Does The Flood Add up?

It nonplusses me also but the way I think about it is that the mainstream religions have thousands of years enculturation. Taking the Italian Renassiance as an arbitrary starting point science has had about 400 years to develop. It may take another thousand years for it to permeat the culture the way the Judeo Christian Muslim thought has permeated our contemporary western cultures.Religious nonsense is part of the very fabric of civilized consciousness. Witness the activities we see in the US and around the world. This religious consciousness actively resists being supplanted by rational thought.I just want to understand this better.lfen

Eh? And the solid evidence you have presented for the ark is?If it's the evidence I think you are referring to that has been refuted in detail.lfen

Geology is not a strong suit of mine so I'm not going into details. You did indicate you were interested in understanding the opposing arguments. Scientist did discover marine fossil high in mountains. It gets more complicted and interesting than that. But have you checked out the scientist's explanation for those finds? The mountains were at one point sea bed that was then pushed up by the movements of the earths plates.Geology is only one of the sciences that deals with issues raised by the flood stories but it is an important consideration.After a brief google I came up with this site but there are a lot more and some may be better suited to your interests.
http://www.mountainnature.com/geology/platetectonics.htmlfen

Now that question got me wondering what the sources of that story were. What prompted that explanation?When I was a young boy my younger brother was frightened of thunder. I remember my mother telling him it was "tater wagons in the sky tipping over and spilling the taters." Dumping a bag of potatoes in a bin does sound a little like thunder.So I wonder if there was a near flood that frightened people and then some one exaggerated that flooding to tell the story of Gilgamesh etc.Does anyone have any leads to ancient roots of the flood story?lfen

I'm convinced that the Noah flood was a retelling of the Babylonian myth.This article gives a good overview:
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/floodorigins.htmlI was struck by this paragraph in the conclusion: I read "musculanisation" as a typo for "masculanization".The tie in with the rainbow sounds like an explanation of why there are rainbows. Maybe someone put the two stories together to expand on that?lfen

Was it a decade ago that National Geographic did a tv show on the ecology of an elephant pooping. It's amazing. The dung beatles fly in to make and bury balls of dung for their eggs. There are other beatles come in to steal the dung balls and then predators show up to feast on the crowd of beatles. I was in awe!So how many kinds need elephant dung to survive?lfen

Not to mention the insectavores that feed on the beetles and other insects. I mean what did they feed the anteaters and all?lfen