lpetrich

So what about flood stories? Lots of rivers make big floods every now and then, so there is plenty of inspiration for flood stories. And does DavidH accept "what is written down in history" as evidence for religions and sects that he does not believe in?

However, this was 10,000 years ago, and most of humanity lived in small villages -- and could easily have moved from the coasts as the sea level rose. Furthermore, imagine that you were living back then -- what would you see? The sea advancing into the land at a rate of a few kilometers a year AT MOST.

Simply by considering what would happen if water covered all the land surface. The Bible itself agrees with what one would naturally expect -- mass destruction of land fauna. So how did all the rattlesnakes make it back to the Americas, leaving none behind? Likewise with sloths and South America. Kangaroos and Australia. And numerous other examples of limited-range species. Why were kangaroos able to hop all the way to Australia, while rabbits couldn't? And why did all the wombats go to Australia, but none of the woodchucks? And why did all the giant turtles go all the way to oceanic islands like the Galapagos? And why did no rats follow them to those islands?

And how is it that trees kept on growing for the last 9000 years as if there was no flood? This is a result found from trees in several places, such as the southwestern US and bogs in Ireland and Germany. The simplest conclusion is that there was no global flood.

Think about that, DavidH.

Millions and millions of years have NOTHING to do with it. Mainstream geologists accept the reality of a variety of relatively rapid events, like massive volcanic eruptions, big local floods, and meteorite strikes. DavidH, I suggest that you study some of the mainstream geological literature some time, and it ought to be clear to you that if a global flood had left unambiguous evidence behind, its occurrence would be accepted.

And what does this have to do with evolution?

HOW WOULD IT HAVE BEEN ALTERED???

Trees continuously growing as if nothing had happened are a good bit of counterevidence, as is all the floral and faunal continuity of various places.

Local floods and exaggeration are both very common, so a single global flood is a totally superfluous hypothesis.

They would think that I had only seen a local flood, because I could not have seen all of our planet without doing a heck of a lot of traveling.

Physical evidence.

Trees. Ice caps. Sediment layers.

If there was no physical evidence of it where there ought to have been, then why not?

Tree-ring dating is known as "dendrochronology". One looks for a site with a lot of well-preserved old tree trunks, and one compares the patterns of tree-ring widths. In good years, a tree will produce a lot of wood, while in bad years, a tree will produce relatively little wood, and several trees showing such a pattern cannot be coincidence. But if one tree had some pattern when it was young, and another tree had that pattern when it was old, the two trees' ring records can be combined to form the equivalent of a long-lived tree. And by combining the records of enough trees, it is possible to construct the equivalent of a 9000-year-old tree that is still alive.

However, that would require superfast continental drift, which is simply not observed. The continents were in one piece 200 million years ago, NOT 6000 years ago. And furthermore, this big supercontinent had been formed by the collision of previous continents; the continents play a game of "bumper cars" over hundreds of millions of years.

Especially after you consider the possibility that parts of the Bible could be found to be equally false.

Sojourner553

this post is for DavidH:

I am asssuming if you are into the universal flood, then you probably believe in the rest of the Ark story as well...

Problems with the Genesis Account

Creation "scientists" are NOT actively looking for data that would DISPROVE
THEIR THEORY. For example, religious theologians have struggled for centuries
to "scientifically" explain how an ark could have been constructed to hold EVERY
known species of animals on the earth--while maintaining temperature, food,
and waste control for them. Other problems of the Ark story include:

*How did the animals from around the world migrate to and from the Ark?
Kangaroos and koala bears exist only in Australia, and penguins and polar bears
live in cold climates. There is no evidence of these animals ever being present
in the Middle East. Were they supernaturally transported from their native
habitats to the Ark, and then back again following the Flood, with no traces
left that they were ever present in the Middle East? And what would the koala
bear have eaten on the ark? Koala bears only eat eucalyptus tree leaves, which
are indigenous to Australia and Indonesia alone. (There are many other examples:
such as panda bears only eating from the bamboo tree indigenous around China).

*Where did all the water go after the Flood receded if it indeed covered the
entire surface of the Earth? (Some creationists have speculated there must
be deep seas of water hidden within deep fissures of the earth that no one has
located yet.

*If the Flood was truly meant to destroy "all flesh that moved upon the
earth", why weren't fishes and sea mammals--such as dolphins and whales-
destroyed as well? (Note, some translations of the Genesis story get around this
by implying that God "only" wanted to destroy "all flesh that moved upon the
LAND".)

* Scientists estimate there are about 100 million species in the world. A
large proportion of these are bugs (twenty percent of the 100 million species
are beetles!) If God specially created each species, then he must have spent
more time making insects than humans. Did He then have a special affinity for
beetles? Do all varieties of bugs serve a purpose? As Mark Twain quipped on
this once, "The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly
comes close."

* Why as one moves from younger to OLDER layers of the fossil record, species
appear to have evolved from simpler forms and common ancestors. As Stephen Jay
Gould put this, "If God made each of the half dozen species discovered in
ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporary sequence of
progressively more modern features-increasing cranial capacity, reduced face
and teeth, larger body size? Did he create this to mimic evolution and test our
faith thereby?"

So much data supporting evolutionary change has been collected, that as
Gould and others have noted, IF evolution were indeed false, then either
God, or alternatively the Devil himself must have falsely planted millions
of faked fossils in order to "trick" those who use observation and science
to guide them.

Creationists largely get around problems such as explaining the LITERAL
nature of the Flood and Ark by arguing that if God is truly all-powerful, then
He would have the power to create ANY miracle-- exactly as described in the
Bible! Creationists try to avoid the issue that this is a religiously inspired
argument, and NOT a scientific one.

By relying primarily on FAITH in the biblical account of creation, AND
ignoring any scientific evidence that would be contrary to a belief in
creationism "scientific creation" is not really scientific at all-- but
clearly falls under the category of an ideology or religion.

Geological Evidence for the Earth being Billions of Years Old

One fact both creationists and the evolutionists agree on is that evolution
would need billions of years in order to work. Creationists maintain that
the earth is around six thousand years old (according to Bishop Ussher's famous
calculations made in 1645). But let's turn this argument around and see what
evidence exists for Earth being LESS than 10,000 years old? That is, what
evidence are creationists ignoring in order to prove the validity of their
young-Earth theory? The following is a list of what Creationists must ignore
or refute:

*why do we see stars in the sky that are millions of light years away from
earth. Creationists argue that God created star light separately from the stars
at the time of creation- just so humans could enjoy this at night!

*why doe the transitional nature of the fossil record shows older creatures
in lower stratum of rock, and more recently evolved creatures in higher stratum.

*How could major geological processes take place over thousands (as opposed
to millions/billions of years. For example, literal creationists disagree that
the Colorado River cut through the Grand Canyon over millions of years,
insisting "special" properties of Noah's Flood sped up the process to fit within
their 6000 age of the earth. (Creationists typically are silent to such
problems as why only extremely primitive life form fossils - as opposed to
advanced organisms can be found in the pre-Flood rocks of the Grand Canyon?)

*Young earth creationists such as Gish maintain that radioactive dating
(such as the carbon-14 method) is only reliable for short-term dating - that
decay rates of the radioactive isotopes used to date rocks could have been much
greater under extreme past conditions (like a great Flood), so the rocks are
really much younger than they "seem" to be. There is no legitimate evidence for
this claim from experimental or theoretical physics.

*Genetic studies that show that DNA molecules from closely related species
resemble each other more than distantly related species.

*Genetic studies that show the Human genome is comprised of 95-98% junk,
with the working 2-5% sequences containing genes that show an evolutionary
history that includes viruses and bacteria.

Taken from:

<a href="http://mac-2001.com/philo/crit/SCIENCE.TXT" target="_blank">http://mac-2001.com/philo/crit/SCIENCE.TXT</a>

Sojourner

HRG

Such events - or the filling of the Black Sea basin may have left their traces in mythologies, as you've said, although I'm dubious about the time scale of the 130m sea level rise.

But they are quite different from the global flood described in Genesis - which covered the highest mountains.

Regards,
HRG.

Bait

David,
Yes, it was a commonly held belief among scientists that the reason men came to walk upright is because of their emergence into the plains areas, where there were few trees, and walking upright would be an advantage (ability to see further). Recently this has been proven false since they have discovered upright (bipedal skeletons) amongst the forests. The scientists are therefore rethinking their hypothesis.

Oh, I'm not Catholic btw, but am a Christian (though I personally (translate me personally)believe that an "old" earth is entirely possible)because of verses in both Psalms and 1Peter. And yes, I've been in this fight before, with Oolon et. al....which is why I'm sitting back to see if someone has some newer ideas.
Bests,
Ron

Oolon Colluphid

Well if you're sitting back, you'll have time to respond to <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000250&p=6" target="_blank">this thread</a> then, won't you Ron? Remind me again what Lucy is...?

Oolon

Bait

David,
You forgot to add: How, pray tell then, did the Aztec's, and so many others from the other ends of the earth also have world flood myths - though many times not exactly the same as the genesis account?

And they (Oolon, Kosh, and all)think that the Jews borrowed from the Babylonian tablet because it is older than the oldest known, currently existing, scroll of the Torah...forgetting that the Jews have a habit n- to this day, of exactly copying down an old "official" Torah scroll, then destroying the old one (like we are supposed to do with old, torn, worn out American flags). This means that the words of the Torah COULD (probably?)be much older than the other accounts, the oldest Torah being a copy of even older one's.

I'm done now...
R.

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exactly. And just by chance, the early Jews actually spent time living in these cultures
with similar myths. Why do you not think the
Jews simply borrowed those myths and adopted
them to suit their needs?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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?

Bait

Sorry Oolon, ol' buddy,
Thought that thread died a while back. I hadn't seen the further posts. Hmmmm... ok, I guess I'll have to revisit. Thanks.
Ron

lpetrich

Because river valleys are a favorite place to live, and because rivers often flood.

To me, that is a MUCH simpler hypothesis than that of a supposed flood which has left absolutely zero physical evidence. Yes, zero.

Dendrochronology is continuous for the last 9000 years; trees grew during that time in southwestern-US mountains and in German bogs without any drastic interruptions.

The big icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica also record a lack of unusual happenings during that time.

Also, aside from human-caused extinctions and reductions in range, distributions of flora and fauna have been essentially unchanged over most of this interglacial; how were these distributions so conveniently restored after that global flood?

These Rabbis were only describing the care that they and their colleagues would use in copying the Tanakh, a.k.a. OT. However, there is no indication of how this super-faithful copying got started. The Tanakh's contents were selected by some committee of theologians at about 200 BCE; before that, their contents could easily have been more variable, and probably were.

(Formatting corrected)

From extrapolating from the behavior of known floods. What did you expect, O Mr. Bait?

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

davidH

Ok I have been doing a little bit of research around various sites and I have some evidience of the flood that maybe would be worth discussing.

Most of the stuff has been taken from <a href="http://www.creationscience.com" target="_blank">www.creationscience.com</a>

1.A one-mile-thick layer of salt water has been detected 10 miles below the Tibetan Plateau.

Interesting?

Here's a theory to discuss;

If you go to the site there are references which would probably help explain why they believe this could have happened.

This could well have then contributed to the ice age that enveloped parts of the earth. I find that totally acceptable as an explaination for the ice age.
The water covering everywhere would have caused a massive drop in temperature - resulting in serve heat loss, as water drained the thinner layers froze etc. - Not sure on this but it's my theory anyway.

This I think would tie in well with what is observed in the fossil record.
Wouldn't the simplar organisms be buried first whereas if the animals that were dead float near the surface? Hence they would either decay quicker or not be buried quickly at all? Again I am not sure on this but it seems to make a bit of sense.

I haven't got the time to put everything else up here but would you go to the site and at least spend some time reading what is there?

I just thought that this was interesting stuff - maybe some of you hadn't considered this before.
Anyway I have to head on here.

Coragyps

David - do you have any inkling of how hot is is ten miles below the surface of the Earth? It is corrently about 300 to 400 degrees Celsius, depending on how thick the crust is. This would mean that Walt Brown's water would have been rather warm on emerging from his 40,000 mile imaginary crack. Rock conducts heat far too slowly for cool water to have miraculously been there, and the rock have heated up since. Seismic evidence excludes the possibility; oil wells have been drilled to 6 miles depth, and their temperature logs exclude the possibility. There are so many absurdities in Walt's "theory" that I can't even start.....

At least he is up to date on his references, though. I'll post from home this evening on what the Science article about Tibet's cellar actually said.