Some water measurements for the Flood

Message 1 of 276 (729812) 06-19-2014 6:25 AM

So I looked around for information on measuring rainfall and found this Weather Underground blog the most informative for my purposes:

What is the Most Rain to Ever Fall in One Minute or One Hour?

The rainfall at the beginning of the Flood is supposed to have been worldwide and continuous and very heavy. How heavy I don't know, but there is one extremely heavy rainfall recorded for the US at over an inch a minute in Unionville, Maryland according to this blog, so I simply computed from an inch a minute and got some pretty hefty numbers.

An inch a minute all over the earth would be
Sixty inches an hour or five feet an hour
Ten feet in two hours, twenty in four, forty in eight,
120 feet in 24 hours. Or 4800 feet by the end of the forty days and nights of the rainfall. That would pretty well cover the pre-Flood mountains which weren’t anywhere near as high as the mountains we have now that were formed by tectonic force.

Please correct my arithmetic if necessary.

Since that's an extreme rate of rainfall, although for all I know it's close to what actually happened, I figured I should consider a lower rate as well. An inch an hour would still be a heavy rain as we know it, so I computed that too. That's of course 24 inches or two feet in a 24-hour day. That's 60 feet in a month or 80 feet by the end of the forty days and nights.

Something between the two rates might be the best guess.

This may be a rather thin topic for a thread but I'm not sure how to flesh it out.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : Change "rainful" to "rainfall"

Message 7 of 276 (729831) 06-19-2014 6:07 PM

Reply to: Message 4 by Percy 06-19-2014 11:33 AM

But perhaps something like that happened, I don't know. If something like that happened it would contribute to explaining how the sea floor could have dropped at the height of the Flood to permit the water to drain back into the ocean basin. I admit that all this sounds physically impossible, but nobody knows what actually happened and it would fit with what the Biblical account says.

So if something like that happened then whatever the rainfall contributed would just be a portion of the total, reducing the rate of the rain which would help as far as the ark's wellbeing is concerned, but there's no way to know how much either source contributed.

Message 10 of 276 (729835) 06-19-2014 7:11 PM

Reply to: Message 6 by JonF 06-19-2014 1:08 PM

Since there is really no way to actually prove anything about one-time events in the past – WHICH YOU ALL REALLY SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE IN ALL FAIRNESS -- it all remains conjecture and speculation, no matter how reasonable in some cases, and we're going to continue to put the Bible above whatever calculations you come up with that contradict it.

So it's all very interesting to read how one creationist calculated temperatures in relation to the canopy idea, but if it doesn’t convince you it doesn’t matter. Anything any of us comes up with, including your answers, HAS to conform to the Biblical account or we're not going to accept it, though we’re always willing to adjust the scientific aspect where it clearly needs adjusting as long as it doesn’t violate the Biblical account.

We do this about the Flood because there is nothing in the Biblical account to suggest it was anything but a natural occurrence, although, yes, circumstances were different enough to require a non-uniformitarian point of view to understand it. I have no objection on any other grounds to regarding it as a miracle: The Bible doesn’t so YECs don’t.

If the science doesn’t work then we need to adjust the science. The Bible says it rained forty days and nights. If your calculations don't provide enough water for that to have happened, too bad for your calculations. We’re talking the Creator God here, you can’t compete, sorry.

I suppose that makes this whole thread futile too. For my purposes I got some idea at least of how a heavy rate of rainfall could all by itself cover the pre-Flood mountains. I thought that interesting even if you can't find enough water in the pre-Flood atmosphere to make it happen.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : punctuation correction

Edited by Faith, : To add YEC to creationist

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Message 12 of 276 (729837) 06-19-2014 7:30 PM

Reply to: Message 11 by Diomedes 06-19-2014 7:12 PM

But since evaporation can't explain the removal of that much water in a period of something like five months we need another explanation. Which is where the dropping of the sea floor becomes a possibility. Creationists have to use their ingenuity to come up with such explanations. It would be nice if our opponents would exert a little of their ingenuity in the same direction once in a while rather than being content with the first piece of debunkery that strikes them.

But "our" vapor canopy is most likely nothing like the original vapor canopy that existed from the Creation to the Flood. You accepted some of the Biblical account, all you have to do is keep thinking like a creationist. Help us out here.

Perhaps that is provided by the space that might have been left beneath the sea floor as the fountains evacuated it -- a vacuum in other words.

If you're going to accept any of the Biblical account, why not all of it? The water rose for five months, sat there for a bit and then took another five months or so to drain away. Evaporation hardly seems the explanation for this so we figure it had to have some place to go and the dropping of the sea floor gives it a place to go. Not ENOUGH of a place to go, though, if we're adding a huge quantity of rain to the total volume, so we still need some creationist ingenuity to give us enough space since evaporation doesn't do it. Ringwoodite in the mantle perhaps?

Except of course we know it was found because the Bible says so. All we have to do is bring science into line with the Bible.

That is the creationist's Mission Impossible but of course we believe it to be ultimately possible. You are welcome to join in the effort. All it takes is discarding anything that contradicts the Biblical account and exerting your scientific imagination to finding explanations that support it.

ABE: Since supposedly the scientific imagination of an actual scientist would be better at this than our poor creationist attempts, it should be an interesting attempt worthy of your training.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Message 14 of 276 (729839) 06-19-2014 8:38 PM

Reply to: Message 13 by Diomedes 06-19-2014 7:51 PM

But that wouldn't contribute to the Flood volume, it would only move the sea floor downward as the fountains were released, the volume would remain constant. But if the release of the fountains did contribute to the increase in volume this would require the retention of the evacuated space beneath the sea floor, which I believe I said in my first comment on this subject above. Which in response to you I then posited would be the vacuum needed to supply the suction you said would be required to pull the water back into the ocean basins. We only need the vacuum to be maintained for a short period of time before the collapse of the sea floor, which then occurred at a rate allowing for the Flood waters to drain over roughly a five-month period.

Actually it was this thread I believe, but as usual you are succumbing to uniformitarian assumptions rather than thinking like a creationist and finding ways the pre-Flood canopy did support more volume than today's canopy would, which of course it had to since it rained for forty days and nights which your calculations make impossible.

Well, that's a start, you just stopped too soon as the foundation of my argument uses a lot more than the part you were willing to reference. Ah well, of course it's too good to be true that an evo would stoop to the level of a creationist.

By creating a vacuum in the space they evacuated that eventually causes the collapse of the sea floor, sucking the water back into the ocean basins.

Well, clearly you don't listen to what I say or you wouldn't say this sort of nonsense.

It results from recognizing God as God and the Bible as His word, that's all. Since it took me until my mid-forties to believe anything other than atheistic rationalism I don't think I can be accused of anything genetic that predisposed me to believing the Bible, and I don't recall a head injury at that time.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Message 16 of 276 (729841) 06-19-2014 11:46 PM

Reply to: Message 15 by Minnemooseus 06-19-2014 10:55 PM

I'm apparently missing what you mean about what exactly you are measuring, bringing sea floor up and continent level down and so on. Are you talking about the depth that would cover the land as it is now, mountains and all etc., or something else?

Message 20 of 276 (729846) 06-20-2014 5:48 AM

Reply to: Message 19 by Larni 06-20-2014 5:20 AM

You ask:

And I believe I answered this back in

Message 9 where I say

And the following Message 10 where I say

I hope this answers your question.

And as to whether it is mechanically possible, not being able to prove that doesn't mean it isn't, and there's so much else that fits the Flood scenario (strata, fossils, argued to death here many times) I feel no need to abandon the attempt.

Message 28 of 276 (729856) 06-20-2014 8:37 AM

Reply to: Message 24 by Dr Adequate 06-20-2014 6:42 AM

I already answered this but can do it again I guess.

For most natural events there is a series of causes that are all natural. Miracles are usually pretty easy to identify, something like raising a person to life from death, causing a depleted supply of oil or grain to increase to overflowing, causing fire to come down from heaven and consume a water-soaked sacrifice, making the sun move backward, turning water into wine, feeding thousands with a few pieces of bread and fish.

There is nothing in scripture that indicates that the release of the fountains of the deep or the rain from heaven was anything but a natural if unusual event, which would have been brought about by a chain of natural events --ABE: even perhaps due to the condition NoNukes describes as persisting from the Creation. /ABE.

God is said in scripture to cause everything: "I make peace and create evil" is in Isaiah 45 where He also lists more things He does; "If there is calamity in a city won't God have done it" is in Amos 3. There are many passages where God says He's going to do something like bring the Assyrians against Israel. In Ezekiel it's a theme "Then they shall know that I am the Lord" when He does various things to punish Israel, make the land desolate etc. He also says He's going to raise up a prophet. None of these things in themselves is anything miraculous that God says He does or is going to do. Peace and war just happen a lot on earth, calamity just happens, enemies invade, events may lay a land desolate, prophets arise etc., all in the normal course of events. All scripture does is show us that God has a hand in all of it, which otherwise we wouldn't think of.

In Exodus He does say He's going to "do marvels" too, however:

"And he said, Behold, I make a covenant: before all thy people I will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation: and all the people among which thou art shall see the work of the LORD: for it is a terrible thing that I will do with thee."

God is the God of the ordinary and the natural, as well as the extraordinary. Unless an event is clearly supernatural or scripture gives us some other reason to think it is, there is no reason to take it as supernatural.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Message 31 of 276 (729860) 06-20-2014 11:01 AM

Reply to: Message 29 by NoNukes 06-20-2014 10:26 AM

Nevertheless I don't have to call you names for believing as you do and it would be nice if you would spare me as well since my position is sincere and I think my arguments are scripturally founded.

Message 36 of 276 (729867) 06-20-2014 11:56 AM

Reply to: Message 35 by NoNukes 06-20-2014 11:12 AM

Seemed obvious to me I guess. The miracles are all one-time events that clearly violate natural laws, the sun moving backwards being a clear example of that.

The water being suspended above the earth, on the other hand, is understood to have been there from the Creation until its release over 1500 years later, therefore clearly a part of the originally created natural physical order, just as the fountains of the deep are presented as also having been there all that time until their release as well.

Their release seems to have completely ended that early physical order, just a small part of the huge changes that can be biblically inferred to have accompanied the Flood and given us in many ways a different world to live in.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Message 41 of 276 (729872) 06-20-2014 1:01 PM

Reply to: Message 40 by ringo 06-20-2014 12:45 PM

http://www.truthnet.org/pdf/creation/genesisflood.pdf

Message 51 of 276 (729883) 06-20-2014 10:05 PM

Reply to: Message 50 by Dr Adequate 06-20-2014 9:16 PM

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.