning," which explores the history of the Bible from Genesis to Jesus. Part one airs on Friday, Dec. 21 and part two on Friday, Dec. 28, both starting at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
Ballard's track record for finding the impossible is well known. In 1985, using a robotic submersible equipped with remote-controlled cameras, Ballard and his crew hunted down the world's most famous shipwreck, the Titanic.
Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.
"Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube," he said. "But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history."
The water from the melting glaciers began to rush toward the world's oceans, Ballard said, causing floods all around the world.
"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods," Ballard said.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Titanic Discoverer Finds Evidence of Biblical Flood
Christian Post | 12/14/2012 | Jeff Schapiro
Posted on December 14, 2012 12:10:06 PM EST by SeekAndFind
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2968752/posts
Apr 29, 2010
A group of explorers from Hong Kong and Turkey believe they’ve made a discovery of Biblical proportions. The group say they have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark, resting at 13,000 feet atop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_wIKiOgk10
Not to forget Gen 7:11, where the fountains of the deep were also loosed with the heavens being opened up on the 7th day of the Great Flood....
“The distribution of Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA types matches up a bottleneck of just one lineage of males with three lineages of females ...”
That is true, but the date is around 72,000-74,000 BC with the eruption of the supervolcano Mt. Toba. (Indonesia).
I understand and discussion of the Nephilim is an entirely different topic but that they are described as existing before and after the flood could mean either they somehow survived the flood, or as you pointed out they could have been recreated after the flood. Suffice it to say there are arguments supporting both views. However, if we go down this path, it's a whole new discussion.
Getting back to the topic at hand, my point is that from a scriptural standpoint, the word "all" doesn't necessarily mean "everything" in a literal standpoint.
Gen 6:17 "I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish".
From a strictly literal standpoint, the above verse means God intended to wipe out everything; plant, animal, insect and microorganism.
What exactly "breath of life" meant to people thousands of years was probably different from our modern understanding. My guess is it meant destructiveness on such a scale that the probability of surviving would be comparable to that of playing the lottery and losing.
Gen 7:21 "Every living thing that moved on the earth perished--birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind."
In Gen 7:21, we are told all birds, land animals and humans died but not necessarily all plants, insects, reptiles or water creatures.
Gen 7:22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died."
Verse 22 now says all birds and land based animals, land based reptiles and possibly insects died but not all amphibians, plants, or water life.
Gen 7:23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark."
Verse 23 says every living thing was wiped out but appears to qualify itself by specifying humans, birds and land based animals.
Gen 8:11 "When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. "
That the dove returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf clearly means God didn't destroy all life as he said was going to do in Gen 6:17. Either God failed, or he was speaking figuratively. Which was it? My inclination is to believe he was speaking figuratively.
I think it fairly clear from Gen 7 that the destructiveness of the flood primarily targeted land based animals and non-waterfowl. Going back to Gen 6:17, if God spoke figuratively of destroying all life on the planet, why then couldn't he also have spoken figuratively in chapter 7:21-23 when saying all land animals and non-waterfowl were destroyed?
As other posters mentioned, there is also the matter of translation accuracy but that's a topic I can't address.
ABC? Amanpour? Not interested.
I’d heard about this many years ago. The fact that several religions have stories of a ‘great flood’ lends more credence to the idea that there must have been one somewhere in that area.
You’re going through a lot of contortions there to avoid reading the text as the text is written, and try to make it seem like it could mean something else. God is not Bill Clinton. All means all. Just count how many times and in how many variations that is reinforced. “All life”, “everything on Earth”, “every living thing”, “all”, “everything”. If that is not enough to make it clear to you that God really meant all, then you must not want to believe Him; it’s certainly no defect in the text.
You should also remember that verses 7:21-23 are consecutive. They are not separate statements, each giving us conflicting accounts. They are individual clauses of a single account, and so their descriptions are obviously additive and not exclusive. It’s not necessary to list every type of creature destroyed in one sentence if they were just listed in the previous sentence.
“That the dove returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf clearly means God didn’t destroy all life as he said was going to do in Gen 6:17.”
First of all, God never says he will destroy the plants. All of the descriptions describe only animal life: “every creature that has the breath of life”, “Every living thing that moved on the earth”, “all the creatures that swarm over the earth”, “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils”. The only one that might be read as possibly including plants is” “Every living thing on the face of the earth”, but since that comes after all the other more specific descriptions, in a single account, then we can safely assume that creatures described are the same as those described in all the previous verses more specifically.
It really wouldn’t be sensible to think that God meant to destroy plant life by a year long flood. Seeds of plants can survive in stasis for years before sprouting under favorable conditions, and even living plants can recover from almost any trauma as long as the roots survive. So, if God wanted to destroy all the plant life, a single year flood would be a poor way to do so, and I don’t think that God makes errors of judgement like that.
Just take the statements in context, and there is really no room for confusion. 6:17 doesn’t leave any wiggle room when you read it in context with the repetitions qualifying and clarifying each other, and neither does 7:21-23. It’s only if you try to take phrases and sentences, separate them, and then set them against each other that you will run into problems.
Didn't you just get finished saying that all meant everything?
God is not Bill Clinton. All means all. Just count how many times and in how many variations that is reinforced. “All life”, “everything on Earth”, “every living thing”, “all”, “everything”. If that is not enough to make it clear to you that God really meant all, then you must not want to believe Him; it’s certainly no defect in the text.
Not quite. It is estimated to have happened at that time. That estimate is based on speculation as to the rate of genetic mutations in the human genome. Those speculations are further based on on the estimated amount of divergence in the human genome from our speculative, unknown, and unobserved pre-human primate ancestors, and the estimated length of time since our presumed speciation event from those presumed ancestors. All of these estimates, speculations, and assumptions are given to us by scientists who happen to be in the business of supporting the Darwinian model, and just happen to fit the needs of that model. Well, at least until those speculative assumptions must be adjusted to fit conflicting data that the scientists must explain away, then any or all of those speculative assumptions may change.
A comet impact created a world-wide flood: http://www.threeimpacts-twoevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/COMET-IMPACT-ANALYSIS-AND-EFFECTS-21Dec12-WEBSITE1.pdf
Also, you can learn how simultaneuos impacts configured Earth’s landforms and instilled its obliquity here: http://www.threeimpacts-twoevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/SIMULTANEOUS-IMPACTS7.pdf
See post 32: a comet impact delivered a world-wide flood. The slide presentation at the link describes the effects, where the impact is located, and posits when it occurred.
Oh! OK. Then when a super volcano goes off in the heart of the most populous region in the world, we could expect only a few casualties?
Get a grip man - The little boom in 72,000 BC was beyond a 10.0 on the Volcanic Eruption Index (VEI) or about 10,000 times the scale of Mt St Helens in 1981.
Mt Toba was the largest volcanic eruption in 400 million years, produced 2,500-3,000 cubic kilometers of lava, 800 cubic kilometers of ash covering 20,000 kilometers, and 6-10 trillion tons of aerosols (including 200,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide - SO2).
The ash cloud was more than 34 kilometers high. Ash covered India between 1 and 6 meters deep.
May have started following cooling period. Began a 6 year period during which the largest amount of volcanic sulphur was deposited in the past 110,000 years, followed by 1000 years of the lowest ice core oxygen isotope ratios, temperatures were colder than during the Last Glacial Maximum at 18-21,000 years ago. Sea level was 160 feet below current.
Global temperature dropped an average of 21 degrees. Volcanic Winter lasted about six years. It was followed by 1,000 years of the coldest Ice Age on record. Warming began again 1,000 years later.
See that last bit about sea level? Where do you imagine all those people were living? Along the coasts and river mouths. just like they do today. And just like the tsunami in 2004 which killed only a small number of people (a mere 227,000), the resulting tsunami in 72,000 BC would have made that one look like a ripple in a pond. BTW that 2004 was a minor even from Toba - quake was just offshore from Lake Toba, the 100 kilometer crater. No speculative assumptions here. Just plain measurable facts.
“It is believed that the 1% human genetic variation stems from this time. No other species shows such a small variation. Genetic evidence suggests only 10,000 adults survived world wide. May be event which caused rise in modern racial differences.” - Professor Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois.
Take your arguments to him. And not to put too fine a point on it, but these poor folk where not pre-human primates. The were fully human just as we are - having been human for nearly 150,000 years.
The effect was sort of like what would happen if Yellowstone went off today. The US would be uninhabited and uninhabitable. As the ash cloud moved over the rest of the globe, the rest of the world would follow within years. A few years later, humans would be nearly extinct. Do not mess with super volcanos!
Great links. Thanks .
I think the hypothesis exceeds the evidence by a wide margin.
“Didn’t you just get finished saying that all meant everything?”
No, I just said all means all. It’s a quantity, you also need to look at what type of thing that quantity is being applied to. Simply reading the passages in question, each time the quantity of “all” is specifically limited to terrestrial, breathing creatures.
If I said: “The tornado killed everything. Every man, woman, and child in the town was killed.”
The first sentence does not mean that, in addition to every man, woman, and child in the town, the tornado also killed every other living thing, both inside and outside the town. The first sentence is simply limited and qualified by the second sentence. This is called context, a thing we seem to have no problem understanding, except when we want to make the Bible say something other than is plainly written.
“No speculative assumptions here. Just plain measurable facts.”
You’re joking, right?
First, you assume there must have been a larger diversity in the genome than what see today, which is why we are even discussing a “bottleneck” in the first place. Next, you make a series of assumptions that are unverifiable in order to make your estimation of the amount of time that has passed since the bottleneck, which I described in my previous post. Then, you look for evidence of some type of disaster in the geological record, ice cores, tree ring samples, etc that date to the approximate time you get from the genetic estimates. Then you concoct a just-so story, like you did in your previous post, about how the disaster you’ve discovered caused the bottleneck.
I can’t even count the number of unfounded, untestable, unverifiable assumptions occur to get from point A to point B in that chain of events, but suffice to say, there are quite a lot. This is not the scientific method, it’s Darwinian apologetics.
“And not to put too fine a point on it, but these poor folk where not pre-human primates.”
I guess you misunderstood my reference. I was describing the process by which scientists purport to date the “bottleneck event”. This genetic dating process requires them to assume a rate of genetic variation in the human genome, which they calculate in part based on the divergence between our genome and the genomes of other primates. They assume that human and extant primate genomes diverged from a theoretical, unknown pre-human primate or protoprimate ancestor. That’s what I was referring to in previous post, not that there would be prehuman primates at the time of the Toba event, in the timeline of the current Darwinian speculative history.
I believe the ‘bottleneck’ can be traced to the eruption of the Toba volcano, in Indonesia, about 75,000 years ago, which came close to wiping out all humans on the earth.
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