In a message dated 3/3/2006 10:36:10 AM Eastern Standard Time,
glennmorton@entouch.net writes:
Without such a magical wall of water, the ark will be pushed (using normal
Newtonian physics and normal hydrodynamics) into the Persian Gulf where it is
impossible for it to land in Turkey or northern Iraq. The slope of the land is
to the SOUTH, not to the NORTH. Please explain how my line of reasoning is
fallacious. I would love to hear it.
Hi Glenn!
You've given me a lot of things to reply to, and I'll take them separately.
Apparently I pushed your hot button. :-) I won't tell you where my hot
button is so you can't push it!
Of course the Ark would go downstream to the Persian gulf, and as your web
page of the physics states, neither a human nor the waters would move it up
hill. But don't you see that it is wrong to say that only two things could move
the ark? The Bible specifically mentions a third thing that could do it: wind.
When I first gave attention to how the ark could go uphill, about 3 years
ago, I immediately remembered that the Bible says how God remembered Noah and
sent a wind. Only a wind could rescue the ark from floating around in the
persian gulf forever. So that is the working hypothesis I've held for the past
three years. I've always wanted to do the numerical modeling of the flood to see
if this would work. I do numerical modeling of other fluid flows moving
sediments around, so I know I could do this. But I just don't have time.
But can a wind actually move the ark uphill that many feet to match the
Biblical description? Well, I'm sure it could! The Bible says it was God who was
sending the wind, and as I've heard you ask others on similar matters, how
capable is God at doing what he sets out to do?
Constant winds blowing over a long reaches of water creates waves, of course,
which are circular rotations that in deep water represent no net motion of
the water. But in Mesopotamia we would have to assume the waters in the flood
immediately retreated to an area very close to the rivers, only flowing over
the wider regions for a very short time (for many of the reasons you describe).
I'd never expect the entire basin to stay full for a year! If only it is
wide enough that Noah could see no mountains or hills off to either side, then
that would be enough. So in the shallow flood waters the viscosity of the water
propagates shear stresses from the earth beneath the water up into the layers
of water above it. This drag on the earth creates an asymmetry between the
upper and lower limbs of the surface waves. This results in net water flow in
the direction the waves are going. You can see this anytime you watch shallow
waters under a sustained wind. The waters have an uphill slope in the
direction of the wind, and currents on and beneath the surface maintain that slope
ad infinitum. Thus, a sufficiently strong, long-sustained, northward-blowing
wind over mesopotamia would actually create uphill water flow in the upper
surface of the waters, while the water was still flowing downhill in the deeper
layers. If the ark has a shallow enough draft, it would be carried uphill by
the waters themselves. Plus the wind would be pushing it. Even if the waves
were insufficient to totally check the downhill flow within the ark's draft,
they would be sufficient to retard it. And the wind acting on the ark would push
the ark slowly uphill against that retarded down-hill flow. Either way I
don't see any problem.
If you doubt whether this is really feasible, why not let's wait to discuss
it after the next PSCF comes out? As I mentioned, Alan Hill has a paper on the
quantitative physics of the flood and it will probably shape the discussion
significantly.
God bless!
Phil Metzger
Received on Sat Mar 4 01:37:36 2006
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