Paul Flocken

Immigration was at least as important to America as native birthrate. But that is only an aside.

Let's make a few assumptions about the regrowth of society.

Assumption 1: Noah and his family got it on immediately when they left the ark. And were immediately pregnant.

Assumption 2: The women folk only took three months off between pregnancies.(Not a bad assumption really. My brother is 13 months younger than I am.)

Assumption 3: The infant mortality rate is 0.

Assumption 4: The maternal mortality in childbirth rate is 0.(added in edit: This despite the fact that childbirth is supposed to be 'sorrow' for women.)

Assumption 5&6: The accidental death rate is 0 and the death due to disease rate is 0.

Assumption 7: All children are physically able to bare children when they reach age 15. This seems like a reasonable age for puberty to have reached 100% of each yearly generation.

Assumption 7.1: They immediately start doing so.

So let's look at the growth rate.

On the first anniversary of disembarkation from the ark the population would be: 8 adults; 4 infants three months old. Pop=12

On the second anniversary of the disembarkation from the ark the population owuld be: 8 adults; 8 kids, 4 of them infants. Pop=16

On the third anniversary of the DFtA the population would be: 8 adults; 12 kids. Pop=20

On the fourth anniversary of the DFtA: 8 adults; 16 kids. Pop=24

5th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 20 kids. Pop=28

6th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 24 kids. Pop=32

7th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 28kids. Pop=36

8th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 32kids. Pop=40

9th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 36kids. Pop=44

10th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 40kids. Pop=48

11th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 44kids. Pop=52

12th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 48kids. Pop=56

13th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 52kids. Pop=60

14th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 56kids. Pop=64

15th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 60kids. Pop=68

16th ann DFtA: 8 adults; 64kids. Pop=72

Whew! 16 years have passed and there are only 72 people on the planet. And those four women must have had some fearful stretchmarks! Can you just imagine what school was like?

But now the population should really start to jump. The kids can finally start having kids.

17th ann DFtA: Pop=78

18th ann DFtA: Pop=86

19th ann DFtA: Pop=96

20th ann DFtA: Pop=108

21th ann DFtA: Pop=122

22th ann DFtA: Pop=138

23th ann DFtA: Pop=156

24th ann DFtA: Pop=176

25th ann DFtA: Pop=198

26th ann DFtA: Pop=222

27th ann DFtA: Pop=248

28th ann DFtA: Pop=276

29th ann DFtA: Pop=306

30th ann DFtA: Pop=338

31th ann DFtA: Pop=372

32th ann DFtA: Pop=408

32 years. Only 408 people. Okay now the grandkids can start having kids.

33th ann DFtA: Pop=447

34th ann DFtA: Pop=490

35th ann DFtA: Pop=538

36th ann DFtA: Pop=592

37th ann DFtA: Pop=653

38th ann DFtA: Pop=722

39th ann DFtA: Pop=800

40th ann DFtA: Pop=888

41th ann DFtA: Pop=987

42th ann DFtA: Pop=1098

43th ann DFtA: Pop=1222

44th ann DFtA: Pop=1360

45th ann DFtA: Pop=1513

46th ann DFtA: Pop=1682

47th ann DFtA: Pop=1868

48th ann DFtA: Pop=2072

By now Noah's and the three son's wives have had 48 children each. Imagine spending 36 out of 48 years preggers I am going to stop here. I will see if I can put the .xls on some file sharing site for all to look at. I carried it out to AFDave's 600 years.

Where is this 2 mile thick layer of sediment?(Typing this late so others may have asked it.)

The devastation area of Mt St Helens was surrounded by non-devastated areas that were full of life that could rapidly intrude into the devastation. After the mythical flood the ENTIRE earth was devastated. There would have been no life anywhere to fill in the devastation. You might claim that Noah had an ark with enough provisions for one year for all the animals but the situation is more dire than that. He would have needed provisions for many, many, many years for all the animals that emerged into a Mt St Helens landscape.


Your guess is, you can no doubt guess, pure speculation. Egyptologists can actually read the history of their country off of the walls of their tombs, temples, and pyramids. No speculation necessary.

You would actually have to supply a specific date for the flood and for babel for us to know that. Why is it so hard for you to supply a specific date? Again, Egyptologists can date many parts of their history down to the year. You have your mythical god on your side and yet you can't seem to do any better than the nearest millennium.

According to the Hebrew calender the flood occurred 2104-2103bce. I am curious to know why you can't accept this date? I should think that the people who allegedly lived this history would know better than anyone else when it was. It is after all THEIR history. What is wrong with this date?

KJV I assume. Chapter and verse please.

Paul Flocken

Calilasseia

I thought that the whole point of introducing Babel into the picture was to establish that god decided to stop everyone understanding each other so that they wouldn't get uppity again and engage upon any more such mega-projects.

Erm, if a small group of those brain-addled people [i]had been able to understand "pre-Babel writings", wouldn't this have frustrated the whole enterprise?

More to the point, wouldn't that small group of people, if these Dave witterings contain any substance, have immediately possessed a massive technological advantage over the rest? Leading, oh, to a massive global takeover of the rest of humanity?

A bit like what happened once European civilisation developed the means to explore the Earth, and the military technology to make their stay permanent when they arrived in new places inhabited by native peoples for whom the bow and arrow was still in development. You know, turn up in ships mounting cannons, disembark with more cannons and personal firearms, and watch the natives crumple and fold under the enormously superior firepower.

So, presuming this didn't happen (because the archaeological evidence tells us that several ancient civilisations around the Eastern Mediterranean were vying for power when they weren't trading with each other, none of them achieved overall supremacy until the ascendancy of the Romans, and even the Romans had their setbacks as an imperial power - Carthage was a continual thorn in their side for example), one is left asking all manner of questions which ultimately lead to one inexorable conclusion - Babel was yet another myth. Because the Babel story results in yet more conclusions unsupported by the evidence. Just like the vast majority of the bad alt-history fanfic in Genesis (talking snakes? :huh: ). If this was the best god could do, perhaps he should have waited until Terry Pratchett came on the scene to do the job properly.

ericmurphy

This is yet one more example of the strangely incompetent supreme being Dave worships. Maybe Vonnegut was onto something with his "Church of God the Fairly Competent."

The God of the Old Testament strikes me as exactly the sort of narrow, petty, insecure, not-very-intelligent bungler that might be imagined by people who were not very sophisticated about the way the universe works. Hardly the sort of being that could will the universe into existence merely by, e.g., thinking really hard about it.

Steviepinhead

The Babel myth is a species of myth that attempts to retroactively "explain" the observed facts: people in Group A look around their world, and there are all these people in Groups B, C, D ... who speak different languages, wear different clothes, practice different lifestyles and religions, look to some degree different, etc.

How did the people of the world become so diverse? How did they develop such different ways of talking?

Time for the myth-makers to get to work.

Dave hasn't hit us with it yet, but there are many myths around the world to account for these same observed facts. They don't line up so neatly (or, ahem, not) for dave's purposes as the alleged "worldwide" distribution of the Flood myth(s), but they are widespread and have the same explanatory focus.

Further, this "how did the people get all spread out speaking different languages" species of myth is itself a member of a larger taxon, which perhaps could be called, how did the species of animals and plants become differentiated and spread out and come to wear their different "outer" appearances and come to behave in their distinctive ways.

This larger myth-cycle could actually be understood to be an allegorical way of grappling with the same underlying patterns of similarities and differences that led the later systematists and naturalists to come up with the Linnean taxonomy: i.e., many practicing "naturalists" among tribal peoples--who had to butcher and dismember animals for all sorts of purposes--were impressed with the same observations of "nested hierarchies" that led modern science to embrace common descent.

Before there were all the separate species, and separate tribes of humans, back in the MythTime, we were "all the same." People and animals could understand each other, etc. Then, by whatever "mechanism" the particular myth adopts, the MythTime came to an end--usually facilitated by a "Changer" or "Transformer" (often also, though not always acting out of altruistic motives, the Light/FireBringer and CultureBearer)--then the various species/tribes adopted their own "cloaks" and characteristic behaviors/cultures/languages, and were dispersed...

On the Northwest Coast, Raven swiped a salmon-filled lake from the primordial beavers (who then lived in a "lodge" a lot like a super-longhouse), rolled the whole lake up like you would an Indian blanket, and dribbled different runs of salmon in various lakes and rivers as he attempted to flee the Beaver-People.

Raven transformed himself into a spruce needle, was swallowed by the daughter of the Great Chief who hid the Sun-Moon-Stars in a treasure box in his house. Thus impregnated the Great Chief's daugher with "baby" Raven, Raven inveigled himself into the chief's family, became the apple of the chief's eye, eventually whined his way into getting to play with the light-treasures, escaped up through the smokehole with them, getting blackened by the house-fire in the process, etc.

Myths of this kind were, in part, proto-scientific attempts to sensibly partition the world of reality into its differentiated but interrelated self.

The Genesis myths are very much swatches from this fabric, not always the best-told or most-entertaining or most-literary of the type. Decent representational samples, but hardly the ideal or prototype or ultimate ancestral versions that Certain People would like to think they were.

Certain people need to read a little more widely. And grant other ancestral groups of people, and their bodies of myth, the same respect that they grant to their "own" traditions. Neither more, nor less.

Respect for mythic tradition is, of course, one thing. Privileging these early attemps at systematics over modern science is, of course, another.

Calilasseia

Don't recall the British Museum saying that they had to dig through two miles of sediment to find their assorted artefacts. Come to think of it, whenever I've seen an archaeological dig on television, most of the holes that have been dug have been somewhere between 4 and 16 feet in depth.

Care to explain how something 10,000 years old can be found by digging a LOT less deep than 2 miles? Care to explain how, in quite a few places in the world, when you dig a 2 mile deep mineshaft, you dig through bloody great thick layers of igneous rock? Try diamond mining in South Africa - diamonds aren't formed in sedimentary rock. To form a diamond, carbon has to be subject to high temperatures AND immense pressures, which means that diamonds tend to occur in igneous rocks. Furthermore, they tend to occur in igneous rocks that are a good way below the surface.

Plus, how come this 2 mile thick layer of sediment didn't cover the Deccan Traps? Which is an enormous slab of igneous rock 2,000 metres thick covering an area of half a million square kilometres in India? How come your mythical 2 mile thick layer of sediment isn't hiding the Deccan Traps from view?

Oh, by the way, the Deccan Traps have been dated to the late Cretaceous Era, and were first formed 68 million years ago. Which is, what, eleven thousand times longer than the age of the universe according to Genesis. But then somehow the Sumerians managed to figure out how to brew beer 2,500 years before your interpretation of Genesis places the creation of the universe, Dave ... which would definitely make them a "pre-flood" civilisation, yet we've been able to find out about them via standard archaeological means, and even been able to determine that they built bloody great ziggurats.In fact, one of them is still extant in Iraq - the Great Ziggurat of Ur, which was built in 4000 BC, and which would be a bloody tourist attraction like the Pyramids if it wasn't for the current war in Iraq ...

shirley knott

And the perennial question, just where can we find any trace of this alleged 2+ mile thick layer of sediment?
Dave insists it is worldwide and visible in the geologic column, but no one else is able to see it.
Nor is Dave able (or willing) to identify which layer is the flood, which layers are pre-flood, and which are post-flood. It almost looks like avoidance of facts and data... Almost...

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Calilasseia

That's on those occasions when he isn't following the lead of other creationists and denying that the geologic column actually exists of course ... something that was a favourite Hovind mantra:

I'm sure someone can find a post somewhere in the vast sedimentary deposit of Dave trainwreck threads where he's introduced this ... it would not be without precedent with respect to the introduction (and sometimes the simultaneous maintenance) of contradictory ideas whilst trying to shore up YEC.

shirley knott

Actually, I don't believe I've seen Dave pull that particular trick out of the bag. And given that he challenged my post with "haven't you heard of the geologic column", I think he now cannot pull it out of the bag.
So again, Dave -- YOU assert that the geologic column provides evidence for a worldwide 2+ mile thick layer of sediment.
I say you're full of it and need to retract your claim, and abandon any notion of the historical validity of Noah's flood.
or provide at least a single location where a 2+ mile thick layer of sediment can be found that supports the notion of the flood. And, given where you raised the issue, I will not accept any location outside of Egypt.
Deal with it or recant, it's up to you.

no hugs for thugs,
Shirley Knott

Dave Hawkins

Your real argument here is with Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, who was the originator of Plate Tectonics theory. He said that continent movement was catastrophic ... not slow.

Note this interesting Nature article (my subscription does not cover articles older than 1997 so I only have the abstract) ...

mung bean

No Dave. The argument is with the modern promoters of your favourite "runaway subduction" model. Pellegrini is no longer relevant.
Observation indicates that plate tectonics is a slow process. The most active plate boundaries only move about an inch a year relative to each other.