Prophet Noah and The Flood...

[Chuck]

1. why bother taking animals at all? If the flood was local they could run away, as they have with so many natural disasters.

could be domesticated animals. But it doesn't say animals in the literal meaning. It just says pair of.

 

[alcurad]

And besides, the Quran says the ark landed on a mountain, you can't have a local flood covering mountains.

you could if the flood occurred within a basin like area, i.e plains surrounded by mountains on most sides.

 

[alcurad]

Ok, let's say he did only take animals he knew and the flood was local.

1. why bother taking animals at all? If the flood was local they could run away, as they have with so many natural disasters.
2. why bother saving animals if they would survive in the non-flooded parts of the world?
3. Let's say he only saved animals endemyc to the flooded area, meaning animals that lived there and nowhere else. If the flood was local, that number would be fairly small, so no point in building a gaint barge. You could argue that the flood was local, but still big, however at some point even a local flood will turn into a global flood.

no explicit reason is given for taking "two from every pair", most likely it was for food, since the flood would have affected the flora and fauna greatly.

 

[Eric H]

Greetings and peace be with you Whatsthepoint;

It says every animal, not every animal in your land.
The only way for this to be a local flood is that all the fauna, including humans, was concentrated in the area Noah lived.

I try and search for meaning as opposed to detail in these stories. If God can create the universe and life from nothing, he can arrange a flood and start life again. The message seems to be that man started to worship wealth, power, whilst the poor were overlooked. I can relate to the story in the Koran simply because it relates to justice for the poor.

In the spirit of searching for One God the creator of all that is seen and unseen

Eric

 

[Whatsthepoint]

you could if the flood occurred within a basin like area, i.e plains surrounded by mountains on most sides.

Yeah but is there such an area, big enough for god to demonstrate his powers and prevent the sinners from escaping and surrounded by mountains on all sides. And preferrably somewehere in the middle east.

 

[Imam]

The Quran deosn't says they were living in a limited loction, that's a presumtion.
.

so you rather assume that they were living in the whole Earth ?!

would you support that from the Quran?

you're committing a logical fallacy here. You're assuming the Quran is wrong and because it is impossible the Quran doesn't say it,There's also a second option, the Quran thought it was possible to carry every living speicies on that barge.

I need what the Quran wrote not what the Quran thought ...
where in the Quran Noah was ordered to carry every living speicies on Earth on that barge?

moreover we don't even what kind of geography ,kinds of animals,their number and availability,and whether animal exactly as humans began living in a location then spreaded all over , in such time and area...

indeed, all what we do is mere a guessing work .....

coem to think of it, if the aim of the whole thing was to punish a local froup of sinners, god could have told Noah to move out of town untill things dry up...

Did he live in a town?
and how many people lived there?
how many been carried in the ship?

accepting that would make us believe that the sinners were not a local group ... but the planet earth was filled of sinners in need of a global flood....

 

[Whatsthepoint]

so you rather assume that they were living in the whole Earth ?!

would you support that from the Quran?





I need what the Quran wrote not what the Quran thought ...
where in the Quran Noah was ordered to carry every living speicies on Earth on that barge?

moreover we don't even what kind of geography ,kinds of animals,their number and availability,and whether animal exactly as humans began living in a location then spreaded all over , in such time and area...

indeed, all what we do is mere a guessing work .....




Did he live in a town?
and how many people lived there?
how many been carried in the ship?

accepting that would make us believe that the sinners were not a local group ... but the planet earth was filled of sinners in need of a global flood....

He didn't live in a town that was just a phrase.
You're right, it's guesswork, it's impossible to determine where humans lived at the time, what animals Noah took on his boat, why he took them etc, that's presuming the whole flood thing actually happened.
But still, it would have be extremelly impossible to make a local flood covering mountain peaks.

 

[Imam]

He didn't live in a town that was just a phrase.
You're right, it's guesswork, it's impossible to determine where humans lived at the time, what animals Noah took on his boat, why he took them etc, that's presuming the whole flood thing actually happened.
But still, it would have be extremelly impossible to make a local flood covering mountain peaks.

All what the verse says that the ark rested upon Al-Judi .....

[011:044] And it was said, `O earth, swallow thy water, and O sky, cease raining.' And the water was made to subside and the matter was decided. And the Ark came to rest on Al-Judi.

What is that Judi? a mouantain or hills
how big? how hight? where the ark exactly rested,is it on the peak or another lower part of such Judi?

any answers to such questions would be mere conjecture...


peace

 

[Whatsthepoint]

All what the verse says that the ark rested upon Al-Judi .....

[011:044] And it was said, `O earth, swallow thy water, and O sky, cease raining.' And the water was made to subside and the matter was decided. And the Ark came to rest on Al-Judi.

What is that Judi? a mouantain or hills
how big? how hight? where the ark exactly rested,is it on the peak or another lower part of such Judi?

any answers to such questions would be mere conjecture...


peace

It makes sense it rested on the peak. If the water had never reached the peak, they could have seen it long before the flood ceased and could simply sail there and anchor.
And anyway, Judi doesn't have to be a mountain to amke the whole thing impossible.

 

[Azy]

Isn't the resting place of the ark supposed to be [here]...

That is the area people recognise as Mount Judi, and if so then the whole ark incident is a little.. puzzling, to put it politely.


edit: might have to zoom out a bit and change to 'terrain' view

 

[alcurad]

why puzzling?

 

[Imam]

Isn't the resting place of the ark supposed to be [here]...

That is the area people recognise as Mount Judi,

this place is guessed be where the ship settled
http://www.wikiislam.com/wiki/Noah's_Storm


but who to be sure?!!
and who ever care if there are remains of such ark...

The search for the ark has been called a "wild goose chase" by some archaeologists....

 

[Azy]

I would be inclined to agree that it is unlikely to be found. A few ancient ships are found preserved in underwater sediment where decomposition is very slow, but exposed on the side of a mountain?

What puzzles me about this and the preceding arguments is that Mount Judi is a few hundred metres above sea level on the edge of the Tigris valley, around which there is a ring of small hills. Beyond that there are plains which stretch for hundreds of miles to the sea.

If it was a local flood it would have been contained within the valley. Noah would not have ever been more than a 1 hour walk from a safe place, so why command him to spend all that time building a boat?

Does the following verse suggest a global flood?
Literal > And Noah said: "My Lord, do not leave on the earth/Planet Earth from the disbelievers a resident/inhabitant." (71:26)

 

[Chuck]

It makes sense it rested on the peak. If the water had never reached the peak, they could have seen it long before the flood ceased and could simply sail there and anchor.
And anyway, Judi doesn't have to be a mountain to amke the whole thing impossible.

Magafloods have happened in the past that have topped peaks. Here is one that was studied in the US, they have probably happened in another places too.

Despite their best efforts at logging, paving and otherwise terraforming the Columbia Gorge into a strip of McMansions, developers still have nothing to compare with the havoc wreaked by nature.

I’m talking about the floods that geologists say roared down from Montana, along the Columbia and scouring the Gorge in ancient times. The waters were said to have topped what’s now Crown Point.

NOVA, the premier public broadcasting science program, has produced a show on the "Mystery of the Megafloods." These floods helped carve out the Columbia Gorge — but this is also a story about how geologic heresy became the accepted standard.

The science is interesting stuff for those of us who make our home here.

Perhaps equally interesting is that not long ago, geologists derided the idea that massive flooding cut channels and cliffs. Geology, after all, was thought to work slowly, over unimaginable time to produce changes measured in eons.

Then, in the early Twentieth Century, along came geologist J. Harlen Bretz. He, in 1919, realized that monumental scouring marks in Northeast Washington were made by flooding and named it the “Spokane Flood.�?

The updated theory is this: That some thousands of years ago, several dozen deluges of “almost inconceivable force and dimensions swept across large parts of the Columbia River drainage.�? (This quote is from the standard text on the flooding, Cataclysms on the Columbia by John Eliot Allen and Marjorie Burns.) The floods raced out of an inland sea in what is now Montana, down the Columbia River and out to the Pacific. Floodwaters filled and gouged out the Gorge, at one point apparently topping Crown Point.

It took nearly 50 years, until the middle 1960s, for Bretz and the evidence to convince the scientific community of the ancient floods. His fellows simply could scarcely believe that a catastrophic Ice Age flood could have cut cliffs and channels from Montana to Portland. One supposes that Bretz, in his 80s, felt a sort of long-awaited vindication when ossified opinions finally turned.

A congratulatory telegram following a field trip for geologists cinched his victory. Its final sentence: “We are all catastrophists now.�?

Today, there's talk of an Ice Age Floods trail; there are floods interest groups; even an Ice Age Floods Institute.

Bretz’s flood work is the kind of research that wins one a Nobel Prize. But science, that great religion to end all religions, has its gatekeepers and its high priests, and they are not pleased with upstarts. Particularly if those upstarts blow away their pet theories.

Science, like democracy, relies on human beings. Objectivity, thoughtfulness or even the barest decency, is never guaranteed. We like to think that, in science, reason holds sway over human passions. But Bretz’s story is all too common. In fact, science creates people who are as passionate, biased and turf-defensive as any ... well, as any faith.

Ask Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, the Australian scientists who won a Nobel Prize this year for proving that ulcers are the result of a mere bacterium, rather than stress and smoking and booze. They won the prize in 2005 — 22 years after making their discovery. What took so long to win the recognition? Breaking through established, and unproved, opinion.

"It was impossible to displace the dogma," Marshall told one interviewer. "Their agenda was to shut me up and get me out of gastroenterology and into general practice in the outback."

The rejection of Marshall’s work echoes in a scientific history fraught with facts we absolutely knew to be true, that turned out false. People once believed dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles; now, the popular theory has them birdlike and warm-blooded. The universe was once thought static; now, expanding from a “big bang�? (a creation without a Creator, which scientists are sure, simply sure, is a figment).

http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/3793/C426/L426

 

[Whatsthepoint]

Magafloods have happened in the past that have topped peaks. Here is one that was studied in the US, they have probably happened in another places too.

Yeah, but here you're talking about a limited area being flooded for 6 months by hundreds of feets of water.

 

[Imam]

What puzzles me about this and the preceding arguments is that Mount Judi is a few hundred metres above sea level on the edge of the Tigris valley

Is the mount judi in Turkey is the Quranic one?

none should be certain of...

was the geography in such place in such ancient time exactly the same as nowadays?

who knows....

Does the following verse suggest a global flood?
Literal > And Noah said: "My Lord, do not leave on the earth/Planet Earth from the disbelievers a resident/inhabitant." (71:26)

1-What is a disbeliever according to the Quran?
it is those who get the message and the signs and insist on disbelieve ......
in other words if there were other humans living the time of Noah and didn't get his message and never heard of his message ,they are not disbelievers and out of such prayer ..

2-The word (Alard) could mean Earth or some land or the ground (according to the context)

examples:


[007:074] "And remember how He made you inheritors after the 'Ad people and gave you habitations in the land(Alard): ye build for yourselves palaces and castles in (open) plains, and care out homes in the mountains


the word (alard) is used to mean (the land Ad people once lived) and not the planet Earth....



[007:085] To the Madyan people We sent Shu'aib, one of their own brethren: he said: "O my people! worship God; Ye have no other god but Him. Now hath come unto you a clear (Sign) from your Lord! Give just measure and weight, nor withhold from the people the things that are their due; and do no mischief on the land (Alard) after it has been set in order: that will be best for you, if ye have Faith.

again Shu'aib adviced them not to mischief on their land ( not the whole Earth)

[005:026] God said: "Therefore will the land (Alard)be out of their reach for forty years: In distraction will they wander through the land: But sorrow thou not over these rebellious people.

the word again refers to a part of Sinai..



[007:100] Is it not an indication to those who inherit the land (Alard)after its people (who thus reaped the consequence of evil-doing) that, if We will, We can smite them for their sins and print upon their hearts so that they hear not ?

those who inherit the land after its people and not the planet Earth

[007:127] Said the chiefs of Pharaoh's people: "Wilt thou leave Moses and his people, to spread mischief in the land(Alard), and to abandon thee and thy gods?"


mischief in the land(Egypt) and not the whole planet

[008:026] Call to mind when ye were a small (band), despised through the land(Alard), and afraid that men might despoil and kidnap you; But He provided a safe asylum for you, strengthened you with His aid.

despised through specific land not the whole Earth

etc..............................................................


there are other dozens refers to the same issue...... but I think that is ok.....

 

[Chuck]

Yeah, but here you're talking about a limited area being flooded for 6 months by hundreds of feets of water.

where 6 months is written in the Quran?

 

[Azy]

Is the mount judi in Turkey is the Quranic one?

none should be certain of...

Does it even make a difference?

Where in the world could a local flood happen that would make walking to safety a less suitable option than single-handedly building a ship that, according to Baidawi, was as large as a WWII aircraft carrier?
(or any ship at all)

1-What is a disbeliever according to the Quran?
it is those who get the message and the signs and insist on disbelieve ......
2-The word (Alard) could mean Earth or some land or the ground (according to the context)

Agreed.

 

[alcurad]

the flood didn't take that long probably to occur, remember it was punishment.

 

[Imam]

Where in the world could a local flood happen that would make walking to safety a less suitable option than single-handedly building a ship that,

If we don't know the geography then ,hard to know why....

anyway we could argue ,too ,that God wanted such believers to stay the time of the flood in the location in order to witness with their eyes all the details of the punishment ...like that the event will stay in their memories ....