February 2017:
WATER WATER EVERYWHERE BUT NARY A DROP TO BE FOUND!
One of the petty peeves of an apostate (like me) is that he often wonders how on earth he ever came to accept religious doctrines that flatly contradict facts known to science — some of those facts being so simple that a sixth-grader could deduce them. Here is an example (others appear elsewhere on this “An Atheist Home Page” forum).
I did a little calculation to see how much water Noah’s god needed to flood the earth to the top of Mount Ararat. (The calculation is so easy that any Noah of today could perform it. All he’d need are: the formula for the volume of a spherical shell, the radius of the earth, and the height of Mt. Ararat. Here’s my back-of-the-envelope shot at it.
The Result:
Water volume to cover Earth to the top of Ararat is V = (4/3).(п).(R3–r3)
Where r is earth’s radius from its core up to sea level, and R is earth’s radius up to top of Ararat. (If h is the height of Ararat above sea level, R= r + h.)
From Wikipedia: r = 6,371 km, and h = 5.137 km (So, R = 6376.137 km)
Thus V = 1,085,831,769,358 km3 (1.086 x1012 cubic kilometers)
But the total water on earth now is 1,386,000,000 km3 1.39×109 km3 (Wikipedia)
So, Noah’s flood required 783 times the total water on earth — not twice, not ten times, nor even a hundred times, but nearly a thousand times. In other words, the earth contains less than one-tenth of one percent of the water needed to flood the world up to the top of Mount Ararat.
(Analogy: If Noah’s flood required one bucket of water to drown all earth, the earth has only one tea-spoonful!)
Question 1: Did the rest come from outside the earth?
(Wikipedia says our atmosphere holds only 0.001% of the earth’s water!)
Question 2: Where did all the extra water go after the flood?
[When I emailed “Answers in Genesis” to ask this question in 2017, they shot back that “ALL THAT WATER IS STILL HERE ON EARTH”!!!]
BTW: Why did Genesis bring Noah’s ark down to rest on Mount Ararat? Clearly, geography was severely limited for the stone-age men who wrote the bible. If they had known of and used Mt. Everest as Noah’s final refuge, the value of h in the equation above would be 8.85 km (nearly twice that for Ararat) — and the deluge water needed to top the mountain and really drown everything on earth would have been far greater than the value of 1.086 x1012 km3 calculated above.
For data, see: https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html