Quote:
Originally Posted by dalmations202
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Gen 7:11 In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month, in this day have been broken up all fountains of the great deep, and the net-work of the heavens hath been opened,
Gen 7:12 and the shower is on the earth forty days and forty nights.
You see it says it in the Bible -- and the storybook is more of a history book from what I have read. It is interpreted vast way which causes lots of issues, but it so far has never been proven to be false. Nor has it been proven to be totally correct - yet.
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The Bible is a bunch of different books. Calling it a storybook is no more accurate than calling it a history book. There are 66 (more if you include the deuterocanonical ones). The Book of Joshua isn't historically accurate. It contradicts the book of Judges constantly - both can't actually be correct if you read them closely, and the actual physical evidence much more closely resembles the story in Judges. The timing of the events don't match archaeological and anthropological data. That's not all radiocarbon dating, and there's no hypothetical flood here to use an excuse for lack of knowledge. Et-Tell (Biblical Ai) literally means "rubble," and the story in Joshua is an aetiological myth as to how that mound of rubble got to be there. No army conquered it in the second half of the second millenium BCE. It just didn't happen. Once that story (and pretty much every other one from the Old Testament) loses its historicity, then everything else should, too, if you believe the Bible to be one divinely inspired or inerrant book as most evangelical Christians do. If references to specific, particular historical events are shown to be fraudulent (and the scholarly consensus even among religious archaeologists is that they're generally not historically valid, at least until the 11th-10th century BCE and the actual establishment of the Davidic Kingdom), there's no rational reason to think that the metaphor-laden opening book has any historical truth to it.
If you, like me, see the entire thing as a giant copy-paste job from half a millennium's worth of politically-minded religious authorities*, there's no reason to use one passage to prove another and the entire scheme falls apart.
* By which I mean Genesis-Nehemiah. After that, it's poetry, prophecy and thoroughly allegorical stories like Job which I don't think anyone intended to be taken literally even if people do that now. And of course the New Testament is a completely different issue.