These things always turn into religious debates, sadly.
[quote]RSGZ wrote:
These things always turn into religious debates, sadly.
[/quote]
The nature of the topic necessitates a religious debate. The story of Noah’s Ark is both a Judeo-Christian and a scientific matter–Judeo-Christian in that it is a prominent part of the Old Testament mythos, and scientific in that, in its most strictly literal interpretation, is a physical and biological impossibility.
Literal interpretationists believe that a man named Noah actually built an ark and actually filled it with two of every animal. They believe that this ark ended up on Ararat. This did not happen.
[quote]Dustin wrote:
[quote]smh23 wrote:
The story of Noah’s Ark is a derivation of an older Mesopotamian flood myth. For extremely obvious reasons, literalist interpretations of the Ark story specifically, and the entire Old Testament in general, have been abandoned by all respectable contemporary science and archaeology.
Anyone claiming to have found Noah’s Ark (as in the actual vessel into which the Biblical Noah stuffed two of every living thing on Earth) is, to use the scientific term, full of shit.
That being said, the ubiquity of the flood story in ancient myth and folklore has led many researchers to the conclusion that there probably was a catastrophic flood somewhere in or around the Mediterranean Basin at some point in human history. Some have even gone as far as to argue that the Mediterranean itself was a huge dry valley until plate shifts opened a rift between Iberia and Northern Africa, allowing the Atlantic to come flooding in. Other theories argue for tsunamis, comets, etc.
Whatever the cause of the event, one thing is certain: you may find an old boat in the area and it may have been used to weather the storm. You may even find an ark that was built by a man who called himself Noah. But you sure as shit will not find the Old Testament’s Noah’s Ark.[/quote]
I might be way off, but isn’t another theory that the “great flood” was caused by the ending of the last ice age (massive glacial melts, global ocean levels rising)?
As I said, my timeline could be wrong though.[/quote]
I have also heard this. I recall something about ocean levels rising up to 300 feet at some point due to receding ice caps.
Personally, I really like the Spain/Africa rift theory, simply because the thought of the entire force of the Atlantic rushing into the Mediterranean Basin all at once is absolutely mind blowing. Imagine sitting in a field as a shepherd and suddenly seeing a wall of water in the sky rushing toward you at 500 miles an hour. Fucking crazy.