Gracchus

<a href="http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/6flood.htm" target="_blank">http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/6flood.htm</a>

Use this at your own risk. Usually it makes creationists withdraw in confusion. Sometimes it makes them dangerously, irrationally hostile.

lpetrich

Good arguments. And there is also the serious question of biogeography. Some examples:

Why did the kangaroos hop all the way to Australia, leaving none behind, while all the rabbits hopped to every continent other than Australia and Antarctica?

Why did all the wombats go to Australia and nowhere else, and all the marmots and woodchucks go to the northern continents and nowhere else?

Why did all the rattlesnakes slither off to the Americas, leaving none behind? Even though much of the rest of the world is good poisonous-snake habitat.

Why did all the armadillos go to South America and southern North America, leaving none behind?

Why did all the sloths do likewise with South America, despite their great slowness of locomotion?

Why do oceanic islands have what look like descendants of animals that can easily get to such places? Why do they have big birds and big turtles but not big rats?

Reldas of Melchezidec

Greetings Grac,
Cool site.
A christian could respond to this bit of reasoning in several ways I can think of besides becoming "irrational":

Uno)........ (silence)

dos)The "I luv God no matter what so you can buggar off" mantra

tres) An exaustively long refutation trying to show that the argument is against a "straw man" (or straw god) useing the same accusative evidence as nurturing support.

quatro) A wierd, confuscing, mysticle response that alludes to some meta wisdom.

The ist way is rational because that person might have no insight whatsoever on the subject or doesn't think trying will really matter any way because the people who make and read these arguments are pretty set in thier ways.
The second response is "rational" because it is rational to the creationist. It is rational to the creationist probably because that is that person's reality. Granted, most of us have similar sense capabilities and mental capacities(for the sake of argument), but if group A looks at existence and percieves it differently from group B, then who's rationality is "correct"


The 3rd response incorporates the second, but instead of just a stubborn grasp of a personel reality, one actually tries to reason out the existence of the proposed contrary evidence in a mannor that would try to bridge the gap between the realities. Creationist hold the burden of proof, because certain traditional doctrines or interpretations of certain texts teach rudimentory truth or complete untruth about "reality". Its quite a task, because the very nature of the reality is that it is highly incommunicable to another reality unless shared with another.

The 4th way involves a riddle, parable, analogy, or paradox, that is very subtle- perhaps being the extreme case of Ockham's razor but all Yodic' and mysticized and stuff. Some people are just that good!

There are more ways to refute the website more than the ones mentioned- depending upon the Christian you ask. However most of them,( and probably includeing some of this response ) will be considered highly irrational. However, one believes in the ability of adam to conjure and percieve alternate realities cognitively, but one has also noticed in one's own experience that this difference in perception of life, the universe, and everything, is bigger than ones own ability to bridge, and greater than any previous human ever- even Yeshua, who did not succeed in altering the reality of a bunch of fundies. (Of all people!)

Peas and Grapes,
Reldas of tres and quatro

crocodile deathroll

You need to Boil the oceans first!!

Where did all the extra water come from enough to submerge the highest mountain (Mt Everest in this case but they may of believed Mt Ararat was the tallest) and where did it drain off to?

Even if it submerged the summit of Mt Ararat then there would still be more water in there all the world's oceans.

It must of be extremely hot on Earth before the flood to cause all the ocean's waters the evaporate only to precipitate down again as rain.

Even if the atmosphere was at 100% humidity all over it still will not be able to hold enough moisture at it's present temperature. Its temperature would then have to be at least hotter than boiling point 100deg C to boil every drop of water all over the globe and that still would not be enough.

Then what will happen to all the polar bears and walruses when the ice caps were boiled?

What will happen to all marine life when all the oceans were boiled?

Sure if you heated the Earth to about 400deg C and waited for all the oceans to evaporate the drop it down to 20deg C you would have a very nice flood. But that still would not be a flood of Biblical proportions

Jimmy Higgins

As for Mt. Ararat, this just doesn't go. I know that in Cleveland, there is a buried valley. The bedrock in the area goes from ~650' feet elevation down to sea level!!!

Now, the "great" flood could have filled that valley, however, this indicates that the earth was rather geologically active before the "great" flood in order to have the valley in the first place.

So the argument that the great mountains of the earth today were formed because of the flood is not a "reasonable" argument for even an e-creationist. Therefore, it is reasonable, to under the model of the flood, to assume Mt. Everest was the highest point, therefore requiring such an incredible amount of water to flood the earth.

tgamble

When did creationists care about having reasonable arguments?

The valley could have been part of the earth's origonal creation. But cretinists think the earth was totally flat before the flod don't they?

Jimmy Higgins

What? You don't think the idea of a water canopy isn't reasonable?

True, and probably the route they'd take, however, it would be a non-linear ideaology. To think that the earth original looked a certain way with large hills and valleys, then god has a flood that recreates the entire surface of the earth? It seems inconsistent.

What a surprise!

Automaton

Some of these arguments were disappointingly bad.
That's a little less than 0.002 approxiamately fox-sized animals per square meter, or 1 animal per every 500 square meters. I think you'll find vastly more than that exist today. No relevent calculations or data references are given.
The ocean is 3 dimensional. The calculation should have taken into account the size of the ocean in cubed feet, and as such, it is useless.
Again, this is only apparently taking into account surface. They would fill the 3 dimensional topography of the ocean. Again, here, some relevent calculations would be nice.
Perhaps they were chemoautotrophs, deriving their energy from minerals, or fed on geothermal energy.
Bacteria, virii and such can easily go dormant and remain that way for extended periods of time. If they can survive in space without a human host, they can survive a flood.

scarmig

I have heard it posed by creationists that all the canopy water from the Flood ran off into the oceans and became the polar ice caps....

So the earth didn't have polar ice caps until enough water was added. And where did the water come from?

Apparantly before the Canopy, the Earth had rings of ice, kinda like Saturn. Of course, no humans ever bothered to write anything about the rings in the sky, even though they wrote about the other starts, because they saw the rings every day and never thought twice about them.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Gracchus

Automaton, in re your post of December 16, 2002 11:06 PM:

You respond, "Some of these arguments were disappointingly bad."

quote:
Then when the Flood began there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded. unquote

"That's a little less than 0.002 approxiamately fox-sized animals per square meter, or 1 animal per every 500 square meters. I think you'll find vastly more than that exist today. No relevent calculations or data references are given."

&lt;G&gt;Let's see. 1 acre is about 4046 m^2 so 2100 animals / acre is about 2100/4046 per m^2. That come out to about 1 animal for every 2 square meters. This is a pretty good carrying capacity . Plants must have grown miraculously fast under that vapor canopy. (Ooops, I forgot. The animals were all chemotrophic before the flood.)

quote:
Later, I tried this number on a calculator and discovered that it amounts to about 27,000 herring per square foot of ocean surface. unquote

You respond, "The ocean is 3 dimensional. The calculation should have taken into account the size of the ocean in cubed feet, and as such, it is useless."

&lt;g&gt;To you it may be useless, but it tells me that if each herring took up a cubic foot of water, under each square foot of ocean there would be a column of herring 5 miles deep."

quote:
If all of the fossilized marine animals could be resurrected, they would cover the entire planet to a depth of at least 1.5 feet. unquote

Your reply: "Again, this is only apparently taking into account surface. They would fill the 3 dimensional topography of the ocean. Again, here, some relevent calculations would be nice."

&lt;G&gt;It's a good thing they were all subjected to hydraulic sorting, or you wouldn't be able to find them among all those herring.

quote:
Creationists can't appeal to the tropical paradise they imagine existed below the pre- Flood canopy because the laws of thermodynamics prohibit the earth from supporting that much animal biomass. The first law says that energy can't be created, so the animals would have to get their energy from the sun. The second law limits the efficiency with which solar energy can be converted to food. The amount of solar energy available is not nearly sufficient. unquote

"Perhaps they were chemoautotrophs, deriving their energy from minerals, or fed on geothermal energy."

&lt;G&gt; So from aardvarks to zebras all animals were feeding on geothermal energy before the flood, and didn't convert to eating plants and each other until after the flood.

"KJV Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

&lt;G&gt;Wow chemotrophic trees! That's probably why they were able to runs so fast trying to escape the flood waters by getting to higher ground!

quote:
For numerous communicable diseases, the only known "reservoir" is man. That is, the germs or viruses which cause these diseases can survive only in living human bodies or well-equipped laboratories. unquote

Your rejoinder: "Bacteria, virii and such can easily go dormant and remain that way for extended periods of time. If they can survive in space without a human host, they can survive a flood."

&lt;G&gt;Some bacteria can encyst, but most cannot. For instance: "Treponema are delicate organisms requiring pH in the range 7.2 to 7.4, temperatures in the range 30°C to 37°C (86°F to 98.6°F ) and a microaerophilic environment."
<a href="http://www.cehs.siu.edu/fix/medmicro/trepo.htm" target="_blank">http://www.cehs.siu.edu/fix/medmicro/trepo.htm</a>

&lt;G&gt;I notice you did not deign to address the question of varves, the fossil sequence, or overturned rock strata. Now that I think of it, perhaps you could account for geologic disconformities. You might find help with the concepts at:

<a href="http://www.uga.edu/~strata/sequence/seqStrat.html" target="_blank">http://www.uga.edu/~strata/sequence/seqStrat.html</a>




[ December 17, 2002: Message edited by: Gracchus ]</p>