MJFlores
Well-Known Member
There is no evidence that the Earth experienced a global flood at any time in the last 20,000,000 years. The biblical story is likely a recounting of a regional flood that was of great size, but not global. Considering how little of the world, people of the time knew, a regional flood might have seemed like the whole world.
Regional?
Is that the official Methodist Church stance?
Genesis 6:12-14 New International Version (NIV)
God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
If the flood was regional then there were safe spots where violent people could save themselves, right?
But this is not what the apostles of Christ like Peter preached. He said:
1 Peter 3:20 New International Version (NIV)
to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water,
Now with regards to the evidence whether Noah, the ark and the flood lived, existed and happened respectively - is a matter of investigative work. How would the flood even be possible, someone might ask. If the whole sky would be empty of water vapor then it could flood the Earth surface with 1 inch of water only.
At any moment, the atmosphere contains an astounding 37.5 million billion gallons of water, in the invisible vapor phase. This is enough water to cover the entire surface of the Earth (land and ocean) with one inch of rain.
How much water is in the atmosphere?
Not enough right? But in 2014, American geologists [I have nothing to do with this] found out that there is so much water underground that it could cover the entire Earth's surface three [3x] times over.
Planet EarthPlanet Earth
Huge Underground Reservoir Holds Three Times as Much Water as Earth’s Oceans
ByEleanor Nelson Saturday, June 14, 2014 NOVA Next
Huge Underground Reservoir Holds Three Times as Much Water as Earth’s Oceans
Now I believe
This water which is three times the volume of all of our oceans
were the flood waters during Noah's time
for which covered the Earth for 150 days
Genesis 7:17-24 New International Version (NIV)
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits. Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
Now where did these flood waters go?
The immense volume couldn't simply vanished right?
With that volume, the atmosphere couldn't contain them all, do you get me?
During Noah, the Earth was a water world.
And the waters gone down and receded....
Genesis 8:1-5 New International Version (NIV)
But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
And there you have it why the American geologist found a vast ocean [Ringwoodite - Wikipedia] under the Earth that has a volume of three times greater than all of our oceans combined.