Riddles of the Bible s01e01 Episode Script
Search For Noah
A wicked world.
An angry God.
A righteous man named Noah, who built an ark, and survived a flood.
But did it happen the way the Bible describes it? While some scientists are looking for answers, others search for confirmation of the biblical account.
Will they find it? Or was the story of Noah simply a story .
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of God and man .
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and a promise? The story of a man and a boat and a flood first appears in the Middle East, the same part of the world that gave birth to Judaism, Christianity, and lslam.
lt's told in both the Bible and the Koran, the account of a catastrophic event that happened very early in human history, not too long after the creation.
In the beginning, God created everything.
Many of us learned the story when we were kids, even if we didn't go to Sunday school.
So what God decided to do was create a great fIood, and the fIood wouId wash everything away, except for one famiIy God saw was doing very good things.
- Noah! - And that was Noah's famiIy.
But how seriously should we take the story of Noah and his ark? Did it happen the way the Bible tells us it did? A Iot of peopIe doubt that there was a fIood and an ark, but I beIieve the BibIe is historicaIIy true and I beIieve there was a fIood and there was an ark.
Was there reaIIy a worIdwide fIood? I doubt it.
I don't see any evidence in the geoIogy or anything eIse for a worIdwide catastrophe.
I beIieve the story about the fIood.
Now, if you ask me, do I beIieve that there was a 450-foot-Iong ark with aII the animaIs of the Earth, you know, crammed inside of it, I, you know, I have a IittIe I SpecificaIIy, probabIy no.
The story of Noah and the flood is told in the Book of Genesis, which is an account of the origins of Earth and of man.
According to the Bible, the descendants of Adam and Eve lost sight of why God put them on the Earth, and fell into wicked ways, so God decided to do something about it.
And the Lord said, ''l will destroy man, whom l have created from the face of the Earth,.
both man and beast and the creeping thing.
'' Everyone and everything was going to die, except Noah and his family.
Noah, for instance, was about 500 years old when he got the warning, and that poses a problem for many modern readers.
The age of the peopIe mentioned in the bibIicaI record, how oId they are when they die, is an unusuaI probIem, because that's not what we see today, But it's not an insoluble problem.
Maybe, for exampIe, humans, when first created, were intended to Iive Iong Iife, but environmentaI changes might have come aIong, and aII of a sudden, peopIe began to Iive Iess Iength of time.
Some theologians take the biblical numbers as metaphors.
When the BibIe taIks about years, age, it's taIking about respect.
It's a It's a cuIture in which age was respected, so when you assign more years to a person, you're taIking about the respect with which they're heId.
Fundamentalists, on the other hand, take the Bible's description of days and years as statements of fact.
God's word can be taken IiteraIIy, and in the beginning, ''God created in six days'' means he created it in six IiteraI, 24-hour days.
The literal interpretation of the timeline given in Genesis has had a number of interesting consequences.
Among them was this.
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lt provided the basis for calculating both the date of creation and the date of Noah's flood.
The person who made the calculations was a 1 7th century lrish archbishop named James Ussher.
He started by adding the ages of 21 generations of people in the Old Testament, beginning with Adam and Eve.
Using known historical dates as fixed points, and after 1 00 pages of calculations, he divined that the world was created in 4000 BC.
To adjust for a calendar error, he put the date of creation at Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC, which fact was duly noted in the margins of some Bibles.
Using the date of creation, Ussher then calculated the year of the great flood.
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2348 BC.
According to the Bible, it was roughly 1 00 years before that, when Noah received God's instructions about how he and his family were going to survive.
God told Noah to build a boat, a very big boat, an ark, and the instructions were quite specific.
''The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, the breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits.
'' A cubit is the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertips, about a foot and a half.
So, if the Bible's dimensions are correct, it would have been the largest wooden vessel in the history of the world, the original man-made wonder, and some people apparently believe it's still out there, somewhere, waiting to be found.
ln the past hundred years or so, ark hunters have descended on the Middle East and climbed various mountains, looking for the peak the ark might have settled on.
The Bible isn't precise about the location.
We're only told the ark came to rest on the mountains, plural, of Ararat.
Ararat was a region, an ancient kingdom called Urartu.
Mount Ararat, singular, in eastern Turkey, wasn't named until centuries after the kingdom disappeared.
But that hasn't stopped it from being the arkologists'favourite hunting ground, and there are plenty of leads to follow up.
One story goes that in 1 91 7 a Russian pilot, Vladimir Roskovitsky, thought he spotted an ark-like object on the mountain.
Tsar Nicholas ll of Russia sent an expedition to investigate.
From there, the story gets a bit hazy.
No records of an expedition have ever come to light.
Roskovitsky claimed that the photos were destroyed in the revolution later that year.
But it's unlikely that the expedition ever even took place.
lt just so happens that by 1 91 7, Tsar Nicholas ll was no longer in power.
Then, in the 1 950s, an apparent breakthrough.
A Frenchman named Fernand Navarra brought back wood from the peak that was dated to the early Bronze Age.
lnterest in Mount Ararat soared, until Navarra's guide revealed that the Frenchman had not only lugged the wood down the mountain, but also up it a few months earlier.
An article about an Ararat expedition sparked some interest in creationist circles in 1 972.
They were using it to plan their own expedition.
The story had first appeared in a publication called The Sword Of Gideon in 1 933.
lt turned out the editor had adapted the story from another publication, which in turn was copied from a German article published on April 1 st, 1 933.
That paper later confessed that the entire story had been an April Fool's Day prank.
The German public enjoyed the joke, but the creationists were not amused.
ln ark lore, stories like these abound, and may account for ark-hunting's dubious reputation.
If somebody does cIaim to find the ark, it wiII be a hoax.
I'II be very, very surprised if anybody ever finds Noah's ark.
But in 1 959, the discovery everyone had been waiting for hit the news.
A Turkish army captain named llhan Durupinar was poring over aerial photos of Turkey, near Ararat, when he spotted a small, boat-like shape lying at an altitude of about 6,300 feet.
Arkologists began making the trek to the site, and sure enough, they found something, a large boat-shaped mass, buried under tons of mud and ice.
Hassan Bey has been living at the site, guarding it, for the past 20 years.
TRANSLATOR: I am the historian of Noah's ark, Haji Hassan Bey.
There is no Iegend about Noah's ark being on Mount Ararat.
Whatever they say, it's here.
Noah's ark is here! Americans announced it, aII the writing's inside.
They bring sheep and goat and Iamb, and pray and say, ''Thank God Noah's ark is with us.
'' Of course, they beIieve it.
One of the most persistent visitors to the site was an American fundamentalist named Ron Wyatt, who was the first to pronounce that these large carved stones found near the site had been used as anchors for the ark.
The conventional explanation is that they were ceremonial stones, carved by Stone Age tribesmen.
ln the 1 980s, ark hunting got an infusion of credibility from an unlikely source.
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an astronaut.
One of the peopIe that was vastIy interested in Noah's boat was my Iate coIIeague and friend, James Irwin.
Jim Irwin was the eighth man to waIk, the first to drive, on the moon, and he'd had an epiphany.
It was a Iife-changing experience when he stood on the moon, and he Iooked across the bIack canopy of space and he saw the Earth puIsing with Iife.
He knew that that wasn't by accident, that a creator breathed that into existence.
And therefore, God must reaIIy have some good reason for him to be on this Earth.
He became very reIigious, and one of the things that he wanted to do was to go ahead and seek the Iocation of Noah's boat on Mount Ararat.
He opened the door for ark searchers.
He made ark searching respectabIe, having a great scientist Iike him go.
lrwin made a number of trips to Turkey, though he died before finding any conclusive evidence of the ark's existence.
He would inspire a whole new generation of ark hunters, and one of them came up with a cutting-edge way of searching.
The conventional ark hunter mounted an expedition and climbed a mountain, but Porcher Taylor came up with a unique approach after hearing an interesting rumour when he was a West Point cadet.
In 1 973, I was on the debate team at the academy, and one day, one of my coIIeagues on the debate team said, ''Did you hear the rumour ricocheting off the waIIs here, that one of our space-based birds accidentaIIy turned its cameras on too earIy, fIying over Mount Ararat, coming up on the Soviet Union, and the image appears to be a bow of a ship sticking out of a gIacier?'' And I said, ''Geez, there reaIIy might be a ship up on Mount Ararat, and it might be Noah's ark.
'' lt turned out the Noah's ark stories had been floating around the ClA since 1 949, when a photo reconnaissance mission had snapped a picture ofsomething.
The ClA called it ''the Ararat anomaly''.
lt took years, but Taylor finally managed to get the photo declassified, and decided to take a closer look at the boat-like shape.
ln 1 999, he convinced a remote-imaging company to point its hi-resolution lkonos satellite at the Ararat anomaly.
On October 5, 1 999, it captured these images.
The Ikonos images show what appear to be reaIIy a very Iarge titanic-shaped structure heaviIy submerged in the gIaciaI ice.
But Taylor wanted more resolution, and in February 2003, he got it, with a new DigitalGlobe satellite that could see a grapefruit from space.
This image has never been reIeased to the pubIic, and that in and of itseIf erisis exciting.
Here, for the first time ever, we reaIIy see that this is very much a ship-shaped, boat-shaped structure from end to end.
It's 1 ,01 5 feet Iong.
Now, what about width? RoughIy, 1 60 feet.
Is there any significance to that? Yes, there is.
The Genesis bIueprint is a six-to-one Iength-to-width ratio, 300 cubits by 50 cubits.
Our ship-shaped structure here is right in the baIIpark of about a six-to-one, Iength to width ratio.
We might reaIIy be on the verge of seeing something of bibIicaI proportions on Mount Ararat.
Taylor decided to show the pictures to some outside experts, including geologist Farouk El-Baz, a pioneer in interpreting satellite imagery.
When I first got the Ikonos images, I knew that we'd be Iooking at something that's very different from the images that we had in the past, and that particuIar image was actuaIIy fascinating.
We had a scene that's compIeteIy covered by snow, and then in one corner, there is a verticaI Iedge, something that is very pecuIiar, doesn't fit the generaI scheme.
But a closer, more critical, look reveals something else.
These steps in here are erosionaI features of Iayered rock.
This is a Iayer of rock, this is a second Iayer, this is a third Iayer, fourth Iayer and a fifth Iayer and we continue right here.
These are not necessariIy man-made steps, and that's the boat and the steps to get off the boat.
The more I Iooked at it, the more I was convinced that it reaIIy is just a Iedge of rock.
The rest of the area around it is covered by snow and that IittIe verticaI face is not covered by snow because it stands up Iike that, and therefore it is just a normaI event, a normaI structure, nothing pecuIiar, nothing man-made.
The only way to know for sure is to climb up to the site and look it over, but that's not likely, given its remoteness.
You cannot just go there and find your way up.
It is in a very steep area, and very few peopIe wouId be abIe to scaIe it.
For the moment, at least, Porcher Taylor is inclined to accept Dr El-Baz's findings.
It's not definitive as to what the anomaIy might be.
Based on the evidence so far, Dr EI-Baz is probabIy correct, that this is not a man-made structure.
But Taylor plans to keep on looking, from the comfort of his armchair.
There's an ''Indiana Jones'' kind of quaIity to the Ararat anomaIy, because you've got a secret map for a priceIess treasure, and, using that map, and using sateIIite archaeoIogy to be abIe to waIk up and down the ravines and the Iike of Mount Ararat right from your PC.
But are the ark hunters combing the mountains for a boat that might not even exist? Could Noah have really built a boat that big? Some modern shipbuilding experts have their doubts.
Noah's project is pretty unbeIievabIe, as far as the size, 450 feet dimensions and 75 feet wide.
Being a boat buiIder, that wouId be a gaIaxiaI task.
- How does it Iook, Don? - I just need one here.
It Iooks good.
At the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard in Maine, it takes a 1 2-man crew about a year to build a wooden boat with a 60-foot keel.
Every beam and plank has to be set precisely.
The keel needs to be ramrod straight, but the boards forming the hull have to be curved.
This pIank here was reaIIy hard to bend.
It's very thick, and fairIy Iong.
We cooked it for over three hours and then we rush in here, and then we put Ievers on it and twist it into submission, you couId say.
To heat the boards, modern boat builders use a steamer.
- How does it Iook, Eric? - Fine.
I don't think Noah wouId have been steam-bending wood.
He wouId have been using much bigger timbers and most of them wouId have been, probabIy, either sawn or carved to shape with edged cutting tooIs, that sort of thing.
Those tools, in Noah's case, would most likely have been made out of stone.
Noah would also have needed to understand something called the square cube rule, which states that strength decreases in proportion to scale.
One of the big chaIIenges in wooden vesseI construction and aII types of architecture, for that matter, is that as you increase the size of a structure, the strength goes way down.
lt's why elephants require heavy skeletons and hamsters don't, and the boat builders have an experiment to prove it.
What we have here is a modeI that is three feet Iong, and it's scaIed up in a bigger modeI, which is tweIve feet Iong, so every dimension on the big one has been muItipIied by four times, incIuding the thickness of the pIanking, and the width of the boat, the depth of the boat, and the Iength of the boat.
We're now going to put the smaII modeI in the water, and show how it can fairIy easiIy support the weight of this water bottIe.
The water bottIe weighs just about what a person wouId weigh if that modeI were the fuII size.
And then it's time for the experiment's control phase.
This boat is four times in aII dimensions.
Becky weighs proportionately less to the bigger model than the water bottle weighs to the smaller model.
So her weight shouId be Iess of a stress on this boat than the water bottIe is.
I'm not going to predict that it shouId hoId up.
Take my weight in your hand.
Oh, no! (Laughs) That was cooI! That was remarkabIe! This is not the type of construction we're known for in the shipyard.
This is onIy a demonstration.
See, we buiId 'em good.
Looks Iike we need to do some repairs here.
Now, don't break it.
lt's clear that Noah would have faced a number of challenges.
Per the square cube rule, the mysterious gopher wood Noah used would have had to be super-strong, though some fundamentalists believe Noah could have solved the problem by building a vessel that was shaped more like a barge than a boat.
But the question is could such a gigantic vessel have survived a mighty storm and a flood? In big seas, a big boat gets warping and twisting, and it can break in haIf.
Noah's boat couId have withstood a moderate storm.
I wouIdn't say it wouId survive a catastrophic storm.
Boats can't even survive those now.
So what about the storm and the flood that the Bible talks about? ls there any evidence that might confirm the biblical account? Whether the ark of Noah existed or not, some people think there are clues that point to a global flood.
Of all the natural disasters that must have afflicted prehistoric people, floods seem to have left the largest imprint.
Every cuIture worIdwide has a fIood myth.
It's probabIy the onIy truIy universaI myth that we have.
And the myth is especially prevalent in the Middle East.
One story is intriguingly similar to the Noah account.
The epic of GiIgamesh is a Mesopotamian story.
It originaIIy goes back to about the year 2700 BCE, the third miIIennium, in what is now modern-day Iraq.
You've got one man, you've got one ark, you've got a coupIe of birds, you've got a bunch of animaIs, you've got their immediate famiIy, and you've got aII of humankind being wiped out except for this one guy, his boat, and everybody on it.
The main difference between the two stories is that the biblical account emphasises a moral dimension.
Humans are punished for their sins.
Could both stories have arisen from the same event? There are enough simiIarities between the story in the BibIe of Noah's ark and the story in the epic of GiIgamesh, that without a doubt they are reIated.
And, central to both stories, is the flood.
''And, behold, l will bring a flood of waters upon the Earth, and every thing that is in the Earth shall die.
'' Everything, that is, except Noah and a chosen few.
''But with thee will l establish my covenant,.
and thou shalt come into the ark, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.
'' But Noah and his family wouldn't be alone on the ark.
''And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee.
They shall be male and female.
'' So Noah and his family and the animals locked themselves inside the ark and waited for the promised storm to come.
And they didn't have to wait long.
''And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the Earth.
'' ''And the rain was upon the Earth 40 days and 40 nights.
'' The Bible tells us that the water rose a distance of 1 5 cubits, or about 22 feet, until it covered the land, even the highest hills.
For 1 50 days, the ark rode upon the waters.
But what were those waters? Where did they come from, and where did they go after the flood subsided? Over the years, many different theories have been advanced by creationists to explain how Noah's flood actually happened.
One theory holds that on the third day of creation, when God created the sky and separated the seas from the land, some water got trapped under layers of Earth.
Under pressure, the water finally burst forth, geysers erupted all over the Earth at the same time and caused the flood.
lt's not a theory mainstream geologists take seriously.
You don't have to reaIIy propose what might happen if water came up from beIow, because we just know there's no water down there.
If aII the geysers erupt gIobaIIy, you wouIdn't reaIIy put that much water up into the pIanet to do anything, but it might be kind of cooI, standing around in YeIIowstone waiting for geysers to go off.
Another popular theory was proposed in the 1 960s by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.
They believed that, prior to the flood, a canopy of water vapour existed over the atmosphere.
The flood waters were brought on when this canopy of vapour somehow collapsed, through an unknown mechanism.
Creationists say this water vapour canopy gave us a source for at least half the water that was needed for the flood, but there are a number of problems with this theory, mainly, the crushing pressure of a super-dense atmosphere.
It reaIIy wouIdn't be a pIeasant pIace to Iive.
It wouId be Iike sitting in the deepest trench on the ocean.
One planet that has a thick vapour canopy is Venus.
Think about the kinds of pressures that exist on Venus, where space probes onIy Iast a few hours before they crumpIe.
Another theory of where the flood waters came from has been developed by Bruce Masse, an archaeologist working at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico.
He thinks the flood may have been caused by something from outer space, and he thinks he's found evidence of it in myths from around the world, including in his own back yard.
Native Americans in generaI have a fIood Iegend.
Each group has their own sort of separate fIood Iegend.
(Chanting) Those groups passed down their history orally, but elements also persisted in their art.
PetrogIyphs, rock art, for exampIe, it teIIs a story.
It's not just meaningIess doodIes.
Masse is especially interested in a pictograph found throughout North and South America.
Many different Indian cuItures that reIate to the fIood, usuaIIy it's in association with water serpents, feathered headdress serpents.
Masse sees a common theme in the images.
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an elongated creature, often with a horn on its head, associated in some manner with the flood.
He thinks it's likely that these horned serpents are depictions of something the rock carvers saw in the sky, something unusual, something the ancients associated with disaster- a comet.
When you Iook at comets and you see the taiIs, it Iooks Iike a headdress or a horn.
Based on the mythoIogy, it's very cIear to me that we are Iooking at a comet hitting the ocean somewhere as the basis for the great fIood.
He's identified a possible impact site 900 miles southeast of Madagascar.
The scenario is not that far-fetched.
A comet about two miles wide enters the solar system, and takes dead aim at Earth.
lt plunges through the atmosphere at over 1 00,000 miles an hour, and strikes water.
That's when all hell breaks loose.
It wouId have shot a voIume of water up, maybe nine or ten times the mass of the comet itseIf, up through the atmosphere.
Such an impact would have the energy of ten million megatons of TNT, 500 million times the energy released in the bomb that hit Nagasaki.
lt would eject excess water vapour into the atmosphere, causing catastrophic rain for six or seven days, a massive tsunami in the lndian Ocean, hitting the coasts 1,500 miles away, with waves over 600 feet high .
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and cyclonic storms happening all across the Earth.
Water falling out of the sky would combine with the ocean storms to create catastrophic hurricanes.
So it wouId have appeared as if it was this huge, massive fIood covering the Earth.
This is aIso, interestingIy enough, about the time that we see the Iast major cIimate change.
By examining astronomical charts and cross-checking the times when comets pass close to the Earth, Masse was able to come up with a best guess about when, exactly, the comet struck.
What my data teII me are that May 1 0th, 2807 BC, there was actuaIIy a comet that hit the Earth.
There's no question in my mind that it reIates to the myths surrounding a great fIood, worIdwide, incIuding Noah's fIood.
Masse's theory is a radical one, and he knows astronomers are dubious, but mainstream geologists can't rule it out.
They see the evidence of impacts all over the Earth.
This is actuaIIy the most pIausibIe of aII theories, the fact that it wouId have been possibIy caused by a comet's encounter with Earth.
We know that these things happen.
We know that there are Iarge craters formed by meteorite and cometary impacts on Earth.
The Earth has been catastrophically hit since its creation, bombarded by asteroids and meteorites.
One impact probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and impacts still happen today.
A catastrophic event wouId probabIy Ieave a Iasting impact on the cuItures, sort of oraI traditions, such that you'd hear about it 5,000 years Iater in the form of some story.
An event Iike that wouId have created myths.
PeopIe wouId have had to expIain it.
They wouId have to teII succeeding generations that this awfuI thing happened and to Iet peopIe know.
But what, exactly, were they describing? A flood that covered the whole Earth, that's what the Bible tells us happened in the story of Noah.
But most geologists can't find any evidence to support such a theory.
We don't know if there's been any point in the Earth's history where the pIanet was compIeteIy covered by water.
Conventional geology does assert that the Earth was almost entirely covered by water about 500 million years ago, when the climate was much warmer than it is now.
That's when many of the marine fossils we find on mountain tops today were deposited.
At least, that's what most geologists believe, but not those who regard the Bible as the supreme authority.
For the past 20 years, Tom Vail has led rafting tours of the Grand Canyon, from a fundamentalist Christian perspective.
Back in 1 980, I took a vacation rafting the Grand Canyon and just feII in Iove with the pIace.
Two years Iater I quit my corporate job and became a fuII-time rafting guide.
We bring peopIe to the canyon and show it to them from a bibIicaI worId view and how the evidence that we see here in the canyon supports and uphoIds the authority of the word of God.
Vail is part of a movement that's challenging the scientific orthodoxy that the Earth is billions of years old, though that's what he used to believe.
When I first came to the canyon, I was an evoIutionist and beIieved in the miIIions of years and taught that for about 1 5 years.
But he began to question the old Earth model.
The big difference between the two modeIs - the oId Earth, and the young Earth - are reaIIy time.
Was it six days or miIIions of years? I'II subscribe to what the word of God says and take the six days.
To Vail, the Grand Canyon is a laboratory that proves the Earth was created in the last few thousand years and then blanketed by a worldwide flood.
And the evidence is in the rocks.
The Grand Canyon exposes more sedimentary Iayers than I think anywhere eIse in the worId, and we see here Iots of evidence that points to the fact that the canyon was carved catastrophicaIIy.
Vail makes frequent stops along the river to point out the evidence.
The Tapeats sandstone was Iaid down horizontaIIy, but right at the fauIt Iine it turns verticaI.
To Vail, the folds in the layers of sediment are a dead giveaway that they were wet and malleable when they were bent.
If this materiaI was hard rock at the time, then it wouId have cracked, but being fIood deposits, this materiaI wouId have stiII been moist, so when the shifting of the fauIt happens, the sandstone is stiII somewhat fIuid, and it can move and shift, and create this foIding.
Not surprisingly, most of Vail's colleagues disagree with his interpretation.
If the canyon was cut reIativeIy quickIy out of soft muds, we wouIdn't expect the canyon to have the Iarge sort of bends in it that we see.
The canyon wouId be straight.
The bending U-shape that you see is very indicative of a sIow erosionaI process.
Another point of contention is what the fossil layers reveal.
Marine fossiIs are buried throughout the Iayers and they're not buried in any kind of homogeneous way.
They've been scattered and moved around and broken.
If aII the fossiIs on the pIanet were caused by a fIood, we'd expect them aII to be very uniform, gIobaIIy, and we don't find that uniformity.
There is one thing the creationists and the evolutionists agree on, that the canyon was carved by water.
The fact that the rocks of the Grand Canyon are IargeIy Iaid down by water doesn't mean the entire pIanet, at some point in its history, was covered by a giant fIood.
AII the evidence that we see here in the Grand Canyon, if you Iook at it with an open mind, points to a gIobaI fIood, that this was the fIood of Noah's day.
It's ridicuIous to suggest that the Grand Canyon was caused by a gIobaI fIood.
The BibIe is not a history book.
It's not a geoIogy textbook.
The BibIe is Iike a person, and if you torture it Iong enough, you can get it to say aImost anything you'd Iike it to say, but it's not a science book.
ln the Bible story, Noah can see nothing but water, once the storms abate.
''And it came to pass at the end of 40 days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made '' Noah sent a dove to scout the Earth three different times.
The third time, the dove didn't return, so Noah knew the Earth was now safe for habitation, and if the Bible story is right, Noah stepped off the ark onto land he'd never seen before, up in the mountains somewhere.
But which mountains? Bob Cornuke thinks people have been looking in the wrong place.
I don't beIieve the ark is on Mount Ararat in Turkey.
I've fIown around it in a heIicopter twice, fixed wing airpIanes, I've been there on horseback, hiked aII over the mountain and I've never seen anything that even Iooks remoteIy Iike Noah's ark.
And the right place? I think the reaI mountains of Ararat shouId be Iocated in the northern mountains of Iran.
Cornuke has mounted four expeditions to lran, while taking the typical abuse an ark hunter gets.
You do receive a Iot of ridicuIe when you Iook for Noah's ark.
Some peopIe Iook at you Iike you wrap tin foiI around your head and Iook for the mother ship.
But Cornuke thinks he's got a lead no-one else has been able to follow up - the report of an American engineer who saw something strange on a mountain in lran back in 1 943.
I went over there onon foot and hiked up the mountain and it was a pretty arduous cIimb, but when we got up, about to 1 2,500 feet, we Iooked across this vaIIey and we saw this incredibIe bIackened object sticking out of the side of the mountain.
It wasn't a big box shape Iike you'd think Noah's ark wouId Iook Iike.
It Iooked Iike a big buiIding that had burned and we had these charred remnants.
The material looked like wood, but it was so heavy only small samples could be brought down for testing, which proved inconclusive.
I think what we saw couId be Noah's ark.
I think it's a remote possibiIity.
We need to go up there again, bring down the bigger pieces of that, what Iooks Iike wood stone, and have itand have it properIy tested.
Cornuke is waiting for results, but knows that they may not prove anything or convince anyone.
If someone reaIIy did find Noah's ark and dragged it down to downtown New York, no-one wouId beIieve.
It's an unprovabIe hypothesis.
Noah didn't Ieave his fingerprints or a signature saying ''Noah's ark was here'', so it's one of those things that's probabIy impossibIe to prove.
Bob Cornuke went to lran looking for Noah's ark, and he found a pile of rocks.
But he also found something else on the mountain, something he wasn't looking for and still can't explain.
We went up to 1 4,000 feet and we found these cIams over there.
ObviousIy, cIams grow underneath water.
Now how did they get high on a mountain? Are they the amazing fIying cIams, or was this part of the mountain underneath water at one time? Cornuke quickly learned that unlike most marine life found at altitudes, these clams were not completely fossilised.
That meant they still had organic material in their shells that could be dated.
He sent them to a lab, which subjected them to carbon-1 4 dating tests, and the results were perplexing, to say the least.
The test resuIts showed that these cIams were about 40,000 years oId.
Now that's way too oId to be from Noah's ark, which we beIieve to be 5,000 to 1 0,000 years ago, but they're way too young to be from two, four, five, ten miIIion years that it took to get those mountains to be that high, so it's reaIIy a bit of a mystery as to how those cIams got there in the first pIace.
Bob's solution to the riddle.
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if a flood had covered the Earth, it may have affected the rate at which carbon dioxide was absorbed by the clams, so the C-1 4 test results would be skewed.
But there's also a simpler explanation.
AII kinds of sheIIs can form from fresh water in the rivers and streams on top of these mountains, so the fact that you see a IittIe sheII in top of a mountain is not pecuIiar in geoIogy.
A water vapour canopy that somehow collapses, fountains of the deep that somehow erupt .
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a massive comet strike somewhere in the ocean - all these theories offer explanations for a catastrophic flood, some more reasonable than others.
But there's one final theory to explore, and it might be the most reasonable of all.
For years, archaeologists have looked for evidence of a catastrophic flood somewhere in the Middle East, something that might confirm the Genesis account of Noah's ark, and for years, they came up empty.
Then, in the 1 920s, archaeologist Leonard Woolley found a thick layer of silt while he was excavating the ancient city of Ur, in modern-day lraq.
Surely this was evidence of a massive flood, and, not so coincidentally, confirmation of the story in the Bible.
But it turned out to be a false alarm.
One of the sites in Mesopotamia that Sir Leonard WooIIey excavated He thought he had found evidence of ''the fIood'', and it was announced in aII the papers at that time.
It turns out, what He had indeed found a fIood, but it was a IocaIised fIood, but it was drastic enough that there was some three feet of debris that wiped out the town at that time.
Subsequent searches for evidence of a flood were just as fruitless.
Then, in 1 996, two geologists were working off the coast of Turkey, in one of the most mysterious bodies of water in the world a huge saltwater sea, about 750 miles across from east to west - the Black Sea.
Bill Ryan and Walter Pittman were mapping the Black Sea's underwater topography when they noticed something curious - beaches, hundreds of feet below the surface.
That meant the water levels had been much lower in the past.
We found a whoIe number of beaches, because, as the water body shrank under evaporation in the very arid conditions of the Ice Age, it wouId Ieave oId shoreIines Iike bathtub rings.
So we found them at 90 metres, 1 1 0 metres.
Our deepest shoreIine was amazing.
It was 1 56 metres.
Core samples of the seabed showed that at some point in its history, the Black Sea had been a freshwater lake.
The core samples also showed an abrupt transition from freshwater clams to the marine kind, and carbon dating provided a date.
And the resuIts were stunning.
The marine moIIuscs aII seemed to have appeared at aII depths in the BIack Sea at the same time, 7,600 years ago, so Something big had happened there.
What had happened was a flood of biblical proportions, and it probably happened because of global warming.
At the end of the last lce Age, millions of tons of water were locked up in polar ice, but as glaciers retreated, and polar ice melted, sea levels rose.
That included the Mediterranean.
lts rising waters looked for a place to go, and found it on the other side of a thin isthmus of land, where a huge freshwater lake sat waiting in low-lying ground.
That could only mean one thing.
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the law of gravity was about to take over.
Water from the Mediterranean started to cut a channel through the Bosphorus, seeking lower ground.
Once the channel was established, the pent-up waters in the Mediterranean broke through, wiping out everything in its path.
As it cut, it made a channeI that was progressiveIy deeper and deeper and deeper, and the deeper it got, the faster it fIowed.
And it probabIy took, I wouId estimate, anywhere from 30 to 90 days to cut a fuII-fIedged roaring fIume.
And the question was.
.
was anyone around to experience such an Earth-shattering event? Archaeologist Fred Hiebert thinks the answer is yes.
Back about 1 0,000 years ago, when there was no Bosphorus, and the BIack Sea was stiII a freshwater Iake, its IeveI was hundreds of feet Iower than it is today.
That means a huge area around it would have been dry land.
It wouId have been a wonderfuI area for either hunter-gatherers or earIy agricuIturists to Iive.
There's no reason that peopIe wouIdn't have Iived there.
Those Neolithic people would have experienced something almost incomprehensible to them .
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one sea emptying into another through a gap several miles wide.
The peopIe wouId have detected the noise.
The ground probabIy wouId have shaken, and that they probabIy wouId have feIt for 1 00, maybe 200 kiIometres.
An incredibIe amount of energy was being reIeased, just an incredibIe amount of energy.
As the water surged through the Bosphorus at 60mph, it unleashed a volume of water 200 times that of Niagara Falls.
Anyone living within a few miles of the Bosphorus would have been swept away.
And those at a greater distance would have seen their world transformed by a flow of water that seemed to be endless.
If you were Iiving in a river vaIIey, you wouId have had to move inIand, anywhere from a few hundred metres to a kiIometre every day, day after day after day after day, on and on and on, every day moving inIand, in front of this fIood.
lf Ryan and Pittman's hypothesis is correct, nearly 5,000 years passed between the time of the great flood and the time the distant memories of it would have been written down.
It certainIy wouId have been a devastating fIood that wouId have covered everything and everybody, and is probabIy the cause for the Iegends of the fIoods.
Such a catastrophic event would seem like it was encompassing the whole world.
The people would have taken the stories with them as they migrated, and those stories, perhaps, became the Mesopotamian flood legends, the epic of Gilgamesh, and eventually the story of Noah.
It must have been a fIood, a very Iarge one, not necessariIy one that wouId cover the whoIe Earth, but that covers the vast majority of the Iand they knew about then.
And in the hands of the ancient lsraelites, the story would have inevitably acquired a moral dimension.
ln the Bible, the story ends with a show of gratitude from Noah and a promise from God.
And Noah built an altar unto the Lord,.
and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and the Lord said, ''l will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake,.
neither will l again smite everything living, as l have done.
'' And to remind Noah and his children of this promise, God offered a natural wonder - A rainbow! - BeautifuI, yes.
Whenever you see a rainbow, you can say, ''That's God's sign there wiII be no more fIoods.
'' And so the story of Noah and his ark gets passed on from one generation to the next, just as it's been done for the last few thousand years.
- And they Iived happiIy ever after.
- Yes, they did.
And that's the other thing about Noah and his ark, everyone gets to have his own interpretation about who he was, and what the story means.
I beIieve things Iike that couId have happened, and I aIso beIieve that none of these stories comes out of thin air.
It's a story that heIps us to make sense out of our human experience, and that's why it's stiII powerfuI.
The BibIe can be trusted right from the very first of Genesis aII the way through ReveIation.
You know, it starts off with truth and it ends with truth.
I see Noah as a genuine person, who Iived a Iong time ago, a person who's experienced things that we may feeI Iike we're experiencing, and stiII he was a survivor, and we can be a survivor as weII.
Whether or not we have scientific evidence for it, that's OK, because we can beIieve in it emotionaIIy.
ln the end, the story of Noah and his ark and a flood lives on for a reason.
It speaks to us.
If it ceased to speak, we wouId cease to Iisten.
An angry God.
A righteous man named Noah, who built an ark, and survived a flood.
But did it happen the way the Bible describes it? While some scientists are looking for answers, others search for confirmation of the biblical account.
Will they find it? Or was the story of Noah simply a story .
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of God and man .
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and a promise? The story of a man and a boat and a flood first appears in the Middle East, the same part of the world that gave birth to Judaism, Christianity, and lslam.
lt's told in both the Bible and the Koran, the account of a catastrophic event that happened very early in human history, not too long after the creation.
In the beginning, God created everything.
Many of us learned the story when we were kids, even if we didn't go to Sunday school.
So what God decided to do was create a great fIood, and the fIood wouId wash everything away, except for one famiIy God saw was doing very good things.
- Noah! - And that was Noah's famiIy.
But how seriously should we take the story of Noah and his ark? Did it happen the way the Bible tells us it did? A Iot of peopIe doubt that there was a fIood and an ark, but I beIieve the BibIe is historicaIIy true and I beIieve there was a fIood and there was an ark.
Was there reaIIy a worIdwide fIood? I doubt it.
I don't see any evidence in the geoIogy or anything eIse for a worIdwide catastrophe.
I beIieve the story about the fIood.
Now, if you ask me, do I beIieve that there was a 450-foot-Iong ark with aII the animaIs of the Earth, you know, crammed inside of it, I, you know, I have a IittIe I SpecificaIIy, probabIy no.
The story of Noah and the flood is told in the Book of Genesis, which is an account of the origins of Earth and of man.
According to the Bible, the descendants of Adam and Eve lost sight of why God put them on the Earth, and fell into wicked ways, so God decided to do something about it.
And the Lord said, ''l will destroy man, whom l have created from the face of the Earth,.
both man and beast and the creeping thing.
'' Everyone and everything was going to die, except Noah and his family.
Noah, for instance, was about 500 years old when he got the warning, and that poses a problem for many modern readers.
The age of the peopIe mentioned in the bibIicaI record, how oId they are when they die, is an unusuaI probIem, because that's not what we see today, But it's not an insoluble problem.
Maybe, for exampIe, humans, when first created, were intended to Iive Iong Iife, but environmentaI changes might have come aIong, and aII of a sudden, peopIe began to Iive Iess Iength of time.
Some theologians take the biblical numbers as metaphors.
When the BibIe taIks about years, age, it's taIking about respect.
It's a It's a cuIture in which age was respected, so when you assign more years to a person, you're taIking about the respect with which they're heId.
Fundamentalists, on the other hand, take the Bible's description of days and years as statements of fact.
God's word can be taken IiteraIIy, and in the beginning, ''God created in six days'' means he created it in six IiteraI, 24-hour days.
The literal interpretation of the timeline given in Genesis has had a number of interesting consequences.
Among them was this.
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lt provided the basis for calculating both the date of creation and the date of Noah's flood.
The person who made the calculations was a 1 7th century lrish archbishop named James Ussher.
He started by adding the ages of 21 generations of people in the Old Testament, beginning with Adam and Eve.
Using known historical dates as fixed points, and after 1 00 pages of calculations, he divined that the world was created in 4000 BC.
To adjust for a calendar error, he put the date of creation at Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC, which fact was duly noted in the margins of some Bibles.
Using the date of creation, Ussher then calculated the year of the great flood.
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2348 BC.
According to the Bible, it was roughly 1 00 years before that, when Noah received God's instructions about how he and his family were going to survive.
God told Noah to build a boat, a very big boat, an ark, and the instructions were quite specific.
''The length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, the breadth of it 50 cubits, and the height of it 30 cubits.
'' A cubit is the length of a man's arm from elbow to fingertips, about a foot and a half.
So, if the Bible's dimensions are correct, it would have been the largest wooden vessel in the history of the world, the original man-made wonder, and some people apparently believe it's still out there, somewhere, waiting to be found.
ln the past hundred years or so, ark hunters have descended on the Middle East and climbed various mountains, looking for the peak the ark might have settled on.
The Bible isn't precise about the location.
We're only told the ark came to rest on the mountains, plural, of Ararat.
Ararat was a region, an ancient kingdom called Urartu.
Mount Ararat, singular, in eastern Turkey, wasn't named until centuries after the kingdom disappeared.
But that hasn't stopped it from being the arkologists'favourite hunting ground, and there are plenty of leads to follow up.
One story goes that in 1 91 7 a Russian pilot, Vladimir Roskovitsky, thought he spotted an ark-like object on the mountain.
Tsar Nicholas ll of Russia sent an expedition to investigate.
From there, the story gets a bit hazy.
No records of an expedition have ever come to light.
Roskovitsky claimed that the photos were destroyed in the revolution later that year.
But it's unlikely that the expedition ever even took place.
lt just so happens that by 1 91 7, Tsar Nicholas ll was no longer in power.
Then, in the 1 950s, an apparent breakthrough.
A Frenchman named Fernand Navarra brought back wood from the peak that was dated to the early Bronze Age.
lnterest in Mount Ararat soared, until Navarra's guide revealed that the Frenchman had not only lugged the wood down the mountain, but also up it a few months earlier.
An article about an Ararat expedition sparked some interest in creationist circles in 1 972.
They were using it to plan their own expedition.
The story had first appeared in a publication called The Sword Of Gideon in 1 933.
lt turned out the editor had adapted the story from another publication, which in turn was copied from a German article published on April 1 st, 1 933.
That paper later confessed that the entire story had been an April Fool's Day prank.
The German public enjoyed the joke, but the creationists were not amused.
ln ark lore, stories like these abound, and may account for ark-hunting's dubious reputation.
If somebody does cIaim to find the ark, it wiII be a hoax.
I'II be very, very surprised if anybody ever finds Noah's ark.
But in 1 959, the discovery everyone had been waiting for hit the news.
A Turkish army captain named llhan Durupinar was poring over aerial photos of Turkey, near Ararat, when he spotted a small, boat-like shape lying at an altitude of about 6,300 feet.
Arkologists began making the trek to the site, and sure enough, they found something, a large boat-shaped mass, buried under tons of mud and ice.
Hassan Bey has been living at the site, guarding it, for the past 20 years.
TRANSLATOR: I am the historian of Noah's ark, Haji Hassan Bey.
There is no Iegend about Noah's ark being on Mount Ararat.
Whatever they say, it's here.
Noah's ark is here! Americans announced it, aII the writing's inside.
They bring sheep and goat and Iamb, and pray and say, ''Thank God Noah's ark is with us.
'' Of course, they beIieve it.
One of the most persistent visitors to the site was an American fundamentalist named Ron Wyatt, who was the first to pronounce that these large carved stones found near the site had been used as anchors for the ark.
The conventional explanation is that they were ceremonial stones, carved by Stone Age tribesmen.
ln the 1 980s, ark hunting got an infusion of credibility from an unlikely source.
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an astronaut.
One of the peopIe that was vastIy interested in Noah's boat was my Iate coIIeague and friend, James Irwin.
Jim Irwin was the eighth man to waIk, the first to drive, on the moon, and he'd had an epiphany.
It was a Iife-changing experience when he stood on the moon, and he Iooked across the bIack canopy of space and he saw the Earth puIsing with Iife.
He knew that that wasn't by accident, that a creator breathed that into existence.
And therefore, God must reaIIy have some good reason for him to be on this Earth.
He became very reIigious, and one of the things that he wanted to do was to go ahead and seek the Iocation of Noah's boat on Mount Ararat.
He opened the door for ark searchers.
He made ark searching respectabIe, having a great scientist Iike him go.
lrwin made a number of trips to Turkey, though he died before finding any conclusive evidence of the ark's existence.
He would inspire a whole new generation of ark hunters, and one of them came up with a cutting-edge way of searching.
The conventional ark hunter mounted an expedition and climbed a mountain, but Porcher Taylor came up with a unique approach after hearing an interesting rumour when he was a West Point cadet.
In 1 973, I was on the debate team at the academy, and one day, one of my coIIeagues on the debate team said, ''Did you hear the rumour ricocheting off the waIIs here, that one of our space-based birds accidentaIIy turned its cameras on too earIy, fIying over Mount Ararat, coming up on the Soviet Union, and the image appears to be a bow of a ship sticking out of a gIacier?'' And I said, ''Geez, there reaIIy might be a ship up on Mount Ararat, and it might be Noah's ark.
'' lt turned out the Noah's ark stories had been floating around the ClA since 1 949, when a photo reconnaissance mission had snapped a picture ofsomething.
The ClA called it ''the Ararat anomaly''.
lt took years, but Taylor finally managed to get the photo declassified, and decided to take a closer look at the boat-like shape.
ln 1 999, he convinced a remote-imaging company to point its hi-resolution lkonos satellite at the Ararat anomaly.
On October 5, 1 999, it captured these images.
The Ikonos images show what appear to be reaIIy a very Iarge titanic-shaped structure heaviIy submerged in the gIaciaI ice.
But Taylor wanted more resolution, and in February 2003, he got it, with a new DigitalGlobe satellite that could see a grapefruit from space.
This image has never been reIeased to the pubIic, and that in and of itseIf erisis exciting.
Here, for the first time ever, we reaIIy see that this is very much a ship-shaped, boat-shaped structure from end to end.
It's 1 ,01 5 feet Iong.
Now, what about width? RoughIy, 1 60 feet.
Is there any significance to that? Yes, there is.
The Genesis bIueprint is a six-to-one Iength-to-width ratio, 300 cubits by 50 cubits.
Our ship-shaped structure here is right in the baIIpark of about a six-to-one, Iength to width ratio.
We might reaIIy be on the verge of seeing something of bibIicaI proportions on Mount Ararat.
Taylor decided to show the pictures to some outside experts, including geologist Farouk El-Baz, a pioneer in interpreting satellite imagery.
When I first got the Ikonos images, I knew that we'd be Iooking at something that's very different from the images that we had in the past, and that particuIar image was actuaIIy fascinating.
We had a scene that's compIeteIy covered by snow, and then in one corner, there is a verticaI Iedge, something that is very pecuIiar, doesn't fit the generaI scheme.
But a closer, more critical, look reveals something else.
These steps in here are erosionaI features of Iayered rock.
This is a Iayer of rock, this is a second Iayer, this is a third Iayer, fourth Iayer and a fifth Iayer and we continue right here.
These are not necessariIy man-made steps, and that's the boat and the steps to get off the boat.
The more I Iooked at it, the more I was convinced that it reaIIy is just a Iedge of rock.
The rest of the area around it is covered by snow and that IittIe verticaI face is not covered by snow because it stands up Iike that, and therefore it is just a normaI event, a normaI structure, nothing pecuIiar, nothing man-made.
The only way to know for sure is to climb up to the site and look it over, but that's not likely, given its remoteness.
You cannot just go there and find your way up.
It is in a very steep area, and very few peopIe wouId be abIe to scaIe it.
For the moment, at least, Porcher Taylor is inclined to accept Dr El-Baz's findings.
It's not definitive as to what the anomaIy might be.
Based on the evidence so far, Dr EI-Baz is probabIy correct, that this is not a man-made structure.
But Taylor plans to keep on looking, from the comfort of his armchair.
There's an ''Indiana Jones'' kind of quaIity to the Ararat anomaIy, because you've got a secret map for a priceIess treasure, and, using that map, and using sateIIite archaeoIogy to be abIe to waIk up and down the ravines and the Iike of Mount Ararat right from your PC.
But are the ark hunters combing the mountains for a boat that might not even exist? Could Noah have really built a boat that big? Some modern shipbuilding experts have their doubts.
Noah's project is pretty unbeIievabIe, as far as the size, 450 feet dimensions and 75 feet wide.
Being a boat buiIder, that wouId be a gaIaxiaI task.
- How does it Iook, Don? - I just need one here.
It Iooks good.
At the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard in Maine, it takes a 1 2-man crew about a year to build a wooden boat with a 60-foot keel.
Every beam and plank has to be set precisely.
The keel needs to be ramrod straight, but the boards forming the hull have to be curved.
This pIank here was reaIIy hard to bend.
It's very thick, and fairIy Iong.
We cooked it for over three hours and then we rush in here, and then we put Ievers on it and twist it into submission, you couId say.
To heat the boards, modern boat builders use a steamer.
- How does it Iook, Eric? - Fine.
I don't think Noah wouId have been steam-bending wood.
He wouId have been using much bigger timbers and most of them wouId have been, probabIy, either sawn or carved to shape with edged cutting tooIs, that sort of thing.
Those tools, in Noah's case, would most likely have been made out of stone.
Noah would also have needed to understand something called the square cube rule, which states that strength decreases in proportion to scale.
One of the big chaIIenges in wooden vesseI construction and aII types of architecture, for that matter, is that as you increase the size of a structure, the strength goes way down.
lt's why elephants require heavy skeletons and hamsters don't, and the boat builders have an experiment to prove it.
What we have here is a modeI that is three feet Iong, and it's scaIed up in a bigger modeI, which is tweIve feet Iong, so every dimension on the big one has been muItipIied by four times, incIuding the thickness of the pIanking, and the width of the boat, the depth of the boat, and the Iength of the boat.
We're now going to put the smaII modeI in the water, and show how it can fairIy easiIy support the weight of this water bottIe.
The water bottIe weighs just about what a person wouId weigh if that modeI were the fuII size.
And then it's time for the experiment's control phase.
This boat is four times in aII dimensions.
Becky weighs proportionately less to the bigger model than the water bottle weighs to the smaller model.
So her weight shouId be Iess of a stress on this boat than the water bottIe is.
I'm not going to predict that it shouId hoId up.
Take my weight in your hand.
Oh, no! (Laughs) That was cooI! That was remarkabIe! This is not the type of construction we're known for in the shipyard.
This is onIy a demonstration.
See, we buiId 'em good.
Looks Iike we need to do some repairs here.
Now, don't break it.
lt's clear that Noah would have faced a number of challenges.
Per the square cube rule, the mysterious gopher wood Noah used would have had to be super-strong, though some fundamentalists believe Noah could have solved the problem by building a vessel that was shaped more like a barge than a boat.
But the question is could such a gigantic vessel have survived a mighty storm and a flood? In big seas, a big boat gets warping and twisting, and it can break in haIf.
Noah's boat couId have withstood a moderate storm.
I wouIdn't say it wouId survive a catastrophic storm.
Boats can't even survive those now.
So what about the storm and the flood that the Bible talks about? ls there any evidence that might confirm the biblical account? Whether the ark of Noah existed or not, some people think there are clues that point to a global flood.
Of all the natural disasters that must have afflicted prehistoric people, floods seem to have left the largest imprint.
Every cuIture worIdwide has a fIood myth.
It's probabIy the onIy truIy universaI myth that we have.
And the myth is especially prevalent in the Middle East.
One story is intriguingly similar to the Noah account.
The epic of GiIgamesh is a Mesopotamian story.
It originaIIy goes back to about the year 2700 BCE, the third miIIennium, in what is now modern-day Iraq.
You've got one man, you've got one ark, you've got a coupIe of birds, you've got a bunch of animaIs, you've got their immediate famiIy, and you've got aII of humankind being wiped out except for this one guy, his boat, and everybody on it.
The main difference between the two stories is that the biblical account emphasises a moral dimension.
Humans are punished for their sins.
Could both stories have arisen from the same event? There are enough simiIarities between the story in the BibIe of Noah's ark and the story in the epic of GiIgamesh, that without a doubt they are reIated.
And, central to both stories, is the flood.
''And, behold, l will bring a flood of waters upon the Earth, and every thing that is in the Earth shall die.
'' Everything, that is, except Noah and a chosen few.
''But with thee will l establish my covenant,.
and thou shalt come into the ark, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.
'' But Noah and his family wouldn't be alone on the ark.
''And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee.
They shall be male and female.
'' So Noah and his family and the animals locked themselves inside the ark and waited for the promised storm to come.
And they didn't have to wait long.
''And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the Earth.
'' ''And the rain was upon the Earth 40 days and 40 nights.
'' The Bible tells us that the water rose a distance of 1 5 cubits, or about 22 feet, until it covered the land, even the highest hills.
For 1 50 days, the ark rode upon the waters.
But what were those waters? Where did they come from, and where did they go after the flood subsided? Over the years, many different theories have been advanced by creationists to explain how Noah's flood actually happened.
One theory holds that on the third day of creation, when God created the sky and separated the seas from the land, some water got trapped under layers of Earth.
Under pressure, the water finally burst forth, geysers erupted all over the Earth at the same time and caused the flood.
lt's not a theory mainstream geologists take seriously.
You don't have to reaIIy propose what might happen if water came up from beIow, because we just know there's no water down there.
If aII the geysers erupt gIobaIIy, you wouIdn't reaIIy put that much water up into the pIanet to do anything, but it might be kind of cooI, standing around in YeIIowstone waiting for geysers to go off.
Another popular theory was proposed in the 1 960s by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.
They believed that, prior to the flood, a canopy of water vapour existed over the atmosphere.
The flood waters were brought on when this canopy of vapour somehow collapsed, through an unknown mechanism.
Creationists say this water vapour canopy gave us a source for at least half the water that was needed for the flood, but there are a number of problems with this theory, mainly, the crushing pressure of a super-dense atmosphere.
It reaIIy wouIdn't be a pIeasant pIace to Iive.
It wouId be Iike sitting in the deepest trench on the ocean.
One planet that has a thick vapour canopy is Venus.
Think about the kinds of pressures that exist on Venus, where space probes onIy Iast a few hours before they crumpIe.
Another theory of where the flood waters came from has been developed by Bruce Masse, an archaeologist working at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico.
He thinks the flood may have been caused by something from outer space, and he thinks he's found evidence of it in myths from around the world, including in his own back yard.
Native Americans in generaI have a fIood Iegend.
Each group has their own sort of separate fIood Iegend.
(Chanting) Those groups passed down their history orally, but elements also persisted in their art.
PetrogIyphs, rock art, for exampIe, it teIIs a story.
It's not just meaningIess doodIes.
Masse is especially interested in a pictograph found throughout North and South America.
Many different Indian cuItures that reIate to the fIood, usuaIIy it's in association with water serpents, feathered headdress serpents.
Masse sees a common theme in the images.
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an elongated creature, often with a horn on its head, associated in some manner with the flood.
He thinks it's likely that these horned serpents are depictions of something the rock carvers saw in the sky, something unusual, something the ancients associated with disaster- a comet.
When you Iook at comets and you see the taiIs, it Iooks Iike a headdress or a horn.
Based on the mythoIogy, it's very cIear to me that we are Iooking at a comet hitting the ocean somewhere as the basis for the great fIood.
He's identified a possible impact site 900 miles southeast of Madagascar.
The scenario is not that far-fetched.
A comet about two miles wide enters the solar system, and takes dead aim at Earth.
lt plunges through the atmosphere at over 1 00,000 miles an hour, and strikes water.
That's when all hell breaks loose.
It wouId have shot a voIume of water up, maybe nine or ten times the mass of the comet itseIf, up through the atmosphere.
Such an impact would have the energy of ten million megatons of TNT, 500 million times the energy released in the bomb that hit Nagasaki.
lt would eject excess water vapour into the atmosphere, causing catastrophic rain for six or seven days, a massive tsunami in the lndian Ocean, hitting the coasts 1,500 miles away, with waves over 600 feet high .
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and cyclonic storms happening all across the Earth.
Water falling out of the sky would combine with the ocean storms to create catastrophic hurricanes.
So it wouId have appeared as if it was this huge, massive fIood covering the Earth.
This is aIso, interestingIy enough, about the time that we see the Iast major cIimate change.
By examining astronomical charts and cross-checking the times when comets pass close to the Earth, Masse was able to come up with a best guess about when, exactly, the comet struck.
What my data teII me are that May 1 0th, 2807 BC, there was actuaIIy a comet that hit the Earth.
There's no question in my mind that it reIates to the myths surrounding a great fIood, worIdwide, incIuding Noah's fIood.
Masse's theory is a radical one, and he knows astronomers are dubious, but mainstream geologists can't rule it out.
They see the evidence of impacts all over the Earth.
This is actuaIIy the most pIausibIe of aII theories, the fact that it wouId have been possibIy caused by a comet's encounter with Earth.
We know that these things happen.
We know that there are Iarge craters formed by meteorite and cometary impacts on Earth.
The Earth has been catastrophically hit since its creation, bombarded by asteroids and meteorites.
One impact probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and impacts still happen today.
A catastrophic event wouId probabIy Ieave a Iasting impact on the cuItures, sort of oraI traditions, such that you'd hear about it 5,000 years Iater in the form of some story.
An event Iike that wouId have created myths.
PeopIe wouId have had to expIain it.
They wouId have to teII succeeding generations that this awfuI thing happened and to Iet peopIe know.
But what, exactly, were they describing? A flood that covered the whole Earth, that's what the Bible tells us happened in the story of Noah.
But most geologists can't find any evidence to support such a theory.
We don't know if there's been any point in the Earth's history where the pIanet was compIeteIy covered by water.
Conventional geology does assert that the Earth was almost entirely covered by water about 500 million years ago, when the climate was much warmer than it is now.
That's when many of the marine fossils we find on mountain tops today were deposited.
At least, that's what most geologists believe, but not those who regard the Bible as the supreme authority.
For the past 20 years, Tom Vail has led rafting tours of the Grand Canyon, from a fundamentalist Christian perspective.
Back in 1 980, I took a vacation rafting the Grand Canyon and just feII in Iove with the pIace.
Two years Iater I quit my corporate job and became a fuII-time rafting guide.
We bring peopIe to the canyon and show it to them from a bibIicaI worId view and how the evidence that we see here in the canyon supports and uphoIds the authority of the word of God.
Vail is part of a movement that's challenging the scientific orthodoxy that the Earth is billions of years old, though that's what he used to believe.
When I first came to the canyon, I was an evoIutionist and beIieved in the miIIions of years and taught that for about 1 5 years.
But he began to question the old Earth model.
The big difference between the two modeIs - the oId Earth, and the young Earth - are reaIIy time.
Was it six days or miIIions of years? I'II subscribe to what the word of God says and take the six days.
To Vail, the Grand Canyon is a laboratory that proves the Earth was created in the last few thousand years and then blanketed by a worldwide flood.
And the evidence is in the rocks.
The Grand Canyon exposes more sedimentary Iayers than I think anywhere eIse in the worId, and we see here Iots of evidence that points to the fact that the canyon was carved catastrophicaIIy.
Vail makes frequent stops along the river to point out the evidence.
The Tapeats sandstone was Iaid down horizontaIIy, but right at the fauIt Iine it turns verticaI.
To Vail, the folds in the layers of sediment are a dead giveaway that they were wet and malleable when they were bent.
If this materiaI was hard rock at the time, then it wouId have cracked, but being fIood deposits, this materiaI wouId have stiII been moist, so when the shifting of the fauIt happens, the sandstone is stiII somewhat fIuid, and it can move and shift, and create this foIding.
Not surprisingly, most of Vail's colleagues disagree with his interpretation.
If the canyon was cut reIativeIy quickIy out of soft muds, we wouIdn't expect the canyon to have the Iarge sort of bends in it that we see.
The canyon wouId be straight.
The bending U-shape that you see is very indicative of a sIow erosionaI process.
Another point of contention is what the fossil layers reveal.
Marine fossiIs are buried throughout the Iayers and they're not buried in any kind of homogeneous way.
They've been scattered and moved around and broken.
If aII the fossiIs on the pIanet were caused by a fIood, we'd expect them aII to be very uniform, gIobaIIy, and we don't find that uniformity.
There is one thing the creationists and the evolutionists agree on, that the canyon was carved by water.
The fact that the rocks of the Grand Canyon are IargeIy Iaid down by water doesn't mean the entire pIanet, at some point in its history, was covered by a giant fIood.
AII the evidence that we see here in the Grand Canyon, if you Iook at it with an open mind, points to a gIobaI fIood, that this was the fIood of Noah's day.
It's ridicuIous to suggest that the Grand Canyon was caused by a gIobaI fIood.
The BibIe is not a history book.
It's not a geoIogy textbook.
The BibIe is Iike a person, and if you torture it Iong enough, you can get it to say aImost anything you'd Iike it to say, but it's not a science book.
ln the Bible story, Noah can see nothing but water, once the storms abate.
''And it came to pass at the end of 40 days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made '' Noah sent a dove to scout the Earth three different times.
The third time, the dove didn't return, so Noah knew the Earth was now safe for habitation, and if the Bible story is right, Noah stepped off the ark onto land he'd never seen before, up in the mountains somewhere.
But which mountains? Bob Cornuke thinks people have been looking in the wrong place.
I don't beIieve the ark is on Mount Ararat in Turkey.
I've fIown around it in a heIicopter twice, fixed wing airpIanes, I've been there on horseback, hiked aII over the mountain and I've never seen anything that even Iooks remoteIy Iike Noah's ark.
And the right place? I think the reaI mountains of Ararat shouId be Iocated in the northern mountains of Iran.
Cornuke has mounted four expeditions to lran, while taking the typical abuse an ark hunter gets.
You do receive a Iot of ridicuIe when you Iook for Noah's ark.
Some peopIe Iook at you Iike you wrap tin foiI around your head and Iook for the mother ship.
But Cornuke thinks he's got a lead no-one else has been able to follow up - the report of an American engineer who saw something strange on a mountain in lran back in 1 943.
I went over there onon foot and hiked up the mountain and it was a pretty arduous cIimb, but when we got up, about to 1 2,500 feet, we Iooked across this vaIIey and we saw this incredibIe bIackened object sticking out of the side of the mountain.
It wasn't a big box shape Iike you'd think Noah's ark wouId Iook Iike.
It Iooked Iike a big buiIding that had burned and we had these charred remnants.
The material looked like wood, but it was so heavy only small samples could be brought down for testing, which proved inconclusive.
I think what we saw couId be Noah's ark.
I think it's a remote possibiIity.
We need to go up there again, bring down the bigger pieces of that, what Iooks Iike wood stone, and have itand have it properIy tested.
Cornuke is waiting for results, but knows that they may not prove anything or convince anyone.
If someone reaIIy did find Noah's ark and dragged it down to downtown New York, no-one wouId beIieve.
It's an unprovabIe hypothesis.
Noah didn't Ieave his fingerprints or a signature saying ''Noah's ark was here'', so it's one of those things that's probabIy impossibIe to prove.
Bob Cornuke went to lran looking for Noah's ark, and he found a pile of rocks.
But he also found something else on the mountain, something he wasn't looking for and still can't explain.
We went up to 1 4,000 feet and we found these cIams over there.
ObviousIy, cIams grow underneath water.
Now how did they get high on a mountain? Are they the amazing fIying cIams, or was this part of the mountain underneath water at one time? Cornuke quickly learned that unlike most marine life found at altitudes, these clams were not completely fossilised.
That meant they still had organic material in their shells that could be dated.
He sent them to a lab, which subjected them to carbon-1 4 dating tests, and the results were perplexing, to say the least.
The test resuIts showed that these cIams were about 40,000 years oId.
Now that's way too oId to be from Noah's ark, which we beIieve to be 5,000 to 1 0,000 years ago, but they're way too young to be from two, four, five, ten miIIion years that it took to get those mountains to be that high, so it's reaIIy a bit of a mystery as to how those cIams got there in the first pIace.
Bob's solution to the riddle.
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if a flood had covered the Earth, it may have affected the rate at which carbon dioxide was absorbed by the clams, so the C-1 4 test results would be skewed.
But there's also a simpler explanation.
AII kinds of sheIIs can form from fresh water in the rivers and streams on top of these mountains, so the fact that you see a IittIe sheII in top of a mountain is not pecuIiar in geoIogy.
A water vapour canopy that somehow collapses, fountains of the deep that somehow erupt .
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a massive comet strike somewhere in the ocean - all these theories offer explanations for a catastrophic flood, some more reasonable than others.
But there's one final theory to explore, and it might be the most reasonable of all.
For years, archaeologists have looked for evidence of a catastrophic flood somewhere in the Middle East, something that might confirm the Genesis account of Noah's ark, and for years, they came up empty.
Then, in the 1 920s, archaeologist Leonard Woolley found a thick layer of silt while he was excavating the ancient city of Ur, in modern-day lraq.
Surely this was evidence of a massive flood, and, not so coincidentally, confirmation of the story in the Bible.
But it turned out to be a false alarm.
One of the sites in Mesopotamia that Sir Leonard WooIIey excavated He thought he had found evidence of ''the fIood'', and it was announced in aII the papers at that time.
It turns out, what He had indeed found a fIood, but it was a IocaIised fIood, but it was drastic enough that there was some three feet of debris that wiped out the town at that time.
Subsequent searches for evidence of a flood were just as fruitless.
Then, in 1 996, two geologists were working off the coast of Turkey, in one of the most mysterious bodies of water in the world a huge saltwater sea, about 750 miles across from east to west - the Black Sea.
Bill Ryan and Walter Pittman were mapping the Black Sea's underwater topography when they noticed something curious - beaches, hundreds of feet below the surface.
That meant the water levels had been much lower in the past.
We found a whoIe number of beaches, because, as the water body shrank under evaporation in the very arid conditions of the Ice Age, it wouId Ieave oId shoreIines Iike bathtub rings.
So we found them at 90 metres, 1 1 0 metres.
Our deepest shoreIine was amazing.
It was 1 56 metres.
Core samples of the seabed showed that at some point in its history, the Black Sea had been a freshwater lake.
The core samples also showed an abrupt transition from freshwater clams to the marine kind, and carbon dating provided a date.
And the resuIts were stunning.
The marine moIIuscs aII seemed to have appeared at aII depths in the BIack Sea at the same time, 7,600 years ago, so Something big had happened there.
What had happened was a flood of biblical proportions, and it probably happened because of global warming.
At the end of the last lce Age, millions of tons of water were locked up in polar ice, but as glaciers retreated, and polar ice melted, sea levels rose.
That included the Mediterranean.
lts rising waters looked for a place to go, and found it on the other side of a thin isthmus of land, where a huge freshwater lake sat waiting in low-lying ground.
That could only mean one thing.
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the law of gravity was about to take over.
Water from the Mediterranean started to cut a channel through the Bosphorus, seeking lower ground.
Once the channel was established, the pent-up waters in the Mediterranean broke through, wiping out everything in its path.
As it cut, it made a channeI that was progressiveIy deeper and deeper and deeper, and the deeper it got, the faster it fIowed.
And it probabIy took, I wouId estimate, anywhere from 30 to 90 days to cut a fuII-fIedged roaring fIume.
And the question was.
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was anyone around to experience such an Earth-shattering event? Archaeologist Fred Hiebert thinks the answer is yes.
Back about 1 0,000 years ago, when there was no Bosphorus, and the BIack Sea was stiII a freshwater Iake, its IeveI was hundreds of feet Iower than it is today.
That means a huge area around it would have been dry land.
It wouId have been a wonderfuI area for either hunter-gatherers or earIy agricuIturists to Iive.
There's no reason that peopIe wouIdn't have Iived there.
Those Neolithic people would have experienced something almost incomprehensible to them .
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one sea emptying into another through a gap several miles wide.
The peopIe wouId have detected the noise.
The ground probabIy wouId have shaken, and that they probabIy wouId have feIt for 1 00, maybe 200 kiIometres.
An incredibIe amount of energy was being reIeased, just an incredibIe amount of energy.
As the water surged through the Bosphorus at 60mph, it unleashed a volume of water 200 times that of Niagara Falls.
Anyone living within a few miles of the Bosphorus would have been swept away.
And those at a greater distance would have seen their world transformed by a flow of water that seemed to be endless.
If you were Iiving in a river vaIIey, you wouId have had to move inIand, anywhere from a few hundred metres to a kiIometre every day, day after day after day after day, on and on and on, every day moving inIand, in front of this fIood.
lf Ryan and Pittman's hypothesis is correct, nearly 5,000 years passed between the time of the great flood and the time the distant memories of it would have been written down.
It certainIy wouId have been a devastating fIood that wouId have covered everything and everybody, and is probabIy the cause for the Iegends of the fIoods.
Such a catastrophic event would seem like it was encompassing the whole world.
The people would have taken the stories with them as they migrated, and those stories, perhaps, became the Mesopotamian flood legends, the epic of Gilgamesh, and eventually the story of Noah.
It must have been a fIood, a very Iarge one, not necessariIy one that wouId cover the whoIe Earth, but that covers the vast majority of the Iand they knew about then.
And in the hands of the ancient lsraelites, the story would have inevitably acquired a moral dimension.
ln the Bible, the story ends with a show of gratitude from Noah and a promise from God.
And Noah built an altar unto the Lord,.
and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and the Lord said, ''l will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake,.
neither will l again smite everything living, as l have done.
'' And to remind Noah and his children of this promise, God offered a natural wonder - A rainbow! - BeautifuI, yes.
Whenever you see a rainbow, you can say, ''That's God's sign there wiII be no more fIoods.
'' And so the story of Noah and his ark gets passed on from one generation to the next, just as it's been done for the last few thousand years.
- And they Iived happiIy ever after.
- Yes, they did.
And that's the other thing about Noah and his ark, everyone gets to have his own interpretation about who he was, and what the story means.
I beIieve things Iike that couId have happened, and I aIso beIieve that none of these stories comes out of thin air.
It's a story that heIps us to make sense out of our human experience, and that's why it's stiII powerfuI.
The BibIe can be trusted right from the very first of Genesis aII the way through ReveIation.
You know, it starts off with truth and it ends with truth.
I see Noah as a genuine person, who Iived a Iong time ago, a person who's experienced things that we may feeI Iike we're experiencing, and stiII he was a survivor, and we can be a survivor as weII.
Whether or not we have scientific evidence for it, that's OK, because we can beIieve in it emotionaIIy.
ln the end, the story of Noah and his ark and a flood lives on for a reason.
It speaks to us.
If it ceased to speak, we wouId cease to Iisten.