HRG

It isn't only that there is no evidence for a global flood: we have lots of evidence against a global flood, starting with the undisturbed Greenland ice layers.

The "immense historical events" you allude to are easily explained as local floods, or perhaps by the Mediterranean waters spilling into the Black Sea basin.

But a global flood is excluded by actual evidence.

Regards,
HRG.

wehappyfew

Not by a long shot, doctor G. The evidence for the global flood is overwhelming and indisputable. I'm surprised at the selective memory displayed by evilutionists here. This flood should be brought up every time creationists mention the global extent of flood myths.

I'm talking about the 130 meter rise in sea-level from the last glacial maximum. Given humans' habit of living near coasts, it must have affected almost every culture - and been quite devastating. It should not be surprising it plays a central role in the mythology of almost every early culture.

davidH

What evidience do you have that they were myths? You see in our time there has never been a global flood - so how do you know what evidience to expect?

I think the problem that you might have is that you are examining this from an evolutionist mind set. You believe that the earth takes millions and millions of years to change - therefore you believe that there should be abundance of evidience to show that there was a global flood.
Putting that aside, what if the earth changed far more quickly than you would have though? That within 6000 years the earth has altered so covering up signs that there was a global flood.

You see, I would be more inclined to believe ancient history, then I would to examine a changing world and not believe because there was no evidience for it.

The fact that there are documents of an ancient flood of massive proportions leads me to believe that something must have happened, that lead to these stories.
Why could there not have been a flood of that proportion even if there is no evidience of it 6000 years onwards?

Let me put it to you another way.
If you were there, and that flood did occur and you decided to document it and write it down. Yet people 6000 years later deny it ever happened because they see no physical evidience for it.

I think I am more inclined to believe what was written in those ancient days. What else do we have to go by?

For example - maybe later on in future years people will deny that there was ever a Roman conquest of the world. Sure all they have to go by is written sources, drawings and all. But Surely that could all have been a myth of the Romans - it could never have happened because they see no physical evidience of it having happened.

You see - where will you draw the line?

Yes it is evidience of a single Flood event.
Before I comment further on this I would rather we had the exact transelation of what was on the tablet.
- Is that possible to find? Or does anyone here have any source they could get it from?

Could a few examples of these be given? And the way they were dated explained?

Just a question I would like to ask out of interest.
As the Bible says that the earth is so young - and that the land mass was created as one area surrounded by sea.
Doesn't that coincide with the fact that the land can be shown today to have originated from one land mass? Could the moving of the land have been started by the great flood, or could the moving of the land today be the slowing down of the moving land after it was forcefully started by the flood?

Don't know why everyone seems to consider you a catholic.

Is this a faw in a theory? Maybe it was something that you had accepted as the truth....supported supposidly by evidience.....until proved wrong by evidience. Maybe the whole theory of evolution is like that....one day evidience will be shown that refutes the theory of evolution.
It's worth pondering I think.

Kosh

davidH -

what you're about to get pounded on here is
that you're making all these assumptions and
choosing your side, then clearly demonstrating
that you haven't done the research. SO don't
take it too personally.

Do a search on the "Epic of Gilgamesh". I believe
that wwww.religioustolerance.com (or .org?) has
a side by side comparison of the two myths.

As for taking ancient writings over scientific
research, does that mean we should also believe
greek and roman mythology to be true?

As for the Catholic comment, that was just a little jab at current events. Aren't all good
Irish lads Catholic?

Oolon Colluphid

The link to that comparison is here:
<a href="http://www.religioustolerance.org/noah_com.htm" target="_blank">Comparison of the Babylonian and Noahic Flood Stories</a>.

Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

Should I be surprised? This is perfectly normal in science, indeed it is how it works. There was one during the 70s and 80s, as palaeontologists gradually came to accept the much more recent date for the human divergence from chimps and gorilas that the molecular clock indicated. It was brought forward by 10 million years, from 15 to 5 may. Why, did you think this new stuff disproved human evolution in general...?

... apparently you do. Proof again, eh? <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> Looks to me like moving closer and closer to the truth.

Quite right you're not touching it. You still have one of your own pending in <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000250&p=6" target="_blank">this thread</a>. Get your fundament in there!

Oolon

MrDarwin

There are several strong and completely independent pieces of evidence against the flood. Here are just three I can think of, off the top of my head:

(1) If the flood as described in the OT had really happened, we would expect all cultures worldwide to have an abrupt discontinuity. And yet the ancient Egyptian and Chinese civilizations, of both of which we have very good records, apparently sailed through the flood period without being altered in any way (much less obliterated entirely, as the story says they must have been)

(2) If the flood as described in the OT had really happened, we would predict a genetic bottleneck in all animal species dating to the period of the flood, because they were supposedly reduced to a very small number of each species. Yet extensive study of the genetics of numerous organisms have revealed no such bottlenecks.

(3) If the flood as described in the OT had really happened, we would expect tree rings to have an abrupt discontinuity at the period of the flood. Yet tree ring correlations have pushed the history of bristlecone pines back more than 6,000 years.

[ March 16, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

Resenter

The satirist Steve Aylett came up with this one in an interview: “In America fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago - in England people drink in bars that are older than that.”

Elsewhere he tackled it again in a story about a man called Lint who: “took issue with the fundamentalist notion that the world was only a few thousand years old and that dinosaur bones had been planted by god to test man’s faith. Lint asserted that the world was only sixty years old and that the mischievious god had buried sewers, unexploded bombs and billions of people.”

Then supposedly in the book Shamanspace, which I haven’t actually read, he says “humanity arrived eons ago but, like a man standing in front of an open fridge, has forgotten why.”

Anyway, he’s British and an unfashionably clear-headed bastard.

resenter (h.murtin)

Daggah

Listen up, David. Use your head here.

And if I was there, what would be the "known world" to me? I doubt I would have ever managed to travel farther than a few hundred miles away. So I see a flood extending as far as I can see (which is only 20-30 miles on a clear day) and what am I supposed to think? I don't even know of the existence of most of the world, much less any way to discern whether it's been flooded. But everywhere I look I see a flood, so, because I'm a person living in a time before knowledge, what am I supposed to think?

I can tell you what most people in this situation would think:

1) That the flood probably covered the entire earth.
2) That this was probably the work of some god. (After all it hasn't been that long ago that humans thought lightning bolts, too, were the work of a god.)

Now what's sad is, a few thousand years later, there are people living in this world today - a world WITH knowledge - that choose to remain ignorant and believe in these fairy tales. Put my hypothetical ancient man into today's world, and teach him science and such, and then put him in a place with an identically-sized flood and he's not going to write some mythic story about how a god sent a global flood to the world. He's going to write that it rained a lot and flooded the area.

Daggah

Except this isn't an "evolutionist mindset," it's a realistic mindset. This knowledge about the age of the earth and basic geology was obtained before Darwin's time. We do not "believe" that the earth takes millions of years to change, just like we don't "believe" that gravity causes objects to fall to the ground when we drop them. As far as we can tell so far, these things are facts. Everything we see in geology points in one direction - it's not the fault of geology if it happens to point in the direction that doesn't agree with your Biblical myths.