Did it Never Rain?

Did it never rain?

For the past 18 years I've been sitting in church listening to self-professed Bible 'know-it-alls' ranting about among other things how the Earth, The Blue Marble, cannot be more than 6000 years old. In addition I sat there open mouthed listening to them say that it never rained before Noah's time on Earth. The entire congregation agreeably nodding their heads up and down shouting: "PREACH!" and "AMEN TO THAT BROTHER except for me, thinking "SHADDAP" ...and "BULLSHIT!"

No rain. Lets give that a think. The atmosphere, the stuff in which we breathe and live in is made up of 5 layers decreasing in temperature from the surface to the exosphere, the layer closest to outer space. On an ideal day the temperature decreases from 59 degrees F on the surface, 3.5 degrees F every 1000 ft. Doing the math at some point up there in the first layer, the troposphere, water vapor hits its dew point and becomes visible. It was never explained to me from the pulpit what they may have called that visible moisture back then. Today we call it a cloud. We know as a fact that without clouds there cannot be any rain. It now follows that we can safely say, if what I've been listening to for 18 years is true, that there were no clouds before Noah.

If there were no clouds then how can it be that water never reached that level in the atmosphere; the height at which water vapor becomes visible? Evaporation never existed? or there were no large bodies of water to evaporate. Without evaporation air conditioning didn't exist. Now there is something that I can believe because I lived as a child without airconditioning because it wasn't invented yet and believe me it was heck on Earth. I digress.

Without evaporation it is believable that there could have been large bodies of water on Earth. They simply defied Gods laws of physics and never evaporated. There are two possibilities here: No evaporation or no large bodies of water i.e. oceans.

First lets explore the evaporation angle. No evaporation meant that no one worked and we know that's not true because God said they would have to earn their keep by( dare I say it? "The sweat of their brow") working as he was kicking their disobedient butts out of Paradise, or if they did the Earth was so cold that they couldn't sweat. Lets follow that for a minute. So it was Paradise on Earth in Eden, but just outside: Ice Age? Sweat is what keeps the body cool. When water evaporates it absorbs heat. Its called the latent heat of evaporation. By sweating a person's surface temperature is cooled by the sweat evaporating and carrying away heat with it from the body surface. So lets say the Earth was covered with ice and everyone toiled on the ice without sweating. Ice Age. That's a fact isn't it? So now here is Noah's ancestors toiling away doing what ever they did then to stay vertical. Somewhere they must have had shelter from the elements, caves, igloos..whatever. Its a safe bet that necessity being the mother of invention, someone invented fire. Noah's grand dad to Noah's grand mom. "Hon, that fire is awfully hot in here and its making my clothes wet. Can you crank it down a log or two or I'm gonna have to take some clothes off 'cause Baby its just too damned hot in here."

At some point in all those thousands of years between Adam and Noah someone must have got, somehow, overheated. Were the pulpit people actually saying to me that no one ever got over heated for some reason or another? Even by following Gods orders of going forth and populating the Earth, by making little cavepersons? I know for a fact that people can get over heated making little cavepersons. I got all sweaty in a dugout once on a hot night..never mind. So instead of cooling the body by sweating they had to run outside and jump in the snow? What a bummer that must have been.

Now the no large bodies of water to evaporate tack: No oceans. Duh? No fish. No fish, no fishing, no boats, no swimming, no diving... this is beginning to sound like a lifeguard sign at a military recreation area. Back to no fish. What did our ancestors live on? Ice Age so no veggies. Polar bears? What did they eat? Seals who hadn't learned to eat fish yet because there were no oceans or didn't know how to swim because..fill in the blanks yourself.
So logically there had to be oceans. Without oceans there is no life. Man is 70% water and 30% bullcrap. Except for pulpit preachers insisting that it never rained before Noah. They are indeed unique among men: 0% water and 100% bullcrap.