mindspawn writes:
This is a very confident assertion that land that has been drained of seawater is poisoned for longer than 5 months. Where is your science to back that up? This is a science forum, not speculation.
You want science, yet you believe ancient myths without any evidence at all? Oh well.
We need to start with some facts. The first of which is how long the earth was submerged and sodden. We have this from Genesis:
10 And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were on the earth.
So within a week of the flood starting the earth was covered.
4 Then the ark rested in the seventh month, the seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat. 5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.
So in the tenth month the flood has subsided to the mountain tops.
A further 40 days pass
6 So it came to pass, at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. 7 Then he sent out a raven, which kept going to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth. 8 He also sent out from himself a dove, to see if the waters had receded from the face of the ground. 9 But the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot, and she returned into the ark to him, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her, and drew her into the ark to himself. 10
We’re now well into the 11th month of a submerged earth.
Then a weird thing happens. A week later he sends another dove
10 And he waited yet another seven days, and again he sent the dove out from the ark. 11 Then the dove came to him in the evening, and behold, a freshly plucked olive leaf was in her mouth; and Noah knew that the waters had receded from the earth.
So, just one week after the land was totally flooded, an olive tree has grown.
It’s pretty clear we’re supposed to imagine an olive tree because Noah tells us that his earlier dove returned because there was nowhere to perch. Olive trees take years to grow so that’s just plain impossible. (But as a child I just saw this as a miracle - I had no idea that it was supposed to be natural.)
The adhoc explanation is that it was a new grown shoot. Well the first newborn leaves from a seed are cotyledons — not true leaves and do not look like true leaves. So we have to suppose that we’d gone beyond the first sprouting stage.
Olive seeds take several weeks to sprout and need slightly damp but not wet material to do it in. We could then add a further 3-4 weeks to get to a true growing plant. I’d say at least a couple of months.
So the odds of one doing all this within a week of Noah seeing that the land was not covered in water anymore is vanishingly slight.
Then, of course, we have the problem that the land was too wet anyway. Although Noah could see dry land from his mountain top, he determined that it was still too wet to release his animals so waited for a further month and 27 days before he could.
13 And it came to pass in the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, that the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked, and indeed the surface of the ground was dry. 14 And in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dried.
No mention at this point that a lush green environment now exists for all his animals to disappear into.
Instead we have a devastated planets with silt, mud and rock everywhere. No trees, so birds can’t nest and monkeys can’t climb. No insect life so no plants to feed from or pollinate.
All life was extinguished with the first week so after 9 months there are no rotting carcasses of anything left for your carnivores to eat.
Everything was dead — even the fish:
21 And all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man. 22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit[a] of life, all that was on the dry land, died. 23 So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth.
Now you’ll argue definitions here about whether fish were included. But fish have nostrils and they have the breath of the spirit of life in them and they move on the earth. Finally we have this, so that we are sure:
Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive.
And he even tells us that it his intention to kill everything:
4 For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.
At no point does the story exclude fish from the living things that god made.
Just to drop a little bit of science in here. We know that the sea is salty and we know that rain isn’t. We have no idea whether the fountains of the deep are saline or not because they don’t actually exist and sadly we don’t know how much of each there was.
However, it’s beyond doubt that both salt and fresh water mixed, which would have been very bad news for both freshwater and salt water fish — only a few species can survive in both salt and sea waters. Plus their habitats have now been destroyed and their food supply has gone. It’s therefore highly unlikely that any fish survived after 11 months of waters up to or above the highest mountains on earth.
It’s then even more unlikely that any that did survive managed to get themselves stranded at the strategically positioned points necessary for the carnivores to find them as the flood subsided (to where?)
But let’s say a few did survive and that a few of the survivors got stranded. How long are you going to give them to be edible? Maybe 2 or 3 days in the desert sun?
How many of your 2x2 animals are now dead from eating the rotting carcasses of dead fish? (Answer — none, because all the fish had been dead for 9 months at least.)
So to the matter of salt and vegetation. Firstly the point is moot because all land-based plant life died in the first few days of the flood. It was submerged and drowned. That’s a simple fact — land based plants can not survive being submerged in water for long periods.
Could seeds survive a combination of salt water and drowning? Some could, most couldn’t — it depends on their seed coat. Certainly grass seeds would drown and rot — they’re small and porous. And grass would be your prime necessity for grazers.
For trees bushes and shrubs it wouldn’t matter whether the seeds survived or not, because they can’t grow fast enough to provide a food source for those that need it. If they did manage to get established at all, they’d be immediately murdered by anything that could get to them — mostly, I suspect insects that breed a lot faster than, say, giraffes.
But before you get to that we have to decide whether seeds are alive because we’re rather forgetting that God said
4 For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made.
There are living cells in seeds — if there weren’t they would not grow. So what are we to make of this? That god excluded seeds from living things? It seems more likely to me that the story tellers didn’t know that seeds were living things so didn’t think to exclude them. Oops.
Then we have the salt problem.
A halophyte is a plant that grows in waters of high salinity, coming into contact with saline water through its roots or by salt spray, such as in saline semi-deserts, mangrove swamps, marshes and sloughs, and seashores. An example of a halophyte is the salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass). Relatively few plant species are halophytes - perhaps only 2% of all plant species. The large majority of plant species are "glycophytes", and are damaged fairly easily by salinity.[1]
Halophyte - Wikipedia
So we have 98% of all plants being intolerant of salt — this doesn’t sound too hopeful does it?
A seed has to survive drowning for at least 10 months, be one of the 2% that can regrow in saline conditions, grow lightening fast and be a natural major food source for all the world’s herbivores from insects to mammals not matter what their adaptive habitats. Sounds a tad unlikely to me.
Now then, have you considered the effect of killing virtually every photosynthesising organism on the planet would be? (Sea weed would be dead to btw as the shallow seas that it inhabits would no longer be shallow and the water would not transmit light until the mud and silt settled out again.) Neither have I, but I’m betting it’s not something the earth would be quick to recover from.
Personally, if I was you - I'd invoke a miracle or ten and be done with it.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
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