Posted on 07/07/2006 10:05:17 PM PDT by freedom44
High in the mountains of northwestern Iran, a Christian archaeology expedition has discovered a rock formation that its members say resembles the fabled Noah's ark.
The team discovered the prominent boat-shaped rocks at just over 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range.
"It looks uncannily like wood," said Robert Cornuke, president of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute (BASE), the Palmer Lake, Colorado-based group that launched the expedition.
Photos taken by BASE members show a prow-shaped rock outcrop, which the team says resembles petrified wood, emerging from a ridge.
"We have had [cut] thin sections of the rock made, and we can see [wood] cell structures," Cornuke said.
Cornuke acknowledges that it may be hard to prove that this object was Noah's ark. But he says he is fairly convinced that the rock formation was an important place of pilgrimage in the past.
The BASE team has uncovered evidence of an ancient shrine near the outcrop, suggesting that this was an important place to people in the past, Cornuke says.
"We can't claim to have conclusively found the ark, but it does look like the object that the ancients talked about," Cornuke said.
Noah and the Flood
The story of Noah's ark is told in three major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
The Book of Genesis describes a great flood created by God "to destroy all life under the heavens."
But before the flood, God told Noah, one of his human followers, to build an ark and fill it with two of every species on the Earth.
But this location doesn't fit the description given in Genesis of the ark's passengers journeying from the east to arrive at Mesopotamia.
Cornuke and his team think that Mount Ararat might be a red herring.
"The Bible gives us a compass direction here, and it is not in the direction of Turkey. Instead it points directly towards Iran," Cornuke said.
Pilgrim Shrine?
Using the Book of Genesis and other literary sources, the BASE team journeyed to Iran in July 2005 to climb Mount Suleiman.
They chose Mount Suleiman after reading the notes of 19th-century British explorer A. H. McMahan.
In 1894, after climbing Mount Suleiman, McMahan wrote in his journal, "According to some, Noah's ark alighted here after the deluge."
McMahan also spoke of wood fragments from a shrine at the top of the mountain where unknown people had made pilgrimages to the site.
"We found a shrine and wood fragments at 15,000 feet [4,570 meters] elevation, as described by McMahan," Cornuke said.
Subsequent carbon dating of samples from the shrine showed the wood fragments from the site to be around 500 years old.
Lower on the mountain, expedition members came across the ark-like rock formation, which they estimate to be about 400 feet (122 meters) long.
Rocks From the Sea?
Not everyone is convinced by the BASE team's claims.
Kevin Pickering, a geologist at University College London who specializes in sedimentary rocks, doesn't think that the ark-like rocks are petrified wood.
"The photos appear to show iron-stained sedimentary rocks, probably thin beds of silicified sandstones and shales, which were most likely laid down in a marine environment a long time ago," he said.
Pickering thinks that the BASE team may have mistaken the thin layers in the sediment for wood grain and the more prominent layers as beams of wood.
"The wider layers in the rock are what we call bedding planes," he said.
"They show fracture patterns that we associate with … the Earth processes that caused the rocks to be uplifted to their present height."
The boat-shaped structure can also be explained geologically, says retired British geologist Ian West, who has studied Middle Eastern sediments.
"Iran is famous for its small folds, many of which are the oil traps. Their oval, ark-like shape is classical," he said.
Meanwhile, ancient timber specialist Martin Bridge, of England's Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, is doubtful that a wooden structure would have lasted long enough to petrify under ordinary conditions.
"Wood will only survive for thousands of years if it is buried in very wet conditions or remains in an extremely arid environment," he said.
Bible scholars think that Noah built his ark somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, making preservation highly unlikely except in extreme environmental conditions.
And even if the wood had petrified, there seems to be little evidence of Noah's carpentry, according to Robert Spicer, a geologist at England's Open University who specializes in the study of petrification.
"What needs to be documented in this case are preserved, human-made joints, such as scarf, mortice and tenon, or even just pegged boards. I see none of this in the pictures. It's all very unconvincing," Spicer said.
Bridge, the Oxford timber specialist, points out that it would also be impossible for a boat to run aground at 13,000 feet.
"If you put all the water in the world together, melting both the ice caps and all the glaciers, you still wouldn't reach anywhere near the top of the mountain," he said.
Introduction
The tradition of a Golden Age existing in the distant past, and of a fall from grace into barbarism due to catastrophes of apocalyptic proportions, is enshrined in the memories and ancient writings of many peoples. These notions are, however, conventionally regarded as pure invention. The existence of a surprising amount of factual evidence which suggests that these accounts are actually based on a series of events really experienced by humankind, is generally either ignored or treated with great caution by established scholarship, largely because attempts to explain how this Golden Age came to an end have hitherto been unconvincing or uncomfortably threatening to orthodox interpretations of history.
The real history of humanity is, however, far more dramatic and interesting than the conventional version implies. When the Earth Nearly Died offers an exciting and challenging new interpretation of the information currently available to us.
When the Earth Nearly Died carefully documents the fascinating story - which has never been told before in such detail - of how this Golden Age of peaceful conditions and equable climates ended traumatically in a tremendous catastrophe about 11,500 years ago.
Among the fundamental geophysical effects experienced by Earth were a massive fracturing of the crust, a realignment of Earth's axis, elevation of new mountains, and widespread rearrangement of land and sea. These changes were accompanied by an appalling global conflagration, a gigantic flood, and what has been described as 'collapsed sky' conditions. A bombardment by debris from the disintegrated satellite of the destroyed planet added to the worldwide chaos.
continued http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/earth/
There is no evidence that any species flora or fauna is exclusively native to this planet.
There is no more evidence any species evolved here than there is for them to have been delivered or engineered here by extraterrestrials (which theoretically, could be occurring unobserved in our midst if there is such an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence).
What do evolutionists think about teaching that life came from outer space??? They already teach the Big Bang theory, which is just another immaculate conception...
To claim life evolved here without influence from the rest of the cosmos is a claim that the earth is the center of the universe; this is akin to saying the sun revolves around the earth and the earth just magically appeared here.
For there to be life on earth consistent with evolutionary theory, there has to be life elsewhere and that life is in the same place of the cosmos the earth is from.
Evolutionists will mock creationists saying they believe in a flying spaghetti monster, but conveniently forget it is evolutionists that believe in a boiling pot of primordial spaghetti sauce... illogical...
(p.s. I am an atheist)
Yeah.
And they just found Moses' staff outside Jerusalem.
Selections from Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision (1950) http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/JNHDA/wic.htm
Excerpt from TV show Firefly:
River: Noah's Ark is a problem.
Book: Really.
River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit five thousand species of mammal on the same boat.
Concider this: just because something us unproveable now, doesn't mean it always will be. Eventually science will catch up to our questions and we will know more, one way or the other. But just because science leans a certain way now, doesn't mean in 100 or 1000 years that it will continue to do so. Time after time man's science has been either proved false or proved true but added to, thus changing original beliefs. To be so arrogant about todays science, that it is unfallable in it's judgement; is just as bad as puting faith in a so called myth.
Keep that in mind the next time you insult someone for their faith in what you call a fable, or even when you are insulted for your faith in today's science.
As for me... I see no need for science and religion to be mutually exclusive. After all, would anyone even have thought to research a global flood thousands of years ago if the story hadn't been told? Maybe, maybe not...
I agree absolutely. It looks like a very ordinary sedimentary outcrop, with natural joints and fractures, like those you could find in many mountain ranges. The bedding is entirely concordant with the topography, which is typical in geology. One would think a stranded boat would be unlikely to perch in perfect conformity like that.
In my lifetime of 56 years, this is about the tenth Ark that has been found. I never knew that Noah was the admiral of a fleet.
here is another http://www.wyattmuseum.com/noahs-ark.htm
He was writing a myth that had been drummed into pakistani children's heads for generations, as it still is in churches today. Myths...hitler...aryan superiority. You see, everyone loves to be loved. A myth that shows how our people are superior to other groups is that same basic instinct. It's propaganda, hype, spin, bragadoccio; the noah myth, based on a true story of survival at sea during a hurricane is how the proto-jews made their own myth. The sand grain of truth was wrapped in a pearl of lies. It's a love/protective thing, psychologists probably have a syndrome/description for it. My quest is the TRUTH of things, not lies.
Back to the original topic: the pic's shown do look like natural rock formations to me too. But then who's to say that if Noah's Ark really existed that there would even be remains of it to find today. I would think it would have made great kindling to dry some off their stuff or cook with. It would have also made great lumber for shelters and homes. Just more thoughts for the "what if" game.
As for the accuracy of the flood story - did the flood cover the entire earth with water? Very unlikely. But there may have been a terrible flood that covered their world as they knew it. In Noah's time (or when Genesis was written) they had no idea how big the world was or even that it was round.
Wish I had a dollar for every sighting of Noah's Ark.
I'd donate it to the 3rd quarter Freepathon!
You're using secular reasoning to try to understand a miracle.
Either God exists or He doesn't. I believe that He does. If someone believes otherwise, that doesn't bother me in the least. I'm not going to lecture someone and tell them that they need to share my faith, or anything like that.
That being said, I've never seen to logic in the type of argument you're presenting. I've even seen people here who profess to believe in God make similar arguments. The arguments are that the Biblical flood couldn't have happened because various aspects of it are too hard to believe. Such as the ones you've mentioned. How could fresh water fish survive in salt water? How could tropical animals have found their way back to their native lands so soon?
But **IF** God exists, those things aren't problems in the least, are they? Now, you may say you don't believe in God (I don't know if you do or not, feel free to post your opinion on this if you feel comfortable discussing this). If you don't believe in God, then we simply have two incompatible world views. You're entitled to believe in a purely materialist worldview, and I'm entitled to believe that there's a realm beyond the material.
But if you do believe in God, how do place limitations on Him? How could you maintain the following positions coherently?
A) I believe in God.
B) But I don't believe He could have pulled off that Noah's flood deal. The salt water fish would've died. The tropical animals couldn't have found their way back to the equatorial jungles afterward. Etcetera.
But if God exists, and is indeed God, He could solve any of those problems with the proverbial snap of a finger, couldn't He?
I suppose it's possible that some of Noah's Ark survived, but it's unlikely.
Yup, that's shale. Pretty common stuff on mountains, and the angle of the bedding demonstrates the uplifting of the mountain, many millions of years ago.
Silliness.
Well, this is certainly news to me, as I assume it is to most people. A google search turned up nothing on this. What is your basis for these 2 claims?
A little girl was talking to her teacher about whales. The teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it was a very large mammal its throat was very small. The little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Irritated, the teacher reiterated that a whale could not swallow a human; it was physically impossible. The little girl said, "When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah". The teacher asked, "What if Jonah went to hell?" The little gir l replied, Then you ask him".
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