DA #fundie

DA #fundie answers.yahoo.com

(copied from a book?)

"Today, when mountain climbers go to the top of mount Everest (the tallest mountain in the world), they need special training and/or oxygen tanks to make the trip because of the lack of oxygen at those high altitudes.However, as the rain gradually lifted the ark higher, Noah and his family would have been conditioned to live with less oxygen, as certain mountain climbers learn to condition themselves. Second, the breakup of the subterranean oceans and the change in the topography of the earth during the flood may have produced mountains that are higher now than were in existence when Noah lived. Third, the vapor canopy that surrounded the earth prior to the flood would have been sustained by oxygen, so Noah and his family (and animals) could have breathed.

63 comments

old comment by BobsOldSocks

Once more: There was no global flood, the story in the bible is plagiarised from earlier texts. Noah, his ark and his family are entirely fictional - they did not exist at any time or in any place.

Have you any idea how heavy water is? Have you any conception of the pressure a "vapour canopy" that comprises the entire volume - or even a fraction of it - of the Earth's oceans would place on our atmosphere? Have you any idea how much heat energy would be released if said "vapour canopy" condensed all at the same time, even over a period of days? How would sunlight get through a hundreds of miles thick "vapour canopy"? What kept it up there? As for mountains growing in size over the period of said "flood": do you understand the forces involved in such a thing? Do you realise that such shifts in the Earth's crust would turn much of the surface to molten rock? In your scenario, Noah and the rest would have been living at thousands of atmospheres of pressure in pitch darkness and if they survived being boiled alive during the "flood" they would have been turned to ash by the lakes of molten lava as mountains bigger that Everest sprang up overnight.

For pity's sake, try opening your mind to the idea of reality and learn something. Your kind of ignorance is neither funny nor excusable.

old comment by Zoo

"Third, the vapor canopy that surrounded the earth prior to the flood would have been sustained by oxygen, so Noah and his family (and animals) could have breathed."

What? Where does it say this in the Bible? Where is the physical evidence for this?

"However, as the rain gradually lifted the ark higher, Noah and his family would have been conditioned to live with less oxygen"

I really don't think it would work that way. The ark would likely have poor air circulation to prevent flooding, and add to that the gases produced by massive amounts of animal waste, both respiratory and digestive. THEN add less oxygen for altitude? Of course, you're assuming that the air wouldn't be pushed up by the sheet of water over the earth. The water would dissolve some of it, but not all of it. It'd probably still be more like sea level.

In any case, the story is simply untenable taken literally. Give it up already.

old comment by Icarus Jones

Hail the Lord of Dumbness.

I take great pride,
I have great pleasure,
and my mind is open wide.
It is fun,
to be this dumb,
I let the pastors
take me for a ride.

I worship the God of dumbness
I worship the God of hate
My grey matter suffers from numbness
I leave everything to holy fate.

My will to lie,
my will to kill,
is equal to my need to drool.
I am thick
and mentally sick,
I thank the Lord
that He lets me be a fool.

I worship the God of dumbness
I worship the God of hate
My grey matter suffers from numbness
I leave everything to holy fate.

My head is completely empty
There's nothing in my brain
Jesus has pulled the plug out
and my intelligence has all gone down the drain.

I am stupid,
I am dull.
What made me get this way?
It was God,
the jealous sod,
the one to whom I always pray.

I worship the God of dumbness
I worship the God of hate
My grey matter suffers from numbness
I leave everything to holy fate.

old comment by Doubting Thomas

@John:

I'm by far no expert, but I have to disagree that the "vapor canopy" would cause runaway greenhouse effect. Perhaps it would at first, if such a canopy formed over the earth, but I think such a thick canopy of water vapor around the planet as to cover the entire earth in water would block out all sunlight. This would cause the planet to become frozen. Perhaps the canopy itself would be heated, and maybe some of that heat might radiate down, but I doubt it.

But the entire idea of a "vapor canopy" is totally stupid since such amount of water couldn't stay suspended in the sky very long without condensing and falling as rain. And the fact is that in Genesis it talks about using the stars for signs and the sun & moon being created to give their light upon the earth, which wouldn't be seen through a thick vapor canopy.

old comment by John

@Doubting Thomas "I'm by far no expert, but I have to disagree that the "vapor canopy" would cause runaway greenhouse effect."

I haven't done the calculations myself, either. I'm relying on creationist Ken Ham's "Answers in Genesis" post that says, after quoting Larry Vardiman, that such a runaway greenhouse effect would occur if the "canopy" held any more than 2 meters of rain (remember, we're talking about a world-wide rain, not just a local rain that could conceivably exceed 2 meters in a particular location):

"Vardiman recognized a major difficulty with the canopy theory. The best canopy model still gives an intolerably high temperature at the surface of the earth.

"Rush and Vardiman have attempted a solution, but found that they had to drastically reduce the amount of water vapor in the canopy from a rain equivalent of 40 feet (12 meters) to only 20 inches (.5 meters). Further modelling suggested that a maximum of 2 meters (6.5 feet) of water could be held in such a canopy, even if all relevant factors were adjusted to the best possible values to maximize the amount of water stored. Such a reduced canopy would not significantly contribute to the 40 days and nights of rain at the beginning of the flood.

"Many creation scientists are now either abandoning the water vapor canopy model or no longer see any need for such a concept, particularly if other reasonable mechanisms could have supplied the rain. In the catastrophic plate tectonics model for the flood, volcanic activity associated with the breaking up of the pre-flood ocean floor would have created a linear geyser (like a wall) of superheated steam from the ocean, causing intense global rain."

As you can see, even biblical creationists have abandoned the "vapor canopy" idea in favor of the "fountains of the deep" hypothesis (i.e., the water came from underground).

old comment by Doubting Thomas

@John:

I guess my point is that since such a thick vapor cloud surrounding the earth would block out all sunlight & heat, that the surface of the earth would become frozen. But, I guess the earth could still be heated by radiant heat, which would create an intolerable greenhouse effect.

I think it's funny how Hovind still clings to this idea even though it's been disproven as impossible to sustain life and there's not one shred of evidence to suggest that such a thing was even possible.

Other YEC's will still have a hard time explaining the "waters of the deep" idea when it said that all the water came from rain. And of course they still have trouble explaining where all that water went to after the flood receded.

I guess I really find it laughable that so many Christians find this story literally true even with so many logistical problems with it. It's the most unbelievable story in the whole bible but they believe it with such fervor that some even travel to Turkey to try to find the ark.

old comment by John_in_Oz

The entire thread is hilarious, but I particularly like "The water evaporated. Pay attention in school."
Dunning Kruger strikes again.

@ Entropius
The 'Vapor Canopy' is Fundie retconning. The Biblical view is that the sky is a solid roof called 'firmament', because it's firm, solid as the lid of a saucepan. The solid roof nevertheless leaks, which is where rain comes from. The Bible refers to the 'water above the sky'
[Citation: Genesis 1:6 God said, 'There shall be a sky in the middle of the water, and it shall divide between water and water.'
1:7 God [thus] made the sky, and it separated the water below the sky from the water above the sky. It remained that way.]
Now that Fundies know there is no water above the sky, they came up with the idea of the vapor canopy which poured down water during Noah's Flood.
A good work-around. Except, of course, for the fact it would have fallen earlier, would have blocked out sunlight, and the heat of condensation would have burned up the Earth.
Oh- and the fact that according to Psalms, the waters above the Earth still remained after the flood.

@ jerk
Sorry, the Bible does mention women on the Boat- Noah's wife, and his three sons had their wives.

Still, the funniest thing of all comes from sunshine, who quotes the watchtower.
"#QUESITON: Did Noah put every animal in the Ark? No; a common misconcetion is that Noah put 2 of every animal into the ark. Noah was instructed to assemble, not every animal but two of every "kind" or family group. It has been estmated by some that the hundreds of thousands of species of animals today could be reduced to a comparatively few family groups or kinds. For example, a wolf, a dog and a fox are all essentially from the same family group. "
I love the 'super-evolution' disclosed here. Noah's two dogs became wolves and foxes as well as pekingese, poodles, Labradors, Sausage dogs etc. in 4,000 years, because they are all of the same 'Kind'.
Hilariously enough, the neo-Darwinian synthesis explains why poodles don't give birth to foxes, but their (revised) version of the Biblical account doesn't- after all, they ought to, they're all the same kind according to the Watchtower, and the bible says they 'give birth after their own kind'.

DA #fundie answers.yahoo.com

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