"However, the group has not revealed the location of the site beyond saying that it is 12,000 feet up the mountain. It has also failed to produce exterior photos of the structure."
Lol, it must look nothing like all the specs God gave in their Bible. Poor delusional christians groups...
Not knowing anything about this particular subject, I would be inclined against it. Luckily I can name many other stupid things that my atheist frienemies have said.
The video snips from documentaries around 1990 remind me how intriguing the whole thing was when it was first publicised. A second problem (as well as the evidence against such an implausibly deep flood) is that a vessel 500 feet long built with iron age techniques would probably just fall to pieces. That is one HUGE boat (well over half the length of the titanic)!
So here's a theory - someone built a boat to the specifications of the ark, high up on mount Ararat, and there it remains to this day.
Lol, that makes tons of sense Elroch...
I am personally inclined to doubt they found anything untill I see the pictures ;)
The stats in Genesis are interesting. Apparently it rained for 40 days, and covered the mountains to a depth of 12 feet (kind of precise this). So taken absolutely literally, an amount of water adequate to cover the entire world to just under 30,000 feet is required. This is vastly more water than in to be found in the oceans which, as everyone knows, are the source of the evaporated water that forms clouds and falls as rain. Also, if we assume the rainfall was precisely constant at all times and locations for the 40 days, 300 feet of rain fell each day. This is about 100 times the heaviest monsoon ever recorded. So billions of cubic kilometers of water appeared in the sky out of nowhere, fell at a rate 100 times that of the heaviest monsoon, flooded the Earth, killed every single animal, then "subsided". Meanwhile civilisation in places like Egypt continued as normal, blissfully unaware.
But the archaelogical find is still intriguing, and very interesting to try to explain.
IDK much about the flood. Get math_magician in here for that. I just prefer to make arguments from entirely different grounds. I guess I am assuming the measurements are what you say they are, Elroch (I think that is a fair assumption)?
I thought so. But in fact the 300 feet of rain per day was based on at least 12,000 feet of flood to dump the Ark where it is supposed to be, whereas the text says "12 feet higher than the mountain tops" which would be over 29,000 feet for Everest, so that one figure needs to be increased even more. I used the Everest depth to calculate the total amount of water, but I only stated this roughly anyway. The precise number of billions of cubic kilometers of water does not materially affect my conclusion.
Wait a minute! It doesn't have to cover all of the mountain tops, literally. It doesn't have to cover Everest. One can literally and justifiably say that the flood covered every mountain in proximity to where they lived. Obviously they couldn't see the whole Earth anyways. I think some of your assumptions about depth could be unwarranted.
ok. Actually that only changes the precise value of the total volume of water (which I stated very vaguely), as I used 12,000 feet for the calculation of the rainfall. Note that over a period of 40 days, a merely local flood is not possible - large discrepancies in water depth propagate very fast (eg tsunami).
(My calculated figure for the total volume of water is about 10 billion cubic kilometers, assuming a depth of 12,000 feet).
Archaelogically, a puzzling point is that they claim to have dated material conveniently to 2800 BC, which was the date they wanted, but they have also found substantial iron in the site. Although I stated that it was "Iron age" based on this, in fact this was deep in the Bronze age, well before iron working displaced bronze.
They find Jesus's napkin and personal deoderant, Noah's Ark and whatnot every year. It's sillyness. Are we really going to argue which all-consuming flood is more unlikely?
That's utter nonsense. It doesn't "prove" anything but the fact the earth is a planet that can sustain life. Are you seriously going to argue every planet with layers of dirt and rock once had a flood with more water than exists on it? Oddly, the dating of fossils bring up more points that go against Christian teachings. But I'd like to keep this down to one main question...are you actually suggesting a planet having layers of dirt and stone is PROOF a planet-wide flood occured on that planet?
Right, so it didn't happen. There was no giant flood or giant boat because it didn't cover the whole world, all species weren't wiped out and another exaggerated fib comes forth from the Bible that has nothing to do with the course of history or reality.
I don't know or really care for the most part what it was talking about since it exaggerates way too often, it's not reliable for anything
As far as I understand, some archaeologists hypothesize that the flood may have happened. BUT not because it rained for 40 days or whatever, but due to either a massive vulcanic eruption that created an immense tsunami, or due to a massive landslide in one end of the mediterranean which then caused a tsunami. (Actually they are afraid that a similar landslide may happen on/off the coast of Portugal that can cause a tsunami that may strike the coast of america.)
I don't know or really care for the most part what it was talking about since it exaggerates way too often, it's not reliable for anything
I am willing to take you up on a personal debate about this one! You are the one making a claim bigger than what the Bible claims to be historically accurate.
There have been substantial floods. But nothing that has covered mountains (well, certainly not since humans evolved).
kobe-bryant, can you not see that your explanation is nonsense? You state confidentally that something "melted all the ice in the world". So that's all of the several miles thick Antarctic ice sheet, plus some more. Then you state that the flood was "a localised event". So why did all the water from Antarctica leap across the globe to the middle east? Assuming more reasonably that the laws of physics did apply, the Antarctic ice is nowhere near enough to create a flood that drops a boat 12,000 feet up mount Ararat. (the large majority of Earth's ice is in Antarctica, so you can ignore the rest without much loss of accuracy)
I do think it is important to note that the authors of the parts of the Bible experienced what they experienced. That is, its hard to conceive of biblical people saying that the whole earth was flooded, considering that they did not see the whole earth in all likelyhood. Perhaps things were exagerated. As the flood is not a doctrinal matter, I see no reason to accept that it is exagerated or even downright false.
"I do think it is important to note that the authors of the parts of the Bible experienced what they experienced."
Their experiences have nothing to do with the texts they've written and that challenge about the Bible being exaggerated or inconsistent I can easily take up ^^
firstly, Genesis is a laugh and a half. It doesn't even agree with itself from chapter to chapter and looks like it was written by a two year old :P
To reconcile the "seeming differences" you'd have to insist that the same account was re-written multiple times to sound different for no apparent reason as translation and the fact so many "creation stories" exist seem to point otherwise
I guess we can start at the beginning ^^
I recall a documentary from the 1990s about an archaelogical investigation of something that looked like an ancient boat high up a mountain (you can guess the inference). It was intriguing but I don't recall being convinced, and external factors (a little military conflict, etc.) left key questions unresolved, if I recall. It seems to be back in the news again, with some extraordinary claims being made by people who sound like they would prefer certain conclusions (not that this means they will be wrong).
Noah's ark found
My opinion - absolute nonsense. Other archaelogical evidence shows there certainly was no 12,000 feet high flood at that time.
[Caveat - the researchers say there is 0.1% chance that what they have found is not Noah's ark. Amazing that they can identify it with a person so accurately from entirely anonymous organic residues!]