I have made it a policy to ignore things like that. He clearly is talking about the block universe and calling it a cube. That alone says he doesn’t know much about what he speaks of.
I always felt like it was some sort of “ism” with a negative connotation with the gentiles are dogs metaphor and then further accented by how it was first for the jew and then for the gentile and so on.
But Einstein wasn’t.
No I do not, thus why I am asking. Seems no one else knows either.
Thanks though.
Neither did the book of Revelation with the new Jerusalem.
Hi gbob, apologies for being late into this topic - not long been on Biologos, and have been reading all your posts on this subject with interest - I think I have read most of them now. I hope your treatment is going ok - if it is and you’re up for a question, one technology question that occurs to me that I can’t see you have covered or anyone has asked is whether Homo Erectus would have been capable of making an ark of the size and complexity mentioned in the Genesis account 5.3 million years ago. If all of the species was within the Mediterranean basin at the time (they must have been if all except Noah et al perished), it must have been fairly early in the development of Homo Erectus as they hadn’t expanded across the globe like they did afterwards. So they would have had to get to this level of technology quite quickly. Your discussions of their levels of tool making, working the ground, and tending animals later, after Noah and family restart again (with difficulty and the need to go back to square1 as you point out), seem to happen over a much longer timeframe from the data you gave and be quite basic compared to boat/ark construction. What’s your view?
Hi Shoes, I have been busy writing a book on what I finally found after 50 years of searching. Thanks for the best wishes on treatment, but I am at the end and what I need are about 3-4 more weeks of life to finish everything up, then my views will be available logically organized (or slightly less disorganized), on Amazon. I have hired an editor because I am horrible at grammar and don’t want the nit-pickers knocking points off of my views because I hated English class. lol
OK, now to the question, the Ark. Quick answer, we know H. erectus built steerable boats 800kyr ago when he did the near impossible, cross the Wallace biogeographical line. Consider this:
“Wallace’s Line is one of the world’s biggest biogeographic disjunctions, marking the border of placental-dominated ecosystems to the west, whereas the lesser known Lydekker’s Line marks marsupial-dominated ecosystems to the east. Only two terrestrial mammal groups are known to have crossed Wallacea (the area between the two lines) to migrate into Australasia: rodents and anatomically modern humans. The discovery of Homo floresiensis (‘Hobbits’) on Flores in 2003 indicates a separate dispersal across Wallace’s Line, whereas a ~67,000 year old foot bone from Callao in the Philippines represents a small-bodied hominin of unknown taxonomic affiliation. These taxa remain enigmatic, but suggest that other hominin species had the capacity to cross the powerful marine current that forms and maintains Wallace’s Line even during times of lowered sea levels.” A. Cooper and C. B. Stringer, "Did the Denisovans Cross Wallace’s Line? Science Oct 18, 2003, p. 321
The currents he speaks of will take one out to the emptiest ocean on earth–the Indian, and if you can’t steer, crossing those straits means you don’t find land again!
Here is a current map:
Here are some of the things that anthropologists have said about H. erectus getting to Flores 800kry ago.
It appears that by 2018, Robert Bednarik has won his battle for acceptance of the idea that H. erectus built steerable boats and sailed to Sumbawa and on:
You will find lots of news articles on this by a bing or google search on “Erectus sail ocean”
From the Guardian:
“Oceans were never a barrier to the travels of Erectus . He travelled all over the world, travelled to the island of Flores, across one of the greatest ocean currents in the world,” said Daniel Everett, professor of global studies at Bentley University, and author of How Language Began. “They sailed to the island of Crete and various other islands. It was intentional: they needed craft and they needed to take groups of twenty or so at least to get to those places.”
“While Everett is not the first to raise the controversial possibility that H. erectus might have fashioned some sort of seagoing vessel, he believes that such capabilities mean that H. erectus must also have had another skill: language.”
Right here I could stop and say if you want Noah to be an erectus, I have no data with which to prove you wrong and you do have evidence that he was smart enough to build some type of box/ark. But I will go on. I might have to add a short chapter on this before my editor comes back from vacation. 
I would suggest reading this from the anthro-literature. It talks about the problems of getting across those straits and the need to have steerable boats. http://www.ifrao.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ComptesRendus1999.pdf
From the archaeology, we know that H. erectus crossed 3 very dangerous straits with enough of a population to inhabit each successive island.
Now, admittedly this is a long time from the flood but here is how I handle it.
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We know the fossil record is very incomplete–only 3% of living animals are actually fossilized. H. erectus could have lived easily hidden away in small colonies, so the lack of his fossils is not proof that he wasn’t on earth, as so many try to say.
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We know he had sailing abilities 800-900 kyr ago to get him to Flores, where his descendants shrank, became the famous flores hobbits,(H. Floresiensis) but made similar tools as their ancestor erectines did.
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While I don’t think Adam was an erectine, but a small brained hominid, it is entirely possible I am wrong thus a creature of his brainpower, capable of building steerable ships would certainly be able of building a box.
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My question is how big is the box. I don’t think ICR or AiG have the size right. Theirs is far too big in my opinion. I don’t think it had to carry every animal on earth nor every animal in the Mediterranean. I think it carried Noah, his family, some food and some special animals. That means the box would be much smaller. The size of a cubit is up for grabs, especially if, as I believe we are dealing with a smaller hominid.
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The ark was only afloat 5 months. Noah entered the ark Gen 7:11 "In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month,
Gen 8:4,And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.
That is 150 days of floating and is in line with the computational modeling done which showed the Western Basin of the Mediterranean would take about 200 days to fill. Make the initial break a bit bigger and one would then have 150. Models are not facts of science, they are ways to learn the parameters of the problem.
Noah didn’t get out of the ark, and thus had to live on what was in it for a full year
"And it came to pass in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, that the waters were dried up from the earth . . . and in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dried
In my mind, there is still work to be done on the size of the ark, for the food supply, but H. erectus did have the smarts to build a water tight box or he could never have sailed to Flores!!!. Your question is a good one, and one, I missed, or didn’t want to deal with. lol. Atheists and doubters can suck lemons on this one, Anthropology disagrees. Erectus was smart enough to build an ark.
Other papers arguing for H. erectus seafaring capabilities are found at:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew_Spriggs/publication/282577571_Comments_on_‘Seafaring_in_the_Pleistocene’_by_Robert_G_Bednarik/links/56131b7f08aea9fb51c28810/Comments-on-Seafaring-in-the-Pleistocene-by-Robert-G-Bednarik.pdf
Hi gbob, good reading again - thanks. Ok, so there’s a good argument that Homo Erectus was sea-faring 1M years ago, and, by inference, Noah, 4Myrs earlier but still Homo E, could have had the intellect to be able to make some sort of Ark. Did they have the motivation to develop their capability? Eden was close to water from your maps, so perhaps population size or diet, say, were sufficient drive to develop his sea-faring? The level of challenge for the flood is high though - sturdy enough for an initially highly turbulent rough sea, a long time at sea, high volume and duration food storage (incl avoidance of disease), with shelter for people and animals. At least it doesn’t have to steer or be propelled. A possible next step, I guess, would be to do the same as in the papers you linked to to show that a sufficiently large ark could have been made from local materials with stone age tools. As you point out the smaller the better - the lowest viable size would be the first thing to assess to see if this is even conceivable with the available technology. Could more than one craft be argued for to make it more achievable?
I’m no archaeologist, but does that sound like a possible starting point for a research project application for someone?!..
Hi Shoes,
Remember, Eden was in my opinion on the dry ocean bed. It was near(maybe 750 miles from some very brinish lakes down hill from them,and it had fresh water in the form of river flow. After the flood, it was all under water. If that is ‘close to water’ then yeah, but I don’t think that is what you meant.
I don’t see how sea faring could have started or been encouraged from the Mediterranean site. I think they found their way blocked and tried solutions to get across the straits of Lombok, Subawa and Flores together.
I know there were trees in that basin because Giraffes eat tree tops. But I will leave the ark calculation to you. I feel that without knowledge of the cubit, and without knowledge of how much each person ate, which requires a decision as to whether Noah was a small brained guy like I want or an erectine like you, we can never arrive at something that will be acceptable to most folk. Erectines and the smaller guys had different metabolic expenditure levels, Then one needs to know how many animals were put on the ark, how much they ate–it is truly a tangled mess to calculate.
If that problem grabs you starte studyiing every aspect of it and go for it.
Hi gbob,
Thanks for the generous offer but I’m still strictly at the curious stage!
I can see there was the motivation to cross the straits at Lombok etc but that was much later. But, surely no development of technology in the Med 4M years earlier is a problem for Noah - he may have had the intelligence but would have had to build a pretty challenging ark with no experience of the technology! For me, its important to be convinced he could have had the technology. Perhaps there’s a way to postulate he could have had experience as the culture would then have been outside Eden (after the Fall) and could have expanded as far as the brinish lakes or used the rivers as highways and therefore had to develop some technology?
Going beyond sea-faring capability and getting into arguments about the size of the ark could actually be counter productive, taking you down a large rabbit hole and a raft (pardon the pun) of potential questions diverting attention from your main idea, IMO.
All the best for the extra chapter!
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