Do you believe they have found Noah's Ark?

Seems like someone “finds Noah’s Ark” every few decades. It’ll only be a few years before someone finds it again…

No.

Did they recover Kate Winslet’s necklace?

Nope.

Mickey Rooney has a boat? When he was a little buoy he used to go on the lake in his soapdish, bless.

Which news broadcast? What was found and by whom?
Links please.

I have seen this published in tabloids over and over. I have yet to see a legit new source carry the story.

I would think wood would turn to dust after a few thousand years !

Even if the Ark once existed, I would need a great deal of convincing evidence that a wooden ship, unprotected from the elements for 5,000 years or more would still be locatable. That alone is totally implausible! To further prove it is the Ark of the Bible would be even less likely.

@Dog ... I dont have a link, I just watched it on t noon time news. If you google “have they found Noah“s Ark“it will pop up. sorry im just finding this exciting.

it’s in the high mountains where the cold would preserve the wood…..
I heard a couple of years ago they might have found it.
Sounds plausible to me.

@Pretty_Lilly…. Its frozen, like when they find bones. After all, its on a mt.

@jazmina88 Apparently only to you it is plausible lol.

the pair of goats from Noah’s Ark have been found on the other hand

@jazmina88 and @slick44 There are still elements on a mountain, especially wind…...

@Simone_De_Beauvoir GA.

Just google it people, Im not makin it up it was on the news. Dont shoot the messenger. I just thought it was really cool.

@slick44 It’s not the story that’s the problem, it’s the whole B.S. of noahs ark that’s the problem…....We would have to assume that such a ridiculous thing like noahs ark actually happened…..

1. Again?

2. Large enough to fit seven specimens of every Kosher animal on earth, and two specimens of every other animal (including 450,000 individual species of beetle, for starters?)

3. Who is funding this, and why are good scientists wasting their time chasing fairy tales? Hell, if it’ll give me the money, I have a shard of the True Cross. Lemme go chop it off my dogwood tree in the backyard…

Dude, not even the Christian Science Monitor. believes this particular wacko’s version of events or facts. Why would you?

The fact that a wacko announces something and a news station reports it doesn’t make it even plausibly, let alone true.

Here’s your link…... http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0428/Noah-s-Ark-discovered.-Again.

What you guys don’t know: is that once finished,Noah made sure to give it two coats of Minwax all weather protection !

@Blackberry try again – 404.

Doh! Standby…..

@Blackberry and my links work. It’s fluther that doesn’t. That period at the end is part of the URL. Stick a period at the end of your address bar when you get the 404.

Yep, that’s right. Magical.

This link will take you to the page cited by @Blackberry.

@Seek_Kolinahr What they did;is store the excess animals and luggage in the trailing Pinta & Santa Maria!!

He claims the wood was carbon-dated to around the reputed time of Noah’s flood, which would be remarkable since organic material should have long since disintegrated in the last 5,000 years.

Bwa ha ha ha!

Yeung said that he is “99 percent certain that it is Noah’s Ark based on historical accounts, including the Bible and local beliefs of the people in the area, as well as carbon dating.”

Local legend is now a sound historical account? Oh, good. I was hoping for verifiable evidence of Zeffie, the central Florida version of the Loch Ness Monster. Now I know I just have to hear a drunken moonshiner from Polk County slur from his front porch.

Yeung refuses to disclose the location of the find and is instead keeping it a secret. This of course is inherently unscientific; for the claims to be proven, the evidence must be presented to other scientists for peer-review. Nor has the alleged 5,000-year-old wood been made available for independent testing.

“I have proof of Noah’s ark! It’s true. I said it and you need to believe me. What? You want to see the proof? But isn’t it about faith?”

@Seek_Kolinahr Yes those parts made me laugh too. I love the subtle sarcastic tone lol.

This Dutch guy (re)build one.
It’s massive.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/04/27/2280442.aspx

These pictures doen’t even look that real… the one with straw in it is really… um… raising my skeptical ire. We have old mountain cabins and hutts that look like the interior shots here. Why no outside pics? These guys aren’t scientist, they’re evangelicals.

Yep. and it’s on my mountain…cats, dogs, geese, chickens, sheep, llamas, horses, donkeys, mules…AND…my neighbors have a pair of Camels!

Not too many species missing over here! lol

How can they be sure it isn’t some other really old boat?

This comment on MSNBC amused me:

Oh, now creationists think carbon dating is useful and accurate.

The Guardian published this half an hour ago. Excerpt:

Noah’s Ark Ministries won’t say precisely where they made their find.

Booshit.

Since it wasn’t possible for Noah, his wife and kids to clear several forests to build a ship big enough to house all the animals on the planet (including emperor penguins), as well as care for and feed them with only like 5 people, I would say the Ark wasn’t found because it never existed.

@richardhenry

Hey, they totally stole my bit about the One True Cross. I claim credit for that joke.

Let’s consult the Magic 8 ball:

That’s a definitive no.

Yeah, no.
First, they are evangelical explorers. These guys will almost invariably twist, cherrypick and fabricate facts to suit their preconceived theories.
Second, they claim to have carbon dated the wood, but refuse to reveal by whom. It is doubtful that they even did carbon date it. It is funny though. All those time they reject carbon dating as unreliable but suddenly they do not as soon as it suits their needs.
Third, they refuse to reveal the actual location of the alleged find and only, from what I have seem, released some inside shots of wooden structures. For all we know what is depicted might be inside a cave, it might be some old wooden house, and it might not even be anywhere near Mt. Ararat or Turkey.

My prognosis: It is probably another hoax.

Article from CSM.

“Noah’s Ark is routinely re-discovered, because there are many who fervently want it to be found. Biblical literalists — those who believe that proof of the Bible’s events remains to be found — have spent their lives and fortunes trying to scientifically validate their religious beliefs.

There are several reasons why the new claims should be treated with skepticism. For example, Yeung refuses to disclose the location of the find and is instead keeping it a secret. This of course is inherently unscientific; for the claims to be proven, the evidence must be presented to other scientists for peer-review. Nor has the alleged 5,000-year-old wood been made available for independent testing.”

If they have found the One True Ark, I’m not sure why they would keep the location a secret or refuse to allow evidence out for peer review. Do you know any Christian organizations that aren’t willing to share the Good News at the drop of a hat?

“In February 1993 CBS aired a two-hour primetime special titled, “The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark.” It included the riveting testimony of a George Jammal, who claimed not only to have personally seen the Ark on Ararat but recovered a piece of it. Unfortunately for believers, it was all a hoax. Jammal was later revealed as a paid actor who had never even been to Turkey and whose piece of the Ark was not an unknown ancient timber but instead modern pine soaked in soy sauce.”

Ah, maybe that’s why. That Good News is sometimes quite fictional.

Edit to add: I should have read everyone’s responses first. Sorry if I stepped on any toes.

You mean it isn’t on the moon?

[ tangent ]

I have no personal insight in the matter, but my understanding about the creationists’ disdain for radiometric carbon dating is that they believe it’s not accurate when used to date things millions of years old. I think they’re fine with items in the thousands.

Wikipedia explains, ”A raw ’(years) Before Present’ date cannot be used directly as a calendar date, because the level of atmospheric carbon-14 has not been strictly constant during the span of time that can be radiocarbon dated. The level is affected by variations in the cosmic ray intensity which is in turn affected by variations in the Earth’s magnetosphere. In addition, there are substantial reservoirs of carbon in organic matter, the ocean, ocean sediments (see methane hydrate), and sedimentary rocks. Changes in the Earth’s climate can affect the carbon flows between these reservoirs and the atmosphere, leading to changes in the atmosphere’s carbon-14 fraction.”

And yes, I agree with the sentiment here that dude’s story sounds like a bunch of bull.

Wait, how did they figure it’s Noah’s ark and not Atrahasis’s ark?

@robmandu… whos “story” are you refering to?

@robmandu
That is why Carbon dating is not even used for artifacts older than 60000 years, and not at all for artifacts that do not contain carbon. There are other radiometric dating methods for that that work for timescales of many many million years.
Even if they say it is fine when talking about a few thousand years, any carbon dating result that puts the age of an artifact at more than 6000 years, like for example, a ten thousand year old piece of wood, would not exactly sit well with the young earth creationist.

@ragingloli, agreed. My point is simply that a young earth creationist would likely find little to argue about carbon dating a piece of wood at 5,000 years… as is the case here.

Is that those same people that found Goliath’s skull in Iraq once, complete with the rock still stuck in the forehead? Lulz.

I’ve always thought the funniest part of the whole ark mythology is the idea that Noah goes around collecting each and every one of the at least one million species of insects.

If you ever want a good time, ask an evangelical how many “kinds” of insects Noah brought on the ark.

Don’t forget that according to the creationists he would have had to have carried on board all the dinosaur species. Oh wait, maybe that is why they went extinct. Personally, I would not have invited Mr and Mrs T Rex on my ark.

They can rationalize that by saying he only took the eggs/babies.

Which is, of course, still ludicrous; there were thousands of species and they would have hatched at different times, etc. But there are so many different kinds and degrees of ludicrous involved in the logistics of the ark myth.

I skipped a few answers so forgive me if I repeat somebody.

First, this is not news. I remember seeing a movie about this back in the 70s. I also thought that Mt. Ararat was ruled out as a place where the Ark could have ended up.

Second, the story of Noah’s Ark was taken from an earlier Sumerian tale and I don’t think it required taking two of every animal.

Thirdly, given that back when the text was written that the sum of the “world” was what you could see in your backyard Noah (or whomever) would have only taken two of what was around; probably cows, goats, and whatever. That would make the story a bit more plausible.

Since a number of tales might be based on an actual happening it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that someone might have found an ark embedded in a mountain if there was some kind of evidence that water reached that high. If there was an actual flood that was actually that high, I doubt that the water line would have stayed there long enough for some kind of geological evidence to be planted.. I’m not a geologist, though.

Also, I agree that a wooden ship wouldn’t have survived that long. Unless it became petrified.

The “flood” in the Biblical and earlier Mesopotamian flood stories isn’t really like a normal flood, though. It’s a cosmic event. The people who wrote these stories believed the earth was flat and that the sky was a dome that held up an ocean above it. To make the flood, the gods (or god) open up the “windows” of the sky and let the ocean in.

It’s sort of like the end of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Except instead of being a magical underwater world, the Hebrews and Babylonians thought the whole world was like that.

I suspect they found a human shelter built for protection from the cold. Perhaps it is an old hunting lodge or hermit’s dwelling, or a protective storage shed for something perceived as important that was kept in hiding. I don’t even think it is a boat. I could be wrong. It was found in a cave. I haven’t seen any external pics. So far what I see is pictures of people crouched inside what looks like a small box. I am curious to what it is, how big it is on the outside, and what it was used for. I suggest an outside archeology team be called in to study it with a less biased, agenda based perspective. It is still something fascinating to find.

To whom it may concern: Just caught a glimps of the evening news, Whoever these researchers are they say they are 99.9% sure it is the Ark. Thought i would keep you updated in case your missing this, wherever you are.

I would say that makes these researchers 99.9% morons.

@slick44, these same researchers are also probably 99.9% sure that Satan planted dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith.

I am a Christian, and I believe the Noah’s ark story, and I do not believe this teams claim.
I think it is a scam to get investment money.

It is like finding the holy grail. There will always be someone “researching” about.
In most cases they are after ‘grants’.

Although I doubt it, I will reserve my judgement until some real scientists investigate it, and publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. Until then, there is no point believing what they say considering their obvious interest in only reporting one side of the story.

Well wether it is or is not, i find it interesting.

@filmfann Not to be too contentious of your beliefs, but how do you think he got to the south pole and the Galapagos Islands in time?

@cockswain

Oh, YHWH sent the animals to him, so that was God’s problem.

The real issue is space, and the sheer paperwork that must have been involved in checklisting the over-1 million species of insects, the 2200 species of rodent, the 5400 species of mammal, the 8700 species of reptiles, the 6600 species of amphibians, the 12,000 species of bird…

…all on a 450 foot long boat, that was built by hand by four men over the course of a hundred years, in the desert.

And since God spoke all the animals into existence and Evolution doesn’t exist, we’ll take it as read that no one will claim there weren’t that many species on earth at that time.

I’d also like to point out the logistical nightmare of feeding these animals. Picture the varied diets, where to store the food w/o refrigeration, and how long it must have taken 5 people to feed all the world’s animals at least once per day. And cleaning those cages sometimes. On a boat that must have been several times the size of an aircraft carrier.

It just occurred to me that many species may have been used to feed the carnivorous animals, so we’ll never get to know about them.

Ah ah ah… God was very specific about the size of his boat. 300 cubits long – that’s about 450 feet (a cubit is the length from your elbow to the tip of your fingers – generally around 18 inches). and 75 feet wide – 50 cubits.

Apparently, YHWH shrunk the animals like the Indian in the Cupboard. Maybe he put them in stasis, too.

@Seek_Kolinahr, you do know how Christians explain the logistics of the million+ species, right?

Noah only brought a few “kinds” into the ark, not all the species.

The million+ species we have today somehow, what’s the word—changed? emerged? drifted out from?—OH, evolved from the smaller number of kinds.

Like I said, my favorite Christian doublethink bar none. Well, maybe the Trinity stuff.

Nearly every unexplainable event falls under the convenient “god moves in mysterious ways” catch-all. My favorite catch-all is the theory that god created a fake history for the earth to make it appear older to explain carbon-dating.

@cockswain

You mean like this?

—i really like that. here’s another one I like

Bwa ha ha!
“During an all-star game in Chicago, he turned water into Gatorade”

The wood can be from any boat and we won’t find a link to the remains of thousands of dead animals. Noah’s Ark is a myth and not a historical event. I’ve shared this quote before:

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life—birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science.

I think a far more interesting question from a scientific and historical point of view is what kind of flood events or natural disasters could have the inspiration for oral traditions and the birth of certain myths? What do the various myths of different cultures have in common? How credible is the Ryan-Pitman Theory for example? See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_myth#Hypotheses_of_origin_of_flood_legends

And we should beware of hasty generalizations of “Christians” explaining logistics when in fact only a few fundamentalist Christians are in this funny Noah logistics business. But all atheists love to depict all Christians in the most stupid way. Oh, oops. I should not have made that generalization. I meant so say, a few fundamentalist atheists engage in this unfair behavior.

@mattbrowne, you always assert this distinction between myth and science. That is simply not an accurate way to understand mythology.

Ancient Mesopotamians thought the sky was a solid dome… because the idea made “scientific” sense to them. It wasn’t strictly science, which didn’t exist until Newton’s day, but it was a naturalistic and even rational understanding of the world. These people knew that large bodies of water were blue—so they concluded, quite reasonably, that there’s a large body of water in the sky. After all, rain falls from it.

They also knew that, obviously, large bodies of water don’t float, so there must be something holding them up. They were familiar with glass and metal, and so thought the sky must be similar to that, a solid structure “beaten out” to hold up the above-sky ocean.

They also knew that if you dig deep enough, you’ll run into groundwater. So there must be an ocean below the earth too.

It’s not “insulting” to say that such myths are earnest attempts by ancient people to scientifically understand the world they lived in. It’s accurate. This has long been a major function of mythology. In fact, I think it’s insulting to the texts we’re talking about to constantly try to interpret such claims as “metaphors” when they are clearly not.

Finally, as for the flood stories… most cultures would have been familiar with the phenomena of flooding. But the ANE flood stories (including the Bible) don’t describe a natural flood; the deluge is described as a cosmic event, similar to the creation of the world. Remember, God opens the “windows of the sky” to let the above-sky ocean in. They thought the Earth was like this bubble in between the underground and above-sky oceans, right? Well, the flood basically “popped” the bubble.

And the reason the Bible’s flood story is so similar to earlier ANE flood stories is because it’s obviously derivative of them.

@Qingu – I’m really disappointed by your Christian logistics comment above.

And I was quoting Michael Shermer, who is an atheist, a critical thinker and the founder of the Skeptics Society debunking pseudoscience and pseudohistory. His view about myths and science do make sense to me and I’m aware that you disagree. Karen Armstrong has very similar views as Shermer. She’s a former nun and author of various books also covering the topic of myths and science (logos). She was awarded the TED Prize in February 2008.

What are your sources?

Sources for the idea that ancient people actually believed what they wrote about the shape of the world?

The late Tikva Frymer-Kensky was one of my profs in college; she’s written extensively about ANE mythology, as have a number of other scholars I read at the time.

I don’t really think my claims above are controversial among the scholarly community. I would be surprised if either Shermer or Armstrong thought differently, actually. In any case, I don’t really see how name-dropping proponents of a position affects the reasonableness of that position…

@Qingu & @mattbrowne… Funny, I didn’t read any mutually exclusive comments in either of your posts. Qingu comes at an explanation for their beliefs in the context of the myth believers time (albeit a certain amount to trying to explain away and rationalise the findings..). I think that’s very interesting. Matt doesn’t like this technique of explanation, I guess, and finds it a pseudo-science. Is it called archaeological sociology? Yeah… not very scientific, seeing as that it’s only ever going to be an hypothesis with no way of testing it for real.
But Matt called it ‘Christian Logistics’. Why is that?

My understanding of this seemingly eternal conflict between Matt and I is that I try to approach religious texts in the context and culture in which they were written, whereas he is more keen on the idea of freely interpreting them to fit the needs of modern society.

I guess it’s sort of like the difference between people who think Shakespeare is best appreciated in the way Shakespeare intended, and people who think Shakespeare is better “updated” for modern audiences, a la Ten Things I Hate About You.

Can we come up with some sort of compromise? Myths do satisfy psychological needs and admit metaphoric interpretations, but this is the view of outsiders. To those who created the myths, they are describing reality. It is the same with present day religion. Don’t tell a fundamentalist that his beliefs are only contain metaphoric truth. When the Bible says that the universe is some 5000 years old that is exactly what he believes. And when it says that plants and animals were created by God that too is what is believed, with no room for evolution.

This was just a ques. cause i saw it on the news, Boy did it get out of hand.

@LostInParadise No we can not because that is the problem in the first place. You seriously wouldn’t have a problem with an adult believing in santa claus? You know for a fact such a person with such abilities doesn’t exist, yet you must accommodate to a person swearing this thing exists? It’s utterly ridiculous, I’m seriously confounded to the point of almost being dizzy at people that believe in this stuff.

@slick44 This is not a problem at all, it’s just discussion : )

@mattbrowne I see you so often as the voice of reason in many threads. Your categorization of @Qingu ‘s answer puzzled me because much of what he said about myths as ancient attempts at doing observational science is not unacceptable. I believe there is less conflict in your underlying views as you may be representing here.

I have no prior opinions about @Qingu and I base my response on what appears in this thread. Could you explain why you see your views and hoz as being so incompatible?

I wouldn’t place too much stock on this claim. Various claims of locating the Ark have been made since the late sixties or so. Even if they carbon dated the wood at 4800 years old, and even if that date fits the time line of the flood described in the Bible, many of the Bible’s more fanatical adherents still believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and science knows different. I think it’s more likely that it is some kind of a shelter. We’ll just have to wait to see what, if any, concrete proof they are able to provide.

No, I did a lot of research on this last year, looking objectively at all the “evidence”. It’s all really shaky and biased.

Anyways, this is probably one of the non-literal stories form the bible.

Whew, let my try to reply to the various comments above coming from different angles.

@cazzie – I didn’t call it Christian Logistics. I was referring to @Qingu‘s earlier comment when he said that people know how Christians explain the logistics of the million+ species. I replied to this comment because I find it offensive. It’s like saying people know Muslims are terrorists. Or like me saying all atheists love to depict all Christians in the most stupid way. The reality is different. Most atheists do not depict Christians in the most stupid way. Likewise most Christians worldwide do not engage in this absurdly stupid Ark Logistics nonsense. Why do people think certain deluded American creationists represent 2 billion Christians? I’m not saying that there are no non-creationist conservative Christians who understand revelation somewhat differently from liberal Christians. But even the majority of conservative Christians outside the US do not get involved in building cages of dinosaurs right next to lions and tigers on ships or explaining the death of fish during a flood. This stuff is even more ridiculous than a 6000-year-old Earth.

So here’s my wish: Make comments like

We know how fundamentalist Christians explain the logistics of the million+ species.

That’s perfectly fine.

@Qingu – It’s not about freely interpreting in an arbitrary way. These 4 links might explain what I mean

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_within_the_Bounds_of_Bare_Reason

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_hermeneutics#Trajectory_hermeneutics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_criticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_God_(book)

(please add closing parenthesis)

Actually, it’s the American religious right movement which seems to be freely interpreting the Bible to serve their (hidden) political agenda.

@LostInParadise – You said, to those who created the myths, they are describing reality. Yes, but in what way? An actual event or an allegory? I’m sure no ancient has actually physically seen Adam and Eve in paradise talking to snakes and eating apples. Something like that is completely different from describing sky domes when looking up at the blue sky or a flat Earth. The Bible also contains parables. The ancient texts are not always describing the natural environment at the time and how it is understood. So the Adam and Eve creation myth for example is about something else. The interpretation that makes most sense to me is the following:

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing knowledge, in fact, it’s great. But Adam and Eve and all the rest of us have to leave the paradise. When we seek knowledge, we will also discover the ugly parts.

A modern variation of the theme is part of ‘The Time Machine’ by H.G. Wells. The Eloi live in a (temporary) kind of paradise. To remain in this paradise they show no interest in knowledge at all. The time traveler discovers that none of the books in the old library has ever been opened. He wants them to pursue knowledge, but this means they will have to leave the paradise. And they will find ugliness.

@slick44 – It’s not getting out of hand, it’s getting at the very heart of the matter when people are claiming to have found Noah’s Ark.

@Blackberry – It’s utterly ridiculous to think Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

Santa Claus is based on a real historical figure. Modern Santa Clauses still symbolize his act of secret gift-giving.

But don’t worry, you are not the only one who hasn’t heard of Saint Nicholas of Myra.

@Dr_Lawrence – See my reply above. Not all myths are about ancient attempts at doing observational science. Why would it be unreasonable to favor one academic opinion over an other? In addition to my own views I was quoting Michael Shermer who studied theology, got a bachelor in psychology and biology and a master’s degree in experimental psychology. Are his views so unreasonable? If so, how come his Skeptics magazine is so popular. Karen Armstrong’s credentials are equally impressive.

I’m not saying @Qingu‘s views on mythology are unreasonable. I think we’ve got competing reasonable views here. Academics don’t always agree. Why do you think I’m being unreasonable here?

@mattbrowne You kind of lost me.

@cazzie

Matt’s saying the ancients knew they were making stuff up – maybe to distract them from the fact that they didn’t have cable.

Quingu is saying they didn’t know they were making stuff up, instead were performing their own best version of science.

The thing is – they could both be right.

Matt, We can go around on this forever, but I think the burden of proof is on you to show that people did not really believe what they wrote. The working assumption has to be that people believed what was written as literal truth. I see no reason to doubt that Jews and Christians of ancient times believed the story of creation as literal truth and the same for the story of the Ark. You have to understand that at the time the Bible was written, there was not even a conception of science. There was no conception of miracles, because there was no conception of a scientific law that could be violated. Everything happened through the direct intervention of God. If something fell when you let go of it, this was only because God deliberately decided to do that. Given this view of the world, it is not difficult to see how people could believe in the Garden of Eden and talking serpents and arks that could house all the world’s species.

You mention Karen Armstrong and Michael Shermer, but you have not supplied any quotations or Web links to show that they support what you are saying.

@Seek_Kolinahr yeah, exactly… but how does saying Santa Claus exists and then saying he’s based on a ‘real person’ that lived long ago aid in is argument? Sounds like an ‘own goal’ to me.

I think Matt is putting on his 21st judgement cap as well. I’m sure the stories that the ancients created in the form of allegories and true stories were meant then as they are now. But I also think that there is a separate side to their ‘beliefs’ where they really were trying to explain and make sense of their world.

@LostInParadise the burden of proof doesn’t fall to the skeptic… it falls to the person who is making the original claim. and in this case, the claims made under archaeological sociology will always be hypothesis because there is no way to prove it.

Yeah. At best Santa Claus used to exist. He may have been based on a real person, but that person is long dead. Now, it’s a massive Coca Cola advertising scheme that just. won’t. die.

And I err on the side of “explaining the natural world”, because that’s what every ancient civilisation did, and every modern civilisation continues to do. Yes, I’m sure they had fiction as well (Epic of Gilgamesh, anyone?) but I think those would have dealt more with tall-tales of every day life, as opposed to the Creation of the Universe.

@Seek_Kolinahr – Yes, we both could be right, therefore I said @Qingu provided reasonable arguments as well. I just take issue when other viewpoints are labeled unreasonable. When the ancients were not describing physical reality around them, this doesn’t mean they were making up stuff like comedians trying to entertain an audience. Their “non-sky-dome” stories are about more abstract forms of reality. Like pursuing knowledge does lead to ugliness as well.

@mattbrowne I am aware of the actual saint nicholas….It was an example. Just like we are aware there probably was a jesus, as a human, but he did not have magical powers.

@cazzie – Okay, here’s another example:

Africans are stupid. We know how Africans explain curing AIDS by having sex with a virgin. The younger the virgin, the better the cure. The blood produced by raping a virgin will cleanse the virus from the infected person’s blood.

In terms of stupidity I think this is a good equivalent for setting up cages with dinosaurs and lions on ancient ships.

So are Africans really stupid? Should we portray them as stupid? Are Christians stupid? Should we portray them as stupid?

Some statistical facts: About 30% of South African males believe in the virgin cure myth. Do South Africans represent all Africans? No, they don’t. Do American creationists represent all Christians? No, they don’t.

That’s my point. Does this help?

By the way the

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_and_AIDS_misconceptions#Sexual_intercourse_with_a_virgin_will_cure_AIDS

originated in Europe. This myth has gained considerable notoriety as the perceived reason for certain sexual abuse and child molestation occurrences, especially in Africa.

@mattbrowne I apologize if I offended you by my generalizations. My experience may be biased by the fact I live near Colorado Springs, which is a hive of evangelical thinking.

@LostInParadise – I didn’t say that people did not really believe what they wrote. But according to Karen Armstrong they believed in different levels of reality. Mainly mythos and logos. I read the following two books

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Myth-Myths/dp/184195800X/

http://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307269183/

but they exist in print only, but a few weeks ago our fellow Flutherite @Zuma invested a lot of time trying to summarize Armstrong’s views on myth and science and here’s the debate @Qingu and @LostInParadise were also involved in

http://www.fluther.com/disc/71708/are-liberals-smarter-than-conservatives/#quip1131709

In my opinion is was one of the best Fluther threads ever!

Here are a few of the essential parts, but it’s worth reading all of the summaries:

“We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.”

“Jews experience this myth every year in the rituals of the Passover Seder, which brings this strange story into their own lives and helps them to make it their own. One could say that unless an historical event is mythologized in this way, and liberated from the past in an inspiring cult, it cannot be religious. To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical and scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is to mistake the nature and purpose of this story. It is to confuse mythos with logos.”

“Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.”

“Logos had its limitations too. It could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational arguments could make no sense of tragedy. Logos could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. A scientist could make things work more efficiently and discover wonderful new facts about the physical universe, but he could not explain the meaning of life. That was the preserve of myth and cult.”

“Reading the Bible as mythos does not mean that it is all metaphor. Rather, it means that its truths are not factual propositions, but resonant psychological truths, in the sense that a poem or a work of fiction rings true. Mythos is about accessing the inner recesses of one’s psyche, such as the natural feeling of sympathy and compassion one feels toward someone who has fallen into a ditch. It is not about dogma or factual correctness, it is about symbolism and meaning and drawing intuitive insights and connections between things.”

“The distinction between mythos and logos is not a dichotomy. They are different but not mutually exclusive modes of knowing, roughly akin to the distinction between literary truths and factual truths.”

“Genesis is mythos, not logos as some kind of Iron Age attempt at cosmology in the modern scientific sense is presentism in the extreme. The purpose of Genesis is not to provide a factual account of the origin the universe, it is to define the relationship between Man and God.”

@cockswain – Next time you’re in Europe maybe I could introduce you to my minister ;-)
The religious right evangelical movement is mainly a US phenomenon, but there are some dubious copies in Brazil and other South American countries. There are a few young-earth creationists in Italy, but in Germany I would guess it’s less than 1% of the people who are a member of the Protestant or Catholic church.

Matt, I recall that thread. As far as I know, the mythos/logos distinction is a modern invention. I would very much like to see a reference to it in an ancient text. Without such support or any other reason for holding it to be true, then by Occam’s Razor it must be dismissed.

Logos is from the Greeks, who invented formal logic. It was an extraordinary accomplishment as was their attempts to explain the world without resorting to religion. Before that time, there was no distinction between natural and supernatural. To believe so is to impose our view on that of the ancients.

@LostInParadise – You would like to see a reference to it in an ancient text? Are you serious? The mythos/logos distinction is a modern interpretation of ancient thinking. This does not mean that the ancient thinkers were capable of a form of self reflection leading them to document this very phenomenon. And I think Occam’s Razor tells us the exact opposite. The mythos/logos distinction is the simplest explanation of this ancient way of thinking. Noah’s Ark is about human psychology and human struggle. What is the alternative explanation? That some ancient writer watched Noah loading his ship with lions and tigers? Hardly.

Show me a simpler explanation than that of Karen Armstrong.

@mattbrowne, I have to say, I think you are fishing for offense. Demanding that I qualify every generalization I make about Christian apologetics with “but only the fundamentalists do this” so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities is kind of silly. I think you know perfectly well what I meant.

Also, Noah’s ark is not about human psychology and human struggle at all. Where on earth do you see that in the text? Again, I think this is the heart of our disagreement. I think that, while texts may be open to various interpretations, those interpretations should at least be grounded in something the text actually says. You seem to think that any interpretation is valid, even if it would never have occurred to the original authors of the text, even if there is nothing in the text to suggest the interpretation. I frankly find this kind of textual interpretation intellectually dishonest, and disrespectful to the literature in question.

@Seek_Kolinahr – Students dress up as George Washington or Benjamin Franklin in school plays to remind people about the ideas the founding fathers of America had.

I’m with you that it’s ridiculous for Coca Cola to misuse the idea of secret gift giving. All we get is secret product placement in our movies.

@mattbrowne, you mentioned the Adam and Eve myth, and I actually agree with your “thematic” interpretation of the story (mostly).

However, did you know that “Gods create men out of clay to be their worker slaves” was a common idea in ancient Mesopotamia? There are many Babylonian myths that describe such a creation of humans. The Atrahasis Epic, which describes an almost identical flood story to the Bible, also has the gods create humans out of clay. (These humans were created to dig canals, not to tend a garden—however, iirc, there are also paradise-garden myths in Babylonian literature as well). “Men from clay” certainly would make proto-scientific sense to a bronze-age nomad; after all our flesh resembles clay, and they were familiar with statues. The idea that humans are “magic statues” created by gods makes perfectly good, intuitive sense based on the evidence available to them.

The Hebrews took a number of mythic ideas from the Babylonians. But just like their ideas about the shape of the earth and sky, I think it’s pretty clear that they actually believed humans were created from clay. Just like the flood myth, I think this was simply an accepted “reality-description” story that the Hebrews took from the nascent culture at the time. Now, the Hebrews certainly added their own thematic “spin” to the stories—the moral message of the Biblical flood story is quite different from the message in Atrahasis—but the underlying “reality description” is the same.

And, it’s incorrect.

@Qingu – It is a sad fact that most of the religious-atheist debates on Fluther are about the absurdities created by the American religious right and their version of Christian fundamentalism. I’ve been part of Fluther for more than a year now and whenever there’s some kind question about God or what does this or that means in religion, about half of all the comments contain the element of ridicule or are depreciative in nature. I think the smart atheists should be role models for the others. And you are one of the smartest and knowledgeable of all. It doesn’t hurt to add the word fundamentalist when the context requires this. That’s 14 characters.

It would really mean a lot to me. Really.

I thought it was abundantly clear from the context that I was talking about Christians who engage in apologetics to defend a literal interpretation of the flood myth. But okay, I’ll try.

ALSO: I thought the conclusion of the abovementioned Zuma vs. me debate was that mythos and logos are not mutually exclusive?

That Genesis did in fact function as both—as a “logos” description of reality, with a “mythos” moral theme on top of that description?

I strongly disagree with your quote by Armstrong that “Genesis is not logos,” and had thought we reached a consensus that she was actually wrong on this point.

@Qingu – I think the clay story was about both the elaboration on old insights and human psychology. Women bear children who grow up to bear children themselves. Who created the first woman? And how? So we got elements of pre-science thinking and the exploration of meaning. Yes, Karen Armstrong doesn’t think that mythos and logos are mutually exclusive.

But for some ancient texts it could be either mythos or logos. Not being mutually exclusive means there are non-overlap parts as well. Otherwise they would be identical. The Adam and Eve myth seems mostly mythos.

About the “Genesis is mythos, not logos as some kind of Iron Age attempt at cosmology” quote. Well, maybe the story is not just about the relationship of Man and God. You’ve got a point here. I kind of tried to summarize Zuma’s summary.

I’m confused, are you arguing that the Hebrews and Babylonians didn’t actually believe the first humans were made from clay? That those stories didn’t describe reality and the actual history of the human species?

Also, Armstrong said “Genesis is mythos, not logos as some kind of Iron Age attempt at cosmology in the modern scientific sense is presentism in the extreme.”

That is incorrect. They did understand it as cosmology, in the same way “modern scientists” try to understand cosmology.

No, the Hebrews and Babylonians did believe the first humans were made from clay. But there were no practical consequences, or were there?

what are you guys doing? Trying to argue AGAINST the perpetuation of myth? or FOR it?

@mattbrowne Your discussion of the Aids crisis in Africa scares me. I know that story, but I can’t for the LIFE of me work out why you directed that at me. If you’re a Christian and don’t believe the fundamental side or the literal interpretation of the bible, just say so. I don’t think I ever threw ALL Christians into some ambiguous lump, if I did, I apologise.

You say it came from ‘EUROPE’ but you fail to mention the ONE man’s name and what actual country he is from. Would you like to do that now… or shall I?

@cazzie, I’m arguing that the creation and flood stories in the Bible should be understood “literally”—that is, as earnest attempts to describe the world and history.

I would also say those earnest attempts are wrong. (Obviously.) However, I believe one’s interpretation of a text—especially an ancient one—should be independent from whether or not you happen to agree with it.

To give another example, look at the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle believed reality was made up of five elements (earth, water, air, fire, and aether). He believed that things fell because of an “affinity” for the earth element. Now, Aristotle was incorrect about this stuff. However, we should still interpret his writings to mean what they say. They aren’t “metaphors.” They aren’t “mythos” without any “logos.”

@Qingu I can’t work out what has matt’s panties in a twist. He’s looking for something to be offended by in the posts.

The man who spread the lie in Africa that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and that vitamins will cure AIDS is a man named Matthias Rath. He is not a doctor. He is a businessman. He sells vitamins. He’s from Germany.

Matt, So you are saying that the ancients developed a sophisticated line of thinking which they did not even have the words to describe. This seems highly unlikely. The simplest explanation is that the ancients believed what was written exactly as it was written. Any other explanation had better have evidence behind it. There was no alternative to religion. It was either a religious explanation or no explanation. Disbelief on any level was not an option. There was certainly no distinction between poetic truth and factual truth. The Greeks had the first atheists because they were the first to be even be able to express such an idea.

There were alternate religions though. My point is that @LostInParadise talks about people believing in things that are blatantly untrue but they still believed in them like it’s an old idea. People STILL have their fairy tales that they want to believe in and perhaps it’s worse now because we should KNOW better. We have technology and scientific methods, but you get a mad man like Matthias Rath and he’s got leaders in Africa who have control over the health of so many people and he is effectively killing unborn children and so many others that will die because he has managed to spread his ‘belief’.

We need RATIONAL thought. NOT fairy tales. I don’t care about the origins so much as I care about the real life implications of false ideas, how they waste time, money and are used to shore-up systems that oppress and damage society.

@cazzie , Maybe @mattbrowne and @Qingu and I are engaged in a bit of hair splitting. There is a core of agreement in that we exonerate the ancients for their beliefs at the same time that we think modern fundamentalists are off base.

I think it could be summarized as follows. @Qingu and I think that the ancients made up their stories as the best explanation that they could come up with. @mattbrowne thinks that they made up the stories to satisfy themselves psychologically, but they did not take them to be literally true. In either case, we are all in agreement that present day fundamentalists should know better than to accept the stories as literal truth. @mattbrowne would say that the stories were never meant to be taken as the literal truth and @Qingu and I would say that they were originally so intended, but modern science makes literal acceptance untenable.

This all makes a big difference to Matt, because it allows him to accept the Bible in what he thinks of as a continuation of customary belief rather than as a modern deconstruction.

@LostInParadise Oh… I get it now…. he needs to keep two conflicting ideas in his head at once…. that makes more sense of the sense he’s trying to make.

@cazzie – I was responding to your “You kind of lost me” post. Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that you are guilty of accusing all Africans of being stupid. It was just another example.

The first dozens of comments of this thread were basically about the whole bullshit of Noah’s Ark, pairs of goats and good scientists wasting their time chasing fairy tales. Noah’s Ark is part of the Bible, the holy book of all Christians. As as I said earlier, there were two elements missing in this thread:

1) Only a small group of Christians engage in literally searching the ark with all the cages of millions of animals.

2) The story of the ark has a completely different meaning. It is not bullshit. But saying it is bullshit is actually bullshit and shows a lack of good education, good manners and good social skills and is totally counterproductive of how we should get along as a group of people. Above all, such an attitude continues to turn radical creationists into ultra-radical creationists. If people feel under attack, they are less likely to listen or change their views.

Pointing this out was not directed at you. I thought you didn’t get my point, therefore I came up with the even more extreme example of the Africans.

It wasn’t my intention to hurt your feelings. I’m really sorry if I did!

Some myths can be a good thing if understood properly and perpetuation is no problem at all. The Ark is one good example. The virgin cure is not.

“Virgin cleansing is a myth that has occurred since at least the sixteenth century, when Europeans believed that they could rid themselves of a sexually transmitted disease by transferring it to a virgin through sexual intercourse.”

I think it isn’t known who exactly in Europe created or promoted this extremely dangerous myth.

@LostInParadise – The way I understand Karen Armstrong is that the ancients were unaware of the deeper structure of their way of thinking. Today we are trying to understand them using concepts like ‘human psychology’. The ancients were not able to grasp such concepts. They certainly didn’t use terminology such as mythos or logos.

But maybe it’s beyond me to understand Karen Armstrong properly. I’m a computer scientist. I got no formal training in mythology or history or philosophy. It’s just part of my hobbies because all forms of knowledge really interest me, not just math and natural sciences. But I seem to fail to convey the meaning intended in this case. I’m sorry.

@cazzie – One more thing: I checked some German sources on Matthias Rath. Most academics believe he’s a crook.

@mattbrowne, you said, “The story of the ark has a completely different meaning.”

What is that meaning? And how did you derive that meaning from the text?

@mattbrowne – re: “The ancients were not able to grasp such concepts. They certainly didn’t use terminology such as mythos or logos.”

Mythos and Logos come from the ancient Greek and were used by their philosophers. How ancient do you mean?

@laureth, the ancient Greek philosophers weren’t quite that ancient… matt was talking about the bronze-age nomads who wrote the Bible. It also applies to the even more ancient Greeks in Homer’s day, before the philosophers.

@mattbrowne , @Qingu, @laureth , I highly recommend the book Uncommon Sense , which talks about the impact of ancient Greece on modern thought and does a particularly good job of distinguishing Greek influence from that of the Near East.

Yes, it’s about the Hebrews long before the ancient Greek. Why did I say that the story of the ark must have a completely different meaning? Here’s my reasoning. Let’s try to make a list of scenarios trying to explain how this myth or story (or pre-scientific account according to @Qingu) ended up in Genesis:

1) Somebody watched Noah build the ark and put thousands of pairs of animals on his very large ship before the flood
2) Somebody watched Noah unload his ship after the flood with all the animals in good health i.e. they had been properly fed during the flood
3) No one saw Noah, but Noah told other people about his journey after he returned
4) Some ancient novelist created a story to entertain people
5) Some ancient thinkers wondered about past floods and potential future floods and what kind of suffering this has caused and will cause to people and animals and this inspired oral traditions

From a scientific point of view scenarios 1 – 3 are extremely unlikely or impossible. Which leaves scenarios 4 and 5. I did a bit of research online using Google. One problem is that whatever the search term combinations results lists seem to be infected with nonsense creationist websites such as www.christiananswers.net

I was also looking for some kind of myth encyclopedia where we can look up myths and learn about their potential meaning and origin. Couldn’t find one. Maybe this exists only in print. Then I searched for Karen Armstrong and her views on Noah’s Ark, hoping she would offer some specific meaning of the Noah’s Ark myth. Well, I found an article pointing to scenario 5. Here it is:

“The explorer who discovered the Titanic beneath the Atlantic in 1985 is setting out on another underwater expedition to document Noah’s flood. The Black Sea was originally a freshwater lake that in ancient times became inundated by the salty Mediterranean. Robert Ballard believes that this was a cataclysmic event that occurred about 7,500 years ago, and was possibly the deluge described in the Bible.

Ballard’s critics are sceptical: they argue that the infiltration of the Black Sea was a gradual process that occurred much earlier and over a long period of time. They accuse Ballard of using Noah to sex up his material for maximum publicity.

Christian fundamentalists will expect great things of Ballard’s expedition. American creationists, who believe that the book of Genesis gives a scientifically accurate account of the origins of life, have long discussed Noah’s flood. Some have even led archaeological expeditions to Mount Ararat in Turkey, in the hope of unearthing the Ark, and proving the literal truth of scripture once and for all.

Other creationists are more cautious, pointing out that the Ark is unlikely to have survived the ravages of time. But all Christian fundamentalists are passionately convinced that the Bible describes a historical deluge that destroyed all life on earth. Noah’s flood was not a local event, as some suggest; it was universal, and even covered the US, creating the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls.

The creationists claim to study the physical effects of Noah’s flood in order to disprove the theory of evolution, using carbon dating methods and modern geological data, and insist on their constitutional right to teach “creation science” in the public schools.

Most importantly, the creationists argue that fossils are simply relics of the flood. After the waters had subsided, exposing millions of rotting carcasses, God caused a powerful wind to blow, which buried them under a mound of trees and earth that later solidified and became rocks, oil and coal. The flood had killed the smallest creatures before the larger animals, which had congregated on hilltops and were buried at a later stage of the storm, so the fossil record does not reveal a truly temporal evolution. Noah saved a pair of each species, just as the Bible records, even though to accommodate them all, the Ark must have been as large as eight goods trains with 65 livestock trucks apiece.

Needless to say, Ballard does not subscribe to these ideas. Yet by mentioning Noah in the context of a serious scientific expedition, he is unwittingly helping to perpetuate a widespread but erroneous understanding of the nature of religious truth. The search for Noah’s flood is as irrelevant as an attempt to find the “real” Middlemarch or Cranford. Like George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, the authors of Genesis are not writing history, but are engaged in an imaginative investigation of the human predicament.

Flooding was a frequent and destructive occurrence in ancient Mesopotamia and a common metaphor for political and social dissolution. In Babylonia, the poems Atrahasis and The Epic of Gilgamesh (around 1300 BC) were part of a long-established epic tradition, which saw a massive deluge as marking the transition from the primordial age, when the gods had intimate relationships with human beings, to the present day, when the divine had become a distant, shadowy reality. Noah’s flood cannot be understood outside this literary genre.

Genesis has preserved two accounts of the flood, which were combined by a later redactor to form the extant text: the so-called Yahwist epic (around the ninth century) and the sixth century priestly source. Neither of our authors is interested in giving an accurate description of a historical flood. Both use an old story to explore the same theological problems as the Babylonians, though they arrive at slightly different conclusions.

Thus in the Babylonian epics the deluge was caused by the irresponsible behaviour of the gods, who were appalled when they saw the extent of the devastation, and decided that henceforth they would withdraw from human affairs. Genesis, however, exonerates God and put the blame squarely on human wickedness.

But even so, unlike some Christians today, the Yahwist has no easy answers and like the Babylonians his story shows a new separation from the sacred. In the old days, God had been a frequent, friendly visitor to the Garden of Eden, but now the divine can seem cruel, arbitrary and incomprehensible.

The priestly author was writing for Jews who had lost their homeland and had been taken into exile. He makes the flood story foreshadow his story of the Israelites’ 40 years in the wilderness in Exodus and Numbers. He is not interested in giving us information about the time of either Noah or Moses, but is addressing a problem of his own time. Like the flood and the wilderness years, the exile of the Jews is a period of transition. It is true that the old world has been destroyed, but there is still hope. A new order, a new world will emerge.

Both authors, in their different ways, are looking into the heart of darkness. Religious truth does not stand or fall by the historicity of its scriptural narratives. It will survive only if it enables people to find meaning and value when they are overwhelmed by the despair that is an inescapable part of the human condition. When we are discussing the meaning of life and the death of meaning, the historicity of the flood becomes an irrelevant distraction from the main issue. We are dealing not with history or science but with myth.

Today in popular parlance, a myth is something that did not happen, so to claim that a biblical story is mythical is to deny its truth. But before the advent of our scientific modernity, myth recounted an event that had – in some sense – happened once, but which also happened all the time. It was never possible to interpret a myth in terms of objective reason.

There were two ways of arriving at truth, which Plato called mythos and logos (reason). They complemented each other and were of equal stature; both were essential. Unlike myth, logos had to relate accurately to the external world: from the very earliest days, we used it to create effective weapons and to run our societies efficiently.

But humans are also meaning-seeking creatures, who fall very easily into despair. When faced with tragedy, reason is silent and has nothing to say. It was mythology and its accompanying rituals that showed people how to acquire the strength to go on.

As a result of our scientific revolution, however, logos achieved such spectacular results in the west that myth was discredited. By the 19th century, believers and sceptics alike began to read the biblical myths as though they were logoi.

But the biblical writers would have been astonished to hear about a scientific expedition to find the “real” flood. In the premodern perspective, mythos and logos each had its own sphere of competence. If you confused them, you had bad science – like that of the creationists. You also had bad religion. Until we recover a sense of the mythical, our scriptures will remain opaque, and our faith – as well as our unbelief – will be misplaced.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/09/religion.uk1

@LostInParadise – Thanks for the reading tip! I’m still waiting for your simple explanation how the story ended up in the bible.

@mattbrowne, the reason why the flood story ended up in Genesis is (6) because the Hebrews adapted the story from the Babylonians.

They replaced the Babylonian gods with Yahweh; they replaced Atrahasis/Utnapishtim with Noah. They replaced the city-dwelling moral/theological message of the Babylonian stories (overpopulation is bad) with a moral message suited to their tribal nomadic culture (stop murdering each other, go forth and multiply). Otherwise they kept the details of the story almost exactly the same.

I’m frankly surprised you didn’t even consider this since I talk about it so much. It would make much more sense to ask where the original Babylonian/Sumerian flood myth came from?

Also, please stop quoting from Karen Armstrong in these huge walls of texts. If Armstrong would like to come on here and defend her points, I’d be glad to debate with her. (As it happens, her reading of the Sumerian and Babylonian flood stories is incorrect.)

Matt, How about this for a scenario? Some revered elder had a vision about the ark and passed it on to the next generation and the story kept being passed down from one generation to the next. In those days you did not question visions or your elders so the story was taken as true. Considering what tribal peoples are willing to believe about witch doctors, shamans and voodoo, this is a quite reasonable explanation.

Here is another way of thinking about it? How do you account for urban legends and false rumors? There is obviously some mechanism in societies that causes untrue stories to be circulated and accepted as truth.

The earliest flood story is in the epic of Gilgamesh, about 2000 B.C. And it’s basically a “story within a story.”

Gilgamesh, the hero, meets this ancient wizard type guy, Utnapishtim. It turns out U. was the sole survivor of a great flood, a la Noah. U. tells Gil some details of what happened.

But it’s not as robust of a story as the later flood story in the Epic of Atrahasis. That story is nearly identical to the still-later story in Genesis.

So, a couple of things seem pretty clear to me:

1. The Hebrews did not come up with the flood story at all. They adapted it from a very popular and well-known myth at the time.

2. This myth, itself, had been told and retold for hundreds of years by the Babylonians and, before them, the Sumerians.

3. The earliest version of the myth, in Gilgamesh, is probably not the original story. The original story is probably pre-dates writing.

4. The nature of the flood stories, when interpreted in the context of these cultures, is not anything like a normal flood. It’s a cosmic event, sort of like stories about the creation of the world from watery chaos. So I doubt very much that the original story was based on a local flood event. It’s best understood as “creation myth round 2.”

@Qingu – Yes, if the Noah myth came from an earlier myth (the Babylonian/Sumerian flood myth) then we need to ask where this came from and we can again contemplate the 5 scenarios

1) Somebody watched Atrahasis/Utnapishtim build the ark and put thousands of pairs of animals on their very large ship before the flood
2) Somebody watched Atrahasis/Utnapishtim unload their ship after the flood with all the animals in good health i.e. they had been properly fed during the flood
3) No one saw Atrahasis/Utnapishtim, but Atrahasis/Utnapishtim told other people about their journey after they returned
4) Some ancient Babylonian/Sumerian novelist created a story to entertain people
5) Some ancient Babylonian/Sumerian thinkers wondered about past floods and potential future floods and what kind of suffering this has caused and will cause to people and animals and this inspired oral traditions

So the principal issue of serving psychological needs or understanding nature does remain whether the myth is rooted in Gilgamesh or something even older.

If Karen Armstrong doesn’t make sense to you, that’s perfectly fine. She does make a lot of sense to me, though. How about we just leave it at that? We don’t have to agree on this. More importantly we all agree that expeditions to find the ark and prove the literal truth of myths is absurd.

@LostInParadise – Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, visions are a good explanation too. Possible causes can be sleep deprivation, dehydration or food deprivation. Perhaps this is even combined with contemplating the meaning of suffering. Another option are vivid dreams. And people couldn’t understand the reasons for having particular dreams and they thought it could be divine inspiration. I think the scenario list is probably a lot longer. The question then is what is the best and simplest explanation ruling out actual historical events.

all i can say is wow

6. Some ancient Sumerian thought of a continuation of the cosmic creation myth.

Again, I strongly disagree with your #5 (along with the others, but of course I doubt you believe those either). The flood story is not describing a normal, local flood. It is a cosmic event. Calling it a “flood story” is almost a misnomer; I actually prefer “deluge” or “cataclysm.” It describes the cracking open of the Earth’s “shell” (the dome of the sky) to let in the chaotic waters that surround it. That’s not what happens in a normal flood.

Why do I continue to be surprised when people try to apply measurable, quantifiable scientific analysis to miraculous acts?

—

How did Noah go around and collect all those animals? Miracle: God brought them there.

Why didn’t the lions eat the sheep? Miracle: God told them not to.

Why didn’t they run out of food? Miracle: God didn’t let them go hungry. Slowed metabolism or the loaves of bread and fish thing.

Who was able to document the event? Miracle: God saw the whole thing and ensured the story passed on eventually to written record.

Or more accurately for all those, Miracle: we don’t know what mechanism or effect was employed in nearly any case… because they’re miracles and are not subject to the normal laws of physics. If they were, they wouldn’t be miracles.

—

Now, I realize that’s a cop out for a lot of people whose belief system is based solely on science. And that’s fine, I’m not trying to dissuade you from that.

But trying to use science to counter miracles is like trying to put out an oil fire with water. It’s not productive or useful. It’s an irrational approach… and one I’m surprised is engaged in with such fervor.

@robmandu
Or in other words: magic.

@ragingloli: I differentiate between the two terms, but I understand your meaning, and so yes.

Trying to explain to someone of any religion that their chosen deity cannot perform miracles simply because we, as mere mortals, cannot reproduce the results in a laboratory will always be a fruitless exercise.

”Why do I continue to be surprised when people try to apply measurable, quantifiable scientific analysis to miraculous acts?”
Because that is how many of those miracles have been disproven.
Origin of the earth and universe: Religion: Miracle! God did it. Actual events: Big bang, Hydrogen cloud accumulation, formation of stars, production of heavier elements, accumulation into planets.
Origin of life: Religion: Miracle! God did it. Actual events: Abiogenesis followed by evolution.
How do the planets and stars move on the sky?: Religion: Miracle! God moves them around the earth. Actual reality: earth moves around the sun. lighter objects move around heaver objects according to a set of physical laws.
How did the great global flood happen? Religion: Miracle! God did it. Actual reality: It did not happen at all.
And so on, from the weather, over volcanic eruptions to asteroid impacts. All of them once thought to be divine and supernatural acts, now proven to be perfectly natural in accordance with the laws of physics.
Using science is our only way to learn the truth. Using science against “miracle” stories is how we expose these “miracles as nothing more than previously not understood perfectly natural events in accordance with the laws of physics.
Why should the Noah’s ark myth (which, as already pointed out, is a mutated ripoff off much earlier babylonian/sumerian stories, and thus can not be literally true) be any different.

@robmandu, you realize a Babylonian Enki-worshipper could make the same argument when confronted with an atheist demanding evidence for the flood story from Atrahasis.

How did Atrahasis go around and collect all those animals? Miracle: Ea-Enki brought them there.

Why didn’t the lions eat the sheep? Miracle: Ea-Enki told them not to.

Why didn’t they run out of food? Miracle: Ea-Enki didn’t let them go hungry. Slowed metabolism or figured out how to genetically engineered nutrient supply, since he’s the god of wisdom.

Who was able to document the event? Miracle: Ea-Enki and the other Anunaki saw the whole thing and ensured the story passed on eventually to written record.

It’s just special pleading and any cult or fairy tale-writer can do it.

@robmandu Those explanations do not satisfy someone who doesn’t believe the bible.

@cockswain, why, exactly?

According to @Qingu, the flood – or indeed, any miracle – never happened. What more is there to explain to your the satisfaction of someone who doesn’t believe the bible?

I was not addressing how to convince a person who holds science in ultimate esteem of the veracity of a particular religion’s tenets and/or miracles. I’m only saying that pointing out the scientific shortcomings of a religious person’s beliefs will rarely, if ever, work. And that’s because miracles are, by their very definition, beyond the scope of science.

Furthermore, I would even go so far as to say that trying to use science to discredit miracles (that is, the unexplained or unexplainable) is not very scientific.

Do we know everything there is to know about everything right now? Is there, for example, an established and proven grand theory that provides a unified explanation of all that’s going on?

No, there’s not.

Science is about research and discovery and explanation. In order for that to work, experiments must be observable and repeatable. And even then, we still get it wrong. But in science, that’s okay because we can fix our mistakes and reformulate our hypotheses.

And since science is then a work in progress, it’s continuously being re-examined as new facts come to light. Where those facts don’t fit in with accepted theories, then new theories are postulated and testing performed. This continues over and over.

Enter a miracle… an event that contradicts what we know in terms of physical science that was caused by an agent outside of our control and even outside our measurable perception.

By what scientific rationale can we categorically deny such possibility? Hell, physicists postulate crazy, even spooky, concepts every day, often with little more than a hunch… and even when observable, still cannot adequately explain the workings of it.

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I tell you this: just because something is not scientific, does not mean it’s not true. At the very least, it may only mean that science hasn’t gotten there yet.

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Wherever your faith resides – in science or religion – it’s a personal choice that you make. And it is faith, either way. Because ultimately, whichever you choose, you must abide the fact that not all is known now. There is a substantial unknown embedded in any belief system.

@robmandu

Is there a single, verifiably documented miracle that has taken place, ever, in the history of the universe, outside the Judeo-Christian Bible? links, please.

@Seek_Kolinahr, according to the Bukhari hadith, Muhammad flew up into the sky on the back of a flying donkey.

According to the Jewish Roman historian Josephus, prior to Rome’s war against the Jews, many people reported seeing a floating army in the clouds, complete with flying chariots.

Surely we have no reason to doubt these accounts. I mean, we could say they’re scientifically impossible, but they’re “miracles,” and scientists don’t know how black holes work, so…. why not believe?

@Seek_Kolinahr, again – and last time – I’m not trying to convince any skeptics of the veracity of religious claims.

To answer your question, I’m not Catholic, but I know they document the occurrence of what they deem to be miraculous events by saints all of the time. Technically, that’s “outside” the bible.

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@Qingu, doubt them as is your wont. However, do you really expect to have a devout muslim renounce his faith when you show him that donkeys don’t have wings? Let me know how that works out for you.

@robmandu, do you believe that Muhammad flew up into the sky on the back of a flying donkey?

Why or why not?

@robmandu

I think there’s a pretty big difference between “healing” a detached retina (the reson for canonization of George Preca) and turning five loaves and two fishes into 8,000 Fillet O’Fish sammiches.

@robmandu At the time the Bible was written, there was no belief in miracles. A miracle is a violation of scientific law, and since people had no clue about science, they could not imagine any violation of it. Their explanation for absolutely everything was very simple: God did it.

Now that we know about science, the story has changed. God allows natural laws to do most of the work, except for the times when intervention is required and a law needs to be broken. As new natural laws are being discovered, God gets to do less and less work. The theory of evolution, for example, eliminated the need for God to create life.

@Qingu – Alright.

6. Some ancient Sumerian thought of a continuation of the cosmic creation myth.

Can you continue this and come to a point in your chain of scenarios that doesn’t require the word myth? Right now we are at

Noah’s Ark myth because of Babylonian/Sumerian flood myth because of Sumerian cosmic creation myth.

This myth is explained by another myth isn’t really satisfactory. Karen Armstrong still makes more sense to me. Human psychology. Search for meaning. Explanation for suffering. And so forth.

Of course I don’t believe in scenarios 1 – 3 and number 4 seems extremely unlikely. I think novels were introduced by the ancient Greeks.

@mattbrowne, do you think the Enuma Elish creation myth, or the Genesis creation myth, were ever not myths?

I should say that I’m not usually opposed to the “kernel of historical truth” idea—that some “myths” are utlimately exaggerated/retold accounts of real events. I think the Exodus myth is probably a good example of this. However, I just don’t think the Flood story fits this template because, as I said, it’s too “cosmic” in nature. It has much more in common with creation myths than it does with historical-y legend myths.

@Qingu Don’t you think the Flood could be an appropriation of a local flood? A culture hit by a devastating flood would quickly see it as punishment from a god, then later on would refuse to accept that they were targeted and extrapolate it to having affected other cultures too. Note that the Bible says the flood covered ‘the whole Earth’, which means the known world. Somehow people had to have survived though, so Noah/Uta-naishtim was invented to preserve the lineage of humans. Once that myth was firmly in place, it would just take a little embellishment to take it to the cosmic event it is said to have been today.

Just like the historical Jesus (in my opinion) was elevated from human to equal of God through re-telling of the story within a few hundred years, a relatively humble flood could be elevated to a cosmic cataclysm.

@Qingu – Well, they were not myths when the ancestors of humans were fish. Or did fish already develop myths 400 million years ago?

My point is, what really explains a wonderful story like Noah’s Ark? Of course many stories are inspired by earlier stories, but where does new thinking come from. Pre-science cosmology and observation of the sky and the stars and local floods does not explain the design of a ship with millions of animals. Now we know this kind of ship never existed. How did people develop this story apart from getting inspired by earlier stories? What kind of thinking did they have?

How do you explain urban myths? I am not saying that these modern myths are comparable in quality to the flood story, but there is the same element of fiction that people accept as truth. If our modern sophisticated society still feels the need to make up and accept fictions, it does not seem so difficult to see the same behavior in pre-scientific societies.

@FireMadeFlesh, I don’t think the Deluge myths are appropriations of “local floods” because they don’t describe anything at all like actual floods. In the same way, the creation myths in the Bible, or in the Enuma Elish, are not based on actual events. In fact, the point of the Deluge myths is that they function as creation stories (Atrahasis was a creation story, full-out).

I mean, I generally agree with your sentiment here (that myths and legends may often be based on actual events), but I don’t think the Deluge myths are examples. They are too “cosmic.”

@mattbrowne, how did people come up with the idea that a god created humans from clay and created the sky by folding the corpse of the defeated ocean goddess?

Those are examples of myths that are clearly not based on real events, but rather are based on extrapolations and “magical thinking” of the reality people observed. People observed that clay was similar to flesh, and humans creating statues, so they thought that gods must have created humans as sort of advanced-form statues. People saw the sky meet the ocean in the horizon, they knew that water falls from the sky, so the sky must be related to the ocean, a boundary for the above-sky ocean.

Creation myths are usually earnest attempts to explain reality; they usually have thematic or moral overlay, but they don’t need to be based on actual half-remembered events; in fact I doubt very many are at all.

@Qingu Fair enough.

@Qingu – for what it’s worth, the Mesopotamians lived in a swamp in the middle of the desert. When the runoff came from the mountains nearby it would sweep in with a blasting ferocity and very, very fast. It’s not the same kind of gentle flood that the Nile experienced regularly. You can tell by looking at the deities of the two cultures. Egyptians trusted the Nile and believed in a happy afterlife. The Mesopotamians had fickle gods that punished at will and an afterlife that was kind of like fear punctuated by boredom.

If my land flooded randomly, with no warning and no apparent reason, and faster than families could get out or save their homes, I’d probably develop a cultural story about the “windows of heaven opening up” and deluging the place. It’s all about the geography.

@laureth Do you think maybe there was a guy who realized this could happen and built a boat in preparation? That would be interesting.

@cockswain – I really don’t know. But I can conceive of it being a cultural hero, not unlike our Johnny Appleseed, whose story got bigger with each passing telling and generation.

This is actually something regarding the Noah legend I could actually believe. Some smart guy realized the valley was likely to flood again and prepared to save his family and maybe some livestock. Everyone thought he was nuts until the flood.