Questions on the Flood for TWD39 (or any theist)
Offline This thread is mainly for TWD39, though other people who believe the flood, Noah and so on really happened are welcome to chime in. It is an extension of the other thread discussing language and the tower of Babel, which started some questions about Noah's flood.
If you believe that the Flood happened as the Bible states, then you must have rational answers to the following questions:
1 Were babies also killed in the flood? Were they deemed sinful, or just collateral damage? What about the unborn? (in case you think people are born with sin..) Is God an innocent baby killer?
2 If the flood covered the whole earth, where did the water come from, and where did it go afterwards?
3 If the flood was caused by rain for 40 days and nights, and rain covered the earth, then it would need to rain 112 million cubic kilometers each day. The water vapour that’s needed to be suspended in the air to achieve this would render the air unbreathable - people would have drowned by breathing this air. How did Noah and his family survive this?
4 How did the animals get to the arc? If Noah gathered them, how did he get around the world so quickly? If the animals came of their own accord, how did the giant tortoises get there in time? How did animals that can’t swim cross seas to get there?
5 How did Noah feed the animals? Some animals have very specific diets (pandas eat only bamboo, koalas eat only eucalyptus, for example) so how did Noah get these foods, which don’t grow in Mesopotamia?
6 How did Noah keep meat fresh for the hungry carnivores?
7 How did the freshwater fish survive? Did the arc carry fresh water? How were these fish collected and stored?
8 The flood would have killed all plant life. What would the ‘saved’ herbivores eat? What about those that feed only on adult trees that take a long time to grow?
9 What about the carnivores? They must have had to eat the herbivores – they were on the arc for over a year, so any corpses would be completely rotten, as well as being buried under sediment.
10 Where would the animals find fresh water to sustain themselves?
11 How did the plants survive being underwater for more than a year? Some might have seeds that survive, but vast numbers of plant species would have become extinct. How come the are still here today?
12 When the flood ended, only 6 people survived that would go on to breed. The bible indicates that the tower of Babel happened 100 years after the flood. How were there enough people to build the tower, which must have been massive?
13 How did the Native Americans, and Australian Aboriginals get to their continents (Which don’t have land bridges with Asia) after the flood?
14 How did God ‘create’ the rainbow as part of the promise he’d never flood the whole world again? If there was refracted sunlight and rain ever before the flood, there must have been rainbows.
15 Why did god change his mind about how many of each type of animal had to be taken into the arc? Genesis 6 says take 2 of each, Genesis 7 says take up to 7.
16 Lastly, why did god go to all the trouble?
- Login to post comments
Offline This statement assumes its first premise. What is a god? How does it interact with the material world to create life? How can you know how much 'god' knows about his 'creation'? If you have no objective proofs of these truth statements then they are hypotheses with no data. You say "God did it". Show us that this is true using a proof that does not involve only a convolution of language.
A god is anyone who is of higher power than you.
How it interacts is through His followers and sometimes His creation.
How do we know how much God knows? God is said to be omnipotent and omniscient.. beyond that, how much does any creator know of his/her creation? usually almost everything... how much more would God have to know to know literally everything??? Not much really.. the only difference is God created much much more than any single creator and also much more complicated.
I say God did it... What did the parents do besides have sex to create the child? Yes carry it to term... but all that work in between... Nature right? God has put a system in place to work on its own. But what gave it the self recognition and id, ego and superego? Nature again? Where does nature stop and God start? To a non-believer, it's all happenstance... hard for me to believe to be honest. To a believer. Nature creates the child, God creates the person.
What we can say in the case of humans is that sperm and egg contribute half the DNA to a germ cell and from that single cell a human grows. Life makes itself. No, I don't understand how at the genetic level, but that's how it seems to be. We can say that life creates ecosystems. We can even say that human bodies are symbiotic ecosystems and we might argue that genomes too, are symbiotic ecosystems.
We can't say certainly what life is, but what we can say is that a mother grows her baby with chocolate, oatmeal and fruit salad. A child is made of the stuff of our planet. There's nothing supernatural in the recipe of life.
even the Bible says From dust you came and to dust you shall return.. no argument here.
I've lost 3 children in utero and that experience argues the universe does not care - not in the way we want it to. It has no agency, no plan, no intent. Older women and men accrue genetic mutations and we lose our babies because their broken genomes are not viable in an environment that's fiercely competitive from the instant of conception. The idea young women keep their babies and older ones lose their's as the result of god's plan has no basis in the data.
All life seems to be part of an entropic system powered by a solar host. This does not mean that in the absence of eager acceptance of supernatural assertion, losing children has no meaning for non-believing humans. Like everything else, loss of little ones has what meaning we give it. It is the shape of the pain I give it.
...and that's just it... it has no meaning to non-believers because there's little meaning to life except a lucky mix of chemicals that happen to be in the right atmosphere at the right moment in history. Likewise i'm sure we could denote that babies are the same way and just happen to be a lucky happening where the sperm finds the egg before the womans body can destory it and then more luck happens when the cells split and grow and even more lucky when they grow correctly so that we have a child we have defined as "normal".
One could argue that the universe does not care, but then again, what can you get out of that experience? How has it changed you?
- Login to post comments
It all makes sense now! So many of the confusing and contradictory things Christians say about their God make sense when viewed in the above way. By "Christians", I mean most of the Christians with whom I've discussed God and religion. Thank you for the insight, RobbyPants! 
It all makes sense now! So many of the confusing and contradictory things Christians say about their God make sense when viewed in the above way. By "Christians", I mean most of the Christians with whom I've discussed God and religion. Thank you for the insight, RobbyPants! 
Content deleted, as it was spam. I'm leaving the post however, because if anyone replied to it directly, deleting this post would also delete those replies.
~Vastet
God does have a different level of love than we have and it is widely accepted that we can never fully understand this love. We accept that it is greater than we can imagine.
Gods behavior was reflected through Jesus. If you're going to compare other choices God made, we'd have to discuss them individually and talk about what we know and moreso what we don't know.
Jesus is a blood sacrifice due to the Law. That was the way to forgiveness. God didn't have to send His son to die for us... He could have gone the way of Noah's time and said forget you all.
concerning your last question: just look at people, look at yourself. Consider all the choices you made in life... can you honestly say you're all good?
Consider this. Is a murderer evil? What if that murderer for most of their life had donated large amounts of money to great causes like Breast Cancer research and shelters maybe they also served at minimum 20 hours a week at a homeless shelter... Because they murdered in cold blood, we typically would still consider them evil regardless of what they've done in life otherwise.
Granted I'm sure... I hope you haven't killed anyone, but consider other things that you've done that people would consider evil. How many times did it happen.. how many different circumstances?