>Bert's comment about "an enormous amount of energy..." seems to me to be
>understatement. It seems to me that an event as dramatic as the one
>being described would have been recorded in rather graphic detail. We
>are talking about fire from the sky kind of stuff. It seems to me the
>writer of Genesis would noted this and remembrance of it would have been
>passed on from Noah and his son's down through the generations.... Is
>this an unreasonable assumption?
If we take the scripture literally, then Noah was shut in the ark by God,
and probably couldn't see out. (Genesis 7:15) Since everyone else (those
not on the ark) died, there were no eyewitnesses who survived whatever
came next. Also, if the earth were bombarded by space debris all at one
time and if the debris hit the western hemisphere, then those on the
eastern hemisphere wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway.
Tom Van Flandern (www.metaresearch.org - I think that's still a good
address; I don't have web access right now so I can't check it) has
developed the "Exploded Planet Hypothesis" which says that there once was
a planet occupying the current asteroid belt. The planet exploded, and
some of the debris was hurled out with less than the solar system escape
velocity and has become comets. Debris which left with > escape velocity
has, of course never returned. All comets are gravitationally bound to
the solar system, and ice (water) makes up a significant portion of many
comets' mass. Asteroids presumably originated near the planets core, and
therefore did not aquire much velocity from the explosion.
If the planet which exploded was largely water, then the expanding shell
of debris from the explosion could have "flooded" the earth from above,
and supplied a nice covey of asteroids as well. Support for this
hypothesis is supplied by the hemispheric asymmetry of many moons and
some of the planets in our solar system.
As an aside, I think it's interesting that _God_ shut Noah in the ark.
If God performed a "discontinuous" miracle at the beginning of the flood,
then He could certainly have continued in the miracle mode during the
flood.
Bill
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