Bad news, Freego, but your flood story in Genesis was plagiarised:

"The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known narrative writing extant, is the likely source of some of these early Genesis myths, especially those regarding the Tree of Life and the great flood. The Epic, written in or around ancient Babylon in Mesopotamia somewhere between two and three thousand BCE, has some of the ancient gods about to send a flood to wipe out humanity because the people were becoming too noisy and boisterous. Another of the gods warned a good and honorable man named Utnapishtim and put him on a great boat, along with his family and two of every living animal. After the flood Utnapishtim was made immortal and dwelt on an Eden like island called Dilmun. You may read this narrative for yourselves at The Epic of Gilgamesh."

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM

The Sumerians were aroud in 3000 BC, they wrote the original Epic of Gilgamesh, which was no doubt based on the flooding of the Black Sea Valley some 7000 or more years ago, at the end of the ice age the Mediteranian Sea overflowed into the Black Sea Valley, which once was a fresh water lake.

It is a bad assumption to say that because there are similarities then it therefore must be borrowed. And because someone with a Ph. D. says that is what happened doesn't necessarily mean that is what happened. What we have are stories from different nations within a particular area telling the story of a flood. It is not illogical to conclude that maybe a flood did in fact happen. The question then is, "Which of the stories is the correct one?"

Freego You make a number of wild, bizarre extrodinary hypotheses and assertions without the slightest citation of evidence. I think you are parroting arguments from ICR or some other pseudoscientific source with no real understanding of these points.

Meaningless. The rise of "civilization" is simply not evidence for a flood.

Do you have this letter? Was it published in a peer reviewed journal? Is Mister Dodwell as much of an astronomer as Duane Gish is a biochemist?

In this entire paragraph you are presenting a chain of extraordinary hypothesis as fact. Where's the evidence?

Freego, scientists do not treat authorities the way that theists do. Charles Darwins opinions are irrelevant; science has advanced greatly since then.

Where is the evidence for this bizarre assertion?

As daemon23 noted, the de Camps are fantasy writers. Additionally, there is quite a lot of controversy around specific theories. This quote smells like it was pulled out of context. Can you provide a citation for the specific work?

Lots of interesting things happen to specific pieces of rock. Perhaps you can cite the actual studies so we can really see what's going on?

Again an extraordinary assertion without evidence.

In Darwin's day paleantology was in its infancy, and very little was known about the fossil record. So at the time it didn't provide much evidence for evolution - beyond the fact that the vast majority of the species which once existed no longer exist. The fact that Darwin's theory is so well supported by subsequent discoveries in paleantology, genetics etc. is strong evidence for its correctness.

And anyway, Darwin is not the be all and end all of evolutionary theory. He was a scientific giant in his time, but science has advanced a long way in the intervening century and a half. The views of modern scientists are much more important.

Not really. By this theory, elephants should be found next to large dinosaurs, which they are not, and cheetahs next to small dinosaurs, which they are not. Instead, elephants are found next to cheetahs, and
large dinosaurs next to small dinosaurs.

They didn't. Many different species of dinosaurs came and went during the 150 million years or so they existed. For example, in spite of the popular images, diplodocus and tyrranosaurus would never have met - the former was extinct long before the latter appeared.

I thought it was pretty certain though that the final extinction of the dinosaurs was due to the meteorite strike in Mexico 65M years ago - though they may have been in decline by then anyway.

My understanding is that rock strata can occasionally be overturned by plate tectonic processes. Certainly in the formation of mountains they must be pushed from horizontal to vertical. So here and there the layers will be found upside down. This is actually evidence for conventional geology and against flood geology - conventional geology can explain overturned strata, while flood geology has no explanation for this phenomenon. I'm not a geologist though - can any geologists help me out on this one?

Actually they show that many became extinct at many points over millions of years. Had they all lived at the same time we would expect to find that all species jumbled up together... not different species in different strata. Again, the differences cannot be explained by the size of the fish, because large and small fish are found in all strata - not just large fish at the bottom and small ones at the top.

I'd rather we did to be honest

Where does the evidence for this statement come from?

Let's talk about the Noah story.

How did the kangaroos and polar bears get from Australia and the Arctic to Palestine (or wherever Noah lived)? If they already lived there, why are their fossils only found in Australia and the Arctic and never found in Palestine? How did they get back? Why did they go back? OK, the polar bears might have found it a bit warm, but kangaroos could have lived quite happily on Ararat. Why do we find no kangaroos outside Australia?

How did Noah simultaneously keep the arctic animals cold enough and the tropical animals warm enough?

What did they eat? They would have needed a lot of fresh food, with no refrigeration. Carniverous animals would have had to have meat. Koala bears eat only eucalyptus leaves - where did they come from? Did they bring them with them from Australia? Did they have a supply with them on their way back?

How did Noah count and sex dust mites, which cannot be seen without a microscope?

How did one family give rise to all the different races - negro, caucasian, mongoloid, in 4000 years or so. In fact, it would have had to have been much faster than that, because Egyptian murals from about 3000 years ago show different races looking much as they do now. Why did the human race change so much in the first 1000 years, then hardly at all in the next 3000?

The flood would have killed all plant life as well. What did they all eat when they got off the ark? Given the length of time it takes trees to grow, where did that dove find an olive branch?

How about diseases? Germs cannot survive without a host. The only hosts which could have prevented human diseases being wiped out in the flood would have been Noah's family. So between them, they must have been carrying malaria, syphilis, bubonic plague, measles, chicken pox, TB, leprosy, smallpox, etc, etc. How did any of them survive that? And if they did survive, they would have acquired immunity to most of those diseases, which would then have had no host and died out. Much the same applies to animal diseases.

TrueThinker

That's not an assumption, that's a conclusion. And a fairly obvious one at that.

Of course. However, a Ph.D. has the presumption of scholarship. A refutation needs a little more substance than "So you say."

Local floods happen all the time.

The question is, how do we determine, to the best of our ability, what really happened?

Bullshit. Deinochus is further down than mastadons.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> Let's not forget about the ark First of all it was not 450 feet long, it was 900 feet long, 12,150,000 cubit foot capacity and a gross tonnage of 121,500 tons. Lets divide the ark up into boxcars. a normal boxcar can house 67 animals with comfort. Lets divide the ark up into boxcars. a normal boxcar can house 67 animals with comfort. If we use this measurment on the ark, we find that we can house 226,125 animals with 25% of the space left.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
12,150,000 (your own goddamned number) divided by 226,125=53 cubic feet. Which less than a cube 4x4x4 each. And you have 25% left? Hmmmmm...n that works out to 40 cubic feet each. Which is around 3.5 feet each. Comfortable. And the food? Waste? What about fresh drinking water? That ocean water would be saline, and I doubt they had room to boil the water for all those animals. And what about them breeding while in there? Rabbits go rather fast. So do hamsters (I know firsthand ). And cages mean shit, because we had a hamster that got out of an impregnible cage and impregnated another hamster, who never left her cage-also impregnable-then returned to his.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> I think the ark was up to the task.

Not really.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> Antediluvian wood was also much stronger than todays wood, and the ark's design insure in ability to float.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Really? Show me the antedilluvian woods. Oh, and, one more thing-
how did the plant life regrow? These things take rather specific conditions, and lots and lots of time. Even with exponential breeding, rainforests and the North American forests all could NOT have cme around in 4k years. It just takes too damned long.


[This message has been edited by Jesus Christ (edited April 11, 2001).]

[Freego:]. When we average the estimated dates for the emergence of the post flood civilizations (3,000, 3,000, 2,250, 2,740, and 2,620) ...

[LP:] Which ones, Freego, which ones?

[Freego:] ThomasA, you asked if there was any evidence. I believe that there is. Mr Geore F. Dodwell, a retired government astronomer of south Australia and director of the Adelaide Observatory stated this in a leter to Dr. Arthur J. Brandenburg of Ohio State University that in 26 years of extensive study, he had found that the the earth showed a typical exponential recovery curve from a nearly vetical postion to an inclination of 26.5 degrees, and then returned to the rpesent inclination of 23.5 degrees. The date of this was 2345 BC and he concludes that the only way this could happen was if the Biblical flood was true.

[LP:] A big load of sauropod dung. How did Mr. Brandenburg come to his conclusions? The Earth's spin axis does not behave like that at all. Instead, it makes a big circle around the Earth's orbital axis. The Earth's orbit is perturbed by the other planets' gravity, and one effect is for the Earth's orbital axis to wobble a few degrees over a timescale of about 100,000 years. This wobbling gets reflected in the precession, meaning that the Earth's spin-orbit angle (inclination of equator to ecliptic) varies by a degree or so over precession timescales.

[Freego:] Where did the water come from. Well, before the flood it neve rained, so there was that moisture in the air, but that is not nearly enough. The Bible speaks of underground resevoirs of water that burst open during the flood..

[LP:] Only one problem: the Earth is solid all the way down to its outer core, which is iron-nickel.

[Freego:] We can find a succesion of animals, the larger less mobile animals are generally found near the lower half of the fossil record while the more mobile animals seem to be higher up. It seems that they were able to survive longer,

[LP:] Assertions like that make paleontologists laugh.

[Freego:] At the very bottom (the Palaeozoic) we find bottom dwelling marin creatures, these animals could not swim fast enough to escape the oncoming sediment.

[LP:] There have been plenty of equally slow Mesozoic and Cenozoic animals, and if you go diving at a reef, you'll have no trouble seeing some.

[Freego:] How about the giant fish beds, foud in California and England, These show thousands of preserved fish exhibiting signs of quick and violent deaths. ...

[LP:] Like how does one figure that out?

[Freego:] How did all the dinosaurs die during the same period of time. Geologists L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine de Camp state that no logical way has been found to connect the know cause of extinction of individual species with the worldwide "Great Deaths." They continue by saying that some other cause, operating on a worldwide basis "would seem to be called for."

[LP:] Those two are science writers, not professional geologists. And their puzzlement over mass extinctions was the "consensus" of paleontologists for many decades. Since the couple had been born in the 1920's, their statements very likely precede the publication of the Alvarez meteorite-strike hypothesis, which was in 1981 or thereabouts. That hypothesis has he honor of being much more successful in explaining the mass extinction of dinosaurs than any of the earlier ones.

[Freego:] The fossil record is also quite mixed up in toher places: ...

[LP:] Thanx to older rock getting shoved on top of younger rock.

[Freego:] The investigators(Zangerl and Richardson) found that fish waying from one half to three fourths pounds disentegrated within six and a half days. Yet we can find very delicate animals and plants preserved perfectly in the fossil record. Something much faster must have happened to create these fossils.

[LP:] All they have to do is sink into anoxic basins where the microbes must metabolize much more slowly.

[Freego:] [A lot of stuff on Noah's Ark...]

You lying get. Have you been to England? I live there. It only covers 547 square miles including the piers we have built out into the sea. Deducting mountains (well, hills then) and lakes it's as much as I can do to find a place to sit down mate. I would write more but my elbows are annoying the bloke next door.

Boro Nut


[This message has been edited by Boro Nut (edited April 12, 2001).]

Oh! I didn't known that the strength of the components increased their ability to displace a fixed volume of water. Makes you wonder how the Titanic ever sank doesn't it. I bet that Greek gadgie is feeling a right prat now for jumping out of his bath starkers shouting 'Eureka' isn't he? What WAS he thinking.