The Great Flood - Page 2

Aha. Old stuff. My favourite.

I think that the Old Testament is basically 'true' in that everything in it happened. They're stories belonging to a particular agriculturalist people refracted, beautifully and metaphorically, through generations of retelling. It's very common for stone age and iron age peoples to remember even recent history in a sort of mythical way, partly because they quite literally understand time differently.

I don't actually know a whole heap about Middle Eastern culture of the late stone age and the early iron age but I do know that there were pastoralists (herders), farmers, expansions and displacement of people, and we remember them thanks to experts in oral history and the people who finally wrote down what they passed on.

For various reasons, agriculturalist societies tend to be more robust, and far more in need of land, than herding people. Agriculturalist people go looking for land to seed and they don't share it with herders. This happed recently in South Africa - less than 2,000 years ago - and when you look at myths of origins there you can often map it to places (rivers and mountains) that really exist. The stories seem to correspond nicely to the archeology. The mythical tone reminds you very much of the stuff in Genesis.

In Southern Africa there were a herding people called the Khoekhoen who lost their land to Bantu-speaking peoples like the Tswana, the Zulu and Xhosa. 'Xhosa', in eastern Khoe dialects, is phonetically identical to a word meaning 'angry men'.

Let's not forget all the water-borne animals. The salinity change, whether it rained fresh water or for some reason salt water, would have disrupted the food chain if not killed fresh-/saltwater animals outright.

The epic story of Noah it great fun because on so many scientific levels it's dead, flat wrong.

And the Thumpers speed right past the point of the story: Brotherhood of Man, Steward of the Earth. Noah's sons venture off and allegedly become all the races of humans. (So he had a Asian son, an Native American son, an Aborgine son... did I say "dead, flat wrong"???). Did I read somewhere that someone seriously stated that the Flood was responible for the deaths of the "mythological animals" (i.e Dragons, Unicorns, etc.)

It is a great fable. A teaching story for the kids but...
Dead
Flat
Wrong

I took a Western Civilizations course. The professor kept segwaying into the Creationist, "Veritas" garbarge. Strict old bat, three lates and you failed the course. That of course set the tone where one couldn't tell her to "Shut the bloody fook up and show us the paintings and the pottery."

Screed

Why fire the teacher? No no no. Keep them alive. The dodo bird is extinct and it is a tragedy. We do not have to slaughter the slow-witted, we have higher purposes, like the pursuit of good comedy.

Leave the teacher alone, encourage him, even. Do not suppress voices!

ast3r3x:


What is rain but water falling from the sky? A rose by any other name, my friend. :-)
The force of the falling water would be the same(ish) whether it came from a meteor splash, clouds or God's giant penis. So the insanely destructive force of the falling water remains regardless of the source.


That is interesting if you completely ignore the impact water falling that fast would have on the mammoth itself. Maybe God aimed the water so it only hit rocks hey I think I'm on to something! :-)

concerning the mammoth thing , if he was killed by flood, there will be water in his lungs. Never heard of that.

The guy is comedy gold.

That's when the dinosaurs went extinct, right? Including the ocean living reptiles, right? GOD told Noah, "Don't bring any dinos on board..."

Heh heh, just having some fun...

So this teacher believes the earth's crust covered a pressurized water ocean until 5000 yrs ago?

Which sat on top of what we know to be a rotating molten iron core (hence earth's magnetic fields) ?

And despite perpetually boiling due to the internal heat and pressure, never escaped the crust ??

It's not like the innards of the earth ever do the volcano thing, or the geyser thing, or the earthquake thing and break through the crust, do they/have they ever ?

And pressurized steam never forces its way out openings in its containment, right ?

And fossils are all flash-boiled, except for the flash-frozen mammoths, and ice-men, right ?
Despite having evolved to their fossilized state in the absence of water other than "mist" ?

Cause that would tend to spoil his "theory" wouldn't it.
Riiiiight.

< /laughter> < /pity >

What do your folks think about this loon teaching you?

Learn whatever he teaches you. You don't have to accept it, of course, but always hear people out.

What is the name of the book?

Keeping an open mind is a valuable trait.

Keeping a mind so open that your brain falls out is not.

Critical thinking is an *important skill*, and learning items that are obviously false is just plain a waste of time. Use that critical thinking. "Does this make any sense? If not, am I missing something? If not, why am I bothering listening to this nut?"

DNA is a bit more complicated than that. We already know we come from scientists that we have a common ancestor.

There is a considerable amount of assumption when it comes to ice cores and stalgmite/tite formation. It's intellectually dishonest to not admit it.


Anyone remember the amount of ice covering the P-38's recovered in Greenland? 268 feet of ice in 50 years. Better than 5 feet a year.

Very Interesting.

so you are saying that the plane went back in time?


Antartic ice is more accurate and also more generally used for these purposes...so your artic example is horse shit...

These are asumptions. You should be more honest and less angry.

No there is evidence. Assumptions aren't based upon evidence.

And I wasn't angry. Your example is horse shit.

You are a fundamentalist Christian so it will be impossible to convince you of the verifiable, quantifiable evidence that supports these (and other) 'assumptions' you dismiss, and it's very likely indeed that you'll be confused by what scientists mean by 'theory', and you'll end up saying that faith in scientific evidence is actually itself religious, and so I'm a hypocrite.

(Not being patronising: it's just that we've had dozens of threads like this, and besides I remember you from last year when you were called something else. )

All the same, I'll make a half-arsed stab here.

To deny that the mountain of cross-corroborating evidence such as dendochronology, ice cores, carbon 14 testing, archeology, mitochondrial DNA decay rates, calcification rates and the theories of erosion, tectonics and fossilisation offer an immeasurably better explanation of the age and formation of the planet than your sacred text of choice is not only the height, acme and quintessence of 'intellectual dishonesty' but is supremely, gloriously arrogant to boot.

Your go.

damn...

I don't think it will work...

but damn...

Evidence bleached with faulty assumptions. Antarctica wasn't always frozen, neither was the Arctic.

No glaciation in the Siberian or Alaskan lowlands, very strange indeed. Animals living in what is now Tundra and Tiaga that can't live in those conditions.....Krakatau dropping the world wide tempatures 1.2 degrees celsius......

Curious.

So you are trying to use science as your proof against science.

For a good overall view of the (possible) scientific evidence to back up a global flood (and the evidence against it), I highly recommend the website for the newsgroup talk.origins.

Talk.Origins Archive: Flood Geology

There's also some good stuff in there on the issue of geological dating methods, too.

The Talk.Origins Archive: Age of the Earth FAQ's

As far as I know, Carbon-14 dating isn't precise. But it can give some amount of information on certain events. As far as the great flood is concerned, I'm pretty sure that most experts have evidence to believe that such an event did actually occur. That is, a large scale flooding of the area now regarded as "The Holy Land."

This link is a goodie.

Scientific creationism (an oxymoron for sure) is just an attempt by Christian fundamentalists to get their ideas into schools by disguising their preconcieved notions as science. Hence, their version of the truth deserves equal time in science class. No way, but unfortuneatly their efforts pay off from time to time. If your math teacher wants to spew this crap in a religious studies class I could accept that, but its good he doesn't teach science and I hope he keeps his comments in math class to a passing amusement. (I figure any teacher gets to stand on their soapbox once a semester-no big harm).

I wonder what will happen if the Colorado river keeps flowing, cutting the canyon deeper and carrying silt out to sea? Ask him that.

If only two of each species survived the flood only a few thousand years ago, how come the genetic differences between indviduals is so great?

How come spread in the mid-oceanic rifts, due to new crust formation, has been measured when these rifts were supposed to be made by some crazy water mechanism?

How come radioactive decay is completely predicatable?

Why do I have an appendix?-sloppy job God.

Don't get me started on the junk DNA and the indadequacy of the human birth canal. You'd figure on the last day of creation that the kinks would have been worked out a bit better.

I leave you with this image: Imagine Noah collecting a pair of each insect spiecies to put on the ark-that's a lot of jars.

So when in the last 6000 years wasn't the antarctic frozen?

Or are you challenging the teachings of the bible?

Ah, but evolution is a sham, at the same time.

D'oh. Slight problem there.

AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaa!!!!

You're here so you obviously know Macs are better than PCs right?

I think that even if those people that don't believe in evolution in the fullest (life from no life, major speciation events etc) probably still except the existence of DNA, genes and at least some basic aspects of genetics. (Those that don't are so lost it's not even worth discussing.) My point is that if you study the DNA then you can see that there are differences within species and that these differences are due to minor changes in the DNA. We can also measure the rate of these changes and show that they are fairly slow under most conditions. Thus, the degree of genetic change is proportional to time (there are quite a few details I'm leaving out here but the general point still holds true). Thus, the degree of genetic change within species is already more in most cases than can be accounted for by a few thousand years of life on Earth. Example, dogs that exist today are beleived to come from about 10 different progenitor breeds 10-12 thousand years ago (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994682). This one little example already gets us in trouble with the whole creation/flood time line.

As a fundamentalist Christian who is fairly confident in Biblical Inerrancy (i.e. there are no *mistakes* or untruths in the bible) I personally find most, if not all, of "Creation Science" repulsive. I mean, in high school, a friend of mine was telling people about some guys theory that the flood waters in question were not *under* the earth, but surrounding the earth in a giant shell of ice, which blocked solar radiation thus prolonging human life. I mean, yes, I believe that if God wanted to, he could make it happen, but our scientific responsibility is to determine exactly what he made to happen, not cook up some freaky theory which serves no purpose other than to undermine the credibility of anyone who calls themself a Christian.

(stops, takes a breath)

As a scientist (well, I'm not *really* a scientist, but I can pretend) I think we should step back, and take a close look at just how sketchy much of our evidence for *anything* is. Essentially, our scientific discoveries constitute a working model of the evidence, and not something worthy of worship in itself.

As for the flood story? As far as its authors were concerned, the flood covered the whole world, and God inspired some guy to build a giant boat to keep his family and some food safe.

W.r.t the Apple/PC numbers game vs. the whole idea of "corroborating evidence", all those PC users don't constitute multiple peices of evidence, they're just multiple measurements made by the same broken instrument

That's a great analysis. I think it's good to look at the Bible as an interpretation of God's word as passed down to man. Obviously, the humans who wrote the Bible couldn't understand some of the concepts that are common knowledge today. So God left them in the dark about various things, and we have been discovering more and more of those mysteries since then.

It is folly to look at the Bible as a scientific text. It isn't one, and it was never meant to be one. The people who wrote it knew very little about science compared to what we know today. But that doesn't mean that science must contradict religion as a rule. You could say that they are totally separate, or that they are somehow linked and each is an essential part of the other. I think it is a bad idea to totally eschew the viability of one because you think it fundamentally disagrees with the other.

DISCLAIMER: I don't actually believe in God, so I don't personally think that the Bible is the word of God. However, I think it's a good concept, and that's why I posted this.

You are very correct in stating that our description of evolution and the mechansims of evoultions are a work in progress. However, the evidence is not sketchy. It's called the theory of evolution because there is so very much evidence that it is way beyond hypothesis. That doesn't mean the whole thing has been explained in every detail-nor will it likely ever be. The origins of life are a particular tough nut to crack since it all happened at least several billions of years ago and replicating chemical reactions don't exactly leave a fossil record to work with. All we have to work with are the commonalities of all life on Earth from which we derive hypotheses on what the first forms of life might have looked like. We also have the ability to test chemical reactions and conditions in the lab.

One interesting problem is figuring out what are the exact conditions under which life developed. It used to be people talked about shallow warm pools of organic chemicals and then it turned to undersea vents away from meteor impacts. Some of the oldest types of life forms appear to be the extremophils that like it hot, salty etc. Then there is always the life started somewhere else and then came here hypotheses, ehich means it could be anybody's guess of what the conditions were like. I've come across more than one scientist who beleives in evolutions ant all the rest but turns to God to fill in the blanks a few billion years ago. To me, that seams to be the more complicated and far fetched of the possible explantations. To each his own.

I agree with this. Religious texts and the discoveries of science are two of our species' coolest achievements.

On a side note I wish that fundamentalists would choose to see the majesty and beauty of the work of God in the discoveries of science rather than trying to convince themselves that He wasn't as cool as He so obviously must be. It must really piss God off.

Science and any creation story/description of how the universe works is the only place where shit hits the fan between religion and science. They operate in completely different realms and thus far moralization from science hasn't taken hold (when it has, things became disasterous -- the holocaust, social darwinism, PETA ). The nature of science currently is to avoid forming a moral structure based upon it; at the same time, religion doesn't need a creation story or describe how the universe works for its teachings to mean something. I will admit that I am an atheist, but at the same time I am not anti-religion per se. It does a great deal of good in maintaining what has become known as the social contract and religion (well, religious customs -- think circumcision, the body/blood of christ...) is as near to that hypothetical document as you can get. I also think religion has its flaws and i don't believe the founders of the various religions ever predicted the coming of fundamentalism (the idea of taking a book, translated and rewritten of course, or particular teachings to their most illogical extreme).

I think it is far more beautiful to think of the storied history the religions have taken under the leadership of different people. How we ended up where we are is fundamentally related to the actions taken by people in regard to their religion and not at all related to the ever changing words and interpretations of the religious documents...

--there's that CLEVER distinction agian, somehow your metphysics count as "science" while mine do not.


Your "science" (let's use your distinction for just a moment) is wrought with a hundred times the controversy that my "religion" is. In all reality your "science" takes more faith than my "religion".

That's only because of your distorted perception. You've been exposed to so much FUD about modern science that you don't even give it a chance. I admit that there are too many scientists who don't give religion a fair chance, but you're just as bad for not giving science a fair chance.

In a perfect world, scientists would realize that religion isn't inherently wrong just because it doesn't appear to make sense at first glance, and religious people wouldn't see science as infringing on their faith. But that doesn't happen, because of atheist and religious fundamentalists.

Wrong. My science is wrought with millions of times, nay, billions of times more controversy than your religion. The thing is it doesn't matter (and I kind of like it that way). They don't replace eachother. I don't think you get it. Religion and science operate on intrinsically different bases. Religion provides some moral structure. Science provides rational (evidenciary) explainations for natural phenomena.

You are arguing with the wrong scientist (and I am a scientist doing real research into things your bible doesn't even begin to describe)....

Couple of things:

Not all scientists are atheists.

Scientists do not think about religion (unless they are religious) on a day to day basis at all. So to suggest that they necessarily think that religion is wrong (what has it got to be wrong about?) is a bit absentminded.

An atheist is someone who doesn't believe in, most fundamentallly, a deity. This has nothing to do with science or even the practical concerns of religion. Christianity doesn't need a god to function as a religion (perhaps the customs would seem absurdist, but they already do even when considering that there might be a god) and science doesn't need the almost purely speculative big bang to continue to function in its realm.

What most judeo/christians don't understand is that the very idea of the beginning of the universe is decendent from genesis. In all practical considerations, there is no need for the universe to have ever began...

Your western education is catching up with you. You have bulldozed a path into existential nonsense.

-and-

When is comes to "rational (evidenciary) explainations".....



....which, of course, proves how solid your science is.

Don't go after people, go after the content of their posts. Don't make it personal.