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First of all, I'm an agnostic. I wasn't born and raised Christian so everything I know about Christianity is from an outsider's perspective. I'm leaning toward converting but I want to explore the world's religions before I make a decision.
Anyway, here's my hypothesis about Noah's flood and what might have caused it: I believe there might have been an advanced, industrialized society that existed before the deluge. This is not to say that Noah and his family lived in this society, if it existed. Right now, there are highly advanced and technologically sophisticated civilizations like ourselves living side by side with more primitive ones, so it's not entirely unreasonable that Noah and his family could have been from a more primitive culture whereas there were other advanced cultures elsewhere in the world at the time then.
Assuming such an advanced civilization existed before the flood, consider the possibility that they were burning fossil fuels on a massive scale just as we are today, but never discovered the greenhouse effect or the fact that burning fossil fuels released carbon dioxide. After all, the greenhouse effect was pretty much discovered by the efforts of a single Frenchman - Joseph Fourier. If he had not lived, who knows how long it would have taken to discover this phenomenon - it is a highly nonobvious concept. Moreover, it's not obvious at all that burning something releases carbon dioxide - it is an invisible gas, and the only way you can detect it is by chemical experimentation and the knowledge of chemical reactions. And these experiments were pioneered by a few men of genius who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It might have been a historical accident that we came to discover these facts and concepts.
In other words, it possessed a high degree of energy usage but had theoretical knowledge gaps that rendered them ignorant about the byproducts and long-term implications of burning large amounts of fossil fuels. Also, even if they knew that burning large amounts of fossil fuels released an invisible gas, and they also knew that this invisible gas could cause global warming, they might not have had the tools needed to actually measure either the average concentration of carbon dioxide or the Earth's average temperature.
In other words, they were in a worse state than us. If global warming really is an existential threat to our species, we have all of the knowledge to discover whether this is so or not. Namely, we know that burning things releases an invisible gas. We know that this gas is a greenhouse gas, and we know what happens in the extreme cases - Venus. We can measure the Earth's average temperature, AND the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as other constituent gases. We know that the Earth has ice caps that can melt, and we can monitor this melting. So if it turns out that our current way of getting the energy we need to maintain our civilization will ultimately threaten its existence, we WILL do whatever we can to stop it. But what if we didn't know any of this? We would just keep on burning the fossil fuels until kingdom come, never knowing that what we were doing was slowly raising the earth's temperature. It would be just like the metaphorical frog in the warming pot - it didn't realize it was doomed until it was too late.
And isn't this just what we see in the Earth's temperature record during the last 20,000 years? Between 20,000 years ago and 11,600 years ago, the Earth underwent a dramatic warming. Over this time, essentially the entire North American ice sheet, which was at one point comparable to the Antarctic ice sheet in its size, melted. Assuming that the Ice Age was before the great flood, why couldn't a human civilization - one that was advanced enough to be burning large amounts of fossil fuels, but not advanced enough to understand the chemical reaction of combustion and its byproducts, and long-term implications resulting from this - have been responsible for this gradual warming?
I'm not saying that the global warming that happened then caused the great flood directly. What I'm saying is that human activity over thousands of years caused a gradual warming that reached some tipping point, and when that tipping point was reached (for whatever reason), the flood came.
Don't believe Noah's flood really occurred, even though it is believed amongst Christians, Jews and Muslims.
It defies science, as do many things, like Genesis etc.
Not all people in those groups think it actually occurred, my friend.
Our preacher preached about the flood. He said God sent the flood because He was upset at all the violence in the world. Before that sermon I had always thought the flood happened to wipe out the sinfulness in the world. Maybe I need to go back and read about the flood again and yes, I do believe it happened. Maybe that was the ice age??
Our preacher preached about the flood. He said God sent the flood because He was upset at all the violence in the world. Before that sermon I had always thought the flood happened to wipe out the sinfulness in the world. Maybe I need to go back and read about the flood again and yes, I do believe it happened. Maybe that was the ice age??
Well violence is sinfulness. But it was't all that caused it.
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