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allenmaher on 11 October 2013
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dsgrue3 said:
allenmaher said:
dsgrue3 said:
HeavenlyWarrior said:
I believe in the flood, but not the way the bible describes

The is evidence for a local flood, so perhaps you aren't far off. 

Most rivers flood, the city of Calgary flooded this year, local floods are not a particularily noteworthy pheomina.  As and earth scientist i am qualified to say that the evidence presented for a biblical flood does not constitute credible evidence.  But lets walk through the math a little to illustrate the point:

A rough estimate of the water on earth 1,382,288,000 km^3  97.302% of which is already in the oceans  the vast majority remaining is in glaciers or ground water >98% of it, about 0.035% of the water on earth is in the atmosphere and has a mean residence time of about 2 weeks.

The size of the Earth is 510,072,000 km2 and the highest point on earth is 8,848m above sea level.  meaning it would take aproximately (and this is a ballpark figure that does not acount for the undulating land masses because loading a global dem and running a full calc would take a long time) 4,488,072,000 km3 to innundate everything.  If you take every drop of water that is not already in the ocean you have 37,288,000 km3. You can't take the water from the oceans or lakes for that matter since you would just have to fill them up again, so you have about 27% of that or 10,068,000 km3 of water including polar glaciers.  That is 0.000002228 % of what you would need.  Unless you are superheating the earth to hold more water it would take 13,241,940 years to happen through rain even if you could find the other 99.9999% of the required water.

So despite the fact that if you accept religeous texts as historical evidence this may be considered historical 'fact' (people wrote about it after all).  It quite simply did not happen.  It is not remotely in the realm of possibility.  So yes, it is far off the mark.

I'm not sure if you were really wanting to respond to me? I certainly don't believe in any global flood.

From what I read, it would have to rain 200 inches per hour for 20 days and nights to reach the dizzying amount of water necessary to cover Everest. 200 inches is more than it rains in a year on the wettest places on the planet. Of course, the water cycle is well-established and known to be an equivalency. When it rains, water isn't added to the planet, it simply recycles the water on the planet. 

So where did this water come from? Thin air, like the rest of the biblical absurdities. 

In any individual location, the most rain ever in 1 day (24 hours) is 1.85m the most ever in 1 hour was 305 mm (12 inches).  The most ever in a year in a location was 27m.  200 inches per hour is 16 times worse than the worst rainfall recorded.  Rain is not like a faucet, if first has to go up, then requires certain conditions to precipitate, it does have some pretty well defined limits not the least of which is the energy involved for evaporation.  I have seen some pretty horendous storms, those that droped half the recorded max, 200 inches is really unthinkable.

I was responding to the topic more than you, i saw a number of quotes in the thread of people believing in the flood, I know it came up earlier as well in a discussion of historical facts.  The consolation prize of "well maybe it was just a local flood so maybe your not far off" while well meaning is really a disservice to the individual you are consoling.  I know a concilliatory tone is good in a forum thread, but why humour the really crazy magical notions?  I think that is why I responded to your post, I knew from your response that you did not believe the notion, but then you offered a little "there there" pat on the head at the end.

In a historical debate there is lots of wiggle room, if (and it is a big if) you accept religeous texts as history, then the flood is historical 'fact' for instance.  A case can be made based on 2 lines from Josephus and 1 from Tacitus that come decades after the fact for a historical man named jesus (a common name at the time) who was a jewish messiah (there were many other messiahs at the time) and was crucified (also a common fate for rebels at the time).  But when people attempt to translate that into proof of the veracity of supernatural claims... and there are some doozies in the new testiment as well, then why soft pedal?