Pappy Jack

Cege, thanks for answering some of the queries I raised with Dave and which he decided to ignore.:thumbs:

Constant Mews

I would insist on a paternity test and a videotape of the entire process from conception to birth. Not that I would be interested in watching it, of course, but documentation, as Dave says, trumps DNA evidence.

Sphincterboy

I'm going to take a stab at this "vast body of literature" claim.


Let's take a look at the primary source afdave offers up as 'evidence': Genesis 6:5-9:17. 1969 Words (including verse numbers). 29 Paragraphs. But that's just the NIV version. Perhaps it's an "uninspired" translation. Or maybe merely 'partially-inspired'?

Now I guess we can add to this formidable block of 'literature' the scattered mythologised stories of a catastrophic flood from ancient low-lying floodplain-based civilizations. Creationist sites claim these number in the hundreds (without supplying the stories themselves, of course).

I surmise that the The Chaldean Flood Tablets, which is a Babylonian retelling of an earlier Sumerian legend is probably counted as part of the body to which afdave attributes the characteristic "vast". It probably among the more detailed accounts and has some striking similarities with the acount in Genesis (and also some presumably unimportant discrepencies). Astonishingly, the two accounts originate from the same geographic area as the Genesis account. The further away from mesopotamia one gets, however, the poorer the correlation with Genesis.

Now say I offer up Tolkeins' "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy and I claim that that is an undeniably historical account of actual events. It is certainly supported by a far more 'vast' body of literature. Not only is there the triloogy itself, there is also "The Hobbit", and detailed pre-histories such as the 'Silmarillion' etc. Furthermore, there is D&D, video games, movies, web blogs, etc, all inspired by the original works. Such a vast body of literature, infinitely more vast than flood accounts, must allude to the veracity of a historical 'Middle Earth', right?

Constant Mews

An excellent point. Not only is the Genesis flood not supported by any empirical evidence, and flatly contradicted by the entirety of modern science; but the entire 'documentary' support can be written on a couple of folding napkins.

James Brown

I was basing my summary based on these statements by afdave:

It seems to me that Dave is beginning with the assumption that the Flood occurred. His answer to the challenge that cultures exhibited similar levels of technology both before and after the Flood is that Noah must have archived everything. Immediately after, the cultures sprang back to life largely unchanged from the deleterious effects of being completely destroyed. I imagine this idea as if history stretches out behind us like a taut wire. The Flood would then be like someone pulling down firmly on the wire, destroying all civilizations on earth. Once released, the cultures of the world "snap back" into their former states, largely unchanged. Of course, the only way this phenomenon could have occurred is if the only survivor of the Great Calamity preserved all the world's knowledge ahead of time.

This despite the fact that there is no mention in the scant written documentation of the Flood about this great archive of the world's technology. Nor does it explain while different cultures may have simultaneously developed technology such as agriculture, astronomy, medicine, etc. that the technology would be so different from one culture to another. If they were all developed from the same source documents, then the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Innuits, the Aborigines, etc. should all exhibit close parallels in their technology.

The simpler assumption, of course, is that there was no world-wide Deluge, and that the world's cultures have grown and evolved, merged and split, arose and died, exactly as we would expect--each culture both influencing and influenced by others, each advancing and retreating in fits and starts, on back to the beginning.

Constant Mews

I agree.Not precisely. Dave does not claim that the same civilizations appeared immediately post-flood - merely that some advanced civilization existed of which Noah was a member, and that Noah preserved the knowledge of that civilization on tablets of some kind. Remember that Dave does not believe that there are any traces of the pre-flood world. Every single human artifact we have is, in Dave's mind, post-flood. Every single one. It is the 'former states' part that I think is incorrect. We don't what the antediluvian states looked like, or how many existed. We know nothing about them. In Dave's mind, of course.Well, that is his claim. It is not supported by any evidence and is contradicted by all available evidence, but this bagatelle doesn't seem to bother him.

Dave's position is logically insupportable. Everyone agrees on that.

Exactly. If Dave is right, then the entirety of modern science is wrong; tens of thousands of scientists, research lab, centuries of observation and theorizing - every single science is utterly false if Dave is right.

On the other hand, if Dave is wrong then, well, Dave is wrong.

The odds are not in his favor.

Steviepinhead

Unfortunately, in DaveyVerse, the Silmarillion is yet another myth that resonates with his Global Flood beliefs--the Valar from the West (the plural makes "them" sound polytheistic, but "behind" them lay the original monotheistic "reality" of Iluvatar ==> All-Father/Yahweh) got ticked at the corruption of their favored tribe of humans (the Numenorians ==> Israelites) for their evil and corruption (they had been seduced by Sauron ==> Satan). The Valar broke the island of Numenor (=advanced pre-Flood civilization/Garden of Eden/Atlantis/gurble burble...) in an event that we would now likely attribute to "hydroplate tectonics," after which it was overcome by titanic waves ( ==> Teh Flud).

Actually, I'm astonished that Dave hasn't cited the Silmarillion long before now as support for his Flood hypothesis.

Except, of course, that it's fiction crafted by an author who lived and wrote in our lifetimes. Whereas the "true myths" that Dave appeals to are of course fact, concocted by unknown persons in times of sufficient antiquity that Dave can hand-wave away any remotest resemblance between myth and make-believe.

Dave, is Scientology a "religion" or a scam perpetrated by a science fiction author? How can you tell?

Steviepinhead

Constant Mews (I must ask you sometime why you took the name of what sounds like a very persistent kitty for your avatar):
As to human civilization, artifacts, bones/fossils, I believe this is a correct statement of the situation in DaveyVerse.

Of course, at the same time, Dave maintains that all the other fossils preserved--and sorted into layers inconsistent with a flood or a recent creation--in the (however many) miles-deep and worldwide sedimentary layer of flood debris (that he can never seem to locate or point to, anywhere in the world) do still exist.

Well, except that, despite the loading of one pair of all the pre-Flood critturs on the Ark, a lot of those fossilized critters don't seem to turn up in any "post-Flood" layers (or any recently-deposited layer of rock or sediment), anywhere in the world.

Yet another curious inconsistency, that. Why save all these fascinating trilobites and wiwaxias and dinosaurs and mosasaurs and such, only to have them perish immediately after they walk off the ark (never mind that their bones again don't seem to show up in "recent" layers anywhere...).

I'm sure there's an excellent "scientific" explanation for all this, but I'm also sure that Dave is unlikely to provide it.

Sphincterboy

This raises a puzzeling question that has been alluded to by others. That of the documantary evidence for the flood itseld. The recorded evidence of these 'advanced' technologies never themselves make any reference to the single source for this information. Neither do they attribute their existence to a sub-handful of breeding pairs that populated their entire respective civilizations. And aside from a Sumerian account of a cataclysmic flood that got A LOT of the key salient details dead wrong (obvoiusly uninspired, those Sumerian mythologists), no mention is ever made of a global flood by civilizations that nevertheless managed to detail their knowledge of astronomy, medicine, construction etc, etc.

Pappy Jack

1. You have no evidence for the hygiene standards of the hypothetical pre-Flud population.
2. You have no evidence for the hygiene standards of the hypothetical post-Flud survivors.
3. You have no evidence that the civilization of Sumer owes anything to the hypothetical post-Flud survivors.
4. Woolley's excavations do nothing to provide you with the evidence you are lacking at (1) through (3) above.