Noah's Flood Hypothesis May Not Hold Water

RPI ^ | June 14, 2002 | Jun Abrajano

[aculeus]

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Part of International Research Group Refuting Popular Theory

In 1996, marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman published a scientifically popular hypothesis, titled Noah's Flood Hypothesis. The researchers presented evidence of a bursting flood about 7,500 years ago in what is now the Black Sea. This, some say, supports the biblical story of Noah and the flood.

But, such a forceful flood could not have taken place, says Jun Abrajano, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Rensselaer. He is part of an international team of scientists who refute the so-called Noah's Flood Hypothesis.

Abrajano cites evidence of a much more gradual rising of the Black Sea that began to occur 10,000 years ago and continued for 2,000 years.

According to the Noah's Flood Hypothesis, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a narrow strip of land now broken by the Bosporus Strait. Ryan and Pittman argue that the Mediterranean broke through the land and inundated the Black Sea with more than 200 times the force of Niagara Falls. The salty powerful flood swiftly killed the freshwater mollusks in the Black Sea. This, they say, accounts for fossil remains that can be dated back 7,500 years.

Abrajano's team has challenged the theory by studying sediments from the Marmara Sea, which sits next to the Black Sea and opens into the Mediterranean.

The team found a rich mud, called sapropel in the Marmara. The mud provides evidence that there has been sustained interaction between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea for at least 10,000 years.

"For the Noah's Ark Hypothesis to be correct, one has to speculate that there was no flowing of water between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea before the speculated great deluge," says Abrajano. "We have found this to be incorrect."

GSA (Geological Society of America) Today magazine recently published a paper in its May 2002 edition based on Abrajano's research. His research also will be published this year in Marine Geology, an international science journal.

For a map of the area go to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/maps/tu-map.jpg

[Physicist]

However, please do not assume that the Bible says this that and the other, when it does not, just because mal-informed Christians say it does.

I don't. I used to be a Christian, and never had any trouble taking Biblical accounts as being metaphorical or allegorical. Such conflicts between science and religion are completely artificial.

[VRWC_minion]

For example, my tea cup might measure 3 inches around but while its rim measures 3.14 inches in diameter. Did M.C. Escher design your teacup?

I see what I did. Let me start over. Lets assume we have a vessel that measures 30 feet around. Am I making a mistake in calculating the diameter of that vessel to be 9.55 feet (30 feet divided by 3.14 ) ?

Next lets say I desire to put a rim around it so that it makes it easier to slip into the vessel. Lets say I make it 10 feet from rim to rim. Couldn't I do that ?

[CyberCowboy777]

Read the study and refute, do not read my bullet and make statements with no sources.

[Citizen of the Savage Nation]

Congratulations, you win. I don't know what you win, but you win :). Hasn't anyone heard of figures of speech?? Four corners of the world...anyone....anyone.....hello??!?

Remember that Moses was writing down was handed down to him by oral tradition. Inspired by God? Yes, but keep all this in mind.

[CyberCowboy777]

Q: Are dinosaurs found in the Bible?

A: Yes

For a biblical study on dinosaurs in the Old Testament, I would definitely recommend using the Authorized Version (AV)/King James Version (KJV) of the Scriptures which were translated into English from the Masoretic text in 1611 [230 years before the word "dinosaur" was available!]. Using a Strong's Concordance, you will find the Hebrew word "tannin" is used 25 times, and is translated as 'dragon(s),''serpent(s),' 'monster(s)' [and, in the more modern versions, improperly as 'jackal(s)']. The key to remember is to look for Hebrew Lexicon #8577.

CREATION WEEK (~4000 B.C.)

DAY 5--[Gen.1:20-21]--Creation of marine monsters (Hebrew "tannin," includes large marine 'mammals' and 'reptiles') and winged/flying creatures (Hebrew "o(w)ph," includes all feathered and non-feathered flyers--even pterosaurs, the flying reptiles!)

DAY 6--[Gen.1:24-25]--Making of dinosaurs and other land creatures, divided among the cattle (Hebrew "behemah," includes all quadrupedal, hoofed/blunt-toed ungulates), beasts of the earth (bipedal/quadrupedal, talon-toed), and creeping things (quadrupedal/multi-legged ground crawlers).

FLOOD YEAR (~2350 B.C.)

[Gen.6:17,19-20; 7:14-15; 9:17,19]--Juvenile representatives of every terrestrial, air-breathing kind (not species), including dinosaurs and pterosaurs, were directed by God to the Ark.

Those outside the Ark would be left to be scavenged by marine predators or be buried and fossilized quickly.

POST-FLOOD PERIOD

MARINE MONSTERS--[Leviathan (Job 3:8-'mourning'; 41:1-34/Ps.74:14;104:26/ Isa.27:1); see also Lam.4:3 & Amos 9:3].

PTEROSAURS--[esp. the bioluminescent flying reptiles (Isa.14:29 & 30:6)].

DINOSAURS--[see Strong's Concordance(KJV) under "dragon(s);" also Exod. 7:9-10 (#8577, not #5175)].

The best dinosaur passage in the Bible is Job 40:15-24 where God speaks to Job concerning BEHEMOTH ["most excellent beasts"--intensive plural of Day 6 'cattle' ("behemah")], a huge sauropod dinosaur (especially notice verses 17 &19 !!!).

[Dead Corpse]

Well, here's one on your so-called Cretaceous Hammer.

As for your footprints... keep on fantasizing.

[CyberCowboy777]

I believe the earth is 6,000 - 10,000 years old - after Eden.

Please provide the method of dating for these facts you present (also some sources please). The method had better be in-fallible else your accusations of lucidity will represent you more than anyone.

[Physicist]

Really? Define "evolution", then.

The canonical definition is, "Change in allele frequency over time."

Did not Darwin claim man, through evolving, has his source from the single living cell?

Whether or not Darwin made that exact claim, it is correct.

Is this not being portrayed as "progressive" by evolutionists?

Not at all. "Progressive" means that it is directed towards some strategic goal. Evolution is all tactics: does this creature live or die? Each step that is taken is merely part of a random walk pattern; it's not going anyplace in particular.

Now, life on Earth has gotten more complex. This is merely the result of the fact that there are more ways in which life can get more complex than there are ways in which life can get simpler. Thus, any sort of random walk pattern will tend to produce more complexity, although certainly not always.

Then progressively, from dinosaurs, there should be the evidence of a continuum of a chain of life which would produce more huge forms of life, yet it does not exist.

Somehow, you've jumped from "more complex" to "bigger". The two are not the same. It simply is not true that there are more ways for a species to get bigger than there are ways for it to get smaller. Furthermore, even if there were, size (or any specific trait) doesn't just change arbitrarily. It will tend to whatever value maximizes survival for that organism, which may or may not be larger than it was in the past.

[CyberCowboy777]

That is it? Speculation brought by the opossing side that is in debate. Of all I have posted, and from a AOL private site no less.

[Saturnalia]

Re: Your big friggen post.

Physicist took care of #8, so I'll take down a different one.

#9 Helium:
All naturally-occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the earth's atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in 5 billion years.21 This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.

Ok, first off the assumption is made that the amount of helium leaving the atmosphere is CONSTANT, which is absurb.
As anyone with physics/chemical training can tell you, the rate of buildup/loss of a substance is proportional to the amount of substance existing within the medium.
In short, more helium=greater loss rate.
As you no doubt know, Helium is second lightest element, resulting in easy escape to space.

That said, there is nothing that keeps helium in our atmosphere except gravity. Helium is rather nonreactive, so no chemical reactions consume/produce helium.
The only source of new helium is through radioactive decay, as alpha radiation consists of an naked helium nucleus (no electron cloud).

Now, the only real source of helium in the world comes from underground deposits where a geologic feature (saltdome/petrol?)managed to trap the helium, preventing its escape into the atmophere and on out of the gravity well.
That said, the given argument is crap.
NEXT!

[CyberCowboy777]

1. OBSERVATION -steps of evolution have never been observed (Stebbins )

In the fossil record we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.(Gould )

2. EXPERIMENTATION -The processes would exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter (Dobzhansky )

3. REPRODUCTION impossible to reproduce in the laboratory. (Dobshansky )

4. FALSIFICATION -cannot be refuted thus outside empirical science. (Ehrlich )

[Citizen of the Savage Nation]

Then why bring up 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chron 4:2 when you know full well that rounding off or just plain sloppy recording explains it? That's pretty weak.

[Physicist]

Next lets say I desire to put a rim around it so that it makes it easier to slip into the vessel. Lets say I make it 10 feet from rim to rim. Couldn't I do that ?

You could, but then (if you insisted on using different circles to measure circumference and diameter), you'd probably say that the diameter was 9.55 feet and the circumference was 31.4 feet. This is because the inner diameter (what can I fit inside) and the outer circumference (how big is this thing) are far more useful and meaningful measures than the inner circumference and the outer diameter.

But come, these are Clintonian word games to try to rescue the literal truth of that passage. If the Holy Word of God requires Clinton-speak in order to parse it, you know that your approach to it must be wrong.

[Physicist]

Read the study and refute, do not read my bullet and make statements with no sources.

Why post what you refuse to defend?

[CyberCowboy777]

Ok, first off the assumption is made that the amount of helium leaving the atmosphere is CONSTANT, which is absurb. As anyone with physics/chemical training can tell you, the rate of buildup/loss of a substance is proportional to the amount of substance existing within the medium. In short, more helium=greater loss rate.

The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small.

Now, the only real source of helium in the world comes from underground deposits where a geologic feature (saltdome/petrol?)managed to trap the helium, preventing its escape into the atmophere and on out of the gravity well.

If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the earth's atmosphere.

You seem to not want to read the actual study as well, I am only giving bullets. If you want to see how the numbers work out read the damn study. Gentry, R. V. et al, "Differential Helium Retention in Zircons: implications for nuclear waste management," Geophys. Res. Lett. 9 (Oct. 1982) 1129-1130.

[gdani]

Obviously if a Divine Creator wanted to create a Woman from a Rib, he could. Does the evidence lend to a Creator?

I asked for scientific evidence, not miracles, faith, etc. I have yet to see any that woman was created from man's rib, that the universe was created in 6 days, that people once lived to be hundreds of years old, etc, etc

[CyberCowboy777]

I do not have time to post every study. That is the point of providing sources. I would think you could understand that concept. If you have some actual alternate studies that refute, then by all means provide the names. Otherwise you are merely taking advantage of the fact that I cannot post 15 or 20 entire studies and books. And that is a very weak defense of your stance.

[Physicist]

Then why bring up 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chron 4:2 when you know full well that rounding off or just plain sloppy recording explains it?

That's the real answer. There is nothing more to it than that. But that answer can't suffice from Tai_Chung's perspective. The Bible is supposed to be the Infallible Word of God, literally true in its every particular. What those two verses demonstrate is that if you take such an extreme position, you're left having to believe some pretty silly stuff.

I probably shouldn't mention that the sign hung on Jesus's cross is worded differently in the four Gospels. ;^)

[Saturnalia]

2. Comets disintegrate too quickly
According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about 5 billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years.3 Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical "Oort cloud" well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed.4 So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations.

Lately, there has been much talk of the "Kuiper Belt," a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists' problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it.

This one comes close to contradicting itself.

1. Assumption that current comets have been making passes on the sun and "evaporating" away.
As mentioned, current theory indicates the presence of an Oort cloud and a Kuiper belt, which provide an "input" of comets while continual passes through the solar system result in eventual loss of said comets.
Now while these objects are in the Kuiper Belt/Oort cloud, the amount of solar radiation reaching them is miniscule compared to the amount received when at perigree (close to sun).

In short, comets don't "melt" as fast when several billion miles away from the sun.

[Chemnitz]

Ship, not a boat. It was the biggest ship ever built until the modern era. Likewise, nothing like the Great Pyramid has been built since - and no one would try to reproduce the GP today.

There are many miraculous elements in the Flood. They cannot be explained by human reason. However, if you believe in God commanding thorugh His Word, then it is clear that He commanded the animals and they gathered and entered the ark.

There are many new roses each year "invented" by man. The DNA is already there but not expressed. The same is true of dogs. Therefore I do not have a problem with species expansion after the Flood.

More importantly we are in another era like the pre-Flood time - great technology, plenty of leisure time, and almost complete godlessness. As Jesus said, "When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith?"