What does science say about this?

According to the Old Testament, God, dissatisfied with the mistakes of humanity in its development, decided to destroy the vast majority of living things, saving only one family – Noah’s family. The six-hundred-year-old Noah, described as the only righteous man of the time, built a huge ark and only a few people were ordered to enter it: his wife and three sons, along with their wives. They also took pairs of all the animals and seven individuals of the so-called “pure” kind for sacrifice after the Flood. Despite all this, the accomplice in the destruction of human civilization and the descendant of Adam in Noah’s tenth generation has a difficult deadline: seven days. What happened next is known to everyone.

Geology: underground tracks

However Can we find any evidence of a global flood in geology today?? Scientists say no.

All we know for sure from geology is that there has never been a global flood. If you look at it as a global flood that literally covers the world’s highest mountains, then sorry, there isn’t enough water on Earth for that.
– says David Montgomery, professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of “Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Discovers the Noah’s Flood.”

• If the “heavens” opened and all the water in the atmosphere poured out in the form of rain at the same time, the planet would actually go under water – but only if to a depth of about 2.5 centimeters. That’s what the US Geological Survey claims. That much water is not enough even for a canoe, let alone a big ship.
• But what, how to take into account only the water in the “heavens”? According to NASA, if all the glaciers and ice sheets on Earth melt, then sea ​​level would rise more than 60 metersthat would add a little more water.
• A study published in 2016 in the journal Nature Geoscience estimates that the upper two kilometers of Earth’s crust contain 22.6 million cubic kilometers of groundwater. cover the land to a depth of 180 meters. That’s a lot of water but first it will have to overcome gravity to reach the surface, and second, there are cities thousands of feet above sea level. Moreover, Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is above 8,849 meters above sea level. We will remind you that the Bible states that the height of the water is high enough to cover even the highest mountains.
• In addition, geologists see no evidence of a global flood of rocks. The fact is that layers of soil, underwater silt and stone retain traces of the environmental conditions of the time when they were on the surface. This principle is similar to tree rings. Yes, we can determine the activity of the Sun, the presence of vegetation or water, the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere, and many other parameters, whether it was 100 years ago, 1000 years ago or a million years ago. The analysis shows that there is no global event of this scale.

More, more doubt

There are other dubious points in the biblical story:

• For example, Noah was 600 years old at the time of the events. It’s hard to imagine a person living this long, or even longer, when medicine was limited to prayer, bloodletting, or “apply banana”-level procedures.
• If only two animals remained, most species would not survive because they would not have enough genetic diversity to create a viable population.
• It’s not clear how each animal could get on board in the first place. “Imagine penguins running from Antarctica to the Middle East”– Writes Live Science.

History: a legend from the depths of the ages

Historical studies show us that the Flood legend came to us from older beliefs, that is, it was actually assimilated from other stories and reworked for the needs of Christianity. It is probably allegorical rather than a literal retelling of the event.

• Ira Spahr, a professor of antiquities at Ramapo College in New Jersey, explains that the Old Testament stories in the Bible, written between 800 and 500 BC, likely come from more ancient oral traditions and from many sources.
• While other religious books such as the Qur’an have slightly different accounts of the flood, earlier versions of the devastating flood come from ancient Mesopotamian texts.
• Spar noted that there was a fragmentary deluge story. It is dated to the end of the 3rd millennium BC. But it can also be borrowed from older beliefs.
• There are locally inspired variations of the myth among many other peoples around the world, including Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, coastal South Americans, and South Pacific Islanders.

So today no one knows how old this story, which has become a kind of archetype, is.

It can be assumed that the source of the specific biblical history is some regional flood that does not seem too distant and even has certain geological foundations. In the late 1990s, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that about 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean began to flow into the then-isolated Black Sea, causing massive flooding around the Black Sea. These floods may be the source of the myth of the global flood, because ancient people, not understanding the essence of natural phenomena, tried to explain them by the activities of the gods.

This would be a devastating event that would lead to flooding. all known world to the people of that time. The surviving inhabitants of the region could thus escape to Mesopotamia and create a new myth that would in one form or another live on for thousands of years.