Taken by the flood

It amazes me the mental gymnastics the biblical fundamentalists will go through to use scientific studies to shore up their contention that the Bible is literally, word-for-word true.

We've seen this sort of pretzel logic here before, of course.  Eleven years ago I did a piece about a cool scientific discovery that a mineral called ringwoodite, which contains about one percent (by mass) chemically-bound water, was abundant in the Earth's mantle, which prompted the biblical literalists to jump up and down yelling, "See?  We told you.  That's where all the water went after the Great Flood!  Ha!  Q.E.D."  A few also pointed out that in Genesis 7:11 we read that God "broke up the fountains of the deep," so this could also have been the source of some of the flood waters as well.

Never mind that the ringwoodite is six hundred or more kilometers beneath the Earth's surface, and if God "broke up the fountains" to that extent, what would come out would not be water but superheated magma.

So more flood basalt than conventional flood, really.  Not something you'd want to float your Ark on, especially if it was made of wood.

It was with only mild surprise that I saw similar reactions to a study that came out this week from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.  You might recall that earlier this week I alluded to the Zanclean Flood -- the astonishing event that occurred about 5.3 million years ago, where plate movement temporarily closed off the Straits of Gibraltar, resulting in the Mediterranean Sea drying up almost completely.  This was followed by a sudden re-opening of the gap and the creation of the Mother of All Waterfalls over the Gibraltar Sill, at its peak refilling the Mediterranean at a rate of an astonishing ten meters a day.

What I didn't know was that apparently a similar thing happened to the Red Sea.  It shouldn't have been a surprise, really; the Red Sea is like the Mediterranean in having only a single narrow connection to the world's oceans (the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb), if you don't count the Suez Canal.  It's also a tectonically-active region, with the Red Sea Rift underlying the entire thing lengthwise, terminating at its south end in the geologically complex Afar Triple Junction.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), Red Sea topographic map-en, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, the research found geological evidence of a similar scenario to the Zanclean Flood; a tectonic shift closing off the strait, followed by evaporation of nearly all of the water, followed by a second shift reopening the strait and refilling the sea.  "Our findings show that the Red Sea basin records one of the most extreme environmental events on Earth, when it dried out completely and was then suddenly reflooded," said study lead author Tihana Pensa.  "The flood transformed the basin, restored marine conditions, and established the Red Sea's lasting connection to the Indian Ocean."

I'm guessing y'all can see where this is going.

The fundamentalists are twisting themselves into knots saying, "See?  We told you.  Moses parting the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army, the waters rushing back!  Ha!  Q.E.D."

Well, needless to say -- or, more accurately, I wish it was needless to say -- there are a few holes in this claim.

First, the study at KAUST explicitly says that the transformation from salty desert back to a water-filled Red Sea was far slower than the Zanclean Flood, and is estimated to have taken a hundred thousand years.  So Pharaoh's army must have been really slow on the uptake.  If they couldn't get out of the way of a flood creeping along at that rate, they deserved everything they got.

Second, the biblical apologists also conveniently leave out that the study found the Red Sea flood happened 6.2 million years ago -- so almost a million years before the much bigger Zanclean Flood.  At this point, there were no modern humans around, and wouldn't be for about another five million years.  Our likely ancestor who would have been alive back then was Orrorin tugenensis, who has been reconstructed to look something like this:

I don't know about you, but when I picture the characters from the Old Testament, this isn't the image that comes to mind.  Although I have to say, it would have made the movie The Ten Commandments a lot more entertaining:

Moses:  Fear not!  The Lord of Hosts will do battle for us!

Israelites:  *excited hooting, one of them throws a femur into the air*

However, the people who can already twist their logical faculties around enough to believe that the Bible is the literal truth will also happily conclude that (1) the KAUST team got the chronology wrong by a factor of 1,000, and (2) the Red Sea could have filled a lot faster than that, because God.

Oh, and (3) why are there still monkeys?

You can not win with these people.  Funny the confidence you can get from assuming your conclusion.

Anyhow.  My general opinion is if you want to believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God, knock yourself out.  As long as you don't try to get it taught as science in public schools, you can believe the universe was created by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, as far as I care.  But a word of advice -- when you start cherry-picking convenient bits of science to support Fundamentalist Bunnyology, and avoiding the much more numerous bits that contradict it, I reserve the right to make fun of you.

Not that I expect it to have any effect.  The creationists, I've found, are as impervious as Noah's lava-proof Ark.

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We found Noah's... no, listen! Wait! Where's everybody going?

Have you noticed that every few months, someone else finds Noah's Ark?

Just since I've begun this blog, I've written about four attempts, one of them "successful" (at least in the sense that the people running the expedition found some random rotting pieces of wood and declared victory).

Well, here we go again.  We now have another "successful Ark discovery," with the added filigree that there's a government coverup designed to prevent our finding out about it.  This should be fun, yes?  Religious whackjobbery + conspiracy theories = WHEEEEEEE!!!!!

This story, which has been making the rounds of social media, is described in some detail in the article by Mark Martineau entitled, "Noah's Ark Has Been Found.  Why Are They Keeping Us In the Dark?"  Here's a quote from the article that explains the gist:

In 1959, Turkish army captain Llhan Durupinar discovered an unusual shape while examining aerial photographs of his country. The smooth shape, larger than a football field, stood out from the rough and rocky terrain at an altitude of 6,300 feet near the Turkish border with Iran...  Capt. Durupinar was familiar with the biblical accounts of the Ark and its association with Mount Ararat in Turkey, but he was reluctant to jump to any conclusions. The region was very remote, yet it was inhabited with small villages. No previous reports of an object this odd had been made before. So he forwarded the photographic negative to a famous aerial photography expert named Dr. Brandenburger, at Ohio State University.

Brandenburger was responsible for discovering the Cuban missile bases during the Kennedy era from reconnaissance photos, and after carefully studying the photo, he concluded: "I have no doubt at all, that this object is a ship. In my entire career, I have never seen an object like this on a stereo photo."

We are then told that some folks investigated, but found nothing too spectacular.  Then a guy named Ron Wyatt decided to take a more thorough look at the site, and after his study, "The evidence was conclusive.  This is the Ark of Noah."

What evidence, you might ask?  Well, we have "traces... of wooden ribs":

We have "high-tech metal rivets":

We have "stone anchors":

Not to mention a plethora of other goodies, such as cat hair and fossilized animal poo.

But then Snopes got involved, predictably debunking the entire thing.   Most of the claims were outright false; there were no petrified wooden ribs, no exotic metal rivets, no subsurface features that look even remotely ship-like.  The animal poo is hardly unusual, given that animals do that.  And even a guy from Answers in Genesis, one Andrew Snelling, concluded that the site is natural geological feature caused by faulting, albeit a kind of peculiar-looking one.  (You should read the entire Snopes article for a piece-by-piece takedown of the claim.)

But so far, there's nothing much to separate this from all of the other times people have found Noah's Ark.  That's because you haven't heard about the conspiracy theory aspect.  "Ordinary people are hungry for this information, yet the organizations responsible to disseminate these facts seem to have an agenda to keep us in the dark," Martineau writes.  "This is especially true when it comes to our ancient human history."

Yup, I'm sure that the powers-that-be spend all of their time trying to figure out how to keep the average citizen from finding out about the Code of Hammurabi.  Makes total sense.

But apparently, that's not all that the powers-that-be are trying to do.  If you take a look at the comments on the original site (Not directly!  Always use eye protection!), you'll see that apparently everyone is lying to us, especially Snopes.  Here are a few examples, as many as I was able to copy before the neurons in my cerebrum started whimpering for mercy:

After [Snopes] said that Obamas Birth Certificate was real...All their credibility was out the window

it a proven fact science does not have all the answers.

I don't use MY real name and I have a picture of Obozo getting ready to masturbate (what he always does right after burning the Constitution that he was HIRED TO PROTECT!). My reasoning is this... if Obozo's Mooselick Booboohood retards saw my REAL face, I would have to spend all my time killing the punk ass wannabe ragheads they send to behead me for being a TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT... killing them in self-defense, of course. Not EVERYONE is stupid enough to put their real face out there where Satan's Minions (spelled MUSLIMS) can lock in on them. Enjoy your eternity in Hell that you will deserve for following Satan's Spawn Osama Obama!

Snopes is a propaganda tool of the far left!

Snopes has been discredited for producing any truth. Wake up and smell the Communism.

Yes, it IS good that previous commentor wasn't born in the islamic world of murdered and taken-over populations and destroyed cultures. That is why islam has spread all over the world, as it is spreading more by murdering Christian populations that have lived in the middle east for hundreds or thousands of years. Thanks all to OUR islamic communist puppet regime's support of money and weapons. But don't worry, it isn't only Christians being murdered, but those of the far east too.

So, I only have two questions about all of this: (1) what the fuck is a "Mooselick Booboohood?" and (2) do the people who comment on sites like this talk this way in real life?

Because if they do, I'm surprised that their loved ones don't stage an intervention involving the administration of horse tranquilizers.

The whole thing is profoundly unsettling, especially given that Snopes has a pretty good track record of establishing fact from fiction, and that there are people who think that the logical next step after "science doesn't have all the answers" is "so the bible must be literally true."  The problem, of course, is one we've seen before; if you can be duped into thinking that the facts are spin, and that the scientific method itself is invalid, you can be convinced of anything.

In any case, it seems pretty unlikely that this rock formation in Turkey has anything to do with either Noah's Ark or government coverups.  Which is a relief, frankly.  Because we've got to get this one debunked in order to make way for the next one.  Only one Noah's Ark allowed at a time, you know.

Saturday shorts

Well, it's Saturday, the beginning of the weekend, and here at Skeptophilia we're hard at work following three stories for your facepalming enjoyment.

First, we have an update from the bible-is-literally-true crowd.  Long-time readers of this blog may remember that back in 2011 we had an announcement from Donna D'Errico, former star of Baywatch, that she was going to be spearheading an expedition to Mount Ararat in Turkey to try to find Noah's Ark.  D'Errico's qualifications for leading the mission seem to be twofold: (1) she has dreamed of finding Noah's Ark since she was ten; and (2) she likes people to take videos of her.  The climb went off without a hitch, unless you count the fact that they didn't find Noah's Ark because it basically doesn't exist.

Of course, you shouldn't let a little thing like reality stand in the way of pursuing your dream, so D'Errico and her team are trying to launch another expedition, this time using a Kickstarter project to fund it.

Even if she gets the money -- and when I looked, she'd raised $2,900 of the $10,000 she's asking for -- she'll still have a rough time ahead, she says.

In a quote I swear I am not making up, D'Errico wrote on her Kickstarter page, "To get to the area where we believe the ark is located, we will have to climb using ropes, traverse cliffs, circumvent rock slides, avoid mountain rebels, survive blinding blizzards, and fend off vicious sheepdogs."

As far as objections to the entire Great Flood story, and how anyone could believe it was true unless they had the IQ of a grapefruit, D'Errico says that it's completely logical.

"If you do the math, the total cubic volume inside the ark would have been roughly 1.5 million cubic feet," she told The Huffington Post by email. "That’s the equivalent of 569 modern railroad stock cars. The average stock car can accommodate 240 sheep, which would have been the average size animal on the ark.  Keep in mind that the Bible did not say two of every species, but rather two of every kind. That means that one feline kind, rather than every species of feline, would have been taken aboard the ark.  Smaller animals would have been kept in cages that could stack on top of each other. As few as 2,000 animal kinds could have been taken aboard the ark, which would have resulted in all of the species we have today."

Right.  2,000 "animal kinds" resulting in 15 million species in 5,000 years (give or take).  Not to mention the fact that the entire Earth being covered in salt water would have killed all of the plants.  Not to mention the wee problem of bringing, for example, the wombats back to Australia after the waters receded.  Nor the problem of where exactly the waters receded to.

But other than that, it's completely logical.


Speaking of not being in touch with reality, we have a story in from Poland that there is going to be a meeting of exorcists soon.  On the agenda: discussing the threat of Madonna.

You would think that, given that these people apparently believe that the world is being besieged by evil supernatural emissaries of Satan who are trying to destroy our souls, they would have more pressing issues to discuss than a 54-year-old has-been pop star.

You would be wrong.

"Part of the conference is dedicated to the hidden subliminal message in communication, and the choice of this subject was inspired by the woman who dares to call herself Madonna," said Father Andrzej Grefkowic, a trained exorcist who is one of the organisers of the conference.  "We've been worried about her concerts."

Well, one of the reasons that Madonna dares to call herself that is that it's her actual name.  And I don't know how "subliminal" you can call her message, given that she once staged a mock crucifixion at one of her shows.  But okay, I can grant them that she pisses off Catholics with great regularity.

Other things that Grefkowic et al. will be discussing are how the increasing popularity of tattoos and body piercings represent a means of ingress for the devil into people's lives.  But as I've discussed before, this is rather thin ice for me personally, so perhaps I'd better just move on.


If you're not in the mood for discussing the evils of pop stars, but you'd still like to find out about the bizarre side of religion, perhaps you should sign up for the "Defending the Faith" cruise sponsored by Catholic Answers.  This holy voyage will be from November 2 - November 9 of this year, and besides some of the usual shipboard activities (a pool, a rock-climbing wall, an ice skating rink, a spa, a nightclub, and several bars) there will be talks, lectures, and panel discussions on Catholic apologetics, not to mention daily Mass.

In particular -- and they must feel it's important because it was quoted on the front page -- Catholic Answers Director of Development Christopher Check will be giving an interesting talk.  "On the cruise, I’ll be defending the Church against the charges that the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition are events for which we Catholics need to apologize," Check writes.

Now, I'm a staunch believer in the idea that no one is responsible for bad things his or her ancestors did (or should bask in the glory of good things they did, either, for that matter).  But the Catholic Church, which just recently issued a 400-year-too-late apology for placing Galileo under house arrest for the remainder of his life for publicly stating that the Earth went around the Sun, really does have a lot to answer for as an institution.  And it's reprehensible that Check and his comrades seem to be claiming that the Catholic Church at the time was acting within its rights to launch people off to "reclaim the Holy Land" from innocent people who had lived there for generations, and to torture and execute thousands for heresy and witchcraft.

But if that sort of thing is your cup of tea, have at it.  Failing that, you can go to Poland and discuss the most recent depredations of Madonna.  Or go to Turkey and join Donna D'Errico in an expedition to once again not find Noah's Ark.  If you believe this stuff, there are thousands of pointless activities you can participate in!  Me, I think I'll stay home and weed the garden.  And frankly, it seems like in doing so I'll accomplish a great deal more toward improving the world.

Ballard, the Black Sea, and the bible

Biblical literalists are crowing with delight over a recent news story that is being widely reported (and subsequently linked and circulated all over the place).  Most iterations of this piece have titles like the version I found on ABC News Online: "New Evidence Suggests Biblical Flood Happened, Says Robert Ballard."

The upshot of the story is that Ballard, a prominent archaeologist (and the man whose team located the Titanic), believes that the Black Sea may have once been the site of a catastrophic flood.  What is now a deep, salty body of water was once a freshwater lake whose surface was far below sea level -- the seawater being held back from filling it by an ice dam across what is now the Straits of Bosporus.  As the weather warmed up following the last ice age, the ice dam receded and finally collapsed, allowing for a sudden, huge inrush of water from the Mediterranean, filling the Black Sea to its current level and drowning anyone who was in the way.

Such events are thought to have occurred elsewhere.  A flood of that sort seems to have happened in the current St. Lawrence Seaway (dumping enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to stop the Atlantic Conveyor for a time and causing a second, shorter ice age), and the Columbia River Valley (creating the "Channeled Scablands" of eastern Washington and Oregon).  So Ballard's idea is fascinating, and quite in line with our current understanding of glacial geology.  Further, it's not unprecedented to have a real event recalled, and mythologized, often many centuries after it happened; so it's entirely possible that this event was the origin of the biblical flood story, and also similar accounts in other traditions (such as the flood mentioned in Gilgamesh).

But of course, this is not how it was reported.  The story strongly implies that Ballard is saying that his evidence indicates that the "Great Flood of Noah" actually occurred, as described in the bible -- which is an outright misrepresentation of Ballard's position.

Don't believe me?  Here are actual quotes from the ABC News Online article:

The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.

Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah.

By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred. 

Noah is described in the Bible as a family man, a father of three, who is about to celebrate his 600th birthday.

Regardless of whether the details of the Noah story are historically accurate, Armstrong (author of A History of God) believes this story and all the Biblical stories are telling us "about our predicament in the world now." 

Ballard does not think he will ever find Noah's Ark, but he does think he may find evidence of a people whose entire world was washed away about 7,000 years ago.

Buried in the center of the article is a bit that says, "The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah," but this is so colossally outweighed by all of the biblical references that Ballard is made to look like some kind of literalist wacko out there diving into the Black Sea looking for evidence of a flood whose only survivors were the family of a 600 year old man.

If I were Ballard, I'd be pissed.

So, let's just get a few things straight, here.  Saying that a bunch of Bronze-Age sheepherders tried to rationalize a cataclysmic flood that washed away bunches of their ancestors by making up a story about god smiting the world for its wickedness is not the same thing as saying that the flood, as per the Book of Genesis, actually occurred.  The breaking of an ice dam is not the same thing as it "raining for forty days and forty nights."  If an ice dam near your house broke, releasing millions of tons of seawater, you would not have time to build an ark, you would only have time to put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.  You would also not have time to run really quickly and get a pair of wombats from Australia and a pair of three-toed sloths from Brazil, and so on.  And while the amount of water in the Black Sea is what is known in scientific circles as "a crapload of water," it does not amount to the entire Earth being covered with water.

The idea of a global flood is, to put not too fine a point on it, unscientific, unsupported, zero-evidence horse waste.  The fact that ABC News Online, and many other media outlets, reported Ballard's fascinating work as supporting the literal account of the bible is crummy journalism, and the reporters who produced this hack job of a story should be ashamed of themselves.

Wackosynthesis

Well, once again we have someone who has blenderized several woo-woo ideas to make a brand new fusion-cuisine of looniness.  The most recent perpetrator of this process, which I like to call "wackosynthesis," is a gentleman named Timothy Green Beckley.  In an article just released a couple of days ago, entitled "Legacy of the Sky People: Was Noah's Ark a Strange Vehicle From Mars?", Sean Casteel (regular writer for UFO Digest) gives a highly laudatory review to Beckley's new book, also called Legacy of the Sky People.   Beckley's book costs $20 (plus shipping and handling), which I absolutely refuse to spend, because just from the review, it sounds like a fine example of woo-woo lunacy.  Beckley uses the following ingredients:

• UFOs
• Ancient Astronauts
• Noah's Ark and the biblical flood story
• The monolith on Phobos
• The Roswell Incident
• CIA conspiracies and coverups

He then stirs well and bakes at 350 degrees for forty-five minutes, and comes up with the following idea:

Noah wasn't an ancient Israelite.  He was a superintelligent Martian that was bringing the last remnant of his civilization to Earth, using a spacecraft, which unfortunately crashed on Mount Ararat.  Noah and his Martian pals then genetically engineered the primitive, Bronze-Age humans they found here, and thus was born the human race in all of its nobility.

What proof does he have, you may ask?  Well, besides the incontrovertible evidence of the Book of Genesis, which we all know to be completely scientifically and historically accurate, we also have:

• cave paintings with some bits that look like UFOs.  Interestingly, the one link that Casteel gives to a cave painting website shows some cave paintings that have nothing whatsoever UFO-like on them.
• the ongoing foolishness that there's an alien monolith on Phobos.  The "monolith" is almost certainly a large rock, but that still hasn't stopped all of the people who think that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a historical documentary from blathering endlessly about it on the internet.
• an allegation that there has been an "anomalous object" discovered on the side of Mount Ararat.  As far as I could follow Beckley and Casteel's logic, the "object" isn't made of "gopher wood," which leaves only one conclusion: it is the wrecked remnants of a spaceship.

Beckley and Casteel also cite some references, which read as a veritable cast-list of woo-woo.  These include:

• Erich von Däniken, who is still making money writing books about the "god(s) are ancient aliens" idea
• Zecharia Sitchin,  who started the whole "Annunaki" business
• Giorgio Tsoukalos,  who publishes Legendary Times, co-produces the series Ancient Aliens, and who has really amazing hair
• Tim Swartz, editor of Conspiracy Journal
• Brinsley LePoer Trench, who besides having a name that's a lot of fun to say, was a member of the British House of Lords, and was one of the first real UFO enthusiasts.  He famously started a debate on the floor of Parliament, and pushed the Members to vote on whether they thought aliens had visited the Earth.  (The result:  "No.")
• Nick Redfern, of Bigfoot fame, and contributing editor of Phenomena magazine
• George van Tassel, one of the most renowned alien abductees

Well, I think we can all agree that with a star-studded list of references like that, we have no other choice but to believe everything Beckley and Casteel are saying.

If, unlike me, you still want to purchase Beckley's book, the link I posted above has Beckley's contact information and all the information you need about price.  There is also price and purchase information on Beckley's other books, which include The American Indian Starseed Connection, Other Tongues Other Flesh Revisited, Ancient Secrets of Mysterious America: Revealing our True Cosmic Destiny, and Alien Space Gods of Ancient Greece and Rome: Revelations of the Oracle of Delphi.  So I think you can see that if you're so inclined, there's a wealth of reading material, here.

As for me, I think I'll pass.  The review was enough to give me a general flavor for Beckley's "theories," and I already think I'm going to need more coffee to get the taste out of my mouth. 

Rocking the boat

New from the "News That Is Way Weirder Than Anything I Could Make Up" department:  Baywatch star Donna D'Errico is planning on climbing Mount Ararat to search for Noah's Ark.

D'Errico, who played the character Donna Marco in order to obviate the need of her having to remember that her character had a different first name than she did, brought several acting talents to the series, the most notable of which was a set of bazongas that left you wondering how she managed to walk upright.  She reports that she has had a dream of finding Noah's Ark ever since she was in Catholic school at age ten.

"I read different stories about how people thought they'd found the cages," she said.  This evidently being all the evidence she needed, she has organized an expedition to Turkey this summer in order to scale the mountain and look for the boat.

I don't know about all this.  The Great Flood story has always sounded mighty fishy to me (rimshot!).  I know that when I was ten years old and in Catholic school, I wasn't buying it, and peppered Sister Ursula with a good many uncomfortable questions.  I wondered, for example, if the whole world was flooded, so that no land was exposed anywhere, where did all the water go afterwards?

And, of course, there's the whole problem of how some dude in ancient Palestine went to the Canadian tundra to bring back two caribou, to Australia to get a couple of kangaroos, and to South Africa for some rhinoceroses, and got them all safely back after the whole incident was over.  Did Noah seriously go to California and bring back some pumas?

When I was eleven, my parents transferred me to public school.  Funny thing, that.

In any case, the question of "how could this story possibly be true?" doesn't seem to bother D'Errico terribly.

"I've been studying this for years and know where the sightings have been," she said in an interview. "According to my research, the ark lays broken into at least two, but most likely three, pieces. I believe that one of those pieces is in the uppermost Ahora Gorge area, an extremely dangerous area to climb and explore."

Asked about the dangers, she said, "Many inexperienced climbers have done it, but you do need stamina and, obviously, a crew."

Obviously.  With videocameras.  Because this is not in any sense a publicity stunt.  Sure.

"I am not doing a reality show," she claimed.  "I will document this for myself and my family."

In other words, look for it to appear on television.  It'll probably have a really creative name like "My Search For Noah's Ark, Starring Donna D'Errico."  Or maybe just "Baywatch: Turkey."

If it doesn't end up on the so-called "History Channel" by December, I will be astonished.  In terms of serious historical merit, it will  be right up there with their other offerings, such as "Monster Quest," "The Nostradamus Effect," and "The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon."