Matrioshka_Brain

Wow! Circular logic followed by a Presupposition followed by Bad Archeology (which was probibaly based on a presupposition).

I'm not sure how you managed it.

_____________________________
I see someone missed the Discovery channel spanking of the flood myth. OR, made an assumtion based on circular logic, and presupposed.

And I loved how you attempted to rationalize some of those contradictions (yet ultimately failed).

Asha'man

Magus55, past archeologists managed to verify events in the Bible only by blinding themselves to the actual evidence, and assuming that the Bible was true in the first place. This is no longer happening. Modern archeologists have looked at past physical evidence while ignoring the faulty conclusions of older work. They have done new excavations as well as complete surveys of the entire region of Israel. The conclusion is clear: huge portions of the Hebrew Bible are myth. The evidence is not only lacking, but it points to an incompatible alternative.

The evidence shows that the story of Abraham and the patriarchs was crafted in the 7th century BC, and could not possibly be a historical account. Many of the cities and peoples referenced in the story did not exist before the 8th or 7th century.

The evidence shows that there was never a captivity in Egypt, never an exodus lead by Moses, never a few million refugees roaming the desert for years, and never a conquest of Canaan by the Jews (though lots of other folks managed to invade in other timeframes). There is hard physical evidence of small tribes roaming in the Sinai desert both before and after the time of the Exodus, but the massive trail produced by 2-3 million Jews, a trail that would be virtually impossible to miss, is completely absent.

The evidence shows that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were never unified under David and Solomon. Each kingdom grew at very separate paces, showing no signs of a unified government. One grew fast and became somewhat wealthy, the other remained poor for centuries, unable to build even the smallest government buildings.

The archeological evidence demonstrates that the bible is absolutely useless as a historical book, that these sections were composed in the 7th century to support a new religious and political agenda by the rulers of Judah.

How can you possibly say this? Knowing about disease, it utterly fails to mention germs and the benefits of soap! Even in the 1st century, the bible records disease as being caused by demons, when it is quite clear that exorcism is among the least successful medical treatment ever known to man, second only to bleeding!

Your continual bashing of science simply demonstrates an ignorance and bias that is utterly incompatible with 21st century existence. I suggest you take a moment to examine what science has actually done, and how it works, rather than trusting the faulty wisdom of your Sunday school teachers.

Science is anything other than a guessing game, and it is rarely wrong. That’s the whole point! Science is a series of successive approximations. It very rarely throws out ideas that are utterly incorrect, it usually replaces them with an idea that is simply more accurate or more precise. Even the most massive revolution in physics, the switch from Newtonian to Relativity, was not a matter of declaring Newtonian physics to be “incorrect.” It was simply found to be limited in applicability. Relativity did not invalidate a single piece of Newtonian physics, it simply allowed more accurate calculations to be made in more extreme environments.

You badly mischaracterize the nature of science every time you speak about it, and that alone destroys your credibility in my mind. Your opinion about theological matters is worthless to me if you cannot accept and accommodate the reality of the current century. When I want an opinion from the dark ages, however, I suspect I know who to ask.

Jack the Bodiless

Magus55:
No, Magus, this will never happen.

We already have a vast quantity of evidence which demonstrates the age of the Earth, common descent of species from shared ancestors over millions of years, and the nonexistence of the Noachian Flood. No matter what ELSE scientists discover in the future, the evidence we ALREADY have will never go away.

"Falsification" is an inherent part of science. Scientists are always reluctant to say that a theory is "proved", because there's always a possibility that some newer, better theory might come along. But when a theory has been DISproved, it is dead, and it STAYS dead.


Biblical creationism is dead, as the evidence disproves it.
(emphasis mine).

This is a lie, Magus. There is no possible excuse for uttering it. Unlike various OTHER ancient peoples, the Hebrews had no idea that the Earth is spherical. You cannot cite scriptures that say otherwise, because none exist. You cannot cite non-Biblical Hebrew sources either, because in every case where the shape of the Earth is mentioned, it is plainly flat.

So you're presenting fantasy as fact.

chapka

So you don't accept plate tectonics as a model of mountain formation? Do you have an alternative explanation for how the Himalayas, for example, were formed, in the last 4,000 years, and when and why they stopped rising and started eroding? For fault lines and earthquake zones?

I have a positive explanation, called "modern geology." It's the best model I've seen so far. If you want to be taken seriously, please provide at least a plausible alternative mechanism.

Mageth

Originally posted by Magus55
Again, it depends on what you assume the Earth used to be like. Lift the ocean floor, and lower the tallest mountains and there is plenty of water sitting in the oceans.

In the first place: no, there would not be plenty of water sitting in the oceans, even in that case.

In the second place, we do not have to "assume" what the Earth was like, say, 4000 years ago. Science is quite apt at telling us what the earth was like 4000, 40,000, 400,000, etc. years ago.

The Bible describes Ararat being the highest mountain,

Where is that? What verse? (In the Genesis account, BTW, it's the "mountains of Ararat")

but I don't think it was anywhere near as high as it is today.

Mt. Ararat didn't magically spring up from the ground 4000 years ago. Mt. Ararat is volcano cone, which has been around for far longer than 4000 years (most of it forming 2-3 million years ago during the Holocene period). Since then, and in recorded history, it's been dormant if not extinct. IOW, no major eruptions to increase its height in a very long time. It's @17,000 feet , ("Little Ararat" is @13,000 feet) and in total mass is one of, if not the, most massive single mountains on the surface of the earth. So, no, Mt. Ararat was as high then as it is today, if not higher. And note that Everest is much older than Ararat.

And of course, the only source of water wasn't from rain, so no it wouldn't have to have rained 360 inches an hour.

"The fountains of the deep"? Think about it, Magus. If enough water came from under the earth to significantly contribute to the Flood, the ground from under which the water came would collapse due to the weight of the water above and the absense of the water below. In other words, emptying "the fountains of the deep" would give your flood a net gain in height of zero.

Since my "180 inches" was based on a height of 15,000 feet, say Ararat was 2000 feet lower then than today, which it wasn't. Well, being very generous and saying 1/3 of the water came from the mythical "fountains". That still leaves you with 120 inches, or ten feet, of rain an hour. That's two inches of rain per minute.

Now, I grew up on the Texas coast, so I've seen hard rains. I've seen it rain 5 inches in one hour, on more than one occasion. During the hardest deluges, if that continued for an hour, you'd perhaps reach around 10-12 inches an hour. It's painful to walk outside in a rain like that - inside, you think the roof might collapse.

Ten feet of rain per hour? That'd be like the entire sky was one colossal fireman's hose. The whole sky would look like Niagara Falls. For forty days and nights.

It'd sink a battleship, not to mention a 450-foot wooden barge.

Only if you assume rain was the only source of water.

No matter how you cut it, you're trying to make a square circle.

Jack the Bodiless

Just to come back to this:
...There never was any evidence, even 20 years ago, that the Earth was 1 billion years old.

Just where are you getting this nonsense from?

Sven

Hey Magus55 (or anyone else), if you want to see another creationist getting bashed for claiming that Noah's Flood was real, look at this thread (you have to scroll down a bit)

Babylon Sister

I've often wondered about the "fountains of the deep" concept. If there really was that much water under the surface, wouldn't the surface of the earth be quicksand? Or wouldn't there be a lot more steam escaping from all those cracks and vents and fissures?

mindaika

Of course if was he was going to do that, why even bother with the ark. Which brings up another point: Why bother torturing the "evil people" to death in the first place. If you're omnipotent and you don't like something, why not just make in vanish?

mindaika

Wouldn't covering up his existence deny God's nature?