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For those who don't believe in the Bible or Christianity: If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind? The Ark itself fascinates me

For those who don't believe in the Bible or Christianity: If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind? The Ark itself fascinates me 1) as a Christian and 2) well, look at my name :)

terhechte 3y ago
If they found a 50k year old giant wooden ship, what would that prove about god or genesis? Or rather, to better answer your questions: what would be verified by the finding and how?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bdcravens 3y ago
Potentially, though the flood tale isn't unique to Christianity. Many tales in the Bible can be correlated with history, especially the parts that take place in the Roman Empire (even the existence of Yeshua ben Yosef), but correlation doesn't prove the spiritual elements.
gs17 3y ago
How verified are we talking about? Verified that it's a boat with similar measurements from the time period, verified that there was a global flood and the only survivors were on board?
- noaheverett 3y ago
  This is where the "verified somehow" kicks in, I don't have the answer for our intellectual minds :)
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    The geographic distribution of animals that we see on Earth today makes it effectively impossible for all surviving land animals to have been on a single boat near Mesopotamia 6k years ago. Not to mention a million other reasons why it can’t have been. The weight of evidence against the idea of a “global multi-month flood several thousand years ago” is so overwhelming that one struggles to imagine a coherent depiction of the world where such a thing could be true.
kennethrc 3y ago
> If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind? Maybe, but it'd definitely have to be verified by Top Men.
- noaheverett 3y ago
  Good movie, torn between that one and The Last Crusade on which is my favorite though
- mcphage 3y ago
  Who?
  - slumos 3y ago
    Top. Men.
kvdveer 3y ago
No, it would not likely change my mind. I'd see it as the origin of the man-with-a-boat-in-a-flood stories, of which the biblical story is just one. An old wooden boatlike structure would be an interesting artifact, but in itself not evidence of anything supernatural.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > of which the biblical story is just one Not even the oldest one, at that.
gaoshan 3y ago
I would assume that if an old boat were found that it had nothing to do with the Ark of Christian mythos. There would be no way to "verify" it because the entire story rests on a foundation of faith, not fact. Where faith and fact do coincide faith likes to use that overlap as evidence of truth whereas fact cannot do that because faith does not require evidence (and there are so many competing faiths but facts are a bit more consistent). Kind of like how if all religions and all scientific and mathematical knowledge were somehow irrevocably lost, all of the science and math would eventually come back just as it was but none of the religions would (in spite of the protestations of fervent believers). The flood story is present in so very many mythologies that there likely was some historical event in that region but people back then could be forgiven from thinking that such a flood covered the entire world as it covered what little they new of it.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
> would it change your mind? about what? I ask that because I believe it's possible to interpret the new testament, the old testament, Egyptian writings about Hyksos, various other historical sources from Greece and Rome and other older cultures all in differing ways, yet find overlapping "lossy" recountings of what was even then ancient history.
- noaheverett 3y ago
  In this case about the Bible being true about the Ark
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 3y ago
> For those who don't believe in the Bible or Christianity: If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind? What does that even mean? I don't follow an organized religion or church but I do believe in the existence of the bible and Christianity. The bible is part history book, part fiction, there are definitely some parts in there that are true and lots of things that have not been verified to be true and probably never will (because they are not). There might have been a flood of some kind in Mesopotamia and someone might have put a bunch of animals on a boat. Were those the only animals that survived, most likely not.
timeon 3y ago
I do not know what it would do to my mind, but even the question is still in realm of fantasy.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
btilly 3y ago
It would depend on what was verified, and how good the verification was. Here is why the "what is verified" matters. Suppose we verified a large boat in about the right time and place with a flood that would have looked like the end of the world to those involved. This would suffice to change my mind from "Noah's Ark is the Judeo-Christian version of a flood myth found around the world" to, "Noah's Ark is an oral history of events witnessed." This wouldn't convince me that there was a world-wide flood. An example of a verification of this type is that https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-city-by-space-rock-may-have-inspired-biblical-story-of-sodom-180978734/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit... was sufficient to convince me that the Biblical record of the destruction of Sodom is likely an eyewitness account. While not convincing me that God did it to punish the gays. As for how good the verification is, before reading on please sit down and think what it would take you convince you that your understanding is wrong. Convincing me of the literal truth of the Biblical narrative would require evidence sufficient to override the following lines of evidence: 1. Either the date is earlier than Biblical analysis like https://creation.com/the-date-of-noahs-flood https://creation.com/the-date-of-noahs-flood describes, or there needs to be an explanation of how the Methuselah tree could predate the Flood. 2. It has to explain how a global flood could have left Lake Suigetsu in Japan undisturbed for 150,000 years of lake sediment. See https://www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/japanese-lake-sediment-unlocks-150000-years-of-history https://www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/japanese-lake-sediment-unlocks-1... for more. 3. We have even longer cores from undisturbed ice in Antarctica and Greenland. 4. There has to be an explanation for the lack of signs of water damage to geology around the world. This problem was first convincingly demonstrated by Louis Agassiz roughly 200 years ago. 5. You have to explain things like the Wallace Line (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line for what that is) which are conventionally explained by evolution and continental drift. The distribution of weird species on islands (see Darwin's finches for an example) also poses a problem. I could go on, but it would take rather overwhelming evidence for me to discount this physical evidence of the history of our world. Which makes me wonder what evidence you think you have that is more compelling than all of this.
- captainvicman 3y ago
  References? Beside Wikipeda please
bediger4000 3y ago
Yes, finding an old boat of the proper proportions and verifying it as Noah's Ark would change my mind. I have a hard time imagining what verification would look like, given how Young Earth Creationists lie, cherry pick and generally BS on this topic.
mcphage 3y ago
That’s kinda like asking “If the sky was green tomorrow what would you do?” Well: I guess it depends on why the sky was green, what other effects there were, and so on. So too with your question: there’s so many possibilities that could be “found and verified somehow” that there really isn’t a good way to answer your question. It’s too open to be meaningful.

terhechte 3y ago

If they found a 50k year old giant wooden ship, what would that prove about god or genesis? Or rather, to better answer your questions: what would be verified by the finding and how?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bdcravens 3y ago

Potentially, though the flood tale isn't unique to Christianity. Many tales in the Bible can be correlated with history, especially the parts that take place in the Roman Empire (even the existence of Yeshua ben Yosef), but correlation doesn't prove the spiritual elements.

gs17 3y ago

How verified are we talking about? Verified that it's a boat with similar measurements from the time period, verified that there was a global flood and the only survivors were on board?

noaheverett 3y ago
This is where the "verified somehow" kicks in, I don't have the answer for our intellectual minds :)
- dwaltrip 3y ago
  The geographic distribution of animals that we see on Earth today makes it effectively impossible for all surviving land animals to have been on a single boat near Mesopotamia 6k years ago. Not to mention a million other reasons why it can’t have been. The weight of evidence against the idea of a “global multi-month flood several thousand years ago” is so overwhelming that one struggles to imagine a coherent depiction of the world where such a thing could be true.

kennethrc 3y ago

> If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind? Maybe, but it'd definitely have to be verified by Top Men.

noaheverett 3y ago
Good movie, torn between that one and The Last Crusade on which is my favorite though
mcphage 3y ago
Who?
- slumos 3y ago
  Top. Men.

kvdveer 3y ago

No, it would not likely change my mind. I'd see it as the origin of the man-with-a-boat-in-a-flood stories, of which the biblical story is just one. An old wooden boatlike structure would be an interesting artifact, but in itself not evidence of anything supernatural.

mcphage 3y ago
> of which the biblical story is just one Not even the oldest one, at that.

gaoshan 3y ago

I would assume that if an old boat were found that it had nothing to do with the Ark of Christian mythos. There would be no way to "verify" it because the entire story rests on a foundation of faith, not fact. Where faith and fact do coincide faith likes to use that overlap as evidence of truth whereas fact cannot do that because faith does not require evidence (and there are so many competing faiths but facts are a bit more consistent). Kind of like how if all religions and all scientific and mathematical knowledge were somehow irrevocably lost, all of the science and math would eventually come back just as it was but none of the religions would (in spite of the protestations of fervent believers). The flood story is present in so very many mythologies that there likely was some historical event in that region but people back then could be forgiven from thinking that such a flood covered the entire world as it covered what little they new of it.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

> would it change your mind? about what? I ask that because I believe it's possible to interpret the new testament, the old testament, Egyptian writings about Hyksos, various other historical sources from Greece and Rome and other older cultures all in differing ways, yet find overlapping "lossy" recountings of what was even then ancient history.

noaheverett 3y ago
In this case about the Bible being true about the Ark

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 3y ago

> For those who don't believe in the Bible or Christianity: If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind? What does that even mean? I don't follow an organized religion or church but I do believe in the existence of the bible and Christianity. The bible is part history book, part fiction, there are definitely some parts in there that are true and lots of things that have not been verified to be true and probably never will (because they are not). There might have been a flood of some kind in Mesopotamia and someone might have put a bunch of animals on a boat. Were those the only animals that survived, most likely not.

timeon 3y ago

I do not know what it would do to my mind, but even the question is still in realm of fantasy.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

btilly 3y ago

It would depend on what was verified, and how good the verification was. Here is why the "what is verified" matters. Suppose we verified a large boat in about the right time and place with a flood that would have looked like the end of the world to those involved. This would suffice to change my mind from "Noah's Ark is the Judeo-Christian version of a flood myth found around the world" to, "Noah's Ark is an oral history of events witnessed." This wouldn't convince me that there was a world-wide flood. An example of a verification of this type is that https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-city-by-space-rock-may-have-inspired-biblical-story-of-sodom-180978734/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit... was sufficient to convince me that the Biblical record of the destruction of Sodom is likely an eyewitness account. While not convincing me that God did it to punish the gays. As for how good the verification is, before reading on please sit down and think what it would take you convince you that your understanding is wrong. Convincing me of the literal truth of the Biblical narrative would require evidence sufficient to override the following lines of evidence: 1. Either the date is earlier than Biblical analysis like https://creation.com/the-date-of-noahs-flood https://creation.com/the-date-of-noahs-flood describes, or there needs to be an explanation of how the Methuselah tree could predate the Flood. 2. It has to explain how a global flood could have left Lake Suigetsu in Japan undisturbed for 150,000 years of lake sediment. See https://www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/japanese-lake-sediment-unlocks-150000-years-of-history https://www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/japanese-lake-sediment-unlocks-1... for more. 3. We have even longer cores from undisturbed ice in Antarctica and Greenland. 4. There has to be an explanation for the lack of signs of water damage to geology around the world. This problem was first convincingly demonstrated by Louis Agassiz roughly 200 years ago. 5. You have to explain things like the Wallace Line (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line for what that is) which are conventionally explained by evolution and continental drift. The distribution of weird species on islands (see Darwin's finches for an example) also poses a problem. I could go on, but it would take rather overwhelming evidence for me to discount this physical evidence of the history of our world. Which makes me wonder what evidence you think you have that is more compelling than all of this.

captainvicman 3y ago
References? Beside Wikipeda please

bediger4000 3y ago

Yes, finding an old boat of the proper proportions and verifying it as Noah's Ark would change my mind. I have a hard time imagining what verification would look like, given how Young Earth Creationists lie, cherry pick and generally BS on this topic.

mcphage 3y ago

That’s kinda like asking “If the sky was green tomorrow what would you do?” Well: I guess it depends on why the sky was green, what other effects there were, and so on. So too with your question: there’s so many possibilities that could be “found and verified somehow” that there really isn’t a good way to answer your question. It’s too open to be meaningful.