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.
Ummmmmm, it was a joke...
Unless they find a sign that say "Noah's Ark" on it, it's just another "something" looking for grant money.
> Was I talking to you?
Yes. You were talking to All Of Us.
Welcome to teh Internets.
Who's trying to win an argument? I'm just noting that either God exists or He doesn't. Millions of us believe that He does exist and does perform miracles. If you don't believe it, fine. You just have a different belief system than we do. I believe light exists and behaves as it does because God created it and designed it to work a particular way. You believe light just happens to exist and just happens to behave as it does.
Countering a "God created light to behave as it does" argument with a "Light just happens to behave as it does" argument isn't a winner, either.
"Even the ten commandments forbid me from stealing my neighbors ass, but say nothing about stealing his Lincoln Navigator. Oh well, I can't afford the gas anyway."
As long as you steal it with a full tank of gas, you can drive it 'til it's empty, then just steal another one. Problem solved!
Nah. T don't need to save hatred
I believe God exists, but the ark story is a fable, and trying to make up things so that you can make it plausable is pretty weak.
God gave us a brain to think and reason with, pity that so many don't want to use it.
saying that to claim life evolved here uninfluenced by life elsewhere in the cosmos is akin to saying that the sun revolves around the earth is simply a non sequitur. And to say that "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" is just not true. Evolutionary theory explains life without such other influence.
"There is no evidence that any species flora or fauna is exclusively native to this planet." Nor is there any evidence there is life elsewhere.
I'm not saying that life is something exclusive to Earth. I'm just saying that it's existence here is not reliant upon its existence elsewhere. Think about it. If life on Earth came, somehow, from life elsewhere, where did that life come from? Life, whether on Earth or not, must have at some point come into existence, whether spontaneously (boiling spaghetti pot) or by the will of a supreme being (flying spaghetti monster). It's unavoidable. so why not on Earth first? (and please, note that I'm not actually advocating any one position. Life could have arisen (or arrived) on Earth by any one of many means, known and unknown, none of which have been either conclusively proven or disproven!)
What did I try to make up? Please elaborate.
What I am saying is that the ark believers are starting with their conclusion (there was an ark) and then filling in the details with a bunch of "maybe", "perhaps" and "what if" types of thinking rather than offering any solid proof to try to explain away the enormous holes in the story.
Scientists gather facts and come to a conclusion based on those facts, you can't do it the other way.
Not when the boat is on top of a mountain after the waters "receded". Think!
Well, that's not making things up, it's just two different worldviews. Christianity is a revelation faith. It presumes there is a God who can perform miracles and who has revealed Truth to us through His Word. No one has to believe that, it's just that many of us do. Anything God might do would violate the rules of science.
I can understand someone saying they don't believe in God and thus don't believe the Noah story. What I find odd is when people say they do believe in the God of The Bible, but don't believe the Noah story because it wouldn't be scientifically possible for God to engineer it. If you follow that line of reasoning, it voids everything that makes God who He is. Virgin births are impossible according to science. So are all of Christ's miracles, including His resurrection. Do you believe Christ rose from the dead? If so, how is that something God could pull off, while being unable to pull off the flood?
-PJ
And I'm just asking someone to show me some proof that it happened and to answer some very pointed questions that exposes the whole thing as a fable.
Rather than any actual scientifically valid answers, all I get is "its a miracle", "perhaps", "maybe", "suppose" and the like.
You can't argue your point by just attributing everything to "God" that you are unable to prove, that is lazy argumentation. Look, if you want to believe in stories and fables, so be it, but don't begrudge someone that wishes to make logical sense out of it by asking reasonable questions. The mere fact that no one can answer any questions put up to try to prove this story says a lot.
If you don't believe the flood story, fine. I'm not going to try to convince you that it's true. I doubt that miracles leave behind scientific evidence. That's why Christianity is a faith.
But, you didn't answer my question about the resurrection. You said you believe in God. I assume you mean the God of the Bible, though admittedly that's an assumption on my part. But if you do believe in the God of the Bible, do you believe in Christ's Divinity, His virgin birth, His miracles, and His resurrection? If so, why could God pull all that off, but not pull off the flood and the ark?
I believe there have been lots of floods, they happen every year somewhere. I don't believe in a flood that covered the earth and killed all but one male and one female of every species, there is zero proof of that. Plus, it would have killed off all the plant life and because of that, the remaining animal life would have died and we wouldn't have those species today.
Its a fable, one used to teach, not science, and it didn't happen. You can't treat it as if it was a historical event on one hand, and then as a supernatural event on the other. There would be proof, there would have been proof centuries ago, why hasn't anyone found the ark in 2000 plus years?
Think, use some logic and some reason to work this out. You are lazily just using the "miracle" route to fill in the huge gaps in this story.
I'm a christian in search of the truth. The noah myth was imprinted in your head when you were young. As Marilyn Von Savant(IQ 230, what's yours?)says: you can convince a 5 year old of anything, a 95 year old of nothing. As scientists it is our job to question EVERYTHING, even biblical "truths" to see if they stand up to close scrutiny, the noah myth is OBVIOUSLY a distorted account of a pakistani farmer, living in the delta region of the Indus River, being washed out to sea on his raft. He was expecting a river flood, instead he got a hurricane storm surge. The story then is a jazzed up version of a Camille Type event(in the 1960's in MS)long before written/recorded history.....You can continue living your child's fables, and believing the universe/earth was created in 4004 BC(an irish bishop's 1/2 a**ed scientific estimate)...or GROW UP and see the flaws of the past.
"propaganda"...look it up in the dictionary. It comes from Pope Urban's VIII's time. Was it(hype, spin)only invented then? Moses(all jews/arabs)claim descent through Abraham who was a pakistani by lineage. Why do jews marry within the tribe? The samaritans are all but GONE by recessive genes. It's to retain a tribal identity in the shifting sands of peoples in the middle east. Thus Moses was defining a standard, flawed though it was, it gave his people a STANDARD to cling to, much as the american flag is to US(which stands for United States, our plural). It's maybe like a modern day american tracing the roots of common law within the british system, at increasing distances things get hazy....
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