Round 1: Apex v Xtrozero How Does God Drown His Sorrows?

The topic for this debate is "The flood stories, such as Noah's Ark, which exist in many cultures, are all based on a single global flood.".

Apex will be arguing the pro position and will open the debate.
Xtrozero will argue the con position.

Each debater will have one opening statement each. This will be followed by 3 alternating replies each. There will then be one closing statement each and no rebuttal.


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To begin with, as seems the norm, I will thank The Vagabond for opening this debate for what should be an enjoyable and educational experience.

As stated in the subject line for this debate, there are stories of a worldwide flood of large proportions in most cultures in the world.

The one most of us are familiar with, that of Noah's Ark, states that God warned Noah that he would purge the world of all evil men, along with all animals that were not on Noah's Ark. This then goes on to say that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. Other cultures do not say it was to punish humanity, but that it happened still, possibly as a warning to people of the power of the Gods.

It is unlikely that all the stories of such a great flood are not related, and such a large scale flood could have happened - although not in the exact way depicted in the book of Genesis. Consider that if there was some cause of Global warming and sea level rise in ancient times, that such an event could easily be seen by those people at the time to be a divine act of retribution to them, and that they would not know what was happening to them, and the effects of such an event would certainly be global. We also know that there was an Ice age too, and the end of which may be related, since the effect would be a global shift in the pattern of the coastline and of how the rivers flow.
It is also known that Great Britain was once connected to France and the rest of Europe, and that as this and other areas were flooded, such ideas as the Great Flood could have arisen. Also, the descriptions of the floods do not state except that of Noah, just how much was flooded during them. It could be that Noah happened to live in a relatively low lying area at the time, and that he and his ark just traveled until he found an area of higher ground. The great flood could not have been to quite the extent of Noah's, there isn't enough water. But we know that there is enough to flood the ground around the coasts of the world easily, and I feel that that is what Noah's flood was, a global flooding of low lying areas.

This could be what the global flood was, since if Ice was retreating, the area that was not covered would also get lower, as it is known the British Isles are since the last Ice age.

Thank you.

I would also like to thank the staff of ATS for providing us this opportunity to debate, and to wish apex good luck in our debate.

Reading Apex’s opening post I am wondering what direction he is looking to go with his logic. One direction would be biblically with the world covered in water and Noah on his ark with all the world’s animals and a small group of humans ready for a fresh start as god wipes the slate clean, so to speak. The other idea and the one that I think Apex is heading is global flooding of the world’s low-lying regions.

With the oceans rising to flood the lower regions theory I think this is something that has happened many times in our past, but since it would be a very slow process humans would not really see it as a big event. It would cause humans to migrate to higher regions over a long period of time, but in a subtle unnoticeable way from generation to generation. This type of world flooding would also totally discount the need for Noah’s ark and not be worthy as a biblical story.

The direction that I will go is this was a localized flood and not global, but for those who experienced it viewed it as if it were globally. This flood would also need to be fast and expansive to be of biblically proportions, and I can show how that could happen.

When we look at the bible we must first understand that the world of the bible is the Middle East and everything outside of that was either unknown or insignificant. The heart of the bible was also around the fertile flood plains along river basins such as the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris-Euphrates river basin of Iraq. Before there were dams these rivers were very prone to massive flooding that would cover “their” known world.

en.wikipedia.org...(mythology)

Sir Leonard Woolley, in the period from 1929-1934, in his famous excavations of the "Death Pits" at Ur, sank a series of text trenches down to bedrock. Finding early evidence of human habitation, he was surprised to find this sequence interrupted by 11 feet (about 3 1/2 meters) of clean, water-lain silt. Woolley wrote, "Eleven feet of silt would probably mean a flood of no less than 25 feet deep; in the flat low-lying land of Mesopotamia a flood of that depth would cover an area about 300 miles long and 100 miles across....[which is evidence] ...of an inundation unparalleled in any later period of Mesopotamian history"[22]. Woolley concluded that this inundation of the early Ubaid period was the Biblical Deluge, and that the story had been carried to Canaan by Abraham.

Ancient man built up mythology around these periodic massive floods as an act of divine retribution as we see in the biblical version. The fact that there are many stories of floods from around the world and these floods are also tied into some kind of mythology of the local cultures also supports my hypotheses that ancient man in many areas viewed localized flooding as a cataclysmic event and is not just a biblical only story.

While it is true that a globalised change in sea level would be gradual, it is also possible such an event could at least locally cause larger more sudden flooding in some areas. This could easily be such as happened in the Ark story, and while not truly global, it would seem so at the time and would be catastrophic.

It could also be the case that the flood could have been a Tsunami or a similar even, since in low lying areas the wave could go a very long way and would definitely seem global. In fact, since a Tsunami can travel a long distance, one could easily cause flooding of a large area, such as the entire of the Atlantic or Pacific coasts, or more likely considering the time, the Mediterranean sea.

All these could be what the great flood was and when considering early civilisation would have favored in at least some cases low lying areas, since that is where lower course rivers are it would easily cause a large flood to be interpreted as gods wrath.

Thank you Apex for helping me prove my point that the great flood was a more localized event and because of your help I will help you some in your global flooding hypothesis.

My flooding Hypothesis would have been based at about 3000 BC and as these floods came and went they added to the lore that over time helped create the story of Noah. There was most likely at least one massive one that caused the 12 feet of silk, so think of a flood like what Katrina caused but instead of 6 inches of silk it was so large that 12 feet was created, a rather larger food indeed.

For a global theory I would go back to the end of the ice age at about 10,000 years ago when the sea level would have been 330 feet lower than it is today, and rose as much as 450 feet back when the ice melted. Yet again I view this golabal flooding as a very slow event to us humans, and if in some way this warming and rising of the seas caused a huge flash flood on a size we have never witness from the breaching/braking of a natural dam of ice mud etc. this would coincide more with my localized hypothesis.

There is one hypothesis that I find intriguing and would be everything the bible pictured the great flood to be, and that would be a small asteroid strike during the ice age in the very heart of the ice. This would cause the end of the ice age and in a very abrupt way would melt massive amounts of ice raising the sea level extremely fast. We would easily see 40 days of heavy rain globally that would help propagate Noah’s story, or for those who believe it could had been the hand of god to bring his omen to life. As I said this is intriguing for there is zero evidence to show that this has happened, and I still have 12 feet of silk to prove mine.

The matter of the argument is that there is no amount of evidence to suggest the actuality of such a large scale flood as that of Noah. However, there are locations which have been declared to be the site of the Ark.

The Ararat anomaly is a prominence on Mount Ararat that is believed by some to be the resting place of the Ark. While it could be a natural phenomenon as opposed to The Ark, it was after being discovered by the US military using Aerial photography kept an official secret from 1949 to 1995.

The film was given a routine classification of "secret" as were subsequent photographs taken in 1956, 1973, 1976, 1990 and 1992, by aircraft and satellites. Six frames from the 1949 footage were released under the Freedom of Information Act to Porcher Taylor, a scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies specializing in satellite intelligence and diplomacy, in 1995.

There is also the Durupinar site, also believed to be a possible resting place of the Ark. This site has also been somewhat investigated, and for a long time people have believed it to be the site of the Ark.

In 1985, Wyatt was joined by David Fasold and geophysicist Dr. John Baumgardner for the expedition recounted in Fasold's The Ark of Noah. As soon as Fasold saw the site, he exclaimed that it was a ship wreck. Fasold brought along a state-of-the-art ground-penetrating radar equipment and a device called a frequency generator, set it on the wavelength for iron, and searched the formation for internal iron loci (the latter technique was later compared to dowsing by the site's detractors). The ground penetration radar yielded a regular internal structure as documented in a report to the Turkish government. Fasold and the team measured the length of the formation as 538 feet, close to the 300 cubits of the Bible if the Ancient Egyptian cubit of 20.6 inches is used.

If such reports are true, it is a surprising discovery. However unless the flood truly was on the scale described in the bible, it would need a lot of interesting Geographical phenomena to get it up there. Earthquakes can move land upwards but not this much, and not without causing significant damage.

Of course, the Bible describes the Ark as being on the 'Mountains of Ararat', not Ararat itself. Though with a Prominence of 3,611m and a height above sea level, it would need a large amount of mistranslation by the makers of the Bible to mean somewhere else.

First I would like to say that during a U2U conversation with Apex I came to realize that in many cases the topics for debates tend to not create equal challenge for the pro and con of the topic selected and it would be interesting if both sides had to first do the normal pro or con for 3 rounds, but then switch to the opposite for 1 round for the same topic. This would show a greater depth to the abilities of those debating.


With that said, I find the Ark history interesting, but the lack of animals throughout that region other than what are considered local species for the majority of the Middle East makes me wonder why all those animals not located in the Middle East migrated so far away, and in many cases an impossible distances across oceans.

When looking at the Ark it was a massive 450 foot vessel that floated on an endless sea for 150 days until it landed on the mountains of Ararat and then it took another 84 days for the water to recede to the point they could leave the Ark and start their new life. The interesting part here is the whole journey took place around Turkey and Iraq for Noah lived near Eden and though it was destroyed by the flood the Tigris and Euphrates was believed to be the rivers that flowed from Edan prior to the flood.

This takes us back in a big circle that if there was a massive flood in this area caused by these rivers then Noah could have built the Ark and collected all the animals and seeds he could and floated only into turkey until the water recede enough to disembark the Ark near the mountains of Ararat a total of about 200 miles at most.

Was there a massive flood in this area? I would say yes since every religion has stories about it, and other more none religious items such as The "Deluge tablet" (tablet 11) of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Akkadian "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_%28mythology%29" also relate the flood. Was it a global flood? I would need to say no since all they stories about it are isolated in the same area of the Middle East, and all these stories coincide with what was a massive flood in that area based on the thickness of the silk found.

Yes God might had wiped the slate clean but I guess it was just a small dirty spot that needed cleaning.

Other than the story of the Ark, there isn't much of a description of how large or for how long the duration of the flood was. This could mean that the flood wasn't a literal flood of rainwater, but something of a different nature. This could have been from a Tsunami, or as Xtrozero said:

There is one hypothesis that I find intriguing and would be everything the bible pictured the great flood to be, and that would be a small asteroid strike during the ice age in the very heart of the ice. This would cause the end of the ice age and in a very abrupt way would melt massive amounts of ice raising the sea level extremely fast.

Also worth considering is that the flood is described as this:

After Noah builds the ark, God makes the "fountains of the great deep burst open" and "the floodgates of the sky" open, making it rain. The Flood story is considered by most modern scholars to consist of two slightly different interwoven accounts

The 'fountains of the deep' could be some sort of description of a tsunami like phenomenon as it would be difficult to explain to people who have no idea of such an occurrence, or of larger waves at all. Such an event as the Minoan eruption of Santorini might give this effect for the area, though it occurred later than that of the Ark story. however if the Ark story is two interwoven accounts, that could be one of them.

Also to give credit to the idea that the flood was not entirely covering everything, the Bible states that the Dove returned with an olive leaf. This would not be possible if no land was remaining, or all life on the land would have died. This means that the floods, if they were worldwide, were not total.

Also worth considering is that the flood is described as this:

After Noah builds the ark, God makes the "fountains of the great deep burst open" and "the floodgates of the sky" open, making it rain. The Flood story is considered by most modern scholars to consist of two slightly different interwoven accounts

The 'fountains of the deep' could be some sort of description of a tsunami like phenomenon as it would be difficult to explain to people who have no idea of such an occurrence, or of larger waves at all. Such an event as the Minoan eruption of Santorini might give this effect for the area, though it occurred later than that of the Ark story. however if the Ark story is two interwoven accounts, that could be one of them.

As I suggested the Ark story could have only happened in a very limited 200 mile radius. If the Ark started in the Middle East and ended up in the Rockies then you might have something there, but as it is written it gives zero credibility to a global flood theory even if it was a factual event.

Another rather anti-global flood indication is the abundance of plant life around the world. A global flood would literary destroy majority of all plant life that was underwater, and with just the more barren mountain ranges above water the time needed to recover, if at all, would be a lot longer than 3000 or even 10,000 years. Also during this recovery time the human race would most likely parish too along with any animals that may have survived since there would not be much but muck and stagnate water for a very long time for humans and these animals to live off of.

To paint this picture think of a world where it is flooded up to the highest peaks for 180 days or so and then the waters slowly reside. Just think of what would be left if anything at all. Maybe some trees, but even seeds would most likely rot where they lay, or germinate for a few days then die. In this case I think we would have a very barren world of endless sand dunes with nothing above water but sparse plant life, bugs, as the primary life on the planet.

Currently there are about 30,000,000 km3s of ice in the world and if all of it melted it would equal to about 26,100,000 km3 of extra water in the world and the seas would rise 66 meters. If all the ice in the world melted today here is a picture of what it would look like.

Originally posted by apex


During the height if the ice age 16,000 years ago the oceans were 120 meters lower than they are today and we see recent discoveries of old civilizations under water, but it has taken 18,000 years for 60% of the ice from the age ice to melt to the levels we are at today. So the question of whether all the water on the face of the earth would cause the earth to be flood is answered with a big no.

Since we need a lot more water than what we have available, just where do we get this water? This leads to the only hypothesis that could possibility do this and that is the of hollow earth hypotheses. This water would need to come from within since we have already shown that rain alone could not do it without increasing the PSI at sea level to kill every living thing in the process. Using the hollow earth as a way to get more water we would also need to figure out how that could be done. Even if there was a vast amount of sea water inside the earth how would it come out and then go back in? God in this case would truly need to be plumber at the wheel to make this happen, and so if we decided it was a global flood with the use of sea water from inside the earth to do it and with the hand of God to pump it in and out I will concede the debate, but I think we are now really trying to stretch the global flooding hypotheses to the point of an impossibility.

To start the closing post:

It is obvious that the global flood as described in the book of Genesis could not happen, but it is known that the bible is rather over exaggerated in it's descriptions of things. If it had been on such a scale, it would obviously have been a mass extinction event on the land.

Now the other sources do not seem to indicate such a large flood, and as such I feel that it would need to have been a smaller scale (in vertical depth at least) in order to be plausible. it would still be devastating however, and indeed it still would be today. Earlier in the debate Xtrozero proposed the idea of an impact of an asteroid melting the ice to cause flooding. An asteroid or small comet could do this in a different way and leave very little evidence, and it could occur without melting ice too, if a few impacts were to occur on the oceans. For example, if there were to be a comet which broke into a few piees, all of which cause Tsunamis, but are too small to leave permanent craters on the sea floor, could cause a lot of flooding in low lying areas, and if it were too hit the Atlantic, pacific and Indian oceans at around the same time, it would certainly be global. If it seems unlikely, consider a smaller version of the impact of Shoemaker Levy 9, only with the Earth.

I feel that this is a reasonably plausible explanation.

In my closing remarks I would like to first thank Apex for a tough match.

I think the key here is to focus on the event in the bible for that is what we are debating. And so I’m going to continue to point my hypothesis towards a very limited area in the Middle East that was flooded. This would work well to match up with the bible and other historical/religious documents that also describe the flood in much of the same way in each case, and so this does add credibility that there was a large flood from so many different description of the same event. With today’s mode of travel we tend to forget that two or three hundred miles was beyond most people view of their world back then and an area flooded on that scale would be global to them. This would also account for extremely large amount of rain to facilitate it as it was written in these different documents.

Since the bible and other documents all take place in the Middle East then this is the area that was written about and when you look at the layout of the Middle East an event such as huge tsunamis would have little effect on that area. The last fact I would like to present is empirical data that shows not only the lack of evidence of a global flood 3000 or so years ago, but also that there hasn’t been one in the last 40,000 years.


Ice Core

Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?

At 12:10 Pacific on 10/8 the count is 9-9 even. Our judge finds in favor of xtrozero. The final margin is 14-9 in favor of xtrozero and xtrozero will advance to round 2.

"The Debate in regards to a global flood was difficult to follow as neither opponent really attacked the topic with any "Gusto", instead choosing to worry about what the opponent was doing or going to do..

However

Both Apex and Xtrozero seemed to early on reach the mutual conclusion that it never happened, at least not globally, there by "making" xtrozero's case..... This continued all the way through the debate...

As such, Xtrozero won the day ....."