I figure that, today, I will return to something a little more regular in terms of critically analysing religious claims. Let us look at Noah’s Flood. I have long maintained that this is a ridiculous story at even the most superficial of analyses. The theology behind the flight is that God was so repulsed by the sinful activity of humans on Earth that he decided to decimate humanity, bar eight, and start again. This is a story of gods supposed love, grace and creation, after which he realised he should never destroy the world again in this manner.
Due to the fact that the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh documented the same flood narrative in a different context, but with certain verses pre-existing verbatim, scholars conclude that both narratives probably borrow off an earlier third-party narrative of the flood myths.
I will now list a few reasons why this story is patent nonsense:
1) OmniGod did it because we were a sinful world. We still are; therefore, it didn’t work.
2) The account is a reworking of Tablet XI of the Gilgamesh, written some 1000 years before the Bible. Some verses are verbatim, or close to.
3) If the deluge destroyed all, why do we have the writings and journals of people before, during and after the deluge?
4) There is internal contradiction from the spliced accounts – 2 of each or 7?
5) 8 people looking after the world’s biggest zoo is ridiculous.
6) The ark is physically bigger than a wooden vessel can be made, apparently by 50%.
7) Clearly the gathering of all the animals is impossible – micro-organisms, polar bears, penguins, condors, glow-worms (how did they get there?).
8) Ark’s reported dimensions would have to be considerably larger to fit the animals.
9) Population of 8 could not rebound in the fashion claimed. Simply not possible.
10) Rainfall would have to be 6 inches per minute. Again, not possible. A category 5 hurricane gives 6 inches per hour which is impossible to sustain over 40 days.
11) The weight of the water would have disastrous consequences on the earth’s crust, emitting noxious gases and eruptions, leading to potentially, a boiling sea! In all probability, it would have imploded in some way.
12) There is no geological evidence for any of this.
13) There are reefs that have been undisturbed in the world for 100,000 years. These would have been crushed and destroyed. They were not.
14) Lots more evidence of fossil, radiometrics and isotopes etc. mean that the flood clearly never happened.
15) How the hell did Noah actually get all the animals on the ark without them trying to eat each other / the family etc?
16) Asexual animals and hermaphrodites not accounted for.
17) Ventilation/food/faeces problems on the ark.
18) Carnivores?
19) DNA pool? no trace of this through DNA analysis (ie we know we came from Africa).
20) All sea fish would have died from the influx of fresh water.
21) All plants that do not rely on the seeds of Noah to survive would die. There are many plants that reproduce in many ways other than seeds.
22) Explaining it away as a local flood is contradictory to Genesis, and would also not kill all the humans who were so evil. Liquids find their own level, and so a local flood of that magnitude and description is physically impossible.
23) This is like using napalm to clear some weeds in your back garden. Is this the best way God could think of for exercising some sin in the world? Could there not be a more precise mess method of locating and ridding the world of these individual sinners? Innocent children, unborn foetuses, all animals, old ladies, pregnant mothers – these were all wiped out in the most slapdash of manners.
24) There are literally not enough water molecules on Earth to account for the flood waters.
25) Theologically speaking, it is nonsensical. if OmniGod had full divine foreknowledge and creative power and responsibility, then creating people in the full knowledge of what they would do, and punishing them for features and behaviour you had designed into them, is totally incoherent. God is actually morally culpable for that which he is punishing them for.
And so on.
Seriously, who believes this nonsense? It is not only historically and scientifically indefensible, but it is also theologically naive and horribly retributive in the most barbaric way.
A God intelligent enough to design even a molecule, let alone a whole universe, would, if he-she-or-it went loony and decided to take up murder, still be intelligent enough to murder only the people he-she-or-it disliked. Accepting the dubious Warren Commission Report, even Lee Harvey Oswald only hit one innocent bystander (the governor). The early Old Testament God appears not only as crazy as Oswald but clumsier, stupider and generally less civilized. King Kong is as convincing a portrait of God as that given in the Old Testament. Trying to imagine Old Man JHVH (Yahweh/Jehovah) designing even a quark, let alone a molecule, is absurd; He would mess it up, go into a temper, and destroy five nearby cities to express his childish rage. – Robert Anton Wilson
Bible believers are constantly telling us how wicked the pre-Flood generation was. In those biblical movies you can practically feel the evil oozing out of those folks. By Jupiter, you can almost see it! But could they have done any wicked thing that hasn’t been done just as wickedly by folks after the Flood? Conversely, if you examine the worst corner of the globe at its sorriest moment in history you will still find, by any reasonable standard of decency, a fair number of decent people. And, don’t forget the children! Die-hard Bible believers answer curtly that the children were part of the cancer which had to be cut out! Their poor limited God had no choice, I suppose. He couldn’t let them corrupt the purity of post-Flood generations. Purity as exhibited by Noah’s drunken state after the flood, had to be preserved, no doubt, from the evil influence of pre-Flood children. And how horrible it would have been if a few pre-Flood children had survived and corrupted the folks of Sodom and Gomorrah. – Dave Matson, On Taking the Bible and Noah’s Flood Literally
The Deluge: A punishment inflicted on the human race by an all-knowing God, who, through not having foreseen the wickedness of men, repented of having made them, and drowned them once for all to make them better – an act which, as we all know, was accompanied by the greatest success. – Voltaire, Dictionary of Theology
Why did God fill the world with his own children, knowing that he would have to destroy them? And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his? – Robert Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
Somehow the Bible forgets to tell us that Noah and his family had every virus, bacteria, protozoa, flea, tick, lice, crab, bedbug, fluke, hookworm, tapeworm, roundworm, that feasts on human flesh. Not to mention that Noah would have had to have taken aboard only those pairs of animals carrying all the diseases and parasites that afflict those animals today. Sorry, the ark’s full. Besides, you two unicorns look too healthy to be awarded a boarding pass. Maybe if you were running a fever and could show me some patches on your skin where your hair is falling out… – Skip Church
Noah and his family were saved…but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes…because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. – Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
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