Awww...just when I was getting homesick for MAD, someone goes and starts a Noah's ark thread on MD. How nice.
Here's a recent thread from MAD where the subject is argued ad nauseum.
Here are some of my thoughts from conversations past:
I believe Noah's flood was not global, for reasons too innumerable to mention. But I believe the Old Testament describes a global flood.
I do not believe the flood could have been local, for reasons including the following:
- In the time it would take to build an ark, Noah and co. could have just walked to higher ground and camped out.
- An ark as huge as described in the Bible would take very deep water to float. A local flood wouldn't be deep enough.
- The ark supposedly ended up in the mountains. A local flood couldn't float a boat into the mountains.
- Local floods are inefficient and imprecise ways to kill people. Disease or war is much better, and God has used both to better effect.
- A local flood would wipe out very, very few species. Even fewer if those species could have migrated to higher ground before the flood.
- A local flood renders the covenant between God and Noah as meaningless and silly. And broken thousands of times since.
An ark wouldn't be needed to save animals from a local flood. You might have a few species of insects that are only found in the specific area to be flooded, and don't have the wherewithal for God to inspire a few to migrate to higher ground for a year; it probably wouldn't be too many. I seriously doubt there is a middle-eastern local-flood plain with more than a few such isolated species. Instead of an Ark, Noah probably could have put all the endangered species into his pocket with room to spare for a pita and some hummus.
And keeping in mind that the Bible gives the flood a depth of 15 cubits (about 22 feet), the endangered animals just needed to get to the nearest mountain range with a height greater than 22 feet to stay out of the flood waters. That would actually have worked for Noah and his family too.
None of the proponents of a local flood have ever gone so far as to actually propose a geography for where the local flood might take place. They can't. The best we can get is some vague generalization about the world "being different back then". The second we try to apply a "local flood theory" to any, you know, real place, it falls to shambles because there isn't a geography anywhere in the world that meets the requirements for a local flood theory. Meaning, the water would have to be deep enough to float an ark into the mountains or hills, deep enough to remain for a year, and wide enough to wipe out whole species of animals and every population that was known to a man who had lived in the land for over a hundred years. And big enough that a bird couldn't fly out to the edge of the flood waters.
The second we start to viewing the scriptures from the "point of view of the author", we totally nullify the ability to have faith in the scriptures (or our modern leaders.) What other stories have been misinterpreted because we couldn't read the mind of the author?
As I've said many times before, my favorite thing about the local flood theory is how silly it makes the whole story. It's like a giant joke, and not even God, Noah, and the modern apostles knew about it. Every verse takes on a bizarrely weird meaning, in which every word means something other than what it says.