Hi Glenn, you wrote (a few days back):
>I am delighted to see you start to think about the topography. The USGS
>would most assuredly have something and if not that, a physical map of Iraq
>in a good encyclopedia will also do. It all slopes down to the Persian
>Gulf.
Reminds me of a story my grandfather told me once about when he was a
truck salesman in western Colorado for International Harvester in the
late 1920's to the early 1930's. He was competing against another
truck manufacturer for a contract to provide school buses for one of
the towns in that area. When the school board interviewed my
granddad, he asked them how comfortable they would be with their
children, some of whom lived in mountainous areas, riding in school
buses that were built on truck frames the way the competing company
built them. When they thought about that for awhile, they awarded
the contract to International. Then my granddad smiled at me and
added, "Of course, we did too. That's the way they built them in
those days."
Glenn, you have repeatedly objected as to how Noah's boat got from
Shuruppak in southern Mesopotamia to the mountains (hills) of Ararat
(Urartu, Armenia). The boat had to move north and east against the
topography. Yet you seem to act as if this presents no problem at
all to a Noah whom you posit lived 5.5 million years ago in the
Mediterranean basin when the infilling of the Mediterranean sea could
have floated the boat to no higher than sea level.
I would suggest that the biblical landing site named in Genesis
presents just as formidable an obstacle to your scenario as it does
to mine. You even have an intermediate mountain range between the
Mediterranean sea and the mountains (or hills) of Armenia. Punting
won't help with that. Notwithstanding I would love to see your
treatise on the techniques of Australopithicine shipbuilding. A bit
more complicated than bone flutes.
>I will take physical evidence any day over literary evidence.
It is precisely the literary evidence from the inspired Scriptures
that has us wrestling with this. If it were not for the fact that
the flood narrative of Genesis 6-9 is in our Bible, none of us would
give a hoot. Who would care if Utnapishtim ever landed on Mount
Nisir as stated in the eleventh chapter of Gilgamesh?
I think Vernon makes a better point. Why float a bunch of local
animals around in a local flood? It's not the who, what, where,
when, how questions that are so tricky. It's the "why" questions
that drive us crazy.
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orislol.com
ěThe Answer we should have known about 150 years agoî
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