Massive regional floods happen all over the world in every generation… and for virtually as long as land masses have existed.
So… it should be no big surprise when Sumerians and other ancient cultures wrote stories to give a theological backstory to floods… the BIGGER the flood, the more theologically pregnant the stories become. The Sumerians describe a pagan-style flood of the whole Earth.
Jewish scribes, not to be outdone, convert a pagan story into a Hebrew one!
An impression from how the ocean looks on a beach cannot show you as complete a picture as scientists who are studying and carefully measuring conditions globally. The oceans have risen between two and three inches just in the last couple of decades. A glance out your window will tell you nothing of this. But this level of change is accelerating and revealing that past estimates were too conservative rather than too exaggerated (much less flat-out wrong). This has been confirmed from multiple sources. Read about it here. Those who still want to deny it are finding themselves testifying against God’s creation itself. Even if all those who accept the data could be made to go away, creation itself would continue to testify to the truth, Martin. The most powerful petroleum companies and their best paid scientists (and that is where the big money is for scientists --willing to give up their quest for truth and take up big corporate agenda instead); even for all that, they cannot make the truth go away.
Next time you are outside at night, glance up at the sky and ask yourself how much the stars have moved. Your own testimony will confirm to you what people had thought for thousands of years: the stars do not move and the heavens (other than planets and the occasional comet obviously) are immutable. Even careful observations seemed to confirm this for a long time. Now it is a well-measured and indisputable fact that the stars are moving – breathtakingly fast. They are just even more breathtakingly far away so that such movement is not easily seen on a time scale of human generations.
So the fact that some actually are beginning to see and notice gradual effects of warming climate even in our own lives gives a sense of how rapidly this change must actually be happening.
That is not evidence that people do not want to consider. That is data which has been considered in considerable detail and completely explained. Mountains such as Everest were originally underwater. They were not originally mountains, and many of them have risen considerably in height at the same time as the sea level has dropped.
In other words, regardless of the ancient definition and usage of the word erets, you will hold to your interpretation in spite of any and all evidence to the contrary.
So why did you bother asking the question to begin with?
And the earth is flat. How do I know you ask?
I look out my window. It’s flat.
Climate change is just being pushed to give the poor nations money from the rich nations{money or wealth transfer} now if one was a socialist they would need an “emergency reason” to do it. well guess what? “climate change” is that reason. The main reason I do NOT accept climate change is real is because I begin my science with In the beginning God.I believe God made this planet and knows fully well how to operate it. Evolution starts with “In the beginning Evolution” and evolution being a “mindless process” could not make the earth perfect as our creator has,therefore they “freak out” so to speak.To put it another way would be this:if i am on a plane the air I have faith that the pilot in the front knows what he is doing when flying the plane and have some faith that he know exactly what he is doing, there for I am not worried However if both pilot were to die for some reason i would not have faith that the plane could land it’s self.That is why evolutionist freak out because they have no faith that God created the world or had any fore thought whatsoever! Do you see what damage evolution does?
you are correct it is a waste of time.
which ever way it happened God must have done it:slight_smile:
I find when no one wants to accept an argument that makes total sense they throw out the “straw man argument” and they claim the other persons argument is straw man argument. how ever that does not dissuade me and what i see as real. they also claim the because of the Dover trial that makes Stephen C Meyers argument about DNA codes in the cell not true either and does not prove creation/ design is true. But after looking at both sides of the issue for along time that argument does not dissuade me either DNA proves design by a mind and it also proves evolution false!
Please consider that the argument may not in fact make any sense, and may indeed be a straw man. Right now you’re posting a lot of “X is true because I say so”, which isn’t very convincing. So you shouldn’t be surprised if people aren’t convinced.
We have gotten off topic.
The question is Why does the Bible describe a universal flood if there is no external evidence of this flood?
In my opinion the answer is history. Conservative Christians want to believe that God wrote Genesis and dictated it to Moses or whomever. There is no real evidence that this is the care.
History is not the past, but how we understand the past. Genesis is historical in that it is the result of the Hebrews attempt to understand the past.
How do historians know what happened in the past? They begin with the best available sources. The best available sources said that there was a universal flood in the distant past. Furthermore these sources were imbedded in the culture of the Semitic people of which the Jews were a part.
Thus the Flood was a part of basically pagan culture from which Judaism developed, so it was an accepted fact of history. The Jews could not just say that science did not verify the story of the flood, because there was no scientific info at that time. The question was not: Did the Flood happen?, but how the Flood did the flood take place?
Thus it was the task of Jewish historians and theologians to give a Jahwist understanding of the Flood, different from the pagan understanding of the Flood, which they did. In other words, Why did YHWH create the Flood? and why did YHWH save Noah and his family?
Does that make the universal Flood real? No.
Does that make the story that we find in the Bible true? Yes, to the extent as the historians correctly grasped through the power of the Holy Spirit how the God of the Jews YHWH could have acted through the Flood.
Conservative Christians often say that Genesis is a “historical book.” That is not true if one means that it is a story of exactly what happened. It is historical in a much more meaningful way in that it is our understanding of how God/YHWH relates and works for God’s people in the real world of history as best we understand it.
This also true of the beginning of Genesis. We have to remember that the Bible was not written for 21st century Western folks, but first and foremost for the Hebrews and Jews who wrote it. It is not the facts of history that make it true, It our understanding of God’s presence in history that makes it true.
We accept it by faith, and not by sight, until God shows a more meaningful way to understand it.
God has given people a “free will”, it is not surprising that people will use it strongly when they do not like what is being said and reject that which was said.The leaders in Jesus day did not like that he said he and God were one and the same either, and they rejected it all the way to the Cross. however it did not make it any less true.
Please watch Updated with Slides - Lord Christopher Monckton Speaking in St. Paul - YouTube and check out check out the website https://wattsupwiththat.com/ and I think that you will be surprised by the counter evidence.
I 
you Roger. @Relates
Actually, I think this highlights part of the problem with this conversation. We are addressing 2 different questions.
Why does the Bible describe the flood as covering the entire ‘earth?’
Does the Bible actually say that the flood covered the entire ‘earth?’
I tend to lean towards a ‘no’ for #2 which makes #1 moot. If @martin would like to address the translation point I would be more than happy to read it.
Respectfully,
Jim
Hi Jim. I think you are spot-on. Whether there was a global flood in human history is not seriously up for debate. There is little evidence in its favor and mountains (pun) against it. In 2016, the persistence of ‘marine fossils on top of mountains’ argument for a global flood is simply another classic example of Mark Noll’s thesis in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
It’s one thing to say “I believe there was a global flood over the entire Earth” but quite another to claim “the science supports it”. In the best, most honest case one could say “I believe there was a global flood but I don’t know why it’s not apparent” and leave it at that.
I Love lord Moncton {video} he is just telling the TRUTH and shaming the Devil!
according to the bible yes! the word EARTH is used.
Your argument is (in part) that people are “freaking out.” Nobody is “freaking out.”
This is true. You don’t like some of what has been said here, and you reject it. That doesn’t make it any less true.
Here’s the difference…explanations and arguments have been presented to you that you have simply dismissed. In contrast, you have not presented explanations, arguments, and evidence.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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