quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I'm wondering what people think about the Genesis flood, really the main question is whether it was local or global

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quote:

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if it was local, then why was the ark so huge,

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quote:

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if it was global, then does geology/biology/other science support this?

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so the Bible's lying?

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so the Bible's lying?

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I'm wondering what people think about the Genesis flood, really the main question is whether it was local or global.......if it was local, then why was the ark so huge....?

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quote:

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Or maybe it's the veracity of people who interpret the Bible as saying there was a global flood who need to be questioned?

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quote:

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The Bible exagerates the extent of the flood inorder to make a theological point - why not also exagerate the size of the Ark?

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I suppose because I'm a biblical inerrantist at heart
 

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Posted by OgtheDim (# 3200) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:

quote:

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The Bible exagerates the extent of the flood inorder to make a theological point - why not also exagerate the size of the Ark?

---

I suppose because I'm a biblical inerrantist at heart

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so the Bible's lying?

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I also believe that the Bible is absolute truth.

But I have always been told that rather than being literal these early bible stories are intended to be understood as symbolic.

I was told that the flood was a flood of evil. Noah and his family represented all those who survived it. The ark and the animals describe how they survived and what survived. The dimensions and details give specific information about this - revealed in a way that made sense to the ancient mind.

The fact that there are similar stories almost everywhere in the world testifies to the universality of this ancient method.

But in the Bible it is all true and straight from the mouth of God - every jot and tittle.
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so the Bible's lying?

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quote:

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Originally posted by ptarmigan:
If we have to believe in the flood, do we have to believe in tales of talking donkeys and snakes too?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mousethief:
And the talking donkey story can't be tested against geological evidence....

Reader Alexis

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My personal religious questions are more centered on the existence and nature of God. If God exists and is good, She may or may not have created everything (one way or another!), made a donkey speak, come among us and rose from the dead. Her nature is the most important thing.

If She exists and is evil, then none of that other stuff matters, true or not. Her nature is the most important thing.

If She doesn't exist, then we're Home Alone. (like the movie). Oh-oh...
 

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Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :
 
The bumper stickers I've read suggest She exists, is pissed, gave birth to your god, and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Not necessarily in that order.

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by golden key (# 1468) on :
 

 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
- imagine 4 men trying to move a tree to make a keel for a 450ft boat let alone shaping it.

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so the Bible's lying?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
I think that much of the OT is non-literal which is NOT the same thing as saying that it's lying. Christianity (and Christians) are so funny in their dualisms. For example:

If it's not literal, than it's a lie.

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quote:

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However, the author of Genesis, however, seems to have taken it to be factual, not even letting the story "float" as some disconnected event in the past, but trying to stitch it into the timeline by genealogies. The Noahic flood may be a myth, but it's a myth that was relayed to us as history, so it will not do to simply say that it was never meant to be taken literally.

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quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

Hardly anyone today says about the Psalms that if it's not literal, than it's a lie. It's a genre understood both in its own time and today as non-literal, so the Psalms aren't charged with "lying" in the same way that Genesis is.

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quote:

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Hear, O LORD , my righteous plea; listen to my cry.
Give ear to my prayer - it does not rise from deceitful lips.

May my vindication come from you; may your eyes see what is right.

Though you probe my heart and examine me at night, though you test me, you will find nothing;
I have resolved that my mouth will not sin.

As for the deeds of men - by the word of your lips I have kept myself from the ways of the violent.

My steps have held to your paths; my feet have not slipped.

---

And she said "That's about David?"

[fixed code]

[ 14. May 2003, 02:48: Message edited by: Scot ]
 

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Posted by Mad Geo (# 2939) on :
 
Karl

The hubris of science is without bounds.

I have read many of the scientific things I brought up, and found the answers often unsatisfying. As have I found the answers posed by innerrantists often unsatisfying.

I do not propose that scientists will not eventually come up with answers to some or maybe even all of the questions I mentioned. But greater minds than I have serious problems with some, if not all, of the questions I raised there.

J.J.

The flood story being presented as history is no more or less a problem than some of the stuff attributed as history that Jesus said. With the possible exception that we have less time traspired since Jesus allegedly said these things.

It is not simple, but it is not complex either.
There is a reality that can be measured using other historical sources to "verify" the historicity of the bible. Again, greater minds than I have shown that historicity and the bible do not perfectly mesh in virtually any book of the bible. It is not limited to Psalms or Genesis.

Many people cannot seem to be able to adjust to the thought that the bible does not have to be literal. It can be mythical and that is OKAY.
It's a document of Faith, not science. If people want a scientific document they should read Einstein. If they want to know how to live a good life, read the bible, or the Koran, or the Sutras. There is nothing wrong with stories of the bible as told, just like there is nothing wrong with any good literature. It's good because it's good.

God will either inspire us through it, or he will inspire us through something else. It doesn't have to fit our conception of how he had it assembled or written.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 
Is there a <sticks hand up at the back of the class and yells 'Please, Sir!'> smiley?

I belive that account of the Flood describes a real historical event and that the author of it intended it to be read as history.

However as we (pretty certainly) know that there hasn't been a global flood in the last some millions of years, it must have been a local flood. Which of course there certainly have been.

And "local" might well mean all of "civilisation" as defined by the originators of the story. There are at least 2 known candidates for massive floods on civilisation-destroying scales geologically recent times - probably more - no way to say "this was Noah's flood" of course, though paperback books claiming that one or another was no doubt sell to people who like to read about how the aliens founded the Knights Templar or whatever (obvious innit - those round churches are based on the shape of a flying saucer - you can even see where the ship's console was)
 

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Posted by Mad Geo (# 2939) on :
 
I heard that smiley was on order, but was held up at the post office.
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider:

quote:

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However, the author of Genesis, however, seems to have taken it to be factual, not even letting the story "float" as some disconnected event in the past, but trying to stitch it into the timeline by genealogies. The Noahic flood may be a myth, but it's a myth that was relayed to us as history, so it will not do to simply say that it was never meant to be taken literally.

---

Then the writer of Genesis (or perhaps more correctly the redactor) got it wrong.

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I'm wondering what people think about the Genesis flood, really the main question is whether it was local or global.......if it was local, then why was the ark so huge, and if it was global, then does geology/biology/other science support this?

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quote:

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Far from being a solution to creationism's problems, the flood is a disaster. Consider biogeography. The ark lands on Ararat, say eight thousand years ago, and out pop the animals (let's be kind and forget the plants). we now have eight thousand years for the marsupials to find their way to Australia, crossing several large bodies of water in the process. Perhaps you can imagine a few energetic kangaroos making it - but the wombats? [And i would add - the marsupial moles?] from 'Born Again Creationism in Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics ed by Robert T. Pennock

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I suppose because I'm a biblical inerrantist at heart

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Then don't be! God is bigger than that.
G.
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
To say that the author or redactor got it wrong IMHO is also wrong.

We are taking a 20th century "modern" (as opposed to post-modern) standard to evaluating whether the author/redactor got it right.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:

If you want to know if he/she "got it right", you gotta put yourself in the cultural/political/writing milieu of the time.

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quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
To say that the author or redactor got it wrong IMHO is also wrong.

We are taking a 20th century "modern" (as opposed to post-modern) standard to evaluating whether the author/redactor got it right.

---

No. The question is whether the author/redactor, by the standards of his (or her) own time, would have been wrong.

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:

If you want to know if he/she "got it right", you gotta put yourself in the cultural/political/writing milieu of the time.

---

Indeed, and that task is neither ludicrous nor impossible. Difficult, yes, and at least as much of an art as a science, but doable.

"It's mythical" or "it's not meant to be taken literally" is sometimes used as a way to protect the Scriptures from being charged with being in error or wrong, especially by those of a more liberal bent. The trouble is, whether something is meant to be taken literally or not is a question of genre. Lack of historicity by itself cannot make something mythical.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
My personal faith survived because I had faith to fall back on, as opposed to just rationale and/or thinking. If I had been someone only geared to Christian Logic and Inerrantness, I would now be an atheist.

I am not alone.

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No, you are not!

From an Orthodox POV one of the chief points of the Noah thing is that it is a prefigurement of baptism. Ditto for the crossing of the Red Sea, and Jonah's being swallowed and regurgitated by the large sea creature, whale, fish, whatever.

In order to do this work, i.e. to prefigure baptism, it is not necessary for ANY of these things to have actually happened.

Thus I remain blissfully agnostic about the historicity of them all.

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
As for the ark being huge its dimensions are exceedingly small if it was going to take a pair of every creature in the globe - a collecting task that would have taken hundreds of years for Noah to accomplish anyway. The story cannot be taken seriously as history. In this respect the problems of seeing it as literally true and historical far exceed the problems facing seeing Genesis 1 as literally true.

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I agree.

It would be one thing if there was any kind of claim that God miraculously built this ark and fed the animals. But there is no claim to a miracle.

1. No one that long ago, much less four incredibly old men acting alone, could make a 150-yard boat (or box) capable of floating around on the ocean for over a year. How would they have done it?
2. No one could catch pairs of all the animals on earth, plus seven pairs of all the clean animals, including birds and insects, and house them until the flood started.
3. No one could keep all those animals alive for a year and ten days on a boat like that. There wouldn't be room for even a small portion of the animals, much less food and water for them.
4. Single pairs of animals could not repopulate the entire earth in a mere few thousand years.
etc.

I say this even though I fully believe in the literal truth of all the Biblical miracles, in the literal strength and quickness of characters like Samson, and that it appeared to Balaam that his donkey literally spoke to him.

It seems evident to me that, somewhere in the geneologies of Genesis 11, Abraham's ancestors pass out of mythical history and into real history. At that point the story becomes the story of the particular people who were the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
 

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Posted by John Collins (# 41) on :
 
The other thing to remember about the Ark is that you can't build wooden ships that big - especially ones to survive that kind of storm. There is a definite limit to the size of ship you can make of wood - that's why they moved over to steel.

Another more amusing thought is the "waste disposal" problem - Noah and his 7 companions would have had to have shovelled poop overboard at the rate of 2 or 3 animals a minute 24 hours a day. Adding to the difficulty of that would be the complete set of pathogenic bacteria and viruses they would have had to be suffering from a share of each. literally.
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:

Well, it sounds like you have more faith in the abilities of humans, reaching backwards through time, with a tiny fraction of the comparitive data required since the books were either non-existent or long gone, and so on, to reach exactitiude than I do.

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quote:

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I am of a "liberal" bent at times and simultaneously have no desire to "protect the Scriptures" from being charged with error or not.

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quote:

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In fact I would say the conservatives try too protect the scriptures by declaring them inerrant.

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quote:

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We do the scriptures a disservice by removing the humanity from them.

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quote:

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I belive that account of the Flood describes a real historical event and that the author of it intended it to be read as history.

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quote:

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If they want to know how to live a good life, read the bible, or the Koran, or the Sutras.

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Well, I would disagree with that one......firstly because of the lack of a capital "B" for Bible and secondly because I think that the only good life that can be led is from the Bible, and not from any other religious text, a truly good life is led in relation to the one true God, and not any other standpoint.
 

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Posted by Mad Geo (# 2939) on :
 
Markporter said:

quote:

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.....the interpretation of the history that is difficult to understand....we are not in the position that the writers were in to understand exactly what they meant by every word.

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quote:

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Well, I would disagree with that one......firstly because of the lack of a capital "B" for Bible and secondly because I think that the only good life that can be led is from the Bible, and not from any other religious text, a truly good life is led in relation to the one true God, and not any other standpoint.

---

Good catch on the Bible, that was a typo not a commentary.

We could start a whole 'nother conversation on whether the "one true God" manifests himself to different people, different ways. We could also start a whole 'nother conversation on the fact that millions of people live wonderful lives from other religious texts or even from agnosticism, or atheism. But that would deviate from your OP.

Suffice it to say, many Christians are gonna be surprised at how many people don't look like "them" in Heaven, High Heaven (Koran), or Nirvana.
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 

quote:

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We could start a whole 'nother conversation on whether the "one true God" manifests himself to different people, different ways. We could also start a whole 'nother conversation on the fact that millions of people live wonderful lives from other religious texts or even from agnosticism, or atheism. But that would deviate from your OP.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
A mentor of mine once said:

"I have no issue with Jesus being the Son of God, I just wonder why Christianity sometimes forgets the rest of us are Sons and Daughters of God, too."

I'm still thinking on that one.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by PaulTH:
It's amazing how many Christians are happy to take OT stories as allegory, but insist that NT stories are history.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
...
The problem is that the flood story is presented as if it were history. Now it may be that when the flood story was originally told, it was understood as just a story with a point to it. However, the author of Genesis, however, seems to have taken it to be factual, not even letting the story "float" as some disconnected event in the past, but trying to stitch it into the timeline by genealogies. The Noahic flood may be a myth, but it's a myth that was relayed to us as history, so it will not do to simply say that it was never meant to be taken literally.

---

• "it's a myth that was relayed to us as history" some mistake surely, since the original writers/redactors of Genesis were not writing for 'us'
• "the author of Genesis, however, seems to have taken it to be factual" the redactor's views on the extent of the factuality of the story are unknown - we can guess at them but concepts of history were different then to now ('history' is not a single timeless genre), so it is unclear what his attitude would have been. '"Ancient prose is generally meant to be taken literally; ancient poetry is given far more license"' is an incredibly vague rule which leaves us asking 'was it meant to be taken that way in this case?

quote:

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Originally posted by OgtheDim:

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:

quote:

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The Bible exagerates the extent of the flood inorder to make a theological point - why not also exagerate the size of the Ark?

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I suppose because I'm a biblical inerrantist at heart

---

Or maybe God likes telling stories.

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quote:

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Originally posted by gladiator:

... the Flood is a significant historical event, that could have happened as stated in the Bible. It has literary value, and should, or what was God's purpose in remembering it in the Bible. But it is not just a story, and not just a myth, and I feel that it can be taken quite literally. I know there are many who don't agree. To end I will close with saying, I believe, if God wanted to do something, He would find a way to accomplish it, He is not limited by time or the people or animals he designed.

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quote:

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I think many of the stories in the New Testament fall into the category of allegory.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
It makes me a little sad and a little frightened when men start deciding which parts of the Bible are fact and which are fiction. Who draws the line? How do you keep it from becoming a tool to enforce whatever arena of reasoning you choose to believe? ...

---

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
the whole purpose of a lot of the miracles is to demonstrate Jesus' authority over some aspect of the world....if they didn't happen, then he didn't have the authority.

---

quote:

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Don't you think the essence of Christianity is faith? Simple, naive, no questions asked, faith?

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quote:

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If our belief is based solely on what can be proven, either historically or scientifically, where's the glory to God in that?

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You misunderstand. I don't reject a literal belief in the flood story because it isn't proven, but because it is dis-proven.

Gladiator - I would take on your post flood hyper-evolution model, but I hear the ghostly neighing of a Mesohippus.

Oh sod it. This thread is full of fossilised proto-equines as it is.

It is not possible for the current genetic diversity of the entire dog family to be present in one or even seven pairs of dogs. Why? Well, you want to be a scientist so you should be able to get this:

Each individual diploid animal has two alleles (versions of a gene) at each locus (position on the chromosome), because it has two chromosomes. Therefore, if there were seven dogs on the ark, there were an absolute maximum of 14 alleles per locus.

Therefore, if all the current genetic diversity within the dog family came from these putative seven dogs, there would only be 14 alleles per locus today.

This is recognised as a problem - indeed the genetic problems are investigated he re on page 6.

We also have the problem of speed. Bear in mind that the animals known to say the ancient egyptians or chinese show the same diversity as today. So the hyperevolution of the "dog kind" into all the current canidae must have taken place in the time between the flood and the beginning of written records!. Given that chinese and egyptian records go right back (and indeed straight through, but that's another question) the period attributed to this Flood, that means the hyperevolution took place virtually overnight.

Observe that this is the same evolution that creationists will tell you ten seconds later couldn't possibly have happened even with the millions of years "evolutionists" (funny, I thought it would be geologists, but never mind) say the earth has been around for.

To be honest, my response to the hyperevolution model can be summed up as

I appreciate your calling your position "unscientific", Gladiator, but if you accept that, don't start pulling science in and suggesting scientific mechanisms. That doesn't fly.
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Potweed:
You're all going to burn in eternal damnation for suggesting that the bible is not the literal, exact word of God, and that it is literally precise in its meaning.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

quote:

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Originally posted by Potweed:
You're all going to burn in eternal damnation for suggesting that the bible is not the literal, exact word of God, and that it is literally precise in its meaning.

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Please supply evidence to support this statement, or withdraw it.

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quote:

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Originally posted by gladiator:
Well, who says that all of the animals that exist today, existed then? The DNA of animals contains genes that are not always expressed and these can have mutations, all the species we have now could have originated from a more common ancestor (this is not the same as evolution, and I am not going to start an agrument about that issue, though I have found myself in that one a lot!) 1 pair of wolves could become, foxes, coyotes, wild dogs etc, just as an example.

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I don't think that you'll find even creation scientists denying this sort of evolution......it's just where you find a dog turning into a cat that would disagree.....they admit evolution within limits.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so the Bible's lying?

---

What makes you think that the Bible is written in the language of 21st Century Western man?

Since the Bible was written, there have been several fundamental changes in world-view, and innumerable cultural changes. The language of the Bible is almost incomprehensible to modern man.

It isn't lying. It is speaking in a way that post-Enlightenment man is very badly equipped to tune into. It isn't a Maker's handbook written in a technical fashion - it is a lot of disparate texts heavily imprinted with the mannerisms of the humans who wrote them. But - with the numinous and aweful ruach of God heavy on every page.

---

Ham'n'Eggs: Great post!
Said so well -- we agree much!
E'en Lewis-worthy!


 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
He's here:

Miacid

But I expect you want to know how we know that he is the ancestor of cats and dogs (and bears, and, weasels, and...)

Well, it's skull is doglike. However, it has retractile claws, like a cat.

Moreover, we have a series of transitional fossils linking the Miacids with modern carnivores; these are outlined briefly Here.

The Cat line goes from the Miacids through Haplogale (can't find an image) to the first "true" cat - ProtoailurusProtoailurus and so on.

A similar line of fossils links the Miacids to dogs, seals, weasels and so on.
 

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Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :
 
Miacids -- so cute!
Want one of my very own!
--What? Extinct? Alas!
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 
hmmm, not sure...doesn't look so cute to me, looks rather dangerous.....but then I'm scared of dogs and cats as well, so that could explain it.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 
Great links Karl, but I am tempted to be pedantic.

No palaeontologist is likely to claim that those fossils are the ancestors of dogs and cats, just that they are from species very similar to those common ancestors.

3 main reasons for that:

1 - it is of course impossible to be sure that we have fossil representatives of all species alive at any time in the past - and bloody likely that we don't. So the real MRCA is probably not represented by any fossils.

2 - in the long run it is likely that few individual isolated species leave descendants. Most are probably evolutionary "dead ends". (Of course it is vanishingly unlikely that any individual fossil is anyone's ancestor at all)

3 - fossil evidence is not much good at supporting the kind of divisions of life into reproductively isolated species that we try to make for living organisms. But those reproductively isolated species are of course the unit of evolution. (Tautologically so - once two individuals are reproductively isolated they cannot both become ancestors of the same descendant - that's what reproductively isolation means)

So when we look at ancient fossils and assign them to species we are neccessarily using a different working definition of species than we might be in living species (in practice we often don't of course, even with living species)

If we use characters taken from more than once actual fossil assigned to the same species in phylogenetic analysis we have to realise that we are building in our assumptions about species boundaries into the resulting trees.

Of course fossil evidence isn't really why most biologists believe in the fact of evolution (although it powerfully supports it) it is more used to illustrate the course of evolution.

When working out "family trees" from fossils we have to use them the same way as we use characters from living species. The fossils, just like the living species, represent endpoints in a diagram, the twigs on the tree. We have to find what are their most likely relationships in terms of common ancestry. It doesn't work to treat them as nodes on the diagram, as if they were ancestors of the living species. They are dead twigs, not part of the trunk.

It is of course possible, and for very ancient species perhaps likely, that a fossil species might share more characters with the most recent common ancestor of that fossil and a living species, than the living species does. (I could post my 60-page undergraduate essay on the subject but it is unlikely that anyone would read it )

The press likes to talk about actual ancestors being dug up. Especially in human fossils. They try to make science into a myth and tell stories of onward and upward progress, or some such crap, stories with a plot, and a hero (Man the Hunter! Home faber! Homo ludens! The Aquatic Ape! Little Lucy!) in which the losers go extinct and the good-guys get rewarded by becoming our ancestors.

Some publicity-friendly scientists use the same sort of language as well. They say that such-and-such a species or even fossil is our ancestor, which is of course nonsense.

No respectable scientist uses such language in scientific papers - at any rate, not since cladism cleaned out the stables a few decades back - but it is what gets into the press.

Then the YECcies get to hear of it, and look up the real stuff and come out with mendacious claims that the scientists have changed their mind, or don't really believe in evolution at all, or were lying to the public in the first place, or have some Secret Knowledge only available to the initiates, or disagree with each other so much that they aren't worth listening to.

They did it with cladism, they did it with mass extinctions, they did it with punctuated equilibrium.

The only way round it is to be honest & open and not compromise with the truth.

So - those miacid fossils are not the common ancestors of cats and dogs! They are another branch of the tree, which shares a common ancestor with cats and dogs, and is almost certainly much more like that common ancestor than cats and dogs are!
 

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Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :
 
Warning! Thread drift! Thread drift!

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
Quite correct ken. I shouldn't have over simplified really.

The miacids represent either the common ancestor or a very close relative of it. The actual species depicted there is almost certainly not ancestral itself; this is quite true. Indeed, all the animals mentioned in the transitional fossils FAQ cannot be definitely stated as ancestral to the next animal; rather they represent a species around at the time that was either ancestral or very closely related to one that was.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
It makes me a little sad and a little frightened when men start deciding which parts of the Bible are fact and which are fiction. Who draws the line?

---

quote:

---

How do you keep it from becoming a tool to enforce whatever arena of reasoning you choose to believe?

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quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
It makes me a little sad and a little frightened when men start deciding which parts of the Bible are fact and which are fiction. Who draws the line? How do you keep it from becoming a tool to enforce whatever arena of reasoning you choose to believe?

---

quote:

---

I believe the flood happened just as it is recounted in Genesis. That Noah and his sons built a huge vessel of gopher wood, that the animals were gathered just as God instructed, that the heavens and earth were opened and it rained and flooded, that it covered the mountains, that it covered the earth, that everything outside the ark died, and that it will never happen again.

And I believe Jonah was swallowed by a big fish.

Do I think either of these events occurred without intervention by the hand of God? No. Whether or not it says God was involved, I believe He was. Who am I to limit what He does or how He chooses to do it?

Don't you think the essence of Christianity is faith? Simple, naive, no questions asked, faith? If our belief is based solely on what can be proven, either historically or scientifically, where's the glory to God in that?

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
People love certainty. Afraid it isn't gonna happen on this world.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
...
The problem is that the flood story is presented as if it were history. Now it may be that when the flood story was originally told, it was understood as just a story with a point to it. However, the author of Genesis, however, seems to have taken it to be factual, not even letting the story "float" as some disconnected event in the past, but trying to stitch it into the timeline by genealogies. The Noahic flood may be a myth, but it's a myth that was relayed to us as history, so it will not do to simply say that it was never meant to be taken literally.

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Yes, but a couple of points here

• "it's a myth that was relayed to us as history" some mistake surely, since the original writers/redactors of Genesis were not writing for 'us'

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quote:

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• "the author of Genesis, however, seems to have taken it to be factual" the redactor's views on the extent of the factuality of the story are unknown - we can guess at them but concepts of history were different then to now ('history' is not a single timeless genre), so it is unclear what his attitude would have been.

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quote:

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• '"Ancient prose is generally meant to be taken literally; ancient poetry is given far more license"' is an incredibly vague rule which leaves us asking 'was it meant to be taken that way in this case?

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quote:

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However these questions are answered it is clearly not possible for us to take the story literally now, or rather to do so requires an absurd degree of rationalistion and ingenuity.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mousethief:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
People love certainty. Afraid it isn't gonna happen on this world.

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Yes, but can you be sure of that?

Reader Alexis

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mousethief:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
People love certainty. Afraid it isn't gonna happen on this world.

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Yes, but can you be sure of that?

Reader Alexis

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
... Don't you think the essence of Christianity is faith? Simple, naive, no questions asked, faith?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mousethief:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
People love certainty. Afraid it isn't gonna happen on this world.

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Yes, but can you be sure of that?

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I am quite certain that we are moving in the direction of certainty. I think that the future will look back on this age and wonder why we were so stupid.

I believe in Isaiah's prophecy: "The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11).
 

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Posted by Mad Geo (# 2939) on :
 
Oh course we're moving in the direction of certainty, oh except for little things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I agree that the future will look back and think we were quite stupid, that's the nature of progress and hindsight. But we are not wholesale heading into certainty. Modernistic thinking that science will have all the answers have proven to be misguided. There is no upper limit to knowledge, and therefore always uncertainty, if history (and quantum mechanics ) are any guide.
 

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Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Mad Geo:
Are you asking me if I can be certain that certainty isn't gonna happen in this world. As in Irony?

Or are you asking something deeper?

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Definitely the former. Freddy knew, bless his little Swedenborgian heart.

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by Mad Geo (# 2939) on :
 
Ah well, I can be dumb as a rock when it comes to irony, and that may be appropo considering my occupation....
 

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Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :
 
I hope that working around rocks doesn't tend to make you as dumb as one. I work around salesmen....

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by Mad Geo (# 2939) on :
 
ROFLOL



I needed that.....
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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"Simple, naive, no questions asked, faith?" is ludicrous. Suppose I took you seriously and decided to have that sort of faith, I would not know where to start! What is it that I am supposed to have faith in? Oh dear there appear to be lots of faiths on offer, which should I accept naively? If I choose this one, why should I not choose one of the others? But whoops, there I go again asking questions and not being a 'naive, no questions asked' believer.

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quote:

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Suppose I took you seriously and decided to have that sort of faith, I would not know where to start!

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I believe Noah was the skipper of the first ship of fools.

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But he had to shovel a lot more s*** than our skipper does.

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I believe Noah was the skipper of the first ship of fools.
--------------------------------------------------

But he had to shovel a lot more s*** than our skipper does

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quote:

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But he had to shovel a lot more s*** than our skipper does

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:

quote:

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But he had to shovel a lot more s*** than our skipper does

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Of course, that's a whole other thread: If the story of Noah is literal and true, just how DID he manage all those animals?

Literal? Allegorical? Discuss amongst yourselves.

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
If the story of Noah is literal and true, just how DID he manage all those animals?

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Well, considering that there are a million species of animals they would have been very crowded.

But according to all the pictures I've ever seen of the ark, the only animals that were included were: elephants, giraffes, camels, pigs, horses, ducks, doves, ravens, goats, sheep, lions, tigers, bears and snakes.

They wouldn't be so hard to take care of. Except maybe the lions and tigers and bears.

All the other animals evolved from them, and were, by my estimates, mostly in place by the time the Tower of Babel was built. After that, of course, people started speaking different languages, so most of the original names were forgotten anyway.
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I'm wondering what people think about the Genesis flood, .......if it was local, then why was the ark so huge,...?

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The ark described in Genesis is about 450 feet long 75 feet across and 45 feet deep. If each of teh three decks was 450 feet by 75 feet we end up with an area of 11,250 square yards which is an area of 106 yards by 106 yards which is about two football pitches in size.

Now try to fit into that just the insects, other arthropods and minor invertebrates; molluscs; reptiles; birds; mammals. The current numbers of described species of these is:

Insects -751,000
Other arthropods and minor invertebrates -132,461
Molluscs -50,000
Reptiles -6,300
Birds -9,198
Mammals -4,170
Total of the above -953,129

(Source: How Many Species? McNeely, J. A. et al. 1990. Conserving the World's Biological Diversity.)

Multiply all of the above by two (or by however many sexes or sexual forms the species might have!) and we have 1,906,258 species. All this on two football pitches! Even considering the mammals alone the 8,340 of them would have had an average of 1.3 square yards each.

Glenn

 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
... we have 1,906,258 species

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Not 'species', sorry, 'individuals.'
 

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Posted by Bonzo (# 2481) on :
 
You forgot the food
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Freddy:
But according to all the pictures I've ever seen of the ark, the only animals that were included were: elephants, giraffes, camels, pigs, horses, ducks, doves, ravens, goats, sheep, lions, tigers, bears and snakes.

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Sorry, I forgot cows.

Thanks, Glenn, for the precise figures.

According to my calculations, however, if the species were restricted to the ones I have mentioned, then each animal would have a spacious 375 square yards to roam around in. That's huge!

As I see it, some of that could be used for storage, thus eliminating the food problem that Bonzo noticed.
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 
Here is one of my favorite pictures.
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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He couldn't.

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:

quote:

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He couldn't.

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Of course, he couldn't. But He could.

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quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
How could Noah clean up after the animals???

With his supernatural powers that God gave him, silly! If God is God, then the practicalities of an ark aren't going to stump him. If he can make oceans of water appear then disappear in order to flood the earth, a bit of animal dung would be easy-peasy. God could dematerialise all the difficult animals, like the 171,000,000 species of beetles, and all the pathogens, then rematerialise them after the flood, so Noah would only have to worry about the larger animals with shapes suitable for wooden toys. In fact God is so powerful that he could not actually have a flood at all but just kill everyone except Noah and family and make them and everyone since then believe that there had been a flood. Or not kill everyone, which is a pretty nasty thing to do, but let a story about 'What if God killed everyone? (almost everyone, naturally)' emerge into consciousness.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider:
If God's going to act supernaturally to overcome the limitations of the Ark, why bother with the ark at all? ... Indeed, why bother with a flood at all? Why not just strike all the bad ones dead and be done with it?

Something doesn't add up here.

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quote:

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I feel this thread is degenerating

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• Did Noah take in single pairs of clean creatures or seven pairs? (Gen 7:2,3 vs 78,9 )
• When exactly did Noah go into the ark? 7 days before the rain (7:1-5)? On the day the rain started (7:10,13)? Befoe either of these 6:18,22
• When did the waters abate, and how long did that take (the confused chronology of 8:2-6 in particular and 8:13 and 14 too)

• If Mount Ararat was covered (7:19,20?) or even just up to its neck in water then the water level would have been up at near the 5165 metre mark (about 16,000 feet) - the height of Ararat. There just isn't a geographical basin that deep in that region which would be able to surround the water and localise it. It would spill over to the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans and so could not reach 5000 metres without those seas also reaching that level - which means a worldwide flood of at least 5000 metres depth.

• If it was global, where on earth did all that water come from?
• If it lasted over a year (the chronology in Genesis is inconsistent) then I can't see many plants surviving under several miles of water, with the lack of light and the intense pressure, to name only two problems.
• Pity poor Noah collecting an average of 30 to 40 species a week for 500 years and keeping them ready to hand for all that time ready to go into the ark. Is he the patron saint of zookeepers, by the way?
• How did the sea fish survive the drop in salinity? Or the freshwater fish the relative increase in salinity?
• And just how did those marsupials know how to head for Australia and not settle down anywhere along the way?

The more one looks at the story the more one becomes aware just how much we have learned about how big the world is since the time this was written, how diverse life is, about the distribution of species on the planet, about geology. Please! This is a story of its time, don't lets pretend it is history pure and literal!

Glenn
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:

... (Hebrews 11)

...(Ephesians 4)

Start here.

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quote:

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In response to Glenn Oldham's quote ... about where to start having "that sort of faith". I guess I just don't find it so hard to believe that it's spelled out fairly simply.

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Well I do think that it is spelled out fairly simply too, but I think that the idea of always having to take the bible literally complicates things rather than making it simpler!

G.R.I.T.S., I appreciate your various posts after the one I responded to so I realise your position is much less simplistic than it at first appeared to me.

I was going to have some fun and say something like "Start here, with Eph and Heb you say? I am sorry, it is too late I realised that one has to start somewhere so I have started by having faith that God speaks pre-eminently through the inspired pages of the British childrens' comic The Beano and I am going to naively have that faith 'no questions asked'. My magnum opus The Beano Code co-authored with my friend Colin will show how Dennis the Menace and Minnie the Minx both predicted most of the history of the 20th century."

You have to start somewhere, but unless you are prepared to ask questions you stand little chance of learning anything or moving closer to the truth. I am pleased to read your comment in your recent post " Continue to ask your questions and listen to the responses of others. "

Best wishes,
Glenn
 

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Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
Forgetting the 'Did ithappen?' stuff, isn't the point, well one of them, of the flood story, for Christians, that a holy God cannot tolerate ghastly, contingent, partial, sinful, fleshly, unholy people? A holy God, we might imagine, ought really to get thoroughly wound up and blast those dreadful humans. A Karcher Pressure Spray of global dimensions should do the trick (and clean up the nasty moss on the mountains at the same time).

But, say we Christians, there is another story. A holy, but loving, God, looked on the dreadful humans, wicked and wilful to a woman, and decided not to do away with them and this horrid gone-wrong creation, but to mend it! The holy (but loving) God entered the world as one of the dreadful humans, and started fixing things. [Does anyone remember the film 'The Fixer' starring Alan Bates, I think - long, long ago.] Not starting afresh, but making do. [This is fanstastic news for most of us!]

Jesus is the alternative to the flood, and the Church is the alternative to the ark - not a liner for the few worth saving, but a raft for the flotsam and jetsam to pile on to.

I think the ark is what these days we call a thought experiment.
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 
I agree completely with Glenn.

Glenn, I really appreciate the detailed list of difficulties with a literal view. The fact that every difficulty is easily brushed aside by reference to God's omnipotence does not, in my opinion, help us make sense of this ancient and beautiful story.

To my mind it is absolutely essential that the why's and wherefores of these things MAKE SENSE.

Yet I believe with all my heart that this story, like others in the Bible, comes directly from the mouth of God - by means of those who composed it, repeated it, wrote it down, copied it, preserved it, and eventually published it in its current, permanent, form.

I also believe that it must fit into a systematic pattern of information that contains and explains universal truths about religion - a pattern that can be discerned through the cultural and time-bound vessels that express it.

Of necessity, the topic has to relate to God's essential desire for the human race, which is to bring it into heaven, or into happiness, and therefore to the contest between good and evil, truth and falsity, light and darkness, happiness and unhappiness.

The only reasonable alternative, to my way of thinking, that preserves this story as a wholly divine part of God's Word, is to appreciate its deeply symbolic nature, and to see how this is echoed throughout the Bible.

A story like this is of a different nature than the biblical miracles, which have other rational explanations. A thinking Christian can believe in all these things, in my opinion, without simply relying on uncomprehending faith.

I believe that we can choose a rational acceptance as the best and most fruitful of many competing reasonable views.
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree completely with Glenn.

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Except for the stuff you were writing while I carefully composed the above - about hearing God "pre-eminently through the inspired pages of the British childrens' comic The Beano and I am going to naively have that faith 'no questions asked'."

Harummmph!


 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Freddy:

quote:

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Originally posted by Freddy:
I agree completely with Glenn.

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Except for the stuff ... about hearing God "pre-eminently through the inspired pages of the British childrens' comic The Beano and I am going to naively have that faith 'no questions asked'."...

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I am glad to hear that you don't agree with that bit Freddy because I was wrong! After seeing the stubble on my chin this morning I have taken that as a sign that I must convert to The Dandy (another British kids' comic) and become a follower of Desperate Dan. I shall now have some cow pie for breakfast.

Glenn
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 
I am greatly relieved. I feel that you have made a wise choice.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
[ I shall now have some cow pie for breakfast.

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On the train to work this morning it occured to me that our local supermarket now sells green eggs. OK, it is only the shell that is green, but a little colouring will fix that. I rarely eat ham, but I am sorely tempted.
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 
Green eggs and ham, Ken! Excellent!

But have I sent the thread on a tangent? Quick, let me think back 40+ years. Yes! There next to my family's Dr Seuss books is our little Noah's Ark and its flat wooden animals! So we are back on topic after all!
Glenn
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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Well I do think that it is spelled out fairly simply too, but I think that the idea of always having to take the bible literally complicates things rather than making it simpler!

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quote:

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I have started by having faith that God speaks pre-eminently through the inspired pages of the British childrens' comic The Beano...

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quote:

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Jesus is the alternative to the flood, and the Church is the alternative to the ark - not a liner for the few worth saving, but a raft for the flotsam and jetsam to pile on to.

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quote:

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"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding..."

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quote:

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I know.....I keep getting that told to me, especially by females....and then sung it in church the other day as well.......

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quote:

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Parting seas, columns of smoke and fire can all be signs of intense seismology as is known to have taken place in the Eastern Mediterranian at a time which wiped out the Minoans os crete with a tidal wave.

The great genius of Hebrew scripture was in how it wove these old legends into it's national canon and ascribed a spiritual meaning to ancient events. God saved Noah and his in the flood. He led the people of Israel through the sea.

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I would take issue when we start referring to the events described for the Israelites as purely natural occurences.

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I'm with you there. Miracles have divine, not natural, causes.

While it may seem fine to say that God used a natural event to lead and teach Israel, not every description of the so-called "miracles" lends itself to such an explanation. Sooner or later you need to either accept that they were real, or decide that there must be some other explanation, such as natural events, myth, etc.

Not to be "all or nothing" about it, but it seems odd to say that some of the described miracles are actually miracles, while others are mere sleight of hand.

I think if we understood what miracles are and how they work, and why they happened in ancient times (but not, in my opinion, today) we wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.
 

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Posted by Moo (# 107) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
Don't you think the essence of Christianity is faith? Simple, naive, no questions asked, faith? If our belief is based solely on what can be proven, either historically or scientifically, where's the glory to God in that?

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• It was the day after the sabbath
• It was early in the morning
• Mary Magdalene came to Jesus's tomb
• It was empty
• One or two young men or angels said that Jesus was not there, he had risen
• He/they gave a message to be given to the disciples
• The message mentioned Galilee

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
Remember, men:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding..."

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• Dear Rev Gerald,
  My heart and my faith have long told me that the Bible is without error, but, after reading it recently I realise that I can't understand how the Noah story can possibly be literally true. Can you advise me?
  Yours, Connie.
  Dear Connie,
  Don't loose the faith you had! Just "trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding" (Prov 3:5)
  Helpfully yours,
  Gerald
  
• Dear Rev Gerald,
  My heart and my faith have long told me that the Bible is certainly not to be taken as inerrant. But, after listening to a sermon recently I realise that I can't understand how the Bible can be authoritative even though it is not 100% accurate. Can you advise me?
  Yours, Libby.
  
  Dear Libby,
  Don't loose the faith you had! Just "trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding" (Prov 3:5)
  Helpfully yours,
  Gerald
  

Glenn
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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As far as I'm concerned, the details in the early part of Genesis don't matter.

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quote:

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For me this is sufficient evidence for the resurrection; the details don't matter.

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quote:

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This verse can certainly be a comfort, but used constantly in all circumstances it is no help.

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quote:

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But haven't you known people who have actually given up their religion because they could not come to rational terms with the details?

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quote:

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In effect, by taking those attitudes you tie Christianity to things which, for most people, who don't already have a big emotional investment in taking a high view of the Bible, can be easily disproved.

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quote:

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I know several people who became Christians, had inerrancy impressed upon them, and trusted in that viewpoint without ever learning to trust in God directly. They have all since rejected their faith.

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Christianity is about a relationship with Jesus, understanding and acceptance of salvation, and faith in God. Just as I believe no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, I believe no one can come to the truth without the Bible. By discounting the validity and sanctity of the scriptures, how do you find your way? I think part of the lessons of faith that God wants us to learn is being able to release all that we think we "know" about reality and reason, and give some credence to His omnipotence. If we limit Him in one respect, what's to stop us from hacking away at every Biblical precedent?

No one has yet to offer an explanation of who it is that decides and how it is decided what in the Bible is real and what isn't. Is it all open for personal interpretation? Is everyone really OK with that? If so, then how do you go about teaching others about Christianity with a guide book that is flawed and fluctuating? I agree that how it happened or whether or not it happened is, in the big picture, not really what it's all about, and I would not have a problem with someone choosing to believe that many OT stories were just that -- stories. I just don't see how that could not somehow seep over into the teachings of Jesus and the covenants of the NT. Where does the line end?

I'm not being a smart aleck: I really want to know how you do it. The response I'm expecting? Something along the lines of "just point them to Jesus". I suppose that would work, eh? Lift Him up, and HE will draw all men to Him.

Thank you for your thoughtful and personal responses, especially you, Louise. Nothing holds more respect for me than the testimony of someone who has come to Christianity from a position of nonbelief. I think that takes much stronger faith than the simple "maintenance" that so many of us practice.

(By the way, Ham'n'Eggs, I LOVE your sig -- it's one of my faves.)
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
I'm sorry to have offended you, Tortuf.

You are quite correct in that anecdotal evidence is not proof of anything. However, one's experience often has a bearing on the views that one develops. Mine comes to a large extent from seventeen years attendance of an Evangelical Free church, and the next seventeen years immersed in a Charismatic New Church. I had an inerrant viewpoint for years, and for me and for many of those I worshipped with, it was certainly idolatory.

My points were not directed at anyone specifically, but were addressing some of the content of the thread. They were my honest opinions, (which may well be wrong), as I think that I clearly expressed.

To put the matter into context, I personally think that almost every Christian has some idol in their life. The liberal may make reason an idol. The middle-of-the-road Anglican such as myself may make tolerance of all positions an idol. (I am doing my best to overcome the latter. ) I certainly wouldn't regard an unhealthy elevation of Holy Scripture as the worst of sins.

Are you seriously suggesting that to express a different viewpoint to someone else is to attack them, or to attempt to convert them to your viewpoint?

If didn't respect G.R.I.T.S. viewpoint, I would not be addressing some of the issues arising from it, and interested in her responses. She is calmly and clearly stating her case in a gracious fashion, and I would not deliberately set out to offend her. If she tells me that I have done, then I would naturally wish to rectify matters.

I see that you havn't been on the boards for long. I would hope that the Pig is usually ready to accept that he may be wrong on a matter. I have certainly apologised on many occasions previously, and no doubt shall do so in the future.

Best wishes,

H&E
 

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Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :
 
Just a short reminder, there are two extensive threads in Dead Horses on should we accept that all Scripture is truth and biblical inerrancy where lots of points have been made by people from different perspectives.

Alan
Purgatory host
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 
I tried to post a reply to G.R.I.T.S. a minute or two ago but I was stopped by something called Flood Protection.

On this particular thread that was amusing. Then irritating!
Glenn

G.R.I.T.S., Rev Gerald is one of SOF's writers pseudonym's. Rev Gerald is very funny indeed, but his humour has a serious side to it as well. See him at Rev Gerald Ambulances home page on SOF

Glenn
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 

quote:

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I believe no one can come to the truth without the Bible

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
By discounting the validity and sanctity of the scriptures, how do you find your way?

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quote:

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(By the way, Ham'n'Eggs, I LOVE your sig -- it's one of my faves.)

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The lady also has good taste.
 

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Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:
But what has this got to do with inerrancy? These don't automatically follow from not accepting the inerrancy of Scripture, a fact that a substantial minority of Evangelicals will vouch for.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
Louise and Ham'n'Eggs, I do understand what you're saying, although I have to be honest and say that I just can't relate to it.

quote:

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In effect, by taking those attitudes you tie Christianity to things which, for most people, who don't already have a big emotional investment in taking a high view of the Bible, can be easily disproved.

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I have no doubt that the reasoning you would use to "easily disprove" things would strike me as ludicrous and much harder to believe than any explanation recorded in the scriptures, i.e. the creation. I am not an unlearned yokel; I know all the theories, science and research related thereto. They always read to me like the ultimate in science fiction, coincidence and happenstance, requiring much more naivete to believe that the Biblical account. Why? Because one must rely on unbelievable acts of nature that could have happened only in the most remote of circumstances, if at all, and one simply relies on believing God could do it just the way the Bible tells it.

quote:

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I know several people who became Christians, had inerrancy impressed upon them, and trusted in that viewpoint without ever learning to trust in God directly. They have all since rejected their faith.

---

Christianity is about a relationship with Jesus, understanding and acceptance of salvation, and faith in God. Just as I believe no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, I believe no one can come to the truth without the Bible. By discounting the validity and sanctity of the scriptures, how do you find your way? I think part of the lessons of faith that God wants us to learn is being able to release all that we think we "know" about reality and reason, and give some credence to His omnipotence. If we limit Him in one respect, what's to stop us from hacking away at every Biblical precedent?

No one has yet to offer an explanation of who it is that decides and how it is decided what in the Bible is real and what isn't. Is it all open for personal interpretation? Is everyone really OK with that? If so, then how do you go about teaching others about Christianity with a guide book that is flawed and fluctuating? I agree that how it happened or whether or not it happened is, in the big picture, not really what it's all about, and I would not have a problem with someone choosing to believe that many OT stories were just that -- stories. I just don't see how that could not somehow seep over into the teachings of Jesus and the covenants of the NT. Where does the line end?

I'm not being a smart aleck: I really want to know how you do it. The response I'm expecting? Something along the lines of "just point them to Jesus". I suppose that would work, eh? Lift Him up, and HE will draw all men to Him.

Thank you for your thoughtful and personal responses, especially you, Louise. Nothing holds more respect for me than the testimony of someone who has come to Christianity from a position of nonbelief. I think that takes much stronger faith than the simple "maintenance" that so many of us practice.

(By the way, Ham'n'Eggs, I LOVE your sig -- it's one of my faves.)

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quote:

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But don't you notice that every one of your points of evidence was based solely on what you read in the Bible? Then why wouldn't the author's testimony about Noah in Hebrews 11 be proof enough of that? See -- I just don't understand all these distinctions.

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quote:

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I had the teens compare the work of four different authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, describing events which had taken place thirty-five to sixty years earlier.

The author of Hebrews, in speaking of Noah, was referring to something that happened more than a thousand years earier, if it happened at all. It is a story worth reading and pondering, but I don't take it literally.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
... aren't we getting further from Noah?

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quote:

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I can't believe these scriptures, which we all seem to agree are God-breathed, would even make reference to an event, give detail about it and commend it, if it didn't really happen.

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.
I can't believe these scriptures, which we all seem to agree are God-breathed, would even make reference to an event, give detail about it and commend it, if it didn't really happen.

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
I think that the fountain of the deep is the better picture of the two.....the water canopy doesn't really seem to make physical sense.....and the arguments would be along the lines of the fact that the mountains etc. were raised up after the flood....there's a verse in there somewhere....so all the water today is actually all the water used then.

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• Gen 7:19 says that 'the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered' The mountains were already there or had been formed by the height of the flood. If the flood covered mountains then the amount of water needed is too huge to be accounted for.
• There is simply no geological evidence for mountain building on such a global scale occuring in so short a time.

• What drove the waters out of those chambers?
• why did the chambers emptied of water not collapse causing catastophic earthquakes and crustal collapse?
• where did the water go afterwards? Back into the chambers?
• If so why have geologists (so good at spotting oil wells) not found these enormous deposits of water?

quote:

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Jesus told many parables. Does anyone have problems with the notion that he made up these stories? What is important is what they tell us about God, and how he relates to us. Why can't we apply the same idea to the story of Noah, and other parts of the Old Testament? The important question is not whether these things actually happened, but what we learn about God from them. Our faith is in the God behind the story, not in the story itself.

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Sorry -- I'm compelled to respond. The parables were never presented as anything other than stories told by Jesus to illustrate a lesson, and I would never try to teach them as factual accounts of actual happenings. However, I find no indication, either in the OT story itself or in the many NT references to it, that Noah and the flood was just a "story". Christ Himself talked about the flood just as pointedly as you and I talk about the Holocaust. There are also many references to Noah in kirect conjunction with Daniel, Job, Abraham, Moses, and on and on. Did none of these great men exist? Did none of the marvelous adventures of the OT occur? How do you teach these things to your children?

Sorry for the tangent, but (to borrow one of those awful phrases from the "Christian words we could do without" thread) God spoke to me all morning about this. As I prepared the Bible class material for our summer church camp, I realized the second lesson was on Noah. After class was over this morning I was picking up the room. The paper I picked up was a student's study sheet from school on, yes, Noah. I read both lessons thoroughly and was peacefully reassured that it all still reads the same to me as it always has -- just like REAL history... only better.

But, whatever the "truth" might be, my faith IS in the God behind the stories, and I believe He is the God of the living, as well as the transcendental.
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
Actually, Glenn, it seems that the descriptions given make a lot more sense when you realise that the author of Genesis was clearly describing a flat Earth, rather similar to the Babylonian cosmology. And the origin and destination of the required water are no longer such a problem.

For a detailed exposition of this, see The Flat Earth Bible.

I find it surprising that the majority of inerrantists do not believe that the Earth is flat, as the Bible clearly uses the language of a flat-earth cosmology. There are some around however, and they are rather interesting people.
Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society.
Application form for membership of the Flat Earth Society.

Despite the usual opprobrium heaped on them, I think that they are truly attempting to take the Bible literally. It seems to me that many inerrantists who say that they do, in fact do not.
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 
me feels that someone is taking the mickey....

but apart from that, I think that the flood story is a lot more explicit, and the flat earth stuff is implicit (if it's really there at all) and can be taken as metaphorical in a way which something presented as history cannot.
 

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Posted by Louise (# 30) on :
 
It's a bit simplified but maybe this summary from religious tolerance.org on differing views of the flood might be helpful.

Noah

By comparison here is Deucalion's flood the equivalent Greek myth.

It's common for ancient societies to treat myths as if they were history and sometimes they even try assigning dates to them - take for instance The Parian marble which even tries to give a date for Deucalian's flood and the reign of the mythical Athenian king Cecrops.

Now suppose all the Greek myths were gathered up with Greek histories, biographies, philosophy and devotional texts and stuck into one book. There cheek by jowl you would find mythical people like Deucalion and real people like Aristotle. You would find things that actually happened like the battle of Marathon and things which were fantastic stories but which didn't actually happen, like the labours of Heracles, but they would be no less valuable and cherished for that. You'd also find real people like Alexander the Great talking about mythical people like Achilles, as if they were real historical characters.

Now the liberal view of the Bible is similar - it sees the Bible as a huge collection of different sorts of documents having different purposes. Some are teaching through myth, some through poetry, some through history.

The Noah story contradicts what is now known about the natural world so much, that most people who study the natural world and its processes would say that it definitely cannot be history (see all the comments above!), so they would say that it's more like the labours of Heracles (a myth) than, say Athens' wars with Sparta (something that happened). Hence people's views differ on the matter. It's one of the sort of matters which we usually discuss on our Dead Horse board because people rarely, if ever, shift their views one way or another on it, but at least people can explain their views a bit more to each other

L.
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
But the author of the passage would probably have understood what he was writing as history, as it seems to be written in the terms of the world-view then current, which included beleif in a flat Earth.

There are plenty of people who take the mickey out of Flat-Earthists. However, the latter are quite serious about their beliefs. My father has met a number of them, particularly in Scotland. And he couldn't fault their argument - if you take the Bible literally, then you have to believe that the Earth is flat. Because the authors of the Bible believed that it was flat, and they make frequent reference to it.

There is nothing in the Bible that would suggest otherwise. The verse about "the circle of the Earth" sits in harmony with the widespread Sumerian/Babylonian understanding of the Earth being flat and circular. ( See this picture of how they would have understood it. )
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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It's one of the sort of matters which we usually discuss on our Dead Horse board because people rarely, if ever, shift their views one way or another on it, but at least people can explain their views a bit more to each other

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Originally posted by DaveC:
We tell the story of the flood, and all the other stories in the old testament, not just because they are great stories, but also because we believe that they contain truths about God.

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Beautifully put, Dave.

And the truths about God are profound ones, told better in a story than by an explanation.
 

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Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by DaveC:
We tell the story of the flood, and all the other stories in the old testament, not just because they are great stories, but also because we believe that they contain truths about God. And, just as in the parables, these truths transcend the stories that contain them, so that the question of whether the stories tell of real events is actually not very important. What we believe about God remains whether the stories are literally true or not.

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Reader alexis
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
I'm perplexed.

When did the flood occur? Allegedly within human history, and yet there is no worldwide flood layer within archaeological remains.

What about further down? Again, nothing. There is no period within earth history that shows world wide flood deposits.

Are we supposed to think that the miles of sedimentary rock are the flood deposits? Then why are the fossils within them so well sorted? What phenomenon sorted ammonites by complexity of shell sutures, so that the simpler patterns are always found in the lower strata? What ensured that all the grass was somehow ripped off the land and kept in the top Cenozoic strata? What ensured that Acanthostega's bones ended up in strata just above those of Panderichthys and just below those of more terrestrial amphibia?

I have to suspend far too many critical thinking faculties to believe in a world wide flood.
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 
so you believe in a local flood Karl?
 

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Posted by Freddy (# 365) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so you believe in a local flood Karl?

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I think the point is that the story isn't about a flood at all. This was just an ancient way of describing big changes in the ancient past, a plausible description of some kind of ancient disaster caused by man's sins. Floods were something familiar and understandable.

For what it's worth, I have always been taught that there was a literal event like a flood, but not a flood of water, in which the people of the most ancient church died out at some point in pre-history. Personally, I link it with the inexplicable extinction of the Neanderthals.

It was not a flood of water but a flood of evil.

The deep and close spiritual relationship of the people of the most ancient church was physically linked with their breathing. As this relationship ended, because of their increasingly sinful lives, they were literally unable to breathe.

Among a few, however, the thought was able to separate from the will, their breathing changed to the more vouluntary kind of breathing we now enjoy, and they survived. This was Noah.

The flood was a flood of evil, which drowned people as surely as any natural flood. How would an ancient person ever describe this?

I wouldn't expect people to accept this particular explanation. I merely use it as an example of a non-literal way of explaining the flood description.
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
so you believe in a local flood Karl?

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quote:

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Originally posted by ken:

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
[ I shall now have some cow pie for breakfast.

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On the train to work this morning it occured to me that our local supermarket now sells green eggs. OK, it is only the shell that is green, but a little colouring will fix that. I rarely eat ham, but I am sorely tempted.

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Originally posted by Freddy:
I think the point is that the story isn't about a flood at all. This was just an ancient way of describing big changes in the ancient past, a plausible description of some kind of ancient disaster caused by man's sins. Floods were something familiar and understandable.

For what it's worth, I have always been taught that there was a literal event like a flood, but not a flood of water, in which the people of the most ancient church died out at some point in pre-history. Personally, I link it with the inexplicable extinction of the Neanderthals.

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"There was a man who had two sons";
"A farmer went out to sow his seed";
"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho".

All opening words from some of the parables in Luke's gospel (NIV) - and nowhere does Jesus give any indication that these events didn't happen. It was understood by his audience that these were stories he was telling to make a point, and the point he was making transcends the question of whether the stories were of actual events.

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No where in Genesis, nor in any of the other OT or NT references to Noah, does the wording even remotely postulate the flood as a fictional event.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

The sheer weight of water in a 5 kilometer deep flood would have created a pressure of 15 tons to the square inch and killed all the plants. If it lasted for a year the result would have been utterly cataclysmic.

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Whoops Actually it is 3 tons not 15. An embarassing miscalculation.

But it would still have killed all the plants.
Glenn
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 
just to come back to the flat earth point: http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_03_03_01.html
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
That link is to an article which appears to pre-suppose that the Bible is inerrant.

What was your point?
 

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Posted by Kevin Iga (# 4396) on :
 
I'll speak as someone who once was interested in tying together Genesis 1-8 with geological history, and finding creative ways to make it fit, but in recent years, by focusing on the narrative intent of the story, feels comfortable with the idea that any combination of pieces of it are metaphorical.

1. Statements like "X can't have happened, scientifically" are harder to prove than you might think, because there is a wide range of interpretation that includes events we haven't thought of yet. The filling of the Black Sea is a recent example of this. What's to say we won't think of something else one day that's an even better explanation?
2. "To get the water there and back would take a miracle" kind of begs the question. "Of course the flood was miraculous," the inerrantist responds. "That's just the point." Or do you think the Bible was there to record natural historical events that are have no supernatural component?
3. "The writers couldn't have known X" is an argument with limited value if you believe God inspired these writers to write precisely those words. Not all inerrantists believe that, but they generally believe something close to it. After all, people are flawed, but the reason an inerrantist believes the Bible is not flawed is because he or she believes the words of the Bible are exactly as God intends them, and His testimony. And God knows about the shape of the earth and about plate tectonics and so on.
The main way the historical context would have an impact, then, is that God knew the mindset of the people He was writing to, and used their frame of reference to explain what He wanted them to understand (typically spiritual truths and not the hydrologic cycle). So He says the heavens opened and rain fell, but in Ecclesiastes, when He talks about the fact that the world goes on in cycles no matter what we do, He points out that water goes down the to sea, and returns to the place where it rains.
Really, then, this point is really based on a more fundamental issue: where the Bible comes from. Is it a bunch of human writings that got collected and at some point people found useful for faith? Or is it a collection of writings whose every word was shaped by God and which God directed to be handed down through the generations?
Or to put it another way, is the formation and transmission of the Bible different, fundamentally, from that of Greek or Babylonian myths?
4. In a way, modern inerrancy is derived from a certain scientific approach. The scientist may like some theories more than others, but must, in the end, test these theories against the natural world using experiments designed with sound methodology. The inerrantist may like some theories more than others, but must, in the end, test these theories against the text of the Bible using hermeneutics designed with sound methdology. Sometimes scientists disagree amongst themselves, since the level of proof needed is different for different people. Sometimes inerrantists disagree amongst themselves, since the level of proof needed is different for different people.
To the inerrantist, the "liberal" Christian is being arbitrary in not using the same strict standards of proof for their theories. Instead they seem to choose which stories are historical and which are metaphorical based on their current scientific understanding of the natural world. To the inerrantist, this puts the scientific methodology of understanding the natural world as more certain than their "scientific" methodology of reading the Bible, and to them, it should be the other way around.
To the inerrantist, the ideal is to independently study science and the Bible and, in the end, find they are saying the same thing, thereby each validating the other. When they are in conflict, the inerrantist believes that something was wrong with one or the other interpretation, and tends to be more suspicious of science than "liberals".

Okay, that being said, I am still in some sense an inerrantist in a broad sense even though I accept Darwinian evolution and think many of the stories in Genesis 1-8 are metaphorical. I can say this because I try to decide which stories in the Bible are metaphorical and which are literal using evidence internal to the Bible, and try not to let my scientific beliefs interfere with that process. I have, however, found it necessary to consider the historical and cultural milleu of the O.T. Israelites, including examining stories of other ancient Near-East cultures. I have also had to think theologically about the role these passages play in our spiritual walk.

I'm still not certain about Noah. It seems that the text doesn't require a global flood, based on the range of literary meaning. It also therefore doesn't require that *all* animal species were in the ark. Again, the genre and use of language permits some level of hyperbole. Perhaps "animals" meant not Kingdom Animalia, but those animals that were herded and used by man.

The geneaologies connecting Noah to Adam on the one hand and Abraham on the other are similar in some ways to other ancient geneaologies, and geneaologies used in some tribal peoples today, and based on this similarity and my understanding of these other cases, I don't think they were intended to be literal, but rather to explain relationships between nations. I'm a little perplexed about why ages of fathering and dying are even there, not to mention their extreme longevity, and I suspect there is a hidden meaning that is not literal (though I have no problem with a handful of people living hundreds of years).

It's hard to understand why the story is in the Bible the way it is, on literary grounds. It is handy later in the Bible, but there are many details in the story (like the size of the ark and the number of days on the water) that don't seem to add much to the metaphorical uses.

I've already tossed in a hypothesis that the Noah story was intended as a parody of the Babylonian Utnapishtim story. That would make some sense to me, though I carry that theory around as one possibility of many.

Kevin
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:
That link is to an article which appears to pre-suppose that the Bible is inerrant.

What was your point?

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quote:

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Let me summarise their argument:

Th Bible does not explicitly teach a particular cosmology. It can be taken to suggest that the earth is flat. But that would be a false cosmology (presumably because we beleive the earth to be a globe). Because the Bible is inerrant, it cannot teach something false. Only a sceptic would suggest that the Bible teaches something false, so only a sceptic would say that the Bible refers to a flat Earth.

How exactly does this highly fallacious argument make your point?

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The point is that I believe God kept the writers from explicitly putting a false cosmology in there.....the Bible does not explicitly teach false science.
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
So what is false science - the belief of 21st century man in the year 2003?

Sceince is continually changing and evolving. Did Neton express false science? No he made the best approximation given the available data. So did Einstein. And so did the author of Genesis.

A flat earth model in the Bible is not false science - it is the best fit to the available data for the culture within which it was written.
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
Duh! Science, Newton.

(retreats into gin-shop mumbling incoherently)
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
It gets worse:

quote:

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So what is false science - the belief of 21st century man in the year 2003?

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
the Bible does not explicitly teach false science.

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quote:

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That's as maybe, but somehow I have to come to terms with the simple fact that a global flood never happened.

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quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I think when Jesus said, "Go into all the world..." He was telling them to go into the regions of the earth inhabited by man at that time. Of course, that region has spread considerably since that time and, if the message is for us today, gives us a much more "global" mission.

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quote:

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And you don't gain much by saying the flood was local to where humans lived - that would still be effectively global given that there have been humans in Africa for 100000 years, and in Australia for 50000 years.

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:

quote:

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And you don't gain much by saying the flood was local to where humans lived - that would still be effectively global given that there have been humans in Africa for 100000 years, and in Australia for 50000 years.

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doh.....you would go and spoil a lovely worldview wouldn't you? Hmmm, think it can still work in two possible contexts, one is if you don't actually acknowledge those in other parts of the world as true humans, which I think is possible if God gave adam a unique spirit......

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
The point is that I believe God kept the writers from explicitly putting a false cosmology in there

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quote:

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Could be nasty. It would imply that modern Aborigines are not human. Possibly better not to go there?

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quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
(other option would be that the flood happened before there were people in Australia......but don't think that the technology matches up in that case)

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quote:

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I think when Jesus said, "Go into all the world..." He was telling them to go into the regions of the earth inhabited by man at that time. Of course, that region has spread considerably since that time and, if the message is for us today, gives us a much more "global" mission.

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There's not really been all that much expansion of the range of human population in the past 2000y - New Zealand and Iceland are the only places I can think of (unless you count small temporary outposts in the Antarctic and in orbit).

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quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Since, as Karl and others have pointed out, there is no evidence for a global flood then the genesis account CANNOT be literally true.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Since, as Karl and others have pointed out, there is no evidence for a global flood then the genesis account CANNOT be literally true.

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MEEP! Logic error - absence of evidence for something is not proof that it is not true.

For example, if I assert that my invisible friend was responsible for drinking Karl's pint of Sam Smith's, but provide no evidence to support my assertion, it cannot automatically be deduced to be untrue (although most observers would regard it as being highly unlikely).

Was that point that you were making that the very substantial contradictory evidence and lack of any corroborating evidence would lead an impartial observer to conclude that, on the overwhelming balance of probabilities, there was no global flood?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

To say that a flat earth is a false cosmology is a modernist viewpoint and nothing short of chronological snobbery.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Since, as Karl and others have pointed out, there is no evidence for a global flood then the genesis account CANNOT be literally true.

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MEEP! Logic error - absence of evidence for something is not proof that it is not true.

For example, if I assert that my invisible friend was responsible for drinking Karl's pint of Sam Smith's, but provide no evidence to support my assertion, it cannot automatically be deduced to be untrue (although most observers would regard it as being highly unlikely).

Was th[e] point that you were making that the very substantial contradictory evidence and lack of any corroborating evidence would lead an impartial observer to conclude that, on the overwhelming balance of probabilities, there was no global flood?

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I hope Neil Robbie is reading this, he will be amused to find me caught in a logical error!

You are right Ham & Eggs, of course, and yes that is what I meant.

Your analogy might be changed to “I assert that my invisible friend was responsible for drinking Karl's pint of Sam Smith's, but provide no evidence to support my assertion not even an empty beer glass , it cannot automatically be deduced to be untrue.”

The opening post asked of the flood was it local or global? The dilemma that faces anyone who wants to be able to believe that the biblical account of Noah’s flood is literally historically true is that

• it can’t have been local since the text says it went higher than the highest mountains; and yet
• it can’t have been global since if it was global such a massive catastrophe would have left evidence of its occurrence, but it has not.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:
For Newton, Einstein's General Therory of Relativity would not be the best fit for the available data,

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

But surely it is the case that for the authors of the Bible our current cosmology would not be the best fit for the available data, and would therefore be false.

For Newton, Einstein's General Therory of Relativity would not be the best fit for the available data, and would therefore be false.

Are future scientific discoveries false? And is our current view, that may in future be disproved, true? If something is always true, and the discovery of truth is progressive, how do we know that we have yet discovered any truth at all?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:
For Newton, Einstein's General Therory of Relativity would not be the best fit for the available data,

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Why not? As I understand it it would fit all the observational evidence that Newton had.
G.

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quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
Take a read of Issac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. I think it shows the problem with your reasoning.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
As I understand it it would fit all the observational evidence that Newton had.

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Yes, it would fit. But with the data available to Newton, it would not be the best fit. If you lined up the Newtonian model along with Einsteins, surely Occam's razor would have removed Albert's beard?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Do you mean to say that Newton had no observational evidence that didn't fit his theory, but would have been better served by Einsteins? Didn't Newton talk about God having to adjust the clockwork from time to time?

Is there a physicist/historian of science on the ship?

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• Whether a theory is true or false depends on how well it models the universe, not per se on how much we know about the universe. Therefore, it is incorrect to say that Einstein's theories would have been false in the days of Newton because there was no data known at the time for which Einstein's theories were a better fit than Newton's. Unless the universe itself was radically different in Newton's time, Einstein's theories still modeled the universe of Newton's day better than Newton's own theories. It's just that no one would have known it yet.
• If a theory is true if and only if it models the universe perfectly, then more likely than not all our theories are technically false. Technically speaking, it is more precise to think in terms of a sliding scale, with theories that more accurately model the physical universe as more true than theories that are less accurate models. In practice, though, we tend to call theories that poorly fit the data as false, and theories that fit the known data really well as true.
• We can have far more certainty about whether a theory is false than whether it is true.

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Now the Genesis account specifically says that the waters were so high that they overtopped all the high mountains. Ararat is 5165 metres (over 16,000 feet high). In other words the confining high ground was overtopped. It is not possible for a local flood to submerge the highest mountain in the locality. Since the next nearest areas are seas then the sea level would have to be over 5000 metres too, so the flood as described in Genesis is NOT a local one.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Iga:

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Now the Genesis account specifically says that the waters were so high that they overtopped all the high mountains. Ararat is 5165 metres (over 16,000 feet high). In other words the confining high ground was overtopped. It is not possible for a local flood to submerge the highest mountain in the locality. Since the next nearest areas are seas then the sea level would have to be over 5000 metres too, so the flood as described in Genesis is NOT a local one.

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Actually, it's not clear from the text that the ark rested on the top of the peak. It could mean that it rested in the mountainous region of Ararat, which could be interpreted to span quite a broad area.

Kevin

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You are right Kevin, but my quote says absolutely nothing about where the ark came to rest so I am not quite sure what you are suggesting.

Are you suggesting that the high mountains referred to as being submerged were actually much lower and that Ararat and it neighbouring mountains were the high ground that confined the flood? The problem then would be, surely, that the flood would have been exceedingly local unless you can suggest some basin-like topography in the region that would be large. The black sea basin would be ideal but there are not any mountains in the middle of it so we would be at a loss to see how the verse about the high mountains being submerged could be true.

Glenn
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 
forgive me if I'm wrong....but I think that I read somewhere that the word that gives mountains can just mean hills....so the highest ground within the area really.
 

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Posted by Kevin Iga (# 4396) on :
 
Yeah, what markporter said.

The flood need not have actually covered Mt. Ararat for the Biblical story to be relating the event accurately. Not literally, but accurately in the ordinary use of language. Certainly we talk about mountains near my house that are only 1000 ft. high or so, and if a flood came and submerged them, I would not be lying if I said that the water "covered all the high mountains", even though within a day's drive or so I can get to mountains that are over 10,000 ft. above sea level.

The point is how God was interacting with that society at that time.

Kevin
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 
Ham'n'Eggs,

I have had a hard time following some of your arguments about the uses of the terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ when applied to theories and worldviews, but I think that I can see what you are driving at. You are seeking to claim value for ancient worldviews even if they contradict our own contemporary worldview at some levels. I approve of this.

I am not sure that you need all the arguments that you have put forward to establish this. All you really need is to point out that theories and worldviews are not all-or-nothing affairs that can be pronounced as false (totally) or true (totally). Theories and worldviews are usually much larger collections of claims and beliefs, some of which may be false, or inaccurate, without thereby causing everything about the worldview to be nonsense.

So to say that the ancient cosmology of the flat earth was false is misleading. That cosmology included the belief that the earth was flat, and we now know that particular belief to be false. (Whether we affirm this with humble indebtedness to the evidence that we have and they did not, or with snobbery, it is still false.) But that early worldview also said that the sky is above the earth and that rain falls from the sky. In saying those things it was not wrong. Similarly with our worldview today there are parts of it that are uncertain and which may well prove wrong (such as views about the expansion rate of the universe) but there are parts that are, frankly, beyond reasonable doubt (such as that the earth is round).

That is all you need really. I don’t think that it is clear enough to just say that Newton’s science was not false science – that is far too vague.

But there is a strand in what you have posted that seems to lean towards a version of the argument, which says that

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All claims by scientists, no matter how well supported, may be overturned by future evidence. And that therefore we can’t be sure that we really know anything scientific at all.

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(A) Why is this worldview correct? Just hang around another couple of thousand years, and it will be superseded - 19. May 2003, 20:22 -
… (B) Science is continually changing and evolving.- 19. May 2003, 20:57 - … (C) If something is always true, and the discovery of truth is progressive, how do we know that we have yet discovered any truth at all?- 20. May 2003, 18:47 -

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Technically speaking, it is more precise to think in terms of a sliding scale, with theories that more accurately model the physical universe as more true than theories that are less accurate models.

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And also in early Genesis isn't there talk of a race of giants and again other people living in the Land of Nod, neither of which are descended from Adam and Eve?

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Also try the idea that the giants, like the Nephilim, were descendants of "the Sons of God (see Job) and the Daughters of Men".

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Originally posted by Little Glimmer:
Can I quickly chuck something in related to several posts back that caught my eye? Thank you.

... it is possible to see that the story of Noah and the extinction of other 'humans' can be only concerned with the chosen people. And also in early Genesis isn't there talk of a race of giants and again other people living in the Land of Nod, neither of which are descended from Adam and Eve?

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I am not at all clear what you think are the implications of this L.G. Could you explain how you think that this helps with interpreting the story of Noah?

The main reason that I am baffled is the fact that those who composed Genesis clearly saw the chosen people as the descendants of Abraham who was only one of the descendants of Noah.

Can I join in with others too, in asking you to avoid gross and (hopefully unintentionally) offensive generalisations such as " the Jewish people believed, and still believe, that God had chosen them alone to be his group of humans elevated above all others. " The idea that "the Jewish people" as a whole all believe that God has chosen them to be elevated above all others is absurd.

Glenn
 

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Posted by Ham'n'Eggs (# 629) on :
 
Hi Glenn,

I'm flattered that you think me obscure.

But I shall attempt to be direct:

The discussion of the scientific method as a perpetually self-refining process is admirably suited to utilitarianism. It is very useful, in that it seems to work very well.

However, I have some philosophical caveats to apply to it:

The scientific method is not some kind of infallable precision instrument. Philosophically, it has no basis other than "it seems to work". To date it seems that it always has - how do we know that it always will?

And the view expressed of the scientific method in the article referenced by J.J.Ramsey makes some unwarranted assumptions.

• One is that knowledge is incremental. This is not true for all periods of history.
• Another is that it does not go down blind alleys to any significant extent. Maybe not to date. But never?

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

The scientific method is not some kind of infallable precision instrument.

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Philosophically, it has no basis other than "it seems to work".

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And the view expressed of the scientific method in the article referenced by J.J.Ramsey makes some unwarranted assumptions.

One is that knowledge is incremental. This is not true for all periods of history.

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Another is that it does not go down blind alleys to any significant extent. Maybe not to date. But never?

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The probability that the world is not flat is not zero. From the data that we have it appears certain that it is [not?!] flat. The route that our current models have taken us down render it extraordinarily unlikely that it could be flat.
But we can never categorically say that it is not flat, because although from our perspective the probability that the earth is flat approaches zero, it is not zero.

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Indeed, it is virtually zero. It is very hard indeed to see how all the data we now have could possibly be made to fit with the earth being flat in the normally accepted sense of the term flat. (All the satellite pictures, the round the world flights, the travel times from place to place being consistent with a round earth. The likelihood of the earth being flat is vanishingly small.

But I have forgotten what this had to do with Noah, but it did seem relevant at the time!

Glenn
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

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Originally posted by Ham'n'Eggs:

And the view expressed of the scientific method in the article referenced by J.J.Ramsey makes some unwarranted assumptions.

• One is that knowledge is incremental. This is not true for all periods of history.

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Indeed, it is virtually zero. It is very hard indeed to see how all the data we now have could possibly be made to fit with the earth being flat in the normally accepted sense of the term flat. (All the satellite pictures, the round the world flights, the travel times from place to place being consistent with a round earth. The likelihood of the earth being flat is vanishingly small.

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
It is very hard indeed to see how all the data we now have could possibly be made to fit with the earth being flat in the normally accepted sense of the term flat.

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Forgive me, but this caught my eye. Are there other senses of the term "flat" that I am unaware of? I mean, are you saying that somebody might say "well when I said the earth was flat, I didn't mean like a pancake, but ..... " where they fill in the blank with something else?



Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by Sean (# 51) on :
 

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Originally posted by Mousethief:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
It is very hard indeed to see how all the data we now have could possibly be made to fit with the earth being flat in the normally accepted sense of the term flat.

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Forgive me, but this caught my eye. Are there other senses of the term "flat" that I am unaware of? I mean, are you saying that somebody might say "well when I said the earth was flat, I didn't mean like a pancake, but ..... " where they fill in the blank with something else?



Reader Alexis

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A punctured tire, perhaps.
 

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Posted by afish (# 1135) on :
 
What intriges me is how this topic has attracted so many posters from such a wide range of perspectives. Surely for the "modern mind" such "speculation" should be completly irrelevant and passé.

As a believer in a factual flood as described in The Bible I make this simple observation, things change. Mt. Arrarat was not always the height it is now neither was sea level, and so on.
Those who try, by the presentation of "scientific facts", to annul the historicity (what a lovely word)of a total flood as told in Genisis are making a statement of faith. They are trusting the innerency of a certain way of observing and measuring the world as it is now and the extrapolations then made to "know" how it was and how it will be.
Though we, with our flawed and feeble minds, may be able to work somethings out and make some intelligent guesses, it is only what has been told us through divine revelation that we can "know", by faith of course.
><>
 

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Posted by Little Glimmer (# 4540) on :
 
Glen, and others to whom I may have caused offence in generallising observations about "the Jewish people". Sorry, offence was not and is never intended to any individual or group. However, I take full responsibility for anything I have posted.
Please enlighten me and dispel my ignorance.
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

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Originally posted by Mousethief:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
It is very hard indeed to see how all the data we now have could possibly be made to fit with the earth being flat in the normally accepted sense of the term flat.

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Forgive me, but this caught my eye. Are there other senses of the term "flat" that I am unaware of? I mean, are you saying that somebody might say "well when I said the earth was flat, I didn't mean like a pancake, but ..... " where they fill in the blank with something else?



Reader Alexis

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• if we look at the world from the point of view that string theory says that the universe has 11 or 12 dimensions then the earth is flat!

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if we look at the world from the point of view that string theory says that the universe has 11 or 12 dimensions then the earth is flat!

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please don't......I'm quite happy with my mind as it is thankyou....
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

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Originally posted by Little Glimmer:
Glen, and others to whom I may have caused offence in generallising observations about "the Jewish people". Sorry, offence was not and is never intended to any individual or group. However, I take full responsibility for anything I have posted.
Please enlighten me and dispel my ignorance.

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Originally posted by afish:
As a believer in a factual flood as described in The Bible I make this simple observation, things change. Mt. Arrarat was not always the height it is now neither was sea level, and so on.

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Originally posted by afish:
What intriges me is how this topic has attracted so many posters from such a wide range of perspectives. Surely for the "modern mind" such "speculation" should be completly irrelevant and passé.

As a believer in a factual flood as described in The Bible I make this simple observation, things change. Mt. Arrarat was not always the height it is now neither was sea level, and so on.
Those who try, by the presentation of "scientific facts", to annul the historicity (what a lovely word)of a total flood as told in Genisis are making a statement of faith. They are trusting the innerency of a certain way of observing and measuring the world as it is now and the extrapolations then made to "know" how it was and how it will be.
Though we, with our flawed and feeble minds, may be able to work somethings out and make some intelligent guesses, it is only what has been told us through divine revelation that we can "know", by faith of course.
><>

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I wonder if you have even thought of just how low you have to make the mountain for it to reduce the amount of water involved to scientifically credible amounts?

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Originally posted by markporter:

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I wonder if you have even thought of just how low you have to make the mountain for it to reduce the amount of water involved to scientifically credible amounts?

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but what if the valleys were less deep as well?

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Sorry, afish, my browser is messing up.

I'll retype what I typed and lost later.

Glenn

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You mean below sea level?

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Originally posted by markporter:

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I wonder if you have even thought of just how low you have to make the mountain for it to reduce the amount of water involved to scientifically credible amounts?

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but what if the valleys were less deep as well?

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Originally posted by markporter:

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You mean below sea level?

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mmmm, think so.....if the current ocean floor were a little higher then there would suddenly be loads more water available to cover mountains.....

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If you want to get the huge additinal amount of water needed to [flood the land], not to mention the extra 15 cubits for it to go above the flat land you will need to sink the continents - which float on the underlying lithosphere - by four to five hundred metres for a year which is going to require some doing!

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So how are you going to raise the ocean floor, Mark? What are you going to put underneath it to keep it up at that higher level?

Scandinavia was pushed down by a 2 to 3 kiolmetre depth of ice in the ice age for example. Here we are talking about a (greater?) depression of all the land in the world. How? We are having enough trouble finding enough water to raise the sea level by more than 150m let alone enough to cover the continents in 2000 to3000 metres of ice!

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You seem to want to defend a literal account of the flood without it really having any down to earth nitty gritty physical reality to it at all.

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Can I ask those to whom it is important that the words of the Bible are literally true, why? And are there any words in the Bible that are not considered literally true? I suppose that in the context of literal truth, which particular translation of the Bible is crucial?
Please, I don't intend to sound impudent. I would like to know what difference it makes that the Flood happened over ALL the planet earth, or only over the known world at that time, given that the Flood happened at all.

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why not just miraculously make all the naughty people drop dead?

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
The Ship seems to be quite the harbor for those who practice adding to and taking away from the words of the Bible.

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Yes, the bottom line is the meaning behind the message, not the particulars of how, when, where, etc. But for me, to discount even one event leaves the entire account flawed.

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All I know is that believing the Bible -- ALL the Bible -- happened just the way it is presented, is one of the main foundations of my faith.

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
"I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy ciyt, which are written in this book." -- Rev. 22:18

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The Ship seems to be quite the harbor for those who practice adding to and taking away from the words of the Bible.

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I believe the Bible is in the form it is, and as it has been for centuries, for a reason -- it is the book in the form and completeness that God intended.

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To read and study with an eye that sees only that which is logical, easily proven by science, reasonable to the human mind, is NOT what God intended.

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But for me, to discount even one event leaves the entire account flawed.

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I believe God wants and needs us to be able to step out in faith, to put aside our human conditions and strategies, and just say, "I believe".

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Because those things were supernaturally more impressive than what happened to Abraham? Because nature was defied and things occured which went against our conceived order?

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don't know why the controversy.

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All I know is that believing the Bible -- ALL the Bible -- happened just the way it is presented, is one of the main foundations of my faith.

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"All Scripture is God-breathed..." I believe the Old Testament is history, not fiction, just as I believe in Christ and His life on earth as God's Son. To me, that just makes good logic.

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The Bible is a fundamental part of my faith too (I personally wouldn't call it foundational as I'd say only Christ is foundational).

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Twisted re-interpretations of passages to fit a particular interpretation of "God-breathed" that has never been a particularly prominant view of the Bible just, for me, results in a total devaluing of Scripture as a basis for informing and guiding my faith. The Bible leads us into Truth - not such absurd falsehoods as a global flood and recent 6 day Creation.

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Oh - and, if I may stick my hand up GRITS, yes I do doubt the historicity of the details of Abraham's story.

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Because some of us know that the Flood did not happen in the literal sense.

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
I too am an occasional overgeneraliser who forgets the old and well known maxim that: " everyone who generalises is a fool! "

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Must be nice to be among the chosen few whose knowledge supercedes that of "some" of us who have studied the Bible all their lives... and reached a different conclusion.

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Once you start bringing in miracles, you have to ask: why not just miraculously make all the naughty people drop dead?

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Originally posted by markporter:

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Once you start bringing in miracles, you have to ask: why not just miraculously make all the naughty people drop dead?

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would that have given Noah an oppurtunity to demonstrate his faith?

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Originally posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider:
Problem with invoking miracles in the flood story is that the whole story is about God using a natural phenomenon - a flood - to accomplish His aims. Once you start bringing in miracles, you have to ask: why not just miraculously make all the naughty people drop dead?

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
The Ship seems to be quite the harbor for those who practice adding to and taking away from the words of the Bible.

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I believe the Bible is in the form it is, and as it has been for centuries, for a reason -- it is the book in the form and completeness that God intended.

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To read and study with an eye that sees only that which is logical, easily proven by science, reasonable to the human mind, is NOT what God intended.

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Yes, the bottom line is the meaning behind the message, not the particulars of how, when, where, etc. But for me, to discount even one event leaves the entire account flawed. I believe God wants and needs us to be able to step out in faith, to put aside our human conditions and strategies, and just say, "I believe."

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"All Scripture is God-breathed..." I believe the Old Testament is history, not fiction, just as I believe in Christ and His life on earth as God's Son. To me, that just makes good logic.

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I am not the one who has to "twist" passages for interpretation. For me, the truth is there as presented. Someone made the comment earlier about how these same issues continue to be points of controversy. Once questioning begins, there is no end, and soon the Book becomes seemingly filled with "absurd falsehoods".

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:

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Because some of us know that the Flood did not happen in the literal sense.

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Must be nice to be among the chosen few whose knowledge supercedes that of "some" of us who have studied the Bible all their lives... and reached a different conclusion.

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You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ?" If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken.

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Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

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Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

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Originally posted by markporter:
well, if it comes from the mouth of God then there's going to be no falsehood in it.

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I think that you're right there Alan, so long as this doesn't lead to a distrust of scripture.....I think that we need to have as much confidence in scripture as in science, if not in our interpretations of it.

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So much wisdom from one so young.
 

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Posted by Glimmer (# 4540) on :
 
Hello GRITS, thank you for giving me an insight into where you are coming from. Not surprisingly, you have little support on the board, as outside the ship I guess most Christians and ALL non-Christians do not agree with you. A bit of factomation - Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, wrote respected biblical commentaries (on the Septuagint) putting the allegorical and symbolic interpretations on the creation stories, the flood, etc and also the Mosaic Law.
However, I respect the strength of your faith.
I won't try to argue, as there are many erudite posters better equipped than me. But I would like to ask anyone 'what IS the Bible?'
I'm sure the Bible collection of books used by most of the Catholic Western world was only settled in the fourth century and then the Reformation saw fit to exclude a number of books from that canon (why?). The final list of books in the NT were decided by Eusebius who used Origen's poll results of what were the most read writings. Start bringing in other canons, eg Eastern Orthodox, then it gets even more complicated. I'm not trying to be know-all, just trying to sort out, in the 'literal' view what is God's Word and what isn't.
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

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It seems to me that you are taking "God-breathed" to mean "literally true in the sense that a 21st Century scientist would understand truth". Is this the case?

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You know, I guess I just don't think God was writing with 21st century scientists in mind, or I'm sure He would have been much more detailed and boring in His explanations. However, that being said, might I be so forward as to recommend a book by a theologian, a Princeton graduate. It's entitled, "The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications" by Drs. Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. You might find it enlightening.

Let me ask how we feel about the following quote:

"The Genesis account of the great flood is not an embarrassment for the Christian. We are not saddled with a contradiction between the established facts of science and the words of the Bible. Rather, we have one more set of objective evidences that the Bible is indeed inerrant, not just in matters of faith and practice, but in all disciplines including geology and history.

Does all this evidence for a regional flood mean that the Genesis flood was not universal? Not at all. Let me reiterate; the Genesis flood certainly was universal in that it destroyed all mankind and the animals associated with his livelihood except those on board Noah’s ark. Only in the twentieth century has “universal” been synonymous with “global.” Global citizens, global corporations, and global wars are unique to this century." (Hugh Ross, Ph.D.)

As I stated in an earlier post, I can live with the concept of a local flood with the understanding that all and everything was relating to the known world at that time. I have to admit making such concessions makes me a bit queasy. It's like saying I don't think God can accomplish His purposes in any way He chooses.

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As it happens I do believe the Bible should not lead into falsehood (though it may contain "lies" within it - there are loads of bits of Scripture which, like parables, do not require the events portrayed to be actual historical events).

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Questioning has to begin , and has to continue. If you are not questioning your interpretations of Scripture, if you are not trying to read intelligently and reflectively, then you will be just repeating the opinions of whatever the traditions of your local church are. And like all other churches those traditions will drift away from the truth. We need to engage with the Bible intelligently in order to stay within the truth.

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The only tradition I practice is Bible study. When one studies only from the scriptures, with a few selected study guides and reference books (none with an "issue" flavor or influence from other theologies) there is nothing to cause drift. Why is it you all feel intelligence can only be gleaned through human sources? I see much pride in these posts -- pride in personal knowledge, pride in diplomas, pride in articulation, pride in (what we call in the South) "book-learnin'". I personally think God is really turned off by "Tower of Babel" types who think they know too much to be snookered by a simplistic faith. (No offence, Ken. You have certainly not presented that way. Your post just generated a rant that had been building. )

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It is analogous to the Bible's instructions to us to test the prophets. We're told this again and again, and we're given a number of different rules to use to test the prophets (that is anyone claiming to teach in the name of God) Most famously Deuteronomy 18.21:

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You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD ?" If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken.

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This is about Old Testament prophets claiming to predict the future. But the general principle - like a lot of OT principles - may still be applicable in our Church age. We have to use our own eyes and our own intelligence and look at the world around us. If we see that what a prophet or teacher has told us is actually true, is really happening, then maybe they are from the Lord. If, on the other hand we don't see it, if the message is not true, then it is not from the Lord.

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If we think the whole created universe - the stars, the galaxies, the rocks under our feet - are just such a stage set, flats, a backdrop to the action; why should we believe that God Incarnate was real either?

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My reason for choosing to believe the events of the OT are as real as the NT. Why should Christ and His life hold any more truth for me than Noah and his life? (Not speaking to salvation, of course -- just reality, factuality, etc.)

The remainder of your post, ken, sounds sadly like someone who has succumbed to the thinking of the world. It sounds like you have very little respect for Christianity, or at least, for Christians who choose to practice their faith in an elementary fashion -- simply reading the Bible and believing in it. I do appreciate your use of scripture, and it's funny that those are some of the same scriptures I would use to confront someone trying to undermine the validity of the Bible. Viva la personal interpretation, huh?

And for Glimmer (congrats on the promotion!) I would just say -- DON'T EVEN GO THERE WITH ME! Don't you think God has a hand in any of this? Do you think He'd allow a picking apart of His Words to the point that there was no rhyme or reason to it? If I believed that what we have isn't complete (at least to the point of faith and salvation) and God-breathed, what WOULD be the point?

I must go -- dinner time for the family.

[long strings of hyphens edited]

[ 01. June 2003, 14:01: Message edited by: frin ]
 

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Posted by David (# 3) on :
 

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
Let me ask how we feel about the following quote:

"The Genesis account of the great flood is not an embarrassment for the Christian... Global citizens, global corporations, and global wars are unique to this century." (Hugh Ross, Ph.D.)

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The only tradition I practice is Bible study. When one studies only from the scriptures, with a few selected study guides and reference books (none with an "issue" flavor or influence from other theologies)

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Why is it you all feel intelligence can only be gleaned through human sources?

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I see much pride in these posts -- pride in personal knowledge, pride in diplomas, pride in articulation, pride in (what we call in the South) "book-learnin'". I personally think God is really turned off by "Tower of Babel" types who think they know too much to be snookered by a simplistic faith.

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My reason for choosing to believe the events of the OT are as real as the NT. Why should Christ and His life hold any more truth for me than Noah and his life? (Not speaking to salvation, of course -- just reality, factuality, etc.)

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The remainder of your post, ken, sounds sadly like someone who has succumbed to the thinking of the world. It sounds like you have very little respect for Christianity, or at least, for Christians who choose to practice their faith in an elementary fashion -- simply reading the Bible and believing in it.

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You're confusing intelligence with knowledge, which, if I were being cruel, would appear somewhat enlightening.

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Pride is not good, but I'd rather be proud of "book-learnin'" than pig-ignorance.

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The only tradition I practice is Bible study. When one studies only from the scriptures, with a few selected study guides and reference books (none with an "issue" flavor or influence from other theologies)

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(Followed by your sweetly snickering smilie.) This was my attempt at a polite way of saying I'm not influenced by what others have concluded to be their interpretation of the Bible. Yes, it's good to know what others think, and I believe you can learn something in any situation. I respect others views, and I just want to know why they believe what they do. But, in turn, I would hope to receive the same restrained patience with my opinions, as well. So far, I feel as though I should be expecting PMs laced with anthrax.

I'm glad you were able to figure out why your train was late, David. Tell me, though -- where would you have searched for answers if your train had crashed? Surely the Bible holds some relevance for you. I believe it has secrets that are yet to be uncovered, and I never pick it up that something new is not revealed to me. It is "living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword... and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

Thank you for your thoughts... and for holding back on the blatant name-calling.
 

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Posted by David (# 3) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I used the word "intelligence" because it was the one used in the quote. I am not confused, and I don't think you mean to be cruel.

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quote:

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And this is where the rubber meets the road, isn't it? You consider acceptance of the Bible as a truthful accounting to be ignorance, as apparently does "poor ken".

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quote:

---

(By the way, thanks for your help putting words in my mouth. You were able to make me sound so much more condescending, which was exactly what I was after.)

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quote:

---

The only tradition I practice is Bible study. When one studies only from the scriptures, with a few selected study guides and reference books (none with an "issue" flavor or influence from other theologies)...
Followed by your sweetly snickering smilie.) This was my attempt at a polite way of saying I'm not influenced by what others have concluded to be their interpretation of the Bible. Yes, it's good to know what others think, and I believe you can learn something in any situation. I respect others views, and I just want to know why they believe what they do. But, in turn, I would hope to receive the same restrained patience with my opinions, as well. So far, I feel as though I should be expecting PMs laced with anthrax.

---

quote:

---

quote:

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I used the word "intelligence" because it was the one used in the quote. I am not confused, and I don't think you mean to be cruel.


No, the quote used the phrases "to read intelligently" and "engage with the Bible intelligently". Nothing about receiving intelligence from any source. So yes, you are confused.

---

quote:

---

I consider that unquestioned acceptance as a truthful account is, by definition, ignorance. Worse, it's willful ignorance.

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quote:

---

etc etc etc. Because you left out the only bit of my post that actually dealt with the issue-at-thread, I'll have to direct you to this Dead Horse for any further discussion on inerrancy.

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quote:

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I personally think God is really turned off by "Tower of Babel" types who think they know too much to be snookered by a simplistic faith.

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G.R.I.T.S, that is the most polite "rant" I've ever heard on The Ship. Honest and sincere rants are valuable tools in communication because it is where the most truth is revealed. I wondered when you were going to come right out with this.

I am exactly the sort of person that you theorize turns off God. To me, a "simplistic faith" that leads a 21st century person to believe myths from 30 centuries ago as historical truth is repellant. Not because I know too much, but because I value the Truth above all else. The earth is neither born on the back of a turtle nor was it flooded by a God who drowned all animal life except for one boatful. Science and reason clearly point me in that direction.

You asked earlier on how on earth anyone with a belief in any part of Christianity can take it apart, discern myth from legend from exaggeration from metaphor, as if these were impossible things to do. It is difficult as first, but then it is easy. This is exactly what our intellect is for. Not to elevate ourselves above God but to assist us on the path to Truth. I cannot believe that God is turned on by people who are willing to say, "OK God, if your Holy Book says that you killed all animal life by drowning, but saved a few in a big boat, that's fine by me. You're God and you're big and you're powerful and who am I to question your Holy Word. They all drowned except for the ones in the boat. And I'll stick up for you if any 'Tower of Babel' intellectuals come along and say that human science says otherwise."

Why would that make God happy? I cannot believe that there is a God who is happy because you are sticking to your guns amongst a bunch of 'Tower of Babel types.' I can believe that you are perplexed at where it would take you were you to alter your view of the world with the Old Testament as filled with instructive myths rather than historical facts. I can believe that you would think there is a God who would be displeased and that you would be floundering with no concrete guide for Goodness and Badness. Growing up in an Assemblies of God parsonage, I saw it all the time.

But others of us are comfortable in that mode. The thought of myths in the Old Testament is neither perplexing nor threatening. It is simply the Truth and we cannot duck it. Our world view is adjusted and we move forward in Truth.

P.S. I notice that I am one month older than you. Perhaps in a month you will feel differently.
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 
For Mr. JimT:

quote:

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quote:
--------------------------------------------------
I personally think God is really turned off by "Tower of Babel" types who think they know too much to be snookered by a simplistic faith.
--------------------------------------------------

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quote:

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because I value the Truth above all else

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quote:

---

The earth is neither born on the back of a turtle nor was it flooded by a God who drowned all animal life except for one boatful

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quote:

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I notice that I am one month older than you. Perhaps in a month you will feel differently.

---

I feel differently EVERY month about some things, being female and all , but not about this. I find that age has only brought more reassurance (no, it's not blind complacency, thank you very much), and my spiritual life is more challenging and enriching than ever.

I hope this wasn't too "Dead Horses", David. We did talk about the flood (see paragraph 5, above).
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 

quote:

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"The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications" by Drs. Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. You might find it enlightening.

---

quote:

---

I sometimes feel the things I say may bring back unpleasant memories for some shipmates who have, perhaps, turned to other beliefs in response to an experience which left them disillusioned about religion.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
Let me ask how we feel about the following quote:
... (Hugh Ross, Ph.D.)

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quote:

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Here they ["scientific creationists" inc. Morris] are sadly misguided and ar misguiding many whose science education and biblical training are inadequate to aid them in evaluation. All of these "evidences" of youthfulness involve one or more of the following problems:

• faulty assumptions
• faulty data
• misapplication of principles, laws and equations
• ignorance of mitigating evidence

Ironically, these fallacious arguments, when corrected, provide some of the strongest evidences available for an old universe and an old earth.
( The Fingerprint of God 1989, p155)

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
Why is it you all feel intelligence can only be gleaned through human sources? I see much pride in these posts -- pride in personal knowledge, pride in diplomas, pride in articulation, pride in (what we call in the South) "book-learnin'". I personally think God is really turned off by "Tower of Babel" types who think they know too much to be snookered by a simplistic faith. (No offence, Ken. You have certainly not presented that way. Your post just generated a rant that had been building. )

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
You consider acceptance of the Bible as a truthful accounting to be ignorance, as apparently does "poor ken". (By the way, thanks for your help putting words in my mouth. You were able to make me sound so much more condescending, which was exactly what I was after.)

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quote:

---

Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
I find Hugh Ross an interesting fellow. He's founder and president of Reasons to Believe, who to quote from their statement of faith "believe the Bible (the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments) is the Word of God, written. As a "God-breathed" revelation, it is thus verbally inspired and completely without error (historically, scientifically, morally, and spiritually) in its original writings".

---

Yes, "Reasons to Believe" is very interesting. I'm not sure I agree with all they say, especially about "real" biology (i.e. genetics & ecology & systematics & so on, not the smelly molecular stuff) but it is a great read.

When I first came across it 3 or 4 years ago, I wrote: "Is this a Q-site? At first glance yet another semiliterate US creationist website, RTB actually offers serious scientific & historical discussion (& even some dissent!) as well as pointing out that the real problem with the young-earth so-called creationists & genesis-flood weenies is their unorthodox and unchristian attitude to God." (& my opinion hasn't changed)
 

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Posted by Glimmer (# 4540) on :
 
Personally I don't believe the Bible (in any of its translations and compositions) can be taken literally in all aspects. BUT I might be wrong. The story of the universal flood and all the animal species alive today living in the same boat does not square with worldly logic and experience, but if God can create everything out of nothing why not make things happen outside 'natural behaviour' (why would he consider that was the best way to achieve his plan?). How do I reconcile the two Creation stories in Genesis with the inerrant approach?

GRITS - sorry to make you angry but my question on Bible composition was without guile. I am inclined to take seriously many books which aren't in the Protestant canon (some I won't) because I don't know why and at what point they were excluded; presumably the 'excluders' would belive they were following God's wishes? Presumably those who originally included the books were also of the belief they were following God's wishes? I'm not trying to change your position, simply come to some understanding of it.
 

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Posted by G.R.I.T.S. (# 4169) on :
 

quote:

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GRITS - sorry to make you angry but my question on Bible composition was without guile. I am inclined to take seriously many books which aren't in the Protestant canon (some I won't) because I don't know why and at what point they were excluded; presumably the 'excluders' would belive they were following God's wishes? Presumably those who originally included the books were also of the belief they were following God's wishes? I'm not trying to change your position, simply come to some understanding of it.

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quote:

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No, he was much politer than you.

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quote:

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Let me just assure you that considerable offence was taken, whether you meant it or not.

And was you going on about diplomas credentials and academic qualifications - you even mentioned Whitcomb and Morris! As if their theology PhDs made any difference to the respect I should give to their opinions on this matter (which is almost zero, as you know if you read the other thread on the yeccies)

However I'm calming down now because it is obvbious you never really read my posting.

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quote:

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In Genesis God said the world he created was very good.

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It is very good, ken, however it happened and however long it took, right? It makes me happy to always be able to come back around to the common ground. How terrible it would be to let our human preconceptions and adherences keep us from being able to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. Seeing men become passionate about their beliefs and convictions concerning Christianity affirms that goodness to me. I am thankful for men like all of you who are seeking to have the mind of Christ.

Thank you for your post, JimT. I shall have to read and ruminate on it. Off to the office now!
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
Slander? Slander is untrue. I stand by everything I say about the professional creationists.
 

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Posted by markporter (# 4276) on :
 
<tangent>
Karl, you wouldn't believe how irritating that avatar can get....
</tangent>
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by markporter:
<tangent>
Karl, you wouldn't believe how irritating that avatar can get....
</tangent>

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quote:

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Originally posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider:
Slander? Slander is untrue. I stand by everything I say about the professional creationists.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:

quote:

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You seem to want to defend a literal account of the flood without it really having any down to earth nitty gritty physical reality to it at all.

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quote:

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Can I ask those to whom it is important that the words of the Bible are literally true, why? And are there any words in the Bible that are not considered literally true? I suppose that in the context of literal truth, which particular translation of the Bible is crucial?
Please, I don't intend to sound impudent. I would like to know what difference it makes that the Flood happened over ALL the planet earth, or only over the known world at that time, given that the Flood happened at all.

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"I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy ciyt, which are written in this book." -- Rev. 22:18

The Ship seems to be quite the harbor for those who practice adding to and taking away from the words of the Bible.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
The Ship seems to be quite the harbor for those who practice adding to and taking away from the words of the Bible.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by G.R.I.T.S.:
I realize now that there really is no way to make you understand -- proof from the scriptures makes no impression on you, nor do learned people with opinions other than yours. I didn't realize how sensitive everyone was about this.

---

Oooh, scratch my eyes out!

You really did get out of bed on the wrong side this morning didn't you? Or else why are you being so insulting all of a sudden?

I will say this to the others here - because I think I've lost you somewhere - that proof from the Scriptures does make an impression on me. That's why I've been quoting them.

To go back to the OP, the genesis flood ideas are not compatible with the Scriptures, or the God revealed in the Scriptures as incarnate in Jesus Christ.

As for "learned people with opinions other than" mine, what gave you that idea? and who are these learned people anyway?
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 
Oh, and when did I call you "ignorant"?

I did say you were following the traditions of your church - not quite the same thing - which you denied by saying that you read the Bible in an unbiased way. Which is another discussion entirely of course.
 

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Posted by Laura (# 10) on :
 
I'll even say that if there were to be empirically quantifiable evidence from a non-biased source suggesting that there had been a great world-inundating flood, I'd say, "cool", but it would not add or take away from my understanding or valuing of scripture. Nor would I suddenly think "it all must be literally true". Scripture is valuable and important, and inspired, whether or not the story of Noah literally took place as reported. None of the sources cited by inerrantists in these debates has ever been remotely unbiased or from people seriously educated in the field in which they're opining. So they might be educated in something-- so what? Lots of educated people have believed all kinds of nonsense over the ages. Why should we add to the tally?

[ 28. May 2003, 15:29: Message edited by: Laura ]
 

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Posted by JimT (# 142) on :
 
Laura for Pope! Laura for Pope! (Hereinafter to be abbreviated LFP).

Now excuse me, I have to take a Biophysics exam and spend some time in the Molecular Evolution Data Processing Lab with the other Assemblies of God orphan (Morgantown, West Virginia) who dedicated her life to research on the origin of life. Amazing what a thirst for real truth does when your religion required you to believe lies. You know what's kinda funny? I've given her my version of Biblical truth and she is amazed that I stuck with it at all. She might even read the Bible.

Not bad for an "attorney for Satan."
 

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Posted by Ben26 (# 4201) on :
 
G.R.I.T.S - My first several churches were exceedingly evangelical and I was fed on a diet of creationism, inerrancy, sufficiency and literal truth. I mention this only becouse I believed this stuff myself untill quite recently. So, I really do understand where your "coming from". I came from there myself.

However, the rub of the matter is this. Something can be true without being literal, for example, a number of Aesop's Fables I would say were true or contained truth but are not literal. If the O.T. needs To be literally true in order to be credible - tough luck. We know as a matter of indesputable, scientific fact that a large number of the events portrayed in the O.T. never, ever, ever happened in any literal sense whatsoever. This does not mean that the Bible is untrue, just that is isn't always literally so.

For the record, I would say that the creationist liars (which, after all, is what they are) do far, far, far, far, far more damage to the faith then "worldly thinking" if the latter means agreeing with the truth. When I found out that some of the things I believed were B.S - well, my faith took a pounding tbh. I, and many more like me, would have been better off never to have believed this innerantist, creationist stuff in the first place.

I'm not angry at you per se - but I am angry that I was fooled for so long - resulting in my having an unrealistic faith and in convincing those I talked to about God that Christains are barmy, ignorant and intellectually dishonest. My faith would now be stronger, I believe, if my earlt teachers had had the integrity to teach me the truth about science etc.

Ben
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 
Let's have a word from Augustine writing in 401 AD. Paragraph 39 is especially relevant.Augustine on the literal meaning of Genesis
 

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Posted by Kevin Iga (# 4396) on :
 
Wow. Everybody seems to be ganging up on GRITS. Though I don't agree with GRITS on this topic (see several pages back where I do express my view), I feel I must point out a few things about the conflict here on GRITS's behalf.

1. One point of contention is epistemology: how do we know what we know? What methods do we use to acquire information, and when should we view the information so obtained as worthwhile or true?

For many Christians, the Bible is such a source. For scientists, experiments and observation on the natural world is such a source. Science and the Biblical narrative are sometimes in conflict. GRITS's point is that the Bible, being the word of God, is surely a more reliable narrative than scientific texts, being the word of man.

From this perspective, if the Bible says that if you drop a stone, it will not fall to the ground, then from this epistemology, we are to believe it even though we have seen stones drop many times. This is not "checking your mind at the door" but deciding which source of knowledge is to be ultimate. Perhaps this is not too different from those of you who believe that bread and wine can become the body and blood of our Lord, even though all scientific tests to the contrary seem to contradict this.

2. Some of you have mentioned the difficulties of interpreting the Bible. This is a good counter-argument to GRITS's claim that we must trust the Bible rather than people, because it shows that GRITS is using not only the Bible but a particular interpretation of it. Therefore, the real debate might center on which method of interpretation is superior in this case, realizing that all such methods are man-made.

3. These interpretations are rooted in the person's view of what scripture is and where it comes from. Some of you have compared the Noah story to other ancient stories from Babylon and India (earth on turtle). This suggests you believe that the Bible is a collection of myths like any other culture's myth collection. If so, it's not clear to me why you view the Bible as superior to these other collections of myths.

4. GRITS's view is not, as someone claimed, in the minority in the church, as far as I can see. Certainly in the US her view is the most prevalent, though this includes many people who perhaps shouldn't count in our survey (such as people who don't know much about science and haven't thought about the issue). It also includes almost everyone in the church for most of its history.

5. GRITS's point about "throwing out" parts of the Bible comes from a perspective of viewing the Bible as a source of truth. If you view one section as "not true", then for GRITS, this is essentially the same thing as removing it altogether, since it is no longer in your "collection of truth". Now as many of you pointed out, non-literal interpretations of the Bible may preserve your idea of it being "true". But your decision to view it non-literally solely on the basis of scientific evidence perhaps betrays your actual feelings on the matter--that you adjust your notion of "truth" only when you want to continue to claim the Bible is true even when you have stopped believing it.

6. That's not quite it. Of course, many of you did not come up with your interpretations of the Noah story on your own; you came to accept the one common to a certain community, perhaps because you resonated with it, or because you accepted the community first. And the way you talk about it is similarly derived at least partly from that community. The same with GRITS. The Churches of Christ (her community) has traditionally viewed the Bible as straightforwardly understandable through an explicit methodology of command, example, and inference in ways that are reminiscent of science (in fact it has its roots in Scottish Baconian rationalism). That also explains why GRITS is accusing many of you of twisting the Biblical interpretation from the plain sense.

Kevin
 

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Posted by JimT (# 142) on :
 
Kevin, what do you hope to accomplish with your fence-sitting commentary? Your position is clearly at odds with GRITS:

quote:

---

I would prefer to find some way of thinking of the flood story as referring to an actual historical event and preferably for the details (which are argued about anyway) to somehow make sense once you see the details of the historical event. But that preference may be a character flaw in me.

Because I don't think that's what the purpose of the story is in Genesis.

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quote:

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So I must ask myself why God wanted the story there. And I just don't know.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
...
1. One point of contention is epistemology: how do we know what we know? What methods do we use to acquire information, and when should we view the information so obtained as worthwhile or true?

For many Christians, the Bible is such a source. For scientists, experiments and observation on the natural world is such a source. Science and the Biblical narrative are sometimes in conflict. GRITS's point is that the Bible, being the word of God, is surely a more reliable narrative than scientific texts, being the word of man.

... This is not "checking your mind at the door" but deciding which source of knowledge is to be ultimate.

2. Some of you have mentioned the difficulties of interpreting the Bible. This is a good counter-argument to GRITS's claim that we must trust the Bible rather than people, because it shows that GRITS is using not only the Bible but a particular interpretation of it. Therefore, the real debate might center on which method of interpretation is superior in this case, realizing that all such methods are man-made.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by David:
That's there some mighty fine book learnin' you've got a-goin' there Glenn.

---

I note that your accent matches your location in Redneck Wonderland, David. Which means that I, form my location, should say that I am much obliged for your kind compliment, sir. Or alternatively: Gawd bless yer me old cock-sparra!
G
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Kevin Iga:

5. GRITS's point about "throwing out" parts of the Bible comes from a perspective of viewing the Bible as a source of truth. If you view one section as "not true", then for GRITS, this is essentially the same thing as removing it altogether, since it is no longer in your "collection of truth". Now as many of you pointed out, non-literal interpretations of the Bible may preserve your idea of it being "true". But your decision to view it non-literally solely on the basis of scientific evidence perhaps betrays your actual feelings on the matter--that you adjust your notion of "truth" only when you want to continue to claim the Bible is true even when you have stopped believing it.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
GRITS's point is that the Bible, being the word of God, is surely a more reliable narrative than scientific texts, being the word of man.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Kevin Iga:

Now as many of you pointed out, non-literal interpretations of the Bible may preserve your idea of it being "true". But your decision to view it non-literally solely on the basis of scientific evidence perhaps betrays your actual feelings on the matter--that you adjust your notion of "truth" only when you want to continue to claim the Bible is true even when you have stopped believing it.

---

No. I thoroughly object to this attempt at mind reading.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
... Many people have jumped to the position that the Noah account is intentionally mythical without thinking through questions like "Why do genealogies present Noah as an ancestor of those presented as actual people?" That does look more like an exercise in saving the Bible's face than exegesis.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

I personally find it impossible to believe that the [Noah] account was intentionally mythical, because I do not believe that the originators of the story had a concept of myth in the way that we do.

---

quote:

---

Nor do I think that they had the same concept of history that we do.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Perhaps so. I personally find it impossible to believe that the account was intentionally mythical, because I do not believe that the originators of the story had a concept of myth in the way that we do. Nor do I think that they had the same concept of history that we do.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by JimT:
Kevin, what do you hope to accomplish with your fence-sitting commentary? Your position is clearly at odds with GRITS:
...
What you are seeing is not "ganging up" but uniformity of opinion: the story is not literal historical fact, and does not need to be in order to derive meaning. You are a subset in that majority in that you agree it does not have to be literal historical fact in order to have meaning. None of your position is in accord with GRITS. Why the lecture on epistemology to those with whom you agree more? Why not argue that GRITS' insistence on historical fact is incorrect? That is your position, is it not?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
No. I thoroughly object to this attempt at mind reading. Why on earth would I want to carry on claiming that the Noah story is true when i have stopped believing that it is true? It is not true! Not true in the literal-historical sense of true. It did not happen as described. And just like other stories in the Bible that are clearly not historically true it still has a point! Saying all this is just an expression of where the evidence points - it is not some desperate subterfuge to salvage something from the wreckage of lost historicity! Many of us are quite happy with seeing the bible as containing many more genres than just literal prose, parable and poetry!

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quote:

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The Bible is, for good or ill, one of the foundation documents of Christianity. The question is: what do we make of it? No Christian group or denomination of any kind takes every part of the the bible as equally authoritative to every other. In that sense the idea that we are chucking out bits of it is the way things are in ALL christian cirles. No fundamentalist I know places Ecclesiates on the same level of 'truth' as the gospels. None that I know of stone stubborn children to death. None that I know of refuse to wear garments made of two kinds of cloth. To suggest that this kind of relativising of parts of the Bible is somehow so radically different from seeing Noah's flood as a legend with a point to it is hard to take!
Glenn

---

quote:

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Originally posted by ken:

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
GRITS's point is that the Bible, being the word of God, is surely a more reliable narrative than scientific texts, being the word of man.

---

Indeed it is.

But the point is not that "scientific texts" contradict yeccism & the idea of a recent global flood; but that things anyone can observe with their own eyes do. Go out and look at the rocks...

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quote:

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Originally posted by JimT:
One of the reasons what I protest so strongly that "either it happened historically or it is a lie" means that if scientific evidence comes along that refutes its historicity, the all bets are off. This puts spiritual meaning unnecessarily in jeopardy.

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Amen, JimT. Amen.
 

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Posted by JimT (# 142) on :
 
Kevin, you've responded to everyone and I don't mean to belabor a point but I think we all know that any position is "tenable" if you grant all the assumptions. Aboriginal tribes in Oz have perfectly tenable positions on creation I am sure. But in 21st century America, these positions are not tenable to a thinking, rational person with a capacity for understanding rudimentary science. So it is that the popular(?!) fundamentalist position that Noah was a 400 year old carpenter who saw the world's first rainstorm which drowned everything that breathed except one boatload of animals is "untenable." To say it is "tenable" because the believer posits that the Bible is literally true regardless of reason, experience, and science is a misuse of the word "tenable" IMO.

But you are right--plenty of people (in my family!) disagree. The all hold untenable positions.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
The point I was making is still there if we consider that our reasoning abilities based on our limited information is always limited by human error. So it doesn't matter if we make the scientific observation or we merely verify the observations of others.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
JimT, I understand your point, but if we exclude from our consideration holding the idea that the Bible should have priority over science, then IMO the point of this discussion (the past two pages of this thread) is then lost. That question is at the very root of the disagreement, so defining it to be outside the scope of discussion will not allow us to progress.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
most people who hold the view I described, and characterized by GRITS's position, DO believe that eventually, as we better understand science and the Biblical narrative, that the two will be in agreement.

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quote:

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Originally posted by JimT:
Not true. Progress is possible if both sides agree that meaning can be extracted regardless of whether the story is factual or not. I heard no argument why an interpretation such as mine misses the point due to not assuming literal historical fact.

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quote:

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
most people who hold the view I described, and characterized by GRITS's position, DO believe that eventually, as we better understand science and the Biblical narrative, that the two will be in agreement.

---

I'm afraid not, Kevin. The literalist view is that the Biblical narrative needs no further understanding or explanation. The literal historical account is right and cannot be changed (do not add or subtract a word) and science is irrelevant. That is what I heard.

Now you said that you hope some day a Biblical interpretation will be found that will not conflict with science, even though it doesn't matter for meaning. GRITS said she has her interpretation right now and science can only agree with the Bible or lead people astray. If she had hoped with you that someday a Biblical interpretation will be found that does not conflict with new scientific evidence, there would have been no argument.

No matter, really. It appears the discussion is dead. RIP.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by JimT:
Progress is possible if both sides agree that meaning can be extracted regardless of whether the story is factual or not. I heard no argument why an interpretation such as mine misses the point due to not assuming literal historical fact.

---

Neither did I. Here's where we come to dead end though.

Christianity has no reliable way of interpreting a story other than literally. This means that a lack of historicity appears to refute claims to divine revelation.

The resulting conflict can't be resolved without new information, since both sides have compelling arguments - one based on conclusive evidence, the other based on the divine Word of God.

It's a foolish juxtaposition, in my opinion, since Jesus showed us how to interpret stories like this when He explained the parable of the Sower in Matthew 13.

This is the only way that both the science can be true and the account can be the infallible Word of God. So much rests on both of these propositions that it is unlikely that one will simply defeat the other - nor would it be good if it did.
 

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Posted by Moo (# 107) on :
 
quote from Kevin Iga

quote:

---

As to what GRITS believes, I actually await her response to this. The easiest way (by observation, no less) to settle this dispute.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by JimT:
I'd like to throw in that my view of 'myth' requires the hearer to assume that it is factually true in order to derive meaning. We must hear the story of Noah as if God is a man-like being who created the universe and became increasingly enraged by what he saw as wickedness. We must see Noah as a bemused but faithful follower of this God.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Moo:
quote from Kevin Iga

quote:

---

As to what GRITS believes, I actually await her response to this. The easiest way (by observation, no less) to settle this dispute.

---

I believe that G.R.I.T.S. has withdrawn from this thread.

Moo

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Laura:
I have heard that GRITS has opted not to return to this thread. So we'll just have to do without further discussion on it from her. This is, of course, a great disappointment, as robust debate ought to be regarded as a good thing.

---

I am sorry to hear that, she certainly enlivened things! I hope that she got some insight into how non-fundamentalists or non-conservatives look at this kind of issue. Looks as if I won't get a response to my last post of 1200 words, but such are the pains of Purgatory.
Glenn
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by JimT:
Progress is possible if both sides agree that meaning can be extracted regardless of whether the story is factual or not.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
The trouble is that the Noah story is a non-historical story presented in a context that implies that it is historical. That means that extracting meaning from it is in large part salvaging wheat from chaff, and the very falseness of the account raises the legitimate question of just how much chaff must be sifted.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Moo:

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
The trouble is that the Noah story is a non-historical story presented in a context that implies that it is historical. That means that extracting meaning from it is in large part salvaging wheat from chaff, and the very falseness of the account raises the legitimate question of just how much chaff must be sifted.

---

I don't think the context implies that it is historical.

To me, the first part of Genesis up to the story of Abraham reads like myth rather than history.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Freddy:
Christianity has no reliable way of interpreting a story other than literally.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Mousethief:
Christianity has, or has had, especially in the "early days" (first millenium) many ways of interpreting the stories of the OT, than literalism.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by JimT:
Everyone gather round, I am going to tell the story of where we all came from. One day God fashioned man from clay and blew his very own breath into the nostrils of the first man. He was Adam, he had sons; some were bad; most were very good. Some were great and did mighty deeds that we could not imagine doing. One was Noah. [insert ark story]. He had sons and daughters, they had sons and daughters, right on down to you and me.

This is history?

---

quote:

---

If one fact is out of place you may as well throw it out?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

quote:

---

Originally posted by JimT:
[qb]Everyone gather round, I am going to tell the story of where we all came from. One day God fashioned man from clay and blew his very own breath into the nostrils of the first man. He was Adam, he had sons; some were bad; most were very good. Some were great and did mighty deeds that we could not imagine doing. One was Noah. [insert ark story]. He had sons and daughters, they had sons and daughters, right on down to you and me.

This is history?

---

No, it is not history, but by the time it came to be in Genesis, it was relayed as such. Even your cursory genealogy "He had sons and daughters, they had sons and daughters, right on down to you and me" means the story is presented as factual enough that its characters were real enough to be the ancestors of real people.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by afish:
As for evidence of the flood, what evidence exactly would you expect there to be after thousands of years during which the face of the earth has experienced huge disruptions? Why exactly are the mass strata of fossilised remains rejected as possible evidence?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

quote:

---

If one fact is out of place you may as well throw it out?

---

If only one fact were out of place, we wouldn't be having this discussion! We know that the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah are so far out of step with the findings of geology and paleology, that we know the stories are not factual. Indeed, as history, we do throw them out.

The question is whether or not we throw them out as input for spiritual guidance. This is a non-trivial question because we are not dealing with an ahistorical story presented for the sake of teaching (like a parable or an allegory) but an unhistorical story that was probably derived from myth but is presented not as a teaching tool, but as a factual account. If we are deriving spiritual guidance from it, we are deriving spiritual guidance from known falsehood.

How do we derive truth from a false story? That is the question, and the answer is not simple.

---

quote:

---

If we are deriving spiritual guidance from it, we are deriving spiritual guidance from known falsehood.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Louise:
To me it simply doesn't make sense to say

quote:

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If we are deriving spiritual guidance from it, we are deriving spiritual guidance from known falsehood.

---

I would say 'If we are deriving spiritual guidance from it, we are deriving spiritual guidance from a powerful symbol which was deeply important to the people who preserved it. So deeply important that they treated it as historical truth, which it turns out it wasn't'.

---

Beautifully said, Louise. Thanks for that whole post.
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Louise:

Oddly enough, it is shared by both fundamentalists (using the word in its doctrinal sense) and most atheists - both groups seem to consider that if a story is found to be historically untrue then it must be valueless.

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quote:

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The best way I can describe this mindset is that it's one of 'a story so good it MUST be true'. Pre-Enlightenment societies gave symbolic thought and story a much higher importance than Post-Enlightenment societies. They were also much more likely to take something that was powerfully symbolic and to treat it as if it was literally true: the stories of Arthur and the round table, classical literature (the Aeneid and The Iliad were treated as literal historical accounts), Celtic myth. The same people also wrote stuff which was perfectly historically accurate by modern standards (eye witness accounts of battles, diaries, letters etc).

This is familiar ground to anyone who works on pre-18th century history. It's extremely common to see myth presented as unquestionably true because of its importance as symbol.

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quote:

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Right down to the 17th century and beyond people were fond of making up genealogies in which a mythical line of forebears were grafted onto people who actually existed. Genealogies were made up for a variety of reasons.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by markporter:
and how about a mixture of the two types of flood, with some areas receiving gentle treatment, and others violent (surely on an area the size of the globe, we would not expect one condition to totally prevail....just look at the oceans today), or a mixture of the two types in time, with one coming before or after the other as the dynamics of the situation change?

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quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
How do we derive truth from a false story? That is the question, and the answer is not simple.

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quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
Hmm, that implies that the geneological "glue" connecting the myths in Genesis is probably myth itself. Interesting.

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quote:

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Originally posted by afish:
We know from the account given, only, that there were “high hills”. How high was a high hill?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by afish:

Glen said:
"1) If we take the story of Noah as literal history then we are faced with the problem that the geological evidence does not point to such an event as having happened, and the biological evidence does not fit with the described effects of the flood on wildlife.”

highlights the real problem. I have not yet seen any “evidence” that convinces me.

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quote:

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The examples you've cited are all of European history. Do you have access to examples of Ancient Near East examples of mythical genealogies?

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
How do we derive truth from a false story? That is the question, and the answer is not simple.

---

I am not at all clear that I understand you here J. J. No one believes that Pilgrim's Progress or Middlemarch or The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe are historically true stories and yet no one I know thinks of them as without truth, or even that the truths in them are hard to get at.

What am I missing in your argument?

---

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
The question, though, is not whether meaning can be extracted from something non-historical. We do that all the time when we deal with parables. Rather, the question is whether we can extract meaning from something incorrect.

If it were simply an issue of the Noah story being non-historical, our arguments would not be so heated. The trouble is that the Noah story is a non-historical story presented in a context that implies that it is historical. That means that extracting meaning from it is in large part salvaging wheat from chaff, and the very falseness of the account raises the legitimate question of just how much chaff must be sifted.

---

quote:

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The Sumerian King list begins with a line of mythical kings and ends with kings whose existence is well documented by archaeological finds. In between there are a few where your guess would be as good as mine whether they're mythical or not!

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quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

Pilgrim's Progress or Middlemarch or The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe are presented as fiction, as non-historical. "False," at best, only applies to them in the most narrow sense of the term, and in practice, it would be considered a dubious description of them. The Noah story, in contrast, is a non-historical story presented as historical. That's the piece you were missing.

---

quote:

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Even now there are places where the chalk is a kilometre thick.

The sandstone of the Weald, below the chalk, contains fossils. The chalk is fossil. A kilometre thick layer of the skeletons of microscopic sea creatures - with plenty of other fossils in it as well. It isn't homogenous - it is layered, with the different layers of different ages containing remains of different macrofossils and microfossils.

I was born and brought up on top of a heap of a trillion tons of fossil.

Below that is sandstone containing fossils, below that is coal - another fossil rock.

The organisms that form the matrix of the chalk live in shallow tropical seas. Many of them are are photosynthetic, they need light. There is no way that a layer a kilometre thick could be deposited in a few weeks, or even a few centuries.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by afish:
Laura
“Afish what on earth are you talking about?”
Too deep for you eh Laura?

---

Yes, that must be it.
 

---

Posted by Laura (# 10) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by pftaylor:

The consistant Christian view is that the Bible is inerrant. To believe that the Flood account is merely figurative is a waste of effort - I'd rather believe it was all a lie.

There is plenty of evidence that there was a world-wide Flood. for instance, the world contains lots of fossils, supposedly laid down over millions of years. So the skeleton was just sticking out of the earth, while the rock grew slowly over it, was it? In fact, fossils can really only be explained by fast deposition of rock sediment, which would have occured during a global flood.

---

Logically, whether the Bible is inerrant is a question entirely independent of whether you'd rather it be or not, as I'm sure you must realize. To take the inerrantist position requires the rejection of biology, geology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, just to name a few. I'm staggered that an inerrantist would see a doctor, as all of what they have been taught must be incorrect, from an inerrantist view. There's just no way around this. Then you create these logical fallacies - it's either all exactly "true" (by a very narrow definition of that term) or it's all false. I just can't grasp why so many people seem to paint themselves into this logical corner.

So it matters not a bit whether there's evidence for a global flood because there's ample evidence that several other biblical events did not transpire as described. To believe the Noah story is one thing; to believe that AND that the two Biblical creation accounts are literally correct requires years of successful brainwashing.
 

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Posted by Ben26 (# 4201) on :
 
Afish.

What Laura said. What Dr. Cresswell said. What Ken said.

Of course I realise that is possible to be intelligent and a literalist (and regardless of how intelligent I may or may not be, I was a creationist myself for years ), I also realise that it is possible to be intelligent and badly informed. I was summarising my views when I posted last, not giving my views in full.

Now, if there was a single shred of evidence that Noah actually existed I would be happier to talk of a debate and good arguements on both sides. The reasons I don't think the literalist arguements are much use are

A) A literal understanding is not really required either from church history or the text itself. The original text is poetry and borrows heavily from other poems/epics/fables from the Ancient Near East. The majority of these probably predate the Genesis account and there is, in any case, clear evidence that the Genesis account was compiled from a number of sources (the Elohim, The Priestly, and a couple of others whose names I have forgotten). These seperate tales display differing Theologies.

2) The geneologies (sp?) in the O.T are mainly used to convey theological rather then historical accounts. If Adam (for example) never existed in a historical sense then Jesus does not need to be the last Adam in a literal sense. The title is symbolic.

If a lot of the Genesis stories are myths, then subsequent Biblical stories are also true in a theological and symbolic sense entirely regardless of any historical truth they may or may not have. The problem with regarding Genesis is historically true is that there is little or no evidence to suggest that it is.

3) Now, clearly a lot of the evidence would have vanished by now whatever the truth of the matter, but the problem is (as Dr. Cresswell points out) that the evidence that does survive is largely if not entirely against much of Genesis being historically accurate .

4) Qouting Jesus from the Gospels in an attempt to prove that Genesis is literal and historical isn't really a very impressive move. While it is possible that Jesus did think that, there is ample evidence that the canonical Gospel Evangelists made errors, had different theologies, contradicted each other, qouted from each other (with the possible exception of John)and sometimes put words in Jesus's mouth in a similair fashion to Plato's accounts of Socrates.

5) As has already been pointed out, the ancients had a different idea of history to us. Literal truth, on my understanding, was less important to them then symbolical truth.

For example, many ancient biographies attempt to pin the person in question into a given "stereotype" rather then giving precise historical details. This is consistent with the ancient view, for example, that what matters about a person is whether they perfrom their given role and this idea can be read about in books on Plato (for example). From my understanding, there was a lot less of a dividing line between history and apologetics in ancient times.

Indeed, the arguement that the canonical Gospel writers were fairly uninterested in the Historical Jesus and merely wrote about the Christ of Faith is perfectly respectable (although I don't fully subscribe to it). The point is, however, that one can't just dismiss the view out of hand.

6) Given that a literalist interpretation lacks historical evidence and isn't required by an informed view of scripture, I think it reasonable to say we have scientific certainty that a lot (note: I do NOT say "all) of Genesis is ahistorical. Scientific certainty may not be 100% certainty but it doesn't need to be.

7) Yes, there are creationist arguements. The majority of these are PRATTS and lies. Given that I am not a scientist, it may be better to let Karl, Dr. Cresswell and others pick up on these points as, indeed, they have already done.

Ben26 (who seems to have written a rather lengthy reply)
 

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Posted by Janine (# 3337) on :
 
Why bother to think anything at all in the scriptures is literal?
 

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Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Janine:
Why bother to think anything at all in the scriptures is literal?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by pftaylor:
So the skeleton was just sticking out of the earth, while the rock grew slowly over it, was it?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

quote:

---

Originally posted by pftaylor:
So the skeleton was just sticking out of the earth, while the rock grew slowly over it, was it?

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If you bothered to read a geology text book you would notice that this ludicrous idea has never been advanced as a means of fossilisation!

If you are going to compare your theory with conventional science at least get the conventional science right!
Glenn

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quote:

---

To believe that the Flood account is merely figurative is a waste of effort - I'd rather believe it was all a lie.

---

quote:

---

There is plenty of evidence that there was a world-wide Flood. for instance, the world contains lots of fossils, supposedly laid down over millions of years.

---

You haven't read the thread have you? Alan Cresswell has already pointed out why the fossil record is inconsistent with a global flood. But for the record, could you perhaps explain why the flood sorted out ammonite fossils in order of complexity of shell sutures? I'm intrigued. Perhaps you could explain why the flood always put giant sauropods in lower layers than ceratopsian dinosaurs, why primitive birds with reptilian features always appear in lower layers than birds resembling those that live today, and perhaps why the fossilised stomach contents of carnivorous dinosaurs never contain any modern mammalian or bird remains?

Oh, and why no flowering plant fossils are found lower than the Cretaceous would be nice. Your explanation as to how a flood model is more consistent with just these observations alone would be enlightening - I've yet to see one despite desperate efforts by creationists.

You say "allegedly over millions of years" - do you actually know why palaeontologists assign these particular ages to these fossils? Would you like to know?
 

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Posted by Shrinking Violet (# 4587) on :
 
I know that archaeologically there is some evidence to support massive flooding in some areas of the world. Question is do all floods from the various regions all point to the same date? One of the problems is that it is hard to compare carbon 14 dating with approximate dates from the bible. Could they be the same flood?
 

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Posted by JimT (# 142) on :
 
Afish, when you get more information I am confident you will see that there could be no global flood.

JJ, read the ninth post on this thread. I presented a single altar call as a historical fact that I personally witnessed. Can't you tell it is not an actual specific historical event but a dramatization? Still, is it not clear what went on? Do you not extract meaning from it? That is how story-telling went in ancient times. Historians and newspaper reporters did not come along until millenia later. You seem to be saying that it reads to you like a factual newspaper account, but we know it to be an event that could not have happened exactly as described. You conclude that it may therefore be the product of fantasy or deliberate deception and we have no way of knowing whether it is of value.

But all we have to do is read the story. I assume you have. What does it mean to you, regardless of whether it really happened as a global flood or not?
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Shrinking Violet:
I know that archaeologically there is some evidence to support massive flooding in some areas of the world. Question is do all floods from the various regions all point to the same date?

---

quote:

---

One of the problems is that it is hard to compare carbon 14 dating with approximate dates from the bible. Could they be the same flood?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Janine:
Why bother to think anything at all in the scriptures is literal?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by pftaylor:
So the skeleton was just sticking out of the earth, while the rock grew slowly over it, was it? In fact, fossils can really only be explained by fast deposition of rock sediment, which would have occured during a global flood.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

Pilgrim's Progress or Middlemarch or The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe are presented as fiction, as non-historical. "False," at best, only applies to them in the most narrow sense of the term, and in practice, it would be considered a dubious description of them. The Noah story, in contrast, is a non-historical story presented as historical. That's the piece you were missing.

---

Nope, I still don't get it. There are large numbers of novels which either do not declare themselves to be fiction or which pretend to be biography (Robinson Crusoe is an example that springs to mind) and I still don't have any major trouble finding the meaning of them.

---

Please. You are playing games.

Obviously, very few fiction works contain text to the effect of "This story is fiction." However, we know that those books you mentioned are fiction, nonetheless, because of context. They are advertised as fiction, placed in the fiction aisles of bookstores and libraries. They are consistently referred to as fiction. It is incredibly facile to imply that there is no difference between how one regards works that have consistently been represented as fiction and stories like Noah that had been regarded as true until about the last century and a half.
 

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Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :
 
Let's play the game a bit further. Suppose in a thousand years time, when maybe people experience make believe stories through interactive holography and only use text to record important factual events (an example just to highlight potential differences in culture), an archaeologist was to dig into the ruins of your home and finds a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Would people in a thousand years time recognise it as fiction or biography?
 

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Posted by J. J. Ramsey (# 1174) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by JimT:

JJ, read the ninth post on this thread. I presented a single altar call as a historical fact that I personally witnessed. Can't you tell it is not an actual specific historical event but a dramatization? Still, is it not clear what went on? Do you not extract meaning from it? That is how story-telling went in ancient times.

---

quote:

---

You seem to be saying that it reads to you like a factual newspaper account, but we know it to be an event that could not have happened exactly as described.

---

quote:

---

You conclude that it may therefore be the product of fantasy or deliberate deception and we have no way of knowing whether it is of value.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
Let's play the game a bit further. Suppose in a thousand years time, when maybe people experience make believe stories through interactive holography and only use text to record important factual events (an example just to highlight potential differences in culture), an archaeologist was to dig into the ruins of your home and finds a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Would people in a thousand years time recognise it as fiction or biography?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
The Noah account is not fiction in the modern sense, but myth, a story absorbed as fact by those to whom it was deliberately transmitted, and probably treated as literal truth within a generation. The Noah account was not a lost account recently rediscovered by moderns, but a story that has been with us continuously and only relatively recently found to be unhistorical.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
The Noah account is not fiction in the modern sense, but myth, a story absorbed as fact by those to whom it was deliberately transmitted, and probably treated as literal truth within a generation. The Noah account was not a lost account recently rediscovered by moderns, but a story that has been with us continuously and only relatively recently found to be unhistorical.

---

How do you know that it was treated as literal truth in ancient times?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

Louise had pointed out that pre-18th century, people tended to mix myth and history and treat both as literally true.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
… Please. You are playing games.

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quote:

---

… the question is whether we can extract meaning from something incorrect.

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quote:

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that there is no difference between how one regards works that have consistently been represented as fiction and stories like Noah that had been regarded as true until about the last century and a half.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by afish:
Then there is the water coming up from the fountains of the deep. This, for the scientific mind, is maybe harder to understand. That there are fountains in the depths of the oceans is admitted, how they actually work the humble, I believe, will admit they don’t know. But, another simple thought, not knowing exactly how something happened should not lead us to say, it didn’t happen.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:
How do we derive truth from a false story? That is the question, and the answer is not simple.

---

quote:

---

I would be asking questions like; what was the exact nature/quantity of the waters above, what was the composition/depth/density of the earth's atmosphere before the flood. Again, we don’t know.
><>

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quote:

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Originally posted by afish:
MouseThief
Because as JJRamsey as ably pointed out parables are not false stories in the same sense that it is claimed Genisis is.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Scot:
Is this a good time to point out that Robinson Crusoe is semi-biographical? That is to say, it is an exaggerated and embellished retelling of a true story.

---

There is no time like the present, Scot. Alexander Selkirk - of course - why didn't that cross my mind at the time. Still, it was written by Defoe presenting himself as Crusoe, so my earlier point still stands (now redundant after I understand J. J.'s point rather better than I did).

Glenn
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by afish:
Heck I'll post this bit anyway.

---

quote:

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I have faith that if I do an imperfect piece of work, someone will read it and will be provoked to demonstrate this imperfection in a really interesting way. This will almost always lead to a greater understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Readings About The Social Animal 7th edition page 6 W H Freeman &Co 1995

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Louise:

Knowing that some kings on a king list were mythical and that some weren't doesn't invalidate a king list, it just means you have to treat it with more caution and look for collaborative evidence, if you are interested in what is historically true.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:

For there to be a threat of meaninglessness hanging over the Noah story it is not sufficient for it merely to be ‘incorrect’ or false or non-historical. It also requires a context in which its historicity appears to be essential. It is the problem facing someone who has had a particular idea of the nature of scripture such that when he realises that the story is not historical he cannot conceive how it can function as scripture at all. His world totters. The story is still intelligible but its significance for him is now baffling, since he has no way of understanding how God can use a bible that is so unclear about the way a passage is to be taken, which genre it lies in. Typically, conservative approaches to the Bible often see the Bible as God’s revelation rather than as a human witness and testimony to God’s revelation. The latter approach has much less difficulty in continuing to affirm and use a bible that is a very human, ambiguous and fallible document but which is nonetheless used by God in nourishing people.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by ken:
Funny thing is, I think I'm that last person left standing here who thinks the account of Noah is historical...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Kevin Iga:
I've got another question, then, for the 3 camps on this thread (1. The Noah story is historical; 2. it's allegorical and not historical; and 3. it's misinformed blather). Why did God want it in the Bible?

---

quote:

---

Funny thing is, I think I'm that last person left standing here who thinks the account of Noah is historical...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by J. J. Ramsey:

You are about 80% correct.

To use your words to express my position:

"For there to be a threat of meaninglessness hanging over the Noah story it is not sufficient for it merely to be ‘incorrect’ or false or non-historical. It also requires a context in which its historicity appears to be essential. . . . [W]hen he realises that the story is not historical he cannot conceive how it can function . . . at all." [The ellipses are intentional.]

Ok, the Noah account is historically wrong. I can live with that. I do not expect the Bible's noise-to-signal ratio to be zero. But I have a hard time seeing the Noah account as anything but noise. There's doesn't seem to be an obvious way to tell whether it is mythic divine revelation that was misapprehended as historical, or just a made-up human story that was found out to be, well, made up. If it's the latter, then treating it as an allegory or otherwise figurative is pointless: massaging noise does not make it data.

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Thanks for the response, J. J. but I am puzzled by the second ellipsis. You seem to be saying that if "the story is not historical it cannot function at all", and again I am puzzled by such a sweeping statement. The Noah story is surely a great story, a piece of dramatic literatature with weighty themes to it. It still works, or fuctions in that sense. That still remains.

But your use of the noise/ information and data metaphors and your earlier wheat/ chaff metaphor suggests that you need to see the story as reliably conveying information about God, or man or whatever. I think that you have a point here, but I am still struggling to understand the threat of menainglessness involved.

You say that: There's doesn't seem to be an obvious way to tell whether it is mythic divine revelation that was misapprehended as historical, or just a made-up human story that was found out to be, well, made up. One resposnse to this is that it is in the bible and so part of the Christian tradition; it tells us something about how the writers of that time viewed the world; we also know that the story was incorporated and used by later generations too; and in that total context what can we draw from it today? It has themes like the idea that mankind is, or can be, or was terribly evil; that God is disgusted with evil; that God desires to recreate a world damaged by evil; it has themes in common iwth other parts of the bible like the saving of a remnant, the choosing of a person or group, the righteousness of one person saving others and so on. These are rich themes surely?

Out of time I am afraid!
Glenn
 

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Posted by golden key (# 1468) on :
 
I don't have a problem with a literal flood, whether global or local. I don't have a problem with the ark, the animals, or the height of the land at the time. (Not that I'm not *interested*.)

My real problem is the idea that God purposely did the flood, and what that says about God's nature.
 

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Posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 

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Originally posted by Janine:
I still think there is something to the idea that people truly did live longer way back when due to a less-ruined Earth from Garden to Flood... less UV exposure , for one thing. And it wouldn't take a super-canopy of an actual shell of liquid water up there to shield us.

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Originally posted by JimT:
Sorry to double post, but I think I see the question. I mean, "God is no longer a god who kills in anger." According to the story, he did once, but regretted it.

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Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
Thanks for the response, J. J. but I am puzzled by the second ellipsis. [changing "function as scripture at all" to "function . . . at all"] You seem to be saying that if "the story is not historical it cannot function at all", and again I am puzzled by such a sweeping statement.

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But your use of the noise/ information and data metaphors and your earlier wheat/ chaff metaphor suggests that you need to see the story as reliably conveying information about God, or man or whatever. I think that you have a point here, but I am still struggling to understand the threat of menainglessness involved.

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quote:

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You say that: There's doesn't seem to be an obvious way to tell whether it is mythic divine revelation that was misapprehended as historical, or just a made-up human story that was found out to be, well, made up. One resposnse to this is that it is in the bible and so part of the Christian tradition; it tells us something about how the writers of that time viewed the world; we also know that the story was incorporated and used by later generations too; and in that total context what can we draw from it today? It has themes like the idea that mankind is, or can be, or was terribly evil; that God is disgusted with evil; that God desires to recreate a world damaged by evil; it has themes in common iwth other parts of the bible like the saving of a remnant, the choosing of a person or group, the righteousness of one person saving others and so on.

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Originally posted by afish:
What I know is that theories are not the same as facts.

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Ah, yet another person confused about what "theory" means. How surprising.

The relevant definition of theory, from M-w.com, is: a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena

Science doesn't deal with "facts" except as data to be fed into theories (or to break theories if they can't handle the data).

Reader Alexis
 

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Posted by Glenn Oldham (# 47) on :
 

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Originally posted by afish:
Glen, why should I overturn The Bible for the sake of believing that “the current theory” is inerrant?

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The first problem with the argument is that it overlooks the status of some of the claims involved in ruling out parts of previous theories. For example: that the world is not flat; that phlogiston does not exist,; that the moon is not carried by a crystalline sphere; and so on. All these overturned assertions from old theories have been so comprehensively falsified that there is no chance of them returning. We are sure beyond reasonable doubt that the world is not as they described it, so we have some reliable information about the world after all. We are not going to awaken next week to the serious headline: 'EARTH FLAT AFTER ALL SHOCK!'

Secondly, since theories are not all-or-nothing affairs the argument is based on a misconception about what it is for one theory to ‘overthrow’ or ‘supersede’ another. The idea that one theory supersedes another does not at all mean that it wipes out every claim of the previous theory. What rather happens is that much of the previous worldview is retained, some of it scrapped, some of it refined or modified, and some genuinely new concepts are introduced.

The flat earth theory was superseded by Aristotle and Ptolemy’s theory which was then superseded by Newton’s, which was then superseded by Einstein’s. To hear it put like that tempts one to say that we can never believe anything. But the temptation is misleading. Among the genuinely new insights brought in by the Greeks including Aristotle and Ptolemy was that the world is not flat but round. That has stood the test of time for over a thousand years. Neither Newton nor Einstein have ditched it, (though ‘round’ has been refined from ‘spherical’, to ‘oblate spheroid.’) And there are, of course large numbers of other details of theory which have fared the same as this example (that there are chromosomes, that the planets have orbits, and so on). As human science progresses, weeding out mistakes and consolidating and refining genuine insights, we have every reason to suppose that, overall, our current theories approximate to the truth better than previous ones. This does not, of course, mean that previous theories did not approach the truth at all (Newton’s equations guided the Voyager missions with spectacular success).

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Glen, why should I overturn The Bible for the sake of believing that “the current theory” is inerrant?

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quote:

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Originally posted by afish:
Glen, why should I overturn The Bible

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quote:

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Originally posted by afish:
What I know is that theories are not the same as facts.

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Originally posted by afish:
Why believe The Bible is inerrant? Because it is so.

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The source of these 'fountains' is thus sea water and does not therefore give us an additional source of water for the flood.

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