How Hard Was it Raining During the Flood? Could the Ark Survive?

The point is that the Bible is the only clue to what happened in the Flood and when it says that the waters "prevailed 15 cubits and covered the high mountains" that suggests mountains of considerably less stature than Everest.The subject of this thread is not the heat that tectonics might or might not generate, it's what the rain did.

I don't see how the verse is saying that the water covered the mountains by 15 cubits but there's no reason not to go ahead and try to calculate how much water that would be if so, and if Everest existed then, and as CI says, plug in other numbers as the thread progresses.

Calculate it for all possibilities. Why not?

That's not what I was suggesting. The idea was to start with Everest and work your way down to other possible interpretations, as they come up in the thread.In any case START WITH EVEREST. That ought to give some pretty solid numbers.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Where are you getting this from? Do the periodic eruptions of undersea volcanoes predictably cause tsunamis?

David Guzik at Blue Letter BibleBy which I take it he means the oceans were shallow, which would mean the fountains of the deep were QUITE deep.

Words are tricky things. I didn't mean deep as in located deeper than we'd been saying already, I meant deep as in lots of volume to it, more depth from top to bottom. Only its lower regions would have been close to the hot depths, upper regions well above the core temperatures, just as the upper regions of present-day oceans are. So it's not like what was released from the "fountains" was necessarily this superheated water that hung out near the core, it was more like an ocean beneath a shallow ocean. Perhaps a warmer ocean, but not necessarily steaming geysers straight from the hot core of the earth.So, if David Guzik is right, and the earth was closer to a sphere, then the ocean would have been very shallow, and BENEATH it there would have been a lot more depth (=volume) of "fountains of the deep" than I had been picturing before. I hope I'm getting this across. I already pictured shallow ocean to accommodate water beneath the ocean floor, but his remarks suggest MUCH shallower ocean, which suggests MUCH deeper (from top to bottom) of the sub-floor water that became the "fountains."I'm trying my best to convey how I understood what he was saying. Hope it worked.{edit: I'm sure it's impossible but then everything so far has been. I don't know what would divide these layers of water or how that could happen, but this is how I pictured what Guzik said.}Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Good question. I was starting to think along those lines recently.Everybody here talks so dogmatically about how this or that would happen, of course absolutely precluding the possibility of a worldwide flood, but in reality simply figuring out the dynamics of one hurricane is not easy, so where does all this certainty come from about how there woulda been such and such a temperature and so on?http://www.berkeley.edu/...eases/2005/07/25_hurricanes.shtmlEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

But all based on sheer guesswork about how it happened. So the rains of the flood started with the removal of latent heat? And what would have removed the latent heat?It's the claims that the planet would have been so hot that nobody at all could have survived that creationists now have to answer though. I didn't put the link up as an argument. I just ran across it trying to get some information about what causes cooling and heating in ocean weather patterns, and thought it mostly showed how hard it is to know much for sure about weather patterns, even when a lot is known. It wasn't meant to prove anything at all.A whole planet covered with hurricanes isn't going to behave the way a few hurricanes here and there behave anyway. Things would probably have been so different I don't see the point in extrapolating anything that is known back to that event any more. The problem with all this is that nobody knows what would have happened. It's all guesswork based on the barest of hints in the Bible. I've had fun with the guessing at times but really it's futile. If I've learned one thing at EvC it's not to take anything anybody says about the supposed physics of the flood seriously any more.

I'd like to hear the story.

The calculations are not guesswork but the actual conditions of the time are guesswork. Things were certainly different in many ways than they are now. Even if something basically true about the conditions can be guessed, there are too many ways the scenario could have played out that probably escape our imaginations.I was thinking about all those hurricanes that they might actually cancel each other out.Your physics showing the flood is impossible is based on wild guesses about what happened.None of it tells me there was no flood. That is based on God's inerrant revelation, and that revelation also happens to be couched in details and facts, genealogies and so on, that ground it in reality.I don't know how it played out, of course, but the creationists have some very interesting ideas about it. And I do know that people who don't believe in God's revelation are not going to be looking for ways it could have happened but only for ways it couldn't. Makes the whole discussion futile finally.

We know that didn't happen because the ark survived. But this is a science forum so I guess I can't say that. People believe the revelation of God on other grounds, and then believe the flood knowing that the word of God is reliable. Of course the creationist effort to explain it is to try to answer the endless debunkery for the sake of some coming to belief, but I'm beginning to appreciate that that probably isn't ever going to happen. One doesn't believe in God because of the flood; one believes in the flood because one believes in the God of the Bible. God never said all will be saved. I'm still curious about some ideas that come up, but I no longer really care about it. If that answers your question. To my mind the flood explains the geologic column and the Grand Canyon beautifully, but the vehement opposition to that to-my-mind-obvious explanation, means there is no point to carrying on the dispute. Can't really. 1000 feet? Wild guess based on absolutely nothing. No real idea.

To be able to produce that much water and have it recede to present levels means things had to be very different. What things? Some have been speculated about on other threads. They would be off topic here.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Oh theoretically it definitely could be. Just practically speaking it hasn't been. True. True. Of course it applied. But if we don't know what the conditions were it applied TO, all its speculations are useless. Way too many unknowns. It can be interesting to think about but as for coming to any certain conclusions, I give up. No, faith in the Biblical God definitely supports reason. What you have to trade is your certainty about scientific explanations of the unknowable distant past for a certainty about God's revelation, coupled with an attitude of faith toward things in that revelation we can't understand, or an agnosticism about how some things played out in the physical world.

But this is a science thread, and my beliefs are out of place here, so please carry on. If some of it intrigues me I'll ask a question or two.