where did all the water go?

[Dream]

So, Juantoo. Have you read either of Glen Morton's book? Taking a look at the site you posted, it looks at first like a faith-killer (but its not intended to be). In fact Glen Morton nearly proves on his site that the evidence refuses any correlation between Noah and the sciences, whatsoever. Then he says his books are my salvation - a way that I can interpret the flood both Biblically and Scientifically. Just when I thought all was lost Glen Morton gave me relief, but I'm wondering if you've already read his books since they're 30$. What's the scoop?

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Dream

So, Juantoo. Have you read either of Glen Morton's book? Taking a look at the site you posted, it looks at first like a faith-killer (but its not intended to be). In fact Glen Morton nearly proves on his site that the evidence refuses any correlation between Noah and the sciences, whatsoever. Then he says his books are my salvation - a way that I can interpret the flood both Biblically and Scientifically. Just when I thought all was lost Glen Morton gave me relief, but I'm wondering if you've already read his books since they're 30$. What's the scoop?

Fair enough question. I wasn't aware he had written any books per se, let alone for sale. All of his material I have read came off the web from this site and the one he had previously.

I'm not selling anything. If it helps and its still available, Morton has an essay that explains his point of view.

I became a Christian in my sophomore year of college. The people who had led me to the Lord immediately began my discipleship. They taught me to evangelize and they taught me what they felt a Christian should believe. But most importantly they were a loving family of believers which was a welcome oasis for someone like me whose home life had been less than familial. Thus, when I was told that Christians must believe in a young-earth and a global flood, I went along willingly. I believed. Being a physics major in college I had not taken any geology courses. I knew there were physics problems, but I thought I could to solve them.
When I graduated from college, physicists were unemployable since NASA had just laid a bunch of them off. I did graduate work in philosophy and then decided to leave school to support my growing family. After six months, I found work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company. Within a year, I was processing seismic data for a major oil company.
This was where I first became exposed to the problems geology presented to the idea of a global flood.

transform

I like Morton's work because it is not the spastic knee jerk bid to put the Bible narrative as the reality and build the facts around it. Rather he starts with the evidence (as any student should) and shows how the Bible narrative "fits." He has some absolutely amazing if dry and intellectual essays dealing with evolution and Adam, which is how I first stumbled on his work.

I have even heard atheists give Morton's scholarship praise, and his work is peer reviewed and frequently published in various trade journals. That's saying something when an atheist recognizes the research of a Christian.

[Dream]

Yeah. It says something both for him and the atheists. I've had a similar experience to him, although it was much less involved. I used to get ICR pamphlets when I was a teen. I started to see the guys at ICR as head-bangers. They were coming up with some foo-foo proofs that earth was young -- like just anything. They tried to estimate the rate of escape of Helium from the earth's crust, second-guess the half life of Plutonium, etc (well I guess that's still debatable). The upshot was that it was just not credible, and legitimate researchers were writing legitimate exposes against ICR materials. It was terribly disappointing. It was the blind leading the blind, and still is. I hope it wasn't intentional, but it was certainly negligent. It also created an equal and opposite response from the scientific community -- an outpouring of vehemence that can only be described as a social big bang.

Anyway, thanks for the link!

[China Cat Sunflower]

Interesting Links, Juan. Thanks.

Chris

[Azure24]

If you look at the world map you'll see that during some period, the water levels have risen. The population during Noah's time was not that large?

[kf123]

Maybe I'm a little late to the party but just a few thoughts.

Where did all the water go? We picture Noah's flood as a big lake or ocean rising several feet above the tallest mountain. Although some areas may have been completely covered, others may have been flooded by torrential rain, causing erosion, etc. Also large wave actions could have resulted in flooding at some of the higher land levels. Regardless of the exact mechanism, I do believe that Noah's flood was a universal flood and not a local flood.

Due to the way most of us were taught in school, science is truth and anything that can't be explained scientifically is a myth. Since Creation, Noah's flood, the waters parting for Moses, etc. cannot be explained "scientifically", they must be a myth. The mistake there is to conclude that all the "scientific" data we have is accurate and that we have enough knowledge of science that there are no scientific principles that might "override" what we know. I dare say that we probably know less than 1% of the scientific knowledge which exists in the universe. My God knows a 100%, I don't know about yours.

A miracle is something that God does "scientifically" according to the rules and laws He has established in this Universe, but can't be explained by man's current knowledge.

[Dream]

Originally Posted by Luke 16:31

He said to him, `If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.'"

Why do people feel it is necessary for them to prove that the Bible is true because of this or that miracle? Miracles are useless for that maneuver.

Originally Posted by Judges 6:30-32

Then the men of the town said to Joash, "Bring out your son, that he may die, for he has pulled down the altar of Baal and cut down the Asherah beside it." But Joash said to all who were arrayed against him, "Will you contend for Baal? Or will you defend his cause? Whoever contends for him shall be put to death by morning. If he is a god, let him contend for himself, because his altar has been pulled down." Therefore on that day he was called Jerubbaal, that is to say, "Let Baal contend against him," because he pulled down his altar.

Speaking of water...

Originally Posted by Judges 7:7

And the LORD said to Gideon, "With the three hundred men that lapped I will deliver you, and give the Midianites into your hand; and let all the others go every man to his home."

Originally Posted by I Corinthians 13:8

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

[17th Angel]

Where did -all- the water go? *looks around at the like 75% water covered planet(not including the icecap regions.)* Uhm... Look around?

[greymare]

ok ok, ask a stupid question...........

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by kf123

Due to the way most of us were taught in school, science is truth and anything that can't be explained scientifically is a myth. Since Creation, Noah's flood, the waters parting for Moses, etc. cannot be explained "scientifically", they must be a myth. The mistake there is to conclude that all the "scientific" data we have is accurate and that we have enough knowledge of science that there are no scientific principles that might "override" what we know. I dare say that we probably know less than 1% of the scientific knowledge which exists in the universe. My God knows a 100%, I don't know about yours.

A miracle is something that God does "scientifically" according to the rules and laws He has established in this Universe, but can't be explained by man's current knowledge.

Kindest Regards, kf123, and welcome to CR!

Yours is a valid assessment regarding science, and it is one that has been raised a number of times before here. The trouble as I see it is, that while G-d may very well know 100% of the knowledge of the universe, we puny humans don't. That includes religion and sacred religious texts. So it is inaccurate to presume that because G-d knows something, that his followers also know something. It suggests a puny human has the capacity to know the mind of G-d. Come to think of it, wasn't that a part of the reason Satan was cast out of heaven; for thinking he could outsmart G-d and take over the place?

Put another way...the Bible is not a science book, it was never intended to be. It is a mistake I often see from both sides of the discussion; one side holds the Bible as scientifically true which it pretty obviously isn't, and the other side mocking because the Bible isn't scientifically true when it wasn't composed for that purpose.

Science is geared to address questions of "how?"

Religion is geared to address questions of "why?"

Pitting them against each other is foolishness and nonsense. In my opinion.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Dream

Originally Posted by I Corinthians 13:8
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

Very astute, Dream.

[Dream]

Originally Posted by Greymare

ok ok, ask a stupid question...........

Thanks for the heads-up. I hope kf123 doesn't think I was smacking them. I'm just saying that scripture that is truly holy doesn't need propping up with excruciating Science proofs. All those do is get people upset, because the results are arbitrary or else "Self evident" when it comes to special knowledge.

[Quahom1]

Originally Posted by greymare

to where?????? ok, the rain stopped, yes i understand that some of it would be soaked up, but it has to go somewhere???

It is believed by some that at one point in the earth's "recent" past, the atmosphere was thicker, and had a great deal of suspended water vapor. There is also an opinion that lands were much more level around the earth than they are now, and the oceans were half as deep. It is also known that around the world are great chasms of underground water reserves (The Great plains of the US sit on such a water shed, or Aquafier).

When the Rain came, it was a phenomenon unseen before. But we aren't told if there were earth quakes along with the rain. However, we have seen what a "small" tidal wave can to to the islands in the Indian Ocean, and how long the water remained "inland", and how many it killed (Christmas 2004). And unlike the Smokey mountains of the US (which are very old and worn down), the Rockies are considered very new (and still jagged peaks). That is because the tectonic plates that make the US shoved against eachother there, and formed the Rockies, and raised the overall level of the US over a mile higher than it used to be. Prior to that, the US used to have an inland sea covering most of it from Canada to Mexico, and Utah to Pennsylvania. That "sea" is now gone. And the Oceans dropped twice as deep as they were before.

We know that the continents can shift and lift without notice, as demonstrated a few years back, and the ocean floor only shifted three feet, yet 200,000.00 people died quickly after that.

As an engineer, I understand the properties of water in motion (other wise known as "free surface effect") as well as Newton's law of intertia, as it applies to water in motion.

Rain can't kill, but a raging torrent of water moving at merely several kilometers an hour, and being two to three meters deep, can kill quickly. Further more, water, does not immediately seek it's own level, until the inertial of the whole of the body of water is spent. Again that took days for that little island flood.

From personal perspective, the river I live on is small, about 50 meters across and three meters deep, with a current normally at two knots. One can wade across but it isn't like skipping through puddles. But when the rains hit Pennsylvania hard, the river becomes a torrent, moving at 20 knots and rising seven to 10 meters above flood stage, and expanding from 50 meters to 300 meters in width. Hell I've seen Oak trees, trucks and mobile homes floating with the current at 20 knots.

And it takes several days for that little river to begin to recede, but once it does begin, it recedes quickly (a day or two).

But you don't have to take my word for it. John D. Morris PH, D sums it up nicely:

"We now know, of course, that the earth has plenty of water to launch a global flood. It has been calculated that if the earth's surface were completely flat, with no high mountains and no deep ocean basins, that water would cover the earth to a depth of about 8,000 feet. But is there enough water to cover a 29,035 foot mountain?
The key is to remember that the Flood didn't have to cover the present Earth, but it did have to cover the pre-Flood Earth, and the Bible teaches that the Flood fully restructured the earth. "The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished" (II Peter 3:6). It is gone forever. The earth of today was radically altered by that global event.
That Flood accomplished abundant geologic work. Eroding sediments here, redepositing them there, pushing up continents, elevating plateaus, denuding terrains, etc., so that the earth today is quite different from before. Today even mountain ranges rise high above the sea.
Mt. Everest and the Himalayan range, along with the Alps, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Andes, and most of the world's other mountains are composed of ocean-bottom sediments, full of marine fossils laid down by the Flood. Mt. Everest itself has clam fossils at its summit. These rock layers cover an extensive area, including much of Asia. They give every indication of resulting from cataclysmic water processes. These are the kinds of deposits we would expect to result from the worldwide, world-destroying Flood of Noah's day.
At the end of the Flood, after thick sequences of sediments had accumulated, the Indian subcontinent evidently collided with Asia, crumpling the sediments into mountains. Today they stand as giants—folded and fractured layers of ocean-bottom sediments at high elevations. No, Noah's Flood didn't cover the Himalayas, it formed them!
Thus we find the Biblical account not only possible, but also supported by the evidence. A pre-Flood world with lessened topographic extremes could have been covered by the Great Flood. That Flood caused today's high mountains and deep oceans making such a flood impossible to repeat. This is just as God promised, back in Genesis."

Hope that helps.

v/r
Q

[Quahom1]

Originally Posted by Pathless

Rivers reversing? I haven't thought about that yet. Damn. That has frightening implications.

The more I think about climate change, the more intricate and prone to catastrophe it becomes. A small degree of change may seem inconsequential at face value, but once we start taking into account that changes create systems of feedback that lead to more change, we see how interconnected and balanced/dynamic climate is.

My fiance was at a conference yesterday where someone was speaking about climate change. This person said that global temperatures have risen .6 degrees (I'm not sure about what the time frame is on that rise). That might not seem like a whole lot, but when complemented by this other bit of information--if global temperature dropped 2 degrees celsius, the Earth would be in an ice age--it becomes quite a bit more significant.

I wouldn't be Path. Rivers reverse twice a day in Maine, and Alaska and in Seattle (think Dawamish). Maine and Alaska use it to make electricity coming and going...

edit, my bad...four times a day.

[wil]

I love it when folks attempt to use science to validate biblical stories.