Dear Christians: What does your god actually do?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

 This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
 You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.

GC

The story is a good one, for its time and place, and the knowledge (and also lack thereof) that the authors had, but there are two main problems with it.

One, it's pretty clearly borrowed (and no I don't mean copied, I mean borrowed, as in they took pieces from it and made their own version of the story) in large part from the legend of Ut-napishtim, a Sumerian myth which was forgotten for centuries by western civilization until the discovery of tablets that told the story, in the mid-1800s, in Ur of Chaldea (you may recall this as the hometown of Abraham). The stories vary widely in places, but they contain a few critical elements that show that the Hebrew version is a rehash of the old tale:

[*] The gods get together and decide that mankind must be punished for his wickedness.
[*] God chooses a righteous man to save the animals by building a boat (in the original, it was more of a multilayered square raft).
[*] God warns Ut-napishtim that the flood is coming, and tells him to build the boat, etc., and the boat is built with one door and a window.
[*] Pairs of animals were taken aboard this raft, while everything else was flooded and wiped out/killed.
[*] Rain fell until it covered the mountains (though in The Epic of Gilgamesh, it only falls for a week).
[*] After a time on the flooded waters, birds are sent out to see if they can find dry land-- where the Bible has Noah sending out a raven (failure) followed by doves, who succeed, the Epic of Gilgamesh has Ut-napishtim sending out a dove and a swallow that fail, followed by a raven, who succeeds. No symbolism there!
[*] The raft came to settle on the top of a mountain (Mount Nisir, about 300 miles away from Mt. Ararat).
[*] Ut-napishtim offered sacrifices to the gods, upon getting out of his boat, which pleased them and they offered blessings that included a promise never to flood the world again.

Now, the traditional way to view this finding, for evangelicals, has been to say that the Sumerians (a mighty empire, in its day) borrowed their tales from badly-remembered history, while the ancestors of the Hebrews remembered the story correctly, and recorded it accurately.

The more obvious explanation is that the ancestors of the Hebrews came from Ur, and brought the tales of 900-year-lifespan God-Kings (which became the 900-year-lifespan Patriarchs), as well as the story of the great flood of Ea, which became the tale of Noah.

If you could let go of your mythology for a bit, you'd see it's not about approaching the issue with doubt that clouds the issue, but approaching it as if it must be true-as-written. The sheer thermodynamics of that much rain are mind-boggling, from the rate at which the rain must have fallen (in inches per hour) to the thermal effects of that much condensation in the atmosphere, if you want to really look at an issue with the story that doesn't involve feeding animals or how a 450+ foot long wooden boat managed to survive for a year when the best architects of wooden ships at the beginning of the 20th century couldn't build a 350 foot long wooden boat that survived (it immediately had problems with flooding, needed a steam engine to keep its holds pumped dry, and wound up foundering after 15 years of operation, 1909-1924), even with steel reinforcement. In other words, your Ark could not have floated successfully, bearing the kind of loads you're talking about, and would have foundered and sank as soon as it hit its first waves in the massive storm that caused the flood... there are about a dozen other major reasons the Ark is physically impossible...

It's. A. Myth!