To ask a stupid question? Noah's Ark

[Besttimelftheyear]

So I am not religious, but I would say I was brought up Christian. I would say my parents were non practicing Christians, but I was taught bible stories as truth and facts. The logical adult in me now says that most of the events can be explained quite simply.

Onto the question. Noah's Ark, is there any evidence of a global flood? Noah was supposed to have taken two of each animals onto the boat while the earth was flooded and wiped out everything else.

Surely this was simply a regular flood like we see today?

What are peoples beliefs or knowledge on this?

Is this like a "Where's Wally" thing because I can't see an Ark in that picture.

They all used to live in the same area but were disembarked in different places as the waters receded I reckon. So the polar bears got chucked overboard somewhere near the north pole for trying to eat the penguins. The penguins refused to get off on the same side of the planet as the penguin eating polar bears. He dumped all the toxic and weird stuff on a massive island so he wouldn't have to deal with it.

So why are polar bears white like the snow and camels yellow like sand ...

Hmmmmm..

Mrs Noah spent too much time on Pinterest and was totally into colour matching. Says so in Genesis 6 vs 43.

Yup, completely disregarded a lot of books too. Dead sea scrolls anyone?

Noah was doing it for the 'gram

It's clearly nonsense to anyone with even basic scientific knowledge. Not to mention a vile notion that some capricious god would kill millions of innocents because some weren't doing what he wanted. Who takes that seriously?
There were flood eras, geological records can attest to that. The rest is laughable.

With all the monstrous things humans have done over the last millenia you've got to wonder what the heck these bronze age(?) people were up to in their spare time.

Noah got drunk and abusive to one of his sons. (Someone will be along to say his response was fine, I'm sure. It's the next bit after the rainbow)

What worries me about the Noah story is that there is a minimal gene pool. All the offspring of those couples on the Ark are effectively brothers and sisters and in order to perpetuate they would have to fornicate.
"C'mon Bro, or we'll die out".

That's not a great plan. God should have had 2 Arks to preclude this situation arising.

It's surprising that he didn't think of that.

all your questions are fully answered in the bonkers website linked earlier
the whole thing about how did they fit so many animals is because, if you read Genesis properly it talks about 'kinds' of animals, and we should understand that 'kinds' doesn't mean species, you silly lot, it means....some higher order of classification, like maybe genus or family (they were vague here, but as an example, Noah wouldn't have needed very single sort of turtle, just a turtle - or 2- would do)
If you want to see dinosaurs frolicking with modern species, watched by humans, its all there

it talks about 'kinds' of animals, and we should understand that 'kinds' doesn't mean species, you silly lot, it means....some higher order of classification

We should understand that "kinds" may not have been used to mean what we'd today call "species", but it might have been. For all we know it might even have been some tighter classification, eg brown cows being a separate "kind" to black cows so there may have had to have been seven pairs of each.

Ancient Hebrew didn't have a specific word for "species" in the sense we mean it today so any modern interpretation of what "kind" means is very much open to interpretation. Claiming that "kind" definitely didn't mean "species" and, instead, meant a broader classification is a relatively recent apologetic. It appears to have come from a need to justify the kind of absolute literal reading of the Bible spearheaded by some some American Baptist congregations.

This really isn't true. The claim is that there was an actual global flood, which is also nonsense. Trying to explain it away as symbolism is a complete misrepresentation of the story as written.

All right, assuming kind just means families or similar. Take bears then. He took two bears on board. Does that mean you believe in the Ark and in evolution? For polar bears, grizzlies, brown bears, etc to now exist must mean that they evolved from that pair, and you think both the bible and evolution are true.

Yes... so, the proposition is presumably that the common ancestors of each current species of animal were all present at the time of the alleged flood (onviously this is completely unsupported by the fossil record) and it was a pair of each of these that showed up for the boat trip and then they speciated in a very short space of time - if not the few thousand years allowed by young earth creationists, then at most within the period of human civilization (again, zero evidence for any such thing happening).

It's all ludicrous, and debating what the word 'kind' may or may not be supposed to mean is quite pointless.

on my trip to India many years ago, I learnt a fascinating fact that they too believe there was a massive “reset” kind of flood that happened. They believe this flood (called Pralaya) at the end of every cycle of time. One cycle consists of 4 Yugas. Each yuga is several thousands of years long. We are currently the the last yuga of a cycle. Summary: End is near.

Why though is it 'important' to be clear about the semantics of something that cannot fit the evidence whichever way you view the text? Sure, it's saying nearly all life was destroyed (even if 2 of every species was saved then nearly all life was destroyed). This simply did not happen, whatever you think 'kind' meant. The people transmitting an oral tradition wouldn't have been clear about what it meant.

We've found evidence for at least 2 mass extinction in the fossil record, but none of these correspond to a biblical flood. Surely we should have found by now some strata containing the fossilised remains of the badgers, bison and bull terriers that didn't have a ticket on the ark.

Isn't the noah story the one where a girls has sex with him whilst he's sleeping??

Oh no, that was Lot's daughters. My mistake!

But there was definitely something about Ham and. Noah. The wording like "he saw his nakedness" or something

Lots of incest, rape and slavery in the Bible 👍🏻

Quite. And lots of murder too. Especially kids.. . oh, and also the ever so kind offering of virgins as spoils of war..