Larry Stone - 31 Jan

Im gonna make it rain for a thousand days and drown em right out, said God, according to comedian Bill Cosby.

Listen, Noah told God. Save water. Let it rain for forty days and forty nights and wait for the sewers to back up.

Noah and the ark makes it on everyones list of top ten favorite Bible storiesright up there with Jonah and the whale, and David and Goliath. God commanded Noah to build an ark to save his family and animals from a flood that would cover all the high mountains. When the waters receded, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, Noah opened the door, let the animals out, built an altar, and worshipped God. God promised He would never again destroy the earth with a flood and gave the rainbow as a sign of that promise.

In retrospect, its easy to say Noah was a hero. He saved animals and his family from the most devastating flood the earth has ever known.

But at the time he must have seemed to be a bit of a nut. He spent sixty to eighty years building a 450-foot-long boat in his backyard. He collected enough food for thousands of animals for a year. And then the animals showed up. What would you think if your neighbor did that? And if your neighbor said God was going to destroy the earth with a flood, how would you react? Would you believe him or call the municipal codes department to get the animals out of your neighborhood?

Noah was probably not the first and certainly has not been the last person to be laughed at for an unpopular idea. Galileo spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest for supporting the crazy idea that the earth revolves around the sun instead of what most people thought at the timethe sun revolves around the earth. When Alexander Graham Bell offered his patent for a telephone to what later became Western Union, a company committee said, The idea of installing telephones in every city is idiotic . (This) ungainly and impractical device has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. And when Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer, his employer, Hewlett-Packard, saw no future in it. Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporationat the time the second largest manufacturer of computerssaid, There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. So Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the Apple computer. Galileo, Alexander Graham Bell, and Steve Wozniak were all told they were wrong. But it turns out they were right.

Noah believed what God had told him. And even though the experts and his neighbors thought he was nutty, he took action. Its easy in retrospect to say he was a hero, but it was not so easy at the time.

Probably no story in the Bible has raised as many questions and has generated as much controversy as Noah and the ark. The story in the Bible is just the beginning!

• Who was Noah?
• How big was the ark?
• Did the Flood cover the whole earth?
• How many animals were on the ark?

And the big question the one about which books have been written, movies made, and television programs broadcast

• Where is the ark now?

For thousands of years, people have said the ark is on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, and hundreds of peoplefrom St. Jacob in the fourth century, to a Dutch sailor in the eighteenth century, to a U.S. astronaut in the twentiethhave all searched for it.

This is the story of Noah, the Flood, the animals, the ark, and those who have looked for it.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have retold the story in film, on stage (complete with live animals), and Captain Noah has been a television star. We have built replicas of the ark in Holland, Hong Kong, and Canada. Noah-and-the-ark theme parks are planned for Kentucky and Florida.

The Bible says the ark saved people and animals when the world as they knew it was destroyed. How can we save ourselves in the event of a future destruction of the earth? Interestingly, the Bible says the story of Noah and the ark also holds a secret to how to survive the end of the world.

Until about two hundred fifty years ago, few people questioned the supernatural stories of the BibleJesus feeding five thousand with five loaves and two fish, Moses leading Israelites across the Red Sea, and the creation of the world in six days. Scientists, geologists, and early paleontologists approached their scientific discovery with the assumption that Noahs Flood explained how the world was shaped. They interpreted evidence they found through the lens of what they believed to be truethe Bible.

Geologist David Montgomery explains.

Today, geologists generally dismiss Noahs Flood with a chuckle and shrug it off as a relic of another time. But for centuries it was considered common knowledge among Christians and many natural philosophers that Noahs Flood shaped our world. What else could have? Geologists tend to forget that the foundation of modern geology, [seventeenth century bishop and scientist Nicholas] Stenos deceptively simple idea that younger rocks lay on top of older ones, was introduced to help explain how Noahs Flood shaped the Italian landscape. Yet Stenos story remains one of the best examples of the complex interplay between geology and theology . The more natural philosophers applied Stenos rules to the geologic record, the more they discovered about how the rocks revealed a much longer story than the traditional biblically-inspired history of the world.

The discoveries suggesting a much longer story brought about a change in the scientific communitys thinking about the Flood. Thomas Huxley, an English biologist and influential advocate of Darwins theory of evolution, explains.

At the present time [1893], it is difficult to persuade serious scientific inquirers to occupy themselves, in any way, with the Noachian Deluge. They look at you with a smile and a shrug, and say they have more important matters to attend to . But it was not so in my youth. At that time, geologists and biologists could hardly follow to the end of any path of inquiry without finding the way blocked by Noah and his ark, or by the first chapter of Genesis; and it was a serious matter, in this country at any rate, for a man to be suspected of doubting the literal truth of the Diluvial history.