Noah's Ark

[MRC_Hans]

However, you would naturally expect the dynamics of a global flood to be unsubstantiated by science, which is true.

A global flood will require magic, so much is true.

Moreover, the arguments put forward by creationists re the flood are insufficient, because they leach off scientific premises, instead of sticking to traditional and recorded views.

True. Any attempts to rationalize out the magic tend to become absurd.

There is a total lack of understanding on both sides about the physics of such masses of water like the ocean.

Which sides? Science understands the physics of oceans pretty well.

To put it plainly- the relative viscosity of water (or any fluid) increases with mass, to the extent that fluid dynamics are no longer supreme. I have explained this in part under earth science, rising sea levels greatest lie...

It will change with the mass of the fluid, but water does not change its mass. The mass of the whole body of water has no impact on the dynamics.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

According to traditional interpretation of those passges, the name Nephilim was given to denote giants. The human race before the flood were all giants as was Noah. Their average height was just over 10 ft. After the flood some races maintained their height more than others, until there was a difference by as much as 3 ft between races. Differences still ocurr today with some races over 6 feet, but giants over 8 ft often suffer a genetic imbalance.

Interesting tale, but ... a tale.

Hans

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Could you please supply a more detailed definition of "relative viscosity", your current definiton of "the behaviour of water and any fluid is different" is a bit to vague.
Huh? I have no idea what, "it is what I understand" means. You didn't read this so did you actual see this phenomena, did someone tell you, did you see it on TV or do you just think it is probably true?

I was aware of it as a child. You went to school, I went down to the local creek, that was my school.

Eg. of relative viscosity, ask a surfer which wave lasts the longest, which volume of water moves relatively slower.
Compare the difference of a wave in the local pool, and an ocean wave, then think of a volume of water, say 100 miles across, and keep increasing the size in your head...
Does the water still splash like spilt milk on a bench top at this scale? No, not at all, it starts to look and act more like a solid.
It takes a long time for it to change in shape and position.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

A global flood will require magic, so much is true.
True. Any attempts to rationalize out the magic tend to become absurd.
Which sides? Science understands the physics of oceans pretty well.
It will change with the mass of the fluid, but water does not change its mass. The mass of the whole body of water has no impact on the dynamics.
Hans

I am using the word mass to mean overall weight by volume.
If science understood water dynamics more fully, they could easily envisage the possibility of a global flood.

 

[Yazata]

A global flood will require magic, so much is true.

A literal global flood certainly would. Perhaps it might be more helpful to interpret the ancient myths as examples of proto-philosophy, expressed in story-form as opposed to the technical-style prose that the Greeks seem to have pioneered.

I wrote this in July's 'Firmament' thread in this subforum:

In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, the idea of 'the waters' symbolized primordial chaos.

Water was the primary engine of chaos in early Sumerian and Akkadian society, since floods periodically devastated their early cities. Even the rain tended to dissolve their structures, which were typically built from sun-dried unfired mud bricks.

More philosophically, water was seen as being without form. Water takes the shape of any container that it's in and has no innate shape of its own. So in ancient Mesopotamia, creation was imagined as an act of taming the primordial waters, creating dry land and a world of stability. Shape was imposed on shapelessness. Form was created out of flux.

That's what the 'waters above and below' stuff is basically talking about. The universe was imagined as inherently chaotic and formless, and the Earth was conceived as having been created by the earliest gods through a process of separating the waters and creating a dry bubble of solid reality in between.

This, btw, is what the 'flood' myth was about. The threat that the ancient Mesopotamians always felt was that rational form and stability might ultimately disappear and chaos return.

The Hebrew writers of Genesis were just making allusions to middle-eastern cosmogonic mythology that was already several thousand years old by the time they wrote, retelling the traditional story in such a way that their god Yahweh played the central role.

Any attempts to rationalize out the magic tend to become absurd.

Right. I don't have a great deal of interest in or respect for the style of thinking that tries to interpret the early chapters of Genesis (or passages from the Vedas or whatever) as if they were literal and historical, and then ties itself in conceptual knots trying to imagine how modern science can be made consistent with those ancient myths. That's a fruitless and pointless enterprise in my opinion.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

A global flood will require magic, so much is true.

The combined mass of water on this planet, including liquid, ice and vapor, is not sufficient to literally cover the planet. That would require sea level to rise by almost nine kilometers, in order to submerge Mt. Everest.

We are already at the end of an ice age. The little bit of permanent ice remaining in the glaciers and polar caps will melt within a few centuries. This will raise sea level by about a hundred meters. If we could squeeze all the water vapor out of the skies maybe that would give us an additional hundred--but now we're talking about magic already!

This will certainly make all the continents a whole lot smaller and submerge some of our favorite islands like Manhattan and Aruba, but there will still be plenty of land sticking up out of the water.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

There is enough water in the oceans, without humming about melting ice caps, which amount to practically nothing, to cover the entire earth by over 2000 meters.
The earth does not behave as a solid rock, it bends and gives way to oceans, and it also has much more flexibility under pressure of such water. So it is quite plastic, and behaves like a garment, not a concrete slab.
One immediate objection to that might be the question why oceans are not bending their way out of their basins or boundaries. The fact is that they tend to do that all the time, but there are several major natural controls to prevent that, which I will not discuss here.

Another factor to consider (out of at least five major ones) is that oceans are not attracted to shores, to level out, the major frame of reference is the earth below, its gravity etc. So the pull of gravity is downward towards the centre of the earth, in every part of the ocean. This means that if an ocean is enabled to cover the land, which it certainly can, the earth will give way and the ocean will stay on that continent for as long as nothing changes.

Another factor about oceans you cannot shift great masses, or displace great masses without extraordinary forces, I mean super natural.
A large ocean going vessel cannot dock sideways, if there is only three meters of water around the ship, despite powerful side shifting screws, because the water is too difficult to displace. Imagine what it takes to move an ocean, or to displace any of its water.

There are several factors of ocean behaviour which are not accounted for by common science, so why would you expect it to support a global flood?

 

[origin]

I was aware of it as a child. You went to school, I went down to the local creek, that was my school.

That is lovely, but the question is how do you know or understand that some parts of the oceans are 90 meters higher than the rest and this hieght difference persists for years?

Eg. of relative viscosity, ask a surfer which wave lasts the longest, which volume of water moves relatively slower.
Compare the difference of a wave in the local pool, and an ocean wave, then think of a volume of water, say 100 miles across, and keep increasing the size in your head...
Does the water still splash like spilt milk on a bench top at this scale? No, not at all, it starts to look and act more like a solid.
It takes a long time for it to change in shape and position.

Large amounts of water do not act more like a solid. None of this has the slightest thing to do with the viscosity of water.

 

[origin]

There is enough water in the oceans, without humming about melting ice caps, which amount to practically nothing, to cover the entire earth by over 2000 meters.

That is not supported by the facts.

The earth does not behave as a solid rock, it bends and gives way to oceans, and it also has much more flexibility under pressure of such water. So it is quite plastic, and behaves like a garment, not a concrete slab.

Deformation of the surface occurs areas of the crust are still rebounding from the weight of the glaciers during the ice age.

One immediate objection to that might be the question why oceans are not bending their way out of their basins or boundaries.

That sure is not a question I have.

The fact is that they tend to do that all the time, but there are several major natural controls to prevent that, which I will not discuss here.

Uh, OK...

Another factor to consider (out of at least five major ones) is that oceans are not attracted to shores, to level out, the major frame of reference is the earth below, its gravity etc. So the pull of gravity is downward towards the centre of the earth, in every part of the ocean. This means that if an ocean is enabled to cover the land, which it certainly can, the earth will give way and the ocean will stay on that continent for as long as nothing changes.

This is known a word salad, or random word generation...

Another factor about oceans you cannot shift great masses, or displace great masses without extraordinary forces, I mean super natural.
A large ocean going vessel cannot dock sideways, if there is only three meters of water around the ship, despite powerful side shifting screws, because the water is too difficult to displace. Imagine what it takes to move an ocean, or to displace any of its water.

Not supported by the facts.

There are several factors of ocean behaviour which are not accounted for by common science, so why would you expect it to support a global flood?

I'm sure science cannot explain your made up behaviours which do not exist, but is that really surprising?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

There is enough water in the oceans, without humming about melting ice caps, which amount to practically nothing, to cover the entire earth by over 2000 meters.

This is not correct. Ice ages occur periodically and we have measured sea level at their peaks and nadirs. Over the cycles during the past 500 million years, the difference between maximum and minimum sea level has been about half a kilometer. In individual ice ages it fluctuates by about 200 meters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level

 

[Aqueous Id]

Common science does not support a global flood,

There is only science, not common science. "Uncommon" science most likely is a euphemism for pseudoscience.

and so I would not expect you to contradict science.

No one should contradict science. That would be ludicrous.

The fact that you said that notions of a race of giants is ridiculous, shows that you actually read it, unlike some who don't even understand plain English.

The myth about giants, or people living for eons, or monsters, dragons, the behemoth, etc., are most likely a combination of half-forgotten legends mixed with ancient peoples' awareness, upon discovering bones and fossils, that something was different about the natural world in the distant past. This is of course exactly what the fossil record tells us.

I support the story of the flood, and from what I read in myths and legends, accept that it was global.

That would be ludicrous.

There is no shortage of scientists who have plenty of evidence of such a flood,

Then they're nuts. It's absurd.

but I don't like their explanations when it comes to accounting for the volumes of water required to cover the highest mountain.

You can very easily estimate it. Would you like me to walk through it? It's quite simple. You only need to consider two concentric spheres. The outer sphere represents the earth flooded up to, say, the height of Mt Everest. The inner sphere represents the actual earth today. Subtract the volume of the inner sphere from the volume of the outer sphere and that gives you the volume of water required. It's an absurdly huge volume. And to get it in forty days & nights you would need the pressure of . . . let me say a fire hydrant for now . . . continuously over every square cm of the planet. Of course it's just a legend, so no one but a few nutty people would ever take it seriously.

However, I have an understanding of water on a large scale that I am fairly certain has already been discovered and understood by many other scientists.

Start by showing how to calculate the volume and I'll begin to believe you have some relevant knowledge. At the moment, you are addressing this topic completely unscientifically.

These greater dynamics of a body of fluid have to be realised intellectually, because they are beyond the lab.

Horsefeathers. Let's start with the stark reality of the sheer volume of water and then let's see if we can figure out its theoretical pressure at condensation, and some of the bizarre conditions that would have to exist to create such an event, all of which would have killed anyone in a wooden boat. Of course it's just a legend, so no one but a few nutty folks take it seriously. However, I would encourage you to do the math anyway. In fact, if I were Supreme Commander of the Universe for a day, I would require that all school children in the world learn to do this calculation within a day or two of learning the formula for finding the volume of a sphere. I would create a committee to gather all the ridiculous myths that people still believe today, in order to debunk them using plain simple facts that kids learn every day in grade school.

 

[Aqueous Id]

There is enough water in the oceans, without humming about melting ice caps, which amount to practically nothing, to cover the entire earth by over 2000 meters.

That's absurd. That water is filling all the basins that hold it, plus the total that's evaporated into the atmosphere, which can't be magically condensed without destroying the putative boat and its occupants. Whatever you're dreaming up is purely imaginary. Let's crunch some numbers. I like numbers. Numbers are our friend. They get us out of a lot of nutty wrong ideas very quickly.

The earth does not behave as a solid rock, it bends and gives way to oceans, and it also has much more flexibility under pressure of such water. So it is quite plastic, and behaves like a garment, not a concrete slab.

The plastic earth rips, quakes and vomits magma when it gets stressed. It doesn't create water out of thin air and then annihilate it to make legends come true. That would be way, way ludicrous.

One immediate objection to that might be the question why oceans are not bending their way out of their basins or boundaries. The fact is that they tend to do that all the time, but there are several major natural controls to prevent that, which I will not discuss here.

You mean magic of course. Massive volumes of water out of--and into--thin air. No, this is straight pseudoscience. You have no solution to this, you just wish you did because you wish the legends and myths to be true since that supports your world view. But it's straight pseudoscience.

Another factor to consider (out of at least five major ones) is that oceans are not attracted to shores, to level out, the major frame of reference is the earth below, its gravity etc. So the pull of gravity is downward towards the centre of the earth, in every part of the ocean. This means that if an ocean is enabled to cover the land, which it certainly can, the earth will give way and the ocean will stay on that continent for as long as nothing changes.

The only thing that's pulling and bending right now is the needle on my baloney meter. It's pegged so far to the right that it's bending, and I think I see little beads of water where it's sweating under the strain.

Another factor about oceans you cannot shift great masses, or displace great masses without extraordinary forces, I mean super natural.

You mean magic, which is a fantasy to explain away anything that's physically impossible.

A large ocean going vessel cannot dock sideways, if there is only three meters of water around the ship, despite powerful side shifting screws, because the water is too difficult to displace. Imagine what it takes to move an ocean, or to displace any of its water.

And yet your mind is more firmly entrenched in this malarkey than the Titanic or Lusitania.

There are several factors of ocean behaviour which are not accounted for by common science, so why would you expect it to support a global flood?

All I expect is a little common sense and a child's level of education. We should agree to exercise that much of our human potential, to go forth into that good night, as it were, and bravely determine that the flood myth is a silly proposition propped up by styrofoam logic, pseudoscience and nutty fantasies of magic that simply repeals the laws of nature whenever it suits the storyteller.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

None of this has the slightest thing to do with the viscosity of water.

Relative viscosity. I gave you a illustration for a large scale. We'll try going the other way - small.
I watched an ant with its head caught in a droplet of water, they are strong creatures, but this one could not shake the water off. Without discussing surface cohesion, if we increased the scale of this droplet and the ant by a thousand, so that the droplet is about a meter wide, and the water stood up like a ball, the ant still cannot get out. Would you say that is a fair representation of water dynamics or would it be fiction?

Fiction of course, because the surface tension, is still as strong but no longer relevant.

The laws of physics are not this uniform scale that goes into infinity, and on a large scale, several physical laws are no longer as relevant.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

That's absurd. That water is filling all the basins that hold it, plus the total that's evaporated into the atmosphere, which can't be magically condensed without destroying the putative boat and its occupants. Whatever you're dreaming up is purely imaginary. Let's crunch some numbers. I like numbers. Numbers are our friend. They get us out of a lot of nutty wrong ideas very quickly.


The plastic earth rips, quakes and vomits magma when it gets stressed. It doesn't create water out of thin air and then annihilate it to make legends come true. That would be way, way ludicrous.


You mean magic of course. Massive volumes of water out of--and into--thin air. No, this is straight pseudoscience. You have no solution to this, you just wish you did because you wish the legends and myths to be true since that supports your world view. But it's straight pseudoscience.


The only thing that's pulling and bending right now is the needle on my baloney meter. It's pegged so far to the right that it's bending, and I think I see little beads of water where it's sweating under the strain.


You mean magic, which is a fantasy to explain away anything that's physically impossible.


And yet your mind is more firmly entrenched in this malarkey than the Titanic or Lusitania.


All I expect is a little common sense and a child's level of education. We should agree to exercise that much of our human potential, to go forth into that good night, as it were, and bravely determine that the flood myth is a silly proposition propped up by styrofoam logic, pseudoscience and nutty fantasies of magic that simply repeals the laws of nature whenever it suits the storyteller.

You seem to have a bad habit of pulling statements apart and separating sentences. This prevents you from getting the picture.

When I make a statement, in anticipating questions in response, the next statement is designed to answer those. So if you miss one point you miss the next, and the whole post is of no value to you.

You are not doing yourself a favour by thoughtlessly dismissing anything that escapes your field.

I have given several examples and illustrations already, which deserve consideration.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

This is not correct. Ice ages occur periodically and we have measured sea level at their peaks and nadirs. Over the cycles during the past 500 million years, the difference between maximum and minimum sea level has been about half a kilometer. In individual ice ages it fluctuates by about 200 meters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level

You have to read my statements in context. Going by common interpretation your view is correct. But the earth can flex under the mass of water.
We all know the highest mountains in the world seemed to rise out of water.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

We all know the highest mountains in the world seemed to rise out of water.

What??? On top of everything else, it seems that you also don't understand plate tectonics. The earth's mountain ranges were all formed by two tectonic plates crashing into each other. ("Crash" is an exaggeration since their rate of motion is less than one millimeter per year, but the masses are so great that the results do indeed resemble the aftermath of a crash.) When two plates collide, one rides up over the edge of the other and distorts.

Of course this movement is not steady. Pressure builds up for centuries and finally it is released by a larger movement happening all at once. This is the mechanism of earthquakes.

The oldest mountains are the lowest, because erosion has been "sanding them down" for millions of years. The Appalachians and Urals are a good example. The tallest ranges such as the Himalayas, Rockies, Andes and Alps are newer.

The only mountains that "seem to rise up out of the water" are of volcanic origin. This includes all the Hawaiian Islands and quite a few others in the Pacific. In fact something like 80% of the world's volcanoes are found in a region in the Pacific--including many long-extinct volcanoes like Maui. These islands/mountains were formed by volcanic eruptions and had nothing to do with water pressure.

 

[MacGyver1968]

Relative viscosity. I gave you a illustration for a large scale. We'll try going the other way - small.
I watched an ant with its head caught in a droplet of water, they are strong creatures, but this one could not shake the water off. Without discussing surface cohesion, if we increased the scale of this droplet and the ant by a thousand, so that the droplet is about a meter wide, and the water stood up like a ball, the ant still cannot get out. Would you say that is a fair representation of water dynamics or would it be fiction?

Fiction of course, because the surface tension, is still as strong but no longer relevant.

The laws of physics are not this uniform scale that goes into infinity, and on a large scale, several physical laws are no longer as relevant.

I think you might need one of these for your theories:

How can you not discuss surface tension when talking about an ant trapped in a droplet of water? Surface tension is the cause. It doesn't scale up the same, because the surface tension is not strong enough to hold larger volumes of water in a sphere.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

How can you not discuss surface tension when talking about an ant trapped in a droplet of water? Surface tension is the cause. It doesn't scale up the same, because the surface tension is not strong enough to hold larger volumes of water in a sphere.

It's the same old surface-versus-volume conundrum; two dimensions versus three. As the linear dimensions of an object are scaled up proportionally, its mass increases as the cube of linear dimension, whereas its surface area only increases as the square of linear dimension. So as the bubble enlarges, the mass of water it contains increases faster than the area of its surface.

This is why flying birds don't get much larger than 40lb/18kg. The lift their wings can produce is a function of surface area, whereas the power they need to lift their mass is a function of volume. For example, people envision flying ostriches with maybe a 20-30ft/6-10m wingspan. In fact their wingspan would need to be more like 200ft/60m to lift their 300lb/135kg bodies.

In addition to the obvious handicap of trying to fold them up when not flying, there's an even worse problem: Just how big would their breastbone have to be to anchor those wings?

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

What??? On top of everything else, it seems that you also don't understand plate tectonics. The earth's mountain ranges were all formed by two tectonic plates crashing into each other. ("Crash" is an exaggeration since their rate of motion is less than one millimeter per year, but the masses are so great that the results do indeed resemble the aftermath of a crash.) When two plates collide, one rides up over the edge of the other and distorts.

Of course this movement is not steady. Pressure builds up for centuries and finally it is released by a larger movement happening all at once. This is the mechanism of earthquakes.

The oldest mountains are the lowest, because erosion has been "sanding them down" for millions of years. The Appalachians and Urals are a good example. The tallest ranges such as the Himalayas, Rockies, Andes and Alps are newer.

The only mountains that "seem to rise up out of the water" are of volcanic origin. This includes all the Hawaiian Islands and quite a few others in the Pacific. In fact something like 80% of the world's volcanoes are found in a region in the Pacific--including many long-extinct volcanoes like Maui. These islands/mountains were formed by volcanic eruptions and had nothing to do with water pressure.

Tectonic activity like volcanoes has only accounted for less than one percent of all geological formations. Under water these formations may occur many times faster than eons of time.

As you can see with "common" science and the other supporting posts, they cannot imagine water doing what I have outlined, and that is how they remain to this day.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

I think you might need one of these for your theories:

How can you not discuss surface tension when talking about an ant trapped in a droplet of water? Surface tension is the cause. It doesn't scale up the same, because the surface tension is not strong enough to hold larger volumes of water in a sphere.

I was actually saying what you have said about water tension. I did not want to discuss surface tension because I did not need to go into detail in order to make a point.

Your reaction is not unusual... and reflective of the older ones.