re: Does anyone believe the story of Noah's ark?

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I think the exact opposite. For anyone to say they know God's real is a foolish arrogant notion. How can you? I'm not talking about believing he's real. Knowing. And you can't know. Everything we know of God was told to us by people with no more experience in the afterlife than any one of us in this thread.

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I tended to think that way. This very short book turned me on to a route of investigation that has given me a more scientific leg on which to base my faith. Does it answer every question, no, but I've become convinced that the Bible is something that was written by a being outside of the constraints of time.

If you're into engineering stuff (particularly communications engineering) there's some really intriguing evidence as to how the Bible is designed and set up in a way very similar to a hologram. I think people have to find the way that God chooses to communicate with them.

I don't intend to really have a lot of conversation about this, but I did want to put out there that there's actually some mathematical evidence about the design, word choice, and spelling of every detail in the Bible, that has been evidence to convince me that there is God, and that He's so much more than what a lot of modern churches portray Him to be. If you don't care enough to really dig into the research, then that's cool and you can do your own thing, but if you diligently search (and not just current form of research of find a reference that agrees with you and that's it), then you'll probably be surprised at what you find.

Definitely didn't intend this post to turn into the rambling that it did. So, and I'll be happy to have a beer with you anytime.

I believe aliens might be real

I believe God is real

not that complicated

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Your oatmeal is real. I don't doubt your experience eating it.

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But you yourself didn't see it, so you would have to believe he had oatmeal in order to recognize and think he did. That is what the essence of faith is. You may want to bash Christians for there believes and faith but in order for you to believe in god or no god still requires faith or believe that you yourself will never see or know. I can make the same case for non-believers and for believer's. Either you have a belief that requires faith in that there is a god or that there is not a god. You will never be able to prove one way or another.

I believe in a great flood... science proves this happened

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That's ridiculous. Big bang cosmology rules the roost and that's what the evidence supports. The universe had a beginning.

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Yes, the evidence points to the beginning of our Universe at the Big Bang. However, the study of existence now goes beyond that point.

What came before the Big Bang? What caused it? Does cause and effect go beyond that point?

"Beginning and end" may just be a human construct. Something we use to reconcile what we see.

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Science? What science?

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Here's a peer reviewed article from the Journal Science

This is certainly no hard and fast proof that the whole earth was underwater like you want, but it does make the line from Genesis 7:11

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on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth

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seem plausible...

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whole earth was under water.

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I did not say that you are putting those words in there. I said big flood and several different religions mention the flood.

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Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.

"Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube," he said. "But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history."

The water from the melting glaciers began to rush toward the world's oceans, Ballard said, causing floods all around the world.

"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods," Ballard said.

According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path.

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Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.

"It probably was a bad day," Ballard said. "At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under." '

The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.

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Now I do believe there was a gigantic flood that altered Earth as it was during that time. One that changed everything about what we know about Earth currently.

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The amount of water on the earth's surface remains static

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So there's no possible way that a cataclysmic event could have caused this subterranean ocean to suddenly burst forth before receding again in the distant past?

I didn't say it proved anything. Just that a recent (2 years ago) study has shown that there is more water on Earth than what he had thought for millenia, and it could be argued that an ancient text may have cited this as a contributing source of a cataclysmic flood long before we had any idea there was that much water there.


ETA: I'm glad you actually read the article, most wouldn't.

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Now I do believe there was a gigantic flood that altered Earth as it was during that time. One that changed everything about what we know about Earth currently.

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I wouldn't go so far as to say it changed what we know about the entire earth as we know it today but it certainly changed what those ancient people knew about their environment. The flood from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea was rapid enough to be classified as a flood.

The freshwater Black Sea became a much bigger saltwater body of water. You can see in the illustration below that peoples living close to the banks of the freshwater lake would've been forced to retreat far away.

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A theory doesnt require belief. A theory requires further testing and retesting. To never stop looking for more information on the subject. Science is not an institution. Science is a method of collecting and analyzing data. Its not mindlessly believing something just bc it was passed down to you.

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You might want to look up the definition of belief. Oh I will do it for you.

belief
b?'li?f/Submit
noun
1.
an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
"his belief in extraterrestrial life"
2.
trust, faith, or confidence in (someone or something).
"a belief in democratic politics"

Without a belief there would be no theory. You have to belief in a theory in order to test it. If not so, why test it at all if you do not believe?