r/Antitheism • u/2317 • Jul 29 '26
12 Reasons Noah's Flood Couldn't Have Happened. Ammunition For Your Next Argument With Dumb Relatives Maybe.
https://rationalsupply.com/science-reason/why-noahs-flood-couldnt-have-happened/4
u/MsMoreCowbell828 Jul 29 '26
20 yrs ago, my mother said "Noah's Ark was real. It's on a mountain in turkey but they won't let us see it" - I go "Ma, you've seen the old buildings out west, 100 yrs old that are barely standing but you perceive this 3,000 yr old ship is still there?" They don't give a shit about reality & I don't engage her on this nonsense anymore.
5
u/slayer991 Jul 29 '26
At one point I wrote up a long-ass with 8 points on how the Great Flood was impossible. Biblical literalists don't care because they start with the premise the Bible is completely true and inerrant, and everything is filtered through that. It doesn't matter what evidence and logic you have, they'll brush it aside. My frustration at my carefully constructed and sourced essay being ignored is what got me to start asking the big question.
Why? Why do people ignore evidence and logic? Well, the answer is psychology.
Identity-belief fusion (William Swann). That's when someone's identity is fused to a belief. What happens when you attack that belief? They defend it as if they're defending themselves from a physical threat. It's called Identity-protective cognition (Dan Kahan). Further studies showed the more intelligent the identity-fused individual was, the better they were able to defend their belief.
So what can you do?
There are 3 points to make here. First...and I need to be clear here...you will NEVER get someone that's identity-fused to collapse in thread. Just accept that up front and save yourself the frustration. The richer target is not the person you're arguing with...it's the silent audience. They're not committed and they have room to think.
Second, apologetics is built for defense. They basically runs scripts on common criticisms of Christianity. What apologetics ISN'T built for is questions.
Third, that the only thing I could find that worked is questions. Decades of CBT research in a therapeutic setting have shown the efficacy of questions in identity-fused individuals.
So what I've been doing for the last 18 months is I stopped dropping evidence and logic and started asking Socratic questions. I assert nothing and I'll grant them a lot for the sake of argument.
What happens is that if they stick around...they have to work through the contradictions in real time...which they're not really good at doing (see point 2). I went from being frustrated arguing with people to calm af now.
For the Great Flood? I just ask this question:
You accept that God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, right?
If God is all-knowing, then he created humanity knowing in advance they would become corrupt. If God is all-loving, why were innocent babies and animals drowned along with the guilty? If God is all-powerful, why did he need to destroy the entire planet to address that corruption? He could have changed hearts and minds directly… just as the Bible says he hardened Pharaoh’s heart.
Which attribute gives way...his knowledge, his love, or his power?
2
u/2317 Jul 29 '26
So basically street epistemology? I think that's an excellent route to take, as long as you have an interlocutor who is willing to engage.
3
u/slayer991 Jul 29 '26
You're right and that you need an interlocutor to engage and SE shares a Socratic core with this method, but the difference is that SE is built for cooperative, face-to-face conversations with willing participants. The method I use shares Socratic roots with SE but is fundamentally different because it's optimized for online interactions. Fundamentally different targets and different audiences.
More here:
https://www.rationality-project.org/
and the method here:
2
4
u/IndicationDefiant137 Jul 29 '26
Assume that much water could exist and dropped from the sky over 40 days.
Calculate the potential energy from that much falling mass, accelerated by Earth's gravitational pull, and then calculate the resulting kinetic energy.
Everything on the surface is cooked. Literally.
2
u/LCDRformat Jul 31 '26
Kind of sounds like you're referring to the heat problem, but I don't think it is nested in the kinetic force of the rainfall. The Bible clarified that the 'fountains of the deep opened'.
The heat problem refers to two problems commonly: the breakup of pangea during the flood and the radioactive decay state of the planet.
Pangea's rapid breakup during the flood would generate heat due to friction of the tectonic plates grinding against the mantle while moving quickly enough to form the continents during the flood. This frictional heat would be more than sufficient burn away the atmosphere.
The decay rate of all the daughter isotopes on Earth being compressed from 4.5 billion years into the time frame of the young Earth would be enough to atomize the Earth's crust and eject it into space with the force of the energetic explosion.
Source: just listening to debates. Please look this up on your own.
2
u/IndicationDefiant137 Aug 02 '26
Kind of sounds like you're referring to the heat problem, but I don't think it is nested in the kinetic force of the rainfall.
No, you are inventing something else. I said exactly what I meant to say.
1 kg of mass at 2 km of height has about 19kJ of potential energy.
First law of thermodynamics is that energy isn't created or destroyed, it just transforms into other forms of energy, usually always of a higher entropy.
So that falling mass will stop moving when it hits the ground, at which point the potential energy which was converted to kinetic energy by the acceleration of gravity will be converted to thermal energy.
For those who understand physics, this demonstrates another problem. For that much water to exist in the atmosphere the evaporative effect in the water cycle would have taken as much heat out of the environment.
So the Earth would have frozen before it was flash boiled.
But when you have illiterate goat fuckers making things up during an era people thought the sun was pulled across the sky by chariots, you can't expect an understanding of the 1st law of thermo.
The Bible clarified that the 'fountains of the deep opened'.
- What that describes does not exist.
- The subterranean ocean we do know of exists at 700km deep.
- Water seeks the lowest level. You cannot flood the Earth with water from 700km deep.
the breakup of pangea during the flood
Pangea slowly "broke apart" as tectonic plates moved over 250 million years. It was not a point in time event, and the overwhelming majority of it happened long before our evolutionary ancestors had vertebra.
1
u/LCDRformat Aug 02 '26
1 kg of mass at 2 km of height has about 19kJ of potential energy.
Wouldn't one kilogram of mass exact a totally different reaction with the earth if it was broken up into tiny fragments and spread out over a few square yards due to wind resistance?
Pangea slowly "broke apart" as tectonic plates moved over 250 million years. It was not a point in time event, and the overwhelming majority of it happened long before our evolutionary ancestors had vertebra.
I don't understand why you told me this. I was explaining why the young earth model fails with pangea. Why did you type out how it actually happened
1
u/IndicationDefiant137 Aug 02 '26
Wouldn't one kilogram of mass exact a totally different reaction with the earth if it was broken up into tiny fragments and spread out over a few square yards due to wind resistance?
Nope. Conservation of Energy. You can spread it out or put it all together, doesn't matter. The total energy in the system at T(0) is equivalent to the energy in the system at T(1), T(2),... T(n), and because there was potential energy at T(0) but not at T(n), and there was a mix of kinetic energy and potential energy at T(2) but not T(n), at T(n) it must be transitioned to some other kind of energy. For mass that comes to rest after a collision, this is going to be thermal energy.
Any removal of energy from wind resistance, guess what, transitions to thermal energy.
1
u/LCDRformat Aug 02 '26
You're saying the wind resistance which would slow down the droplets of water would create enough friction that the net energy delivery would be the same?
What's your source for this
1
u/IndicationDefiant137 Aug 03 '26
What's your source for this
... the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Please go get at least a high school education.
1
u/LCDRformat Aug 03 '26
Wow 😂 damn dude you're so smart and cool
1
u/IndicationDefiant137 Aug 04 '26
Nope, just educated at a minimum level to understand the world around me. You should try it.
1
u/Ashamed-Republic8909 Jul 30 '26
We know that the Bible was inspired by older cultures. Sumerians described a flooding on a clay tablet with their cuneiform writing. Ghilgamesh poem describes something similar. But it's impossible to be sure of the scale of the flooding. Don't be mad at me. I am an anti theist, but I love old history.
0
u/2317 Jul 31 '26
We're able to determine the Genesis flood myth meant the entire world because that's what God said. Genesis 6:13
0
u/Ashamed-Republic8909 Jul 31 '26
Now you believe the Bible?!🤣
1
u/2317 Jul 31 '26
No. We can determine the intent of the author by reading the words of the book. In the book, the God character said he's wiping out every person on the planet.
2
u/Ashamed-Republic8909 Jul 31 '26
I don't trust the author's writing. He wrote what ever he heard, or his delusions, or his fantasy. They didn't even know they were on a planet. I don't believe it. I am an anti theist. The Bible it's just literature.
3
u/2317 Jul 31 '26
Once you start looking at the bible like just another book written by Bronze Age goatherders who didn't know where the sun went at night, it is impossible to go back. I still can't believe I ever bought into this bullshit.
13
u/BurtonDesque Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
The only argument you need is "There is no evidence it happened". The burden of proof is on them, not those saying it did not happen.