An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis Chapter Seven – The Flood

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God remind Noah that he and even relatives are being spared the impending deluge for Noah being righteous (the righteousness or lack of it of the sons and wives is unclear. Just how have the eight most righteous people on Earth all just happened to be in the same family? It’ like the rigged voting of a reality game how (and jut as unrealistic). Noah is now told about taking the clean beats in 7 pairs, with the uncleans in ingle mating pairs. All birds are to have seven pairs saved too. Noah is given just seven days to round up to 14 million male and female creatures before the Flood starts, clearly an impossible task. Noah is 600 when the Flood starts. As the animal enter, the waters come, first through the eruption of underground springs, releasing more water than there could be on Earth eve if the ice caps melt. It’ as though the Genesis authors think of the Earth as a big hollow ball full of water. The rain followed extremely quickly. The date of the Flood starting is given as the 17th of February. Only as the Food starts does Noah get the animals gathered to actually enter the Ark. Think on this. 14 million creatures, through one door (and possible the window) in one day, plus the eight navigator, feeders and zoologists, as the storm is already raging. Impossible doesn’t enter into it. You couldn’t possibly move that many animals in one day especially through so short a space even if all the animals were freely co-operating. Once everyone and everything is aboard, God shuts them inside the Ark. Surely Noah could close / lock a door himself? The waters rise for forty days and forty nights. We are told that the water was eventually twenty feet higher than the highest mountains. (the plural itself is a mistake as no mountain matches Everest in height). Every living thing on Earth has been drowned if not on the Ark, and the Bible mentions only the animals but all plant life would perish too. Noah hasn’t even taken any of that on the Ark. All those innocent babies, children and infant animals wasted in the greatest genocide ever. We can now actually work out the rate this impossible flood would have had to rise. The water had to rise twenty feet higher than Everest. Mount Everest rises 29,035 feet above sea level. Add the twenty feet plus water rise and we get a new sea level of 29,055 feet. The water rises to that in forty days. 29,055 divided by forty equals just over 726 feet – so that is the rate at which the flood water rises – 726 feet every day. It seem unlikely most life would not survive the first day of such a deluge. Such a vast wooden hip as the Ark would be twisted apart by such violent forces very quickly. (no such wooden vessel can hold together even in calm seas anyway. Even when the water stop rising, the crew and the entire menagerie are trapped on the boat for a further 150 days. Why was no one else able to survive the Flood? Obviously anyone inland and nowhere near rivers or the sea would be drowned in such rapidly rising water but people near rivers and ocean might have made it onto boats or ships. Fishermen might already have been out on the water. If Noah could ride out the storm, why not others on boats? We tend to take it a read that the fish at least did not need to get on the Ark, as they could swim in the deepening water, but many deep-sea fish might well die with the vast increase in pressure of waters rising so high. Some fish and crustaceans depending on hallows would also be doomed. Then here are the whales. Though they breathe air they can swim very deep, for up to half a day at a time, but if the water roe too high, they might drown trying to swim back up only to find the surface considerably higher above them than when they submerged. There would also be no fresh water as the oceans would dominate, so any river or lake fish were doomed (unless Noah rounded them up too). Tropical fish and other aquatic creatures depending on waters maintaining a warm temperature would die as the Flood waters would be extremely cold. The phrase suggesting the flood rose just twenty-two feet (15 cubits) above confuses many scholars but it is generally taken to mean the water height above the mountains. Quite simply, this would be a total extinction event. Period. The Flood did not happen. Arthur Chappell