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Source: (consider it) Thread: Purgatory: Noah
Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:

...in the context of what we are discussing, that is, the age of the earth/ carbon dating/ the theory of evolution, the reality is that as material evidence we have *only* one marked bullet and *nothing* else. There is no gun not even a scale model and there is no unused bullet to put in the gun to verify that the markings tally. There are descriptions/drawings of a gun, that is all.
To be clear, the used bullet = the here and now material world, the gun = the means by which the bullet has come to be where and how it is. The gun and the firing of it using the original bullet *cannot* be replicated. This is true for both a Darwinian gun and for a creation gun. It also applies to dating matter. The expert looks at the bullet (a chunk of rock) and says because of these markings, based on this ballistic theory, I believe this bullet has travelled 50,000,000 years. Fair enough, but not only do we not have the original gun, or and unused bullet but neither do we have a firing-range long enough to verify this belief.

The problem with this view is that the used bullet that we have is changing all the time! It is full of processes like erosion, weathering, vulcanism, earthquakes, deposition, river delta formation, glaciations, radioactive decay, continental drift and so on. It is also amazingly full of detail that we can study, like the chemical composition of rocks, how some are made for shells of marine organisms, the distribution of fossils, and so on.

Lo and behold, if we look at those processes and work backwards from where we are now we find that those processes can account for large amounts the geological and biological features that the world has. This is not the case with the young earth global flood idea which has been utterly unable to account for how such a flood could have produced the geological record in the ordered way it is today.

Also, independent lines of evidence point to the same answers. For example, (1) astronomers worked out from physical principles that the tidal friction caused by the moon should be gradually slowing down the earth’s daily rotation. They worked out how much the slowing effect has been and what the earths rotation would have been say 380 million years ago. (3) Radioactive dating of Devonian rock indicates an age of the rocks of 380 million years ago. (2)Biologists know that corals lay down a tiny layer of skeleton each day and the layering also shows a yearly pattern. Palaeontologists looked at fossil corals from the Devonian period and found that there were 400 daily layers per annual pattern period suggesting that the earth was rotating at the same faster rate that the astronomers had predicted. Amazing!

So here we have (1) a prediction based on the physics of tides confirmed by (2) observations interpreted by theories of radioactive dating and biology. Note that the theories in (1) and (2) are independent. There is no circularity involved here.

How do we explain this result on the young earth global flood model, where the earth was not around 380 million years ago? Who knows! Maybe the data was put there by God just to mess with our heads!

So the used bullet is remarkably informative because it is a dynamic and changing thing.

Glenn

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afish
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ken
You are a mine of information and its all interesting stuff. Though if it were a bit more condensed and focused less “processing” time would be needed which would help someone like me.
1. Concerning the pressure problem, it would be interesting to see in mathematical detail what a model(s) of maximum, above earth, water storage would give for total possible one off rainfall. But of course whatever the amount of water coming down there is also the water coming up, so.
2. I take your points about inbuilt safeguards within “science” against fraud and error. However “science” no more than any other sphere of human activity can ever be guaranteed to be free of either. Is not the pressure to conform and not question too searchingly the evolution construct maybe even greater than the pressure to fault previous research and current theories?
3. My position is not that *all* present day geology is, as it is, because of The Flood. Indeed I was surprised to see that Talk.origins presents that as the “creationist” position. Fossilisation and sedimentation will have been occurring since creation. We have no idea whether or what upheavals there where before The Flood or what changes (and when) happened after. The question that interests me is what “mark” did The Flood leave behind and how much of that “mark” can be seen and identified, 4000 years later?
4. While we are talking about Talk.origins, the “Geological Record” section that I browsed through asked a lot of questions and that’s all. The assumption being “you (believers in The Creation/The Flood) can’t answer these questions therefore what you believe can’t be true”.
Firstly many of the questions are easy enough to answer if one treats this premise,
quote:
“Most people who believe in a global flood also believe that the flood was responsible for creating all fossil-bearing strata.”
with the scepticism it deserves. I wonder how many of these “most people” they have actually spoken to?
Secondly, often their “hard questions” depend on assumptions that could well be over-assumed. This is particularly obvious when talking about rates of sediment deposition and varves. The conditions and circumstances in which layers of sediment may have been deposited and the time it took is not as “certain” as they present it.
Lastly, there is an assumption that the tens of millions of years of evolution theory does give *satisfactory* answers to the unanswered (and probably unanswerable) questions. It does not and itself raises up numerous “hard questions”.

5.
quote:
“So-called "Creation Science" dishonours God by pretending to use science and in fact by importing miracle into science whenever science doesn't do what they want it to. It breaks the 9th commandment.”
Ken, I’m not defending “creation science” as I know very little about it but I’m fairly sure that the above statement is rubbish. To bear false witness in the context of The Commandments, I believe, means to deliberately and knowingly lie. Is that what you are saying these people are doing?
The plea by a Christian that, “we as scientists don’t “deal” with miracles and that supernatural causes are inadmissible in any explanation of natural world happenings” seem to me to be a declaration of faith in a closed material universe and a disengaged God. In talking about “interface” I attempted to say why such a faith was illogical for a Christian.
Your,
quote:
“(I'm afraid I wasn't able to extract meaning from what you wrote about "The Interface". )”
reminded me of that old Patagonian proverb; “Better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all.”
><>

--------------------
"Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much"
Bob Dylan

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afish
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Glen
My bullet metaphor as with all such illustrations has its limitations but the point it makes, that as material evidence all we have is a used bullet and that there is no way to verify which gun fired it, stands. The fact that the marks on the bullet are changing even as we examine them is a complication rather than a support for any particular gun theory. In extrapolation data backwards into the distant past there are always unverifiable assumptions involved.
With the coral/ tidal thing there is an assumption that the growth patterns and environment of corals that we observe now have always been the same. It would be interesting to know what environmental spin-offs a 400 day year and a significantly faster turning earth would (in theory) produce.
Is the coincidence of two independent unrelated extrapolations arriving at the same number remarkable, Well yes but for me nowhere near as remarkable as the coincidence that the sun, moon, and earth are exactly the right size and distances from each other to appear as perfect fits to one another. But there you go different things impress different people.
><>

--------------------
"Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much"
Bob Dylan

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Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:

3.My position is not that *all* present day geology is, as it is, because of The Flood.

So you are not a 'young earther' then, afish. Good for you.

If you are, just how much fossilisation and rock formation do you reckon can be achieved in the thousand or so years before the flood? Just how little are you going to be able to leave for the flood to do?
Glenn

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Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
Glen
My bullet metaphor as with all such illustrations has its limitations but the point it makes, that as material evidence all we have is a used bullet and that there is no way to verify which gun fired it, stands. The fact that the marks on the bullet are changing even as we examine them is a complication rather than a support for any particular gun theory. In extrapolation data backwards into the distant past there are always unverifiable assumptions involved.
With the coral/ tidal thing there is an assumption that the growth patterns and environment of corals that we observe now have always been the same. It would be interesting to know what environmental spin-offs a 400 day year and a significantly faster turning earth would (in theory) produce.
Is the coincidence of two independent unrelated extrapolations arriving at the same number remarkable, Well yes but for me nowhere near as remarkable as the coincidence that the sun, moon, and earth are exactly the right size and distances from each other to appear as perfect fits to one another. But there you go different things impress different people.
><>

[brick wall] But this kind of thing is only one of a large number of independent lines of evidence. I guess I had better come back with more.

--------------------
This entire doctrine is worthless except as a subject of dispute. (G. C. Lichtenberg 1742-1799 Aphorism 60 in notebook J of The Waste Books)

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Karl: Liberal Backslider
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# 76

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Just a brief interjection at this point - yes, some 'creation scientists' do lie, demonstrably.

They've been caught at it on a number of equations. Their wriggles out of it are unconvincing.

--------------------
Might as well ask the bloody cat.

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Alan Cresswell

Mad Scientist 先生
# 31

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Further aside, we had a good go at the "are Creationists deliberately deceptive?" question on the Church attitudes to Creationism thread (especially from page 2).

--------------------
Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:

1. Concerning the pressure problem, it would be interesting to see in mathematical detail what a model(s) of maximum, above earth, water storage would give for total possible one off rainfall. But of course whatever the amount of water coming down there is also the water coming up, so.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by this. It looks like unintelligible waffle to me.

quote:

2. I take your points about inbuilt safeguards within “science” against fraud and error. However “science” no more than any other sphere of human activity can ever be guaranteed to be free of either. Is not the pressure to conform and not question too searchingly the evolution construct maybe even greater than the pressure to fault previous research and current theories?

Other way round if anything. Of course there are errors, and frauds, in the body of scientific scholarship. But they are easier to spot than in other kinds of endeavour.

The whole point about scientific scholarship is that it is published and checkable. If you want to find out why these people say what they say you can look up their papers and books, and, if in end, go and look at the places they looked at.

quote:

3. My position is not that *all* present day geology is, as it is, because of The Flood. Indeed I was surprised to see that Talk.origins presents that as the “creationist” position.

Rather as the "young earth" creationist position. Not the only one, or even the most common one.

Just the most obviously wrong wone, both doctrinally (it is not in accordance with a Christian understanding of the nature of God) and scientifically (it doesn't agree with the evidence we see arounds us)

The argument is not really about "creationists" in general - any Christian must in some sense be a creationist. It is about the people who brand themselves "creation scientists" and have more or less stolen the name "creationist" from other Christians. They claim to be able to show that the earth is young by scientific investigation. But they haven't been able to do it.

quote:

The question that interests me is what “mark” did The Flood leave behind and how much of that “mark” can be seen and identified, 4000 years later?

To which the plain answer is that there are obvious geological record of all sorts of floods at all sorts of times. Floods are common. Really, really, massive floods aren't that rare on a geological timescale (though they are on a historical scale)

No-one has managed to identify one single great Flood in the geological record.

Some people thought they had back in the very early 19th century. But it became obvious very quickly that they were in fact seeing evidence of ice. (Some of the effects are similar of course because melting ice can produce floods) And over a rather longer period it became obvious that there was not one but many incursions of ice into temperate latitudes.

quote:

Lastly, there is an assumption that the tens of millions of years of evolution theory does give *satisfactory* answers to the unanswered (and probably unanswerable) questions. It does not and itself raises up numerous “hard questions”.

So what? Young-earth creationism is so obviously wrong that one doesn't need a better theory to argue against it.

Lets say we find a large isolated, rounded, granite rock, weighing a few tons, sitting all on its own on top of a hill made of some sedimentary rocks, many miles from the nearest granite.

If we saw that in Britain today our first assumptions would be either that people put it there, or that it was left behind by the ice. We could make various investigations to see which was more likely. That would be science.

If someone came along and said "it was put there by the fairies" that would not be science. It might be true but until and unless we could get hold of some evidence of what fairies were and how they behaved and what powers they had; all science could do is say "fine - you say that - we'll stick to our explanation".

But what if someone said "David Beckham booted it up there last Thursday - that man has such a strong right foot"; in that case you wouldn't need to have a better explanation to disbelieve it.

You might disbelieve it for at least three reasons:

- neither Beckham not anyone else has a strong enough foot to kick large lumps of granite uphill

- the rock has obviously been in place for more than a few days because it shows signs of weathering and there is no crushed vegetation under it

- and Beckham was in the USA on Thursday anyway, because he wasn't selected to play for England against Slovakia.

That is a good analogy of the situation between young-earth creationism and secular science. (In fact it is also a good analogy of the situation between young-earth creationism and old-earth creationism). The scientists would not need an alternative explanation against that one.

It's also why a lot of people get very angry at so-called "creation scientists". They are young-earthers who start off by claiming that they have scientific evidence that Beckham did it. But when the holes in that are pointed out to them they fill in the gaps by resorting to the fairies anyway.

quote:


5.
quote:
“So-called "Creation Science" dishonours God by pretending to use science and in fact by importing miracle into science whenever science doesn't do what they want it to. It breaks the 9th commandment.”
Ken, I’m not defending “creation science” as I know very little about it but I’m fairly sure that the above statement is rubbish. To bear false witness in the context of The Commandments, I believe, means to deliberately and knowingly lie. Is that what you are saying these people are doing?

A few of them have done that, yes.

And the whole project is fundamentally dishonest as it claims to have found observational evidence for things that they believe on other grounds.

They think the Bible says that the world is young.
So they claim they have proof that it is young from science. But they don't.

If my mate Andy told me that he was in London yesterday, and I was asked whether he was in London, I would say "yes". But if someone asked me "did you see it with your own eyes, or are you saying that because he said so and you trust him" and I claimed to have seen it with my own eyes, I would be lying.

quote:

The plea by a Christian that, “we as scientists don’t “deal” with miracles and that supernatural causes are inadmissible in any explanation of natural world happenings” seem to me to be a declaration of faith in a closed material universe and a disengaged God.

ABSOLUTELY THE OPPOSITE!

It is a declaration of faith in an honest and truthful God.

Get one thing straight

- the problem is not with creationism. There is no conflict between what we observe about the world and the idea that God created it a long time ago.

- the scientific problem is not with the idea that God created the world recently and either God made it look old at the time of creation (the "Omphalos" idea) or else made it come to seem old at some more recent time by miraculous action, maybe associated with the Flood. Science can have nothing to say about such claims. Many Christians have a theological problem with such ideas, but there can be no scientific problem with them.

- the scientific problem is with that minority of creationists who believe that the world is young, and claim that its apparent age can be explained scientifically by non-miraculous processes operating over at most a few tend of thousands of years. These are the people who call themselves "creation scientists" and "Flood geologists".

The reason their teachings are a problem is, frankly, that there isn't the tiniest piece of observational evidence for them. They aren't really scientific claims at all.

They are theological claims, and they point to that miraculous "omphalos" universe. But they know that that view of the universe is deeply unpopular (not to say scary) so they heistate to talk about it, and get involved in the pseud-science of so-called "Flood Geology" instead.

quote:

In talking about “interface” I attempted to say why such a faith was illogical for a Christian.

You failed.

--------------------
Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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Alan Cresswell

Mad Scientist 先生
# 31

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quote:
Originally posted by ken:
quote:
Originally posted by afish:

1. Concerning the pressure problem, it would be interesting to see in mathematical detail what a model(s) of maximum, above earth, water storage would give for total possible one off rainfall. But of course whatever the amount of water coming down there is also the water coming up, so.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by this. It looks like unintelligible waffle to me.
I think I understand where this is coming from. There seems to be two questions here: 1) how much water vapour/clouds can the atmosphere sustain without it raining? 2) how much greater can the atmospheric pressure be than present and the earth still be habitable? afish - if I've misunderstood your question just speak up.

1) I'm not sufficiently familiar with atmospheric science to answer this. The answer would depend on temperature and pressure, as well as the availability of aerosols to act as nucleating centres for rain drop formation.

2) The human body can survive a fairly wide range of pressure - we can dive to quite deep depths and climb to the top of Everest (albeit in both cases with canned gases to enable us to breath enough oxygen). Sudden reductions in pressure are a problem though. To be conservative, lets assume an atmospheric pressure five times present would be survivable in the long term (with associated changes in the composition so we could breath) and the Flood rainfall was sufficiently slow that decompression wasn't an issue. That would release enough water to raise the Flood by about 150ft. If you're postulating a global flood covering all the major mountains then, even allowing for substantial mountain building post-Flood, this is still an insignificant quantity of water - in fact, so small that it barely seems worth considering and you might as well say that the rainfall was nothing special and abandon the whole water-canopy thing.

--------------------
Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

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1,000m of water would of course be more or less 100 atmospheres (sums are easy in metric) which would be easily survivable if you were breathing 0.2% oxygen, 0.00004% CO2, no more than 1 or 2% nitrogen, a little bit of argon and 98-99.8%(ish) helium.

You'd need the helium.

--------------------
Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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JimT

Ship'th Mythtic
# 142

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quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
quote:
Originally posted by afish:

1. Concerning the pressure problem, it would be interesting to see in mathematical detail what a model(s) of maximum, above earth, water storage would give for total possible one off rainfall.

1) I'm not sufficiently familiar with atmospheric science to answer this. The answer would depend on temperature and pressure, as well as the availability of aerosols to act as nucleating centres for rain drop formation.
Specifically with respect to temperature and pressure, you have differential cooling and winds that drive things toward equillibrium and fight water storage. Differential heating of the surface due to day/night cycles and the different specific heats of water and land guarantees that air is constantly in motion, including rising and condensing, falling and expanding. Supply of condensate nuclei is not a problem; rain can condense on even salt crystals from the ocean. It is always raining somewhere. You just can't get the atmosphere to hold still and start storing water on a global scale.

I found an excellent quote:

quote:
There is certainly no geological evidence for a worldwide flood. What's more, you only need to apply a modicum of educated intelligence to the idea of fitting every species now known to exist in the world into one 133-metre boat to come to the conclusion that we are not dealing with literal history.

Add to this the fact that Genesis is clearly weaving together two slightly different flood stories (each uses a different name for God, and they disagree, for example, about the number of animals on the ark) and it becomes clear that this, like the rest of the book of Genesis, is a retelling of well-loved myth, a campfire story shaped to embody theological teaching. The Bible makes no other claims for it.

-Ship of Fools, Ark site

[Not worthy!] Ship of Fools.
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Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
With the coral/ tidal thing there is an assumption that the growth patterns and environment of corals that we observe now have always been the same.

So what you are suggesting is that the day lengths might have been just the same as now except that the corals might then have grown seven point seven layers a week instead of seven layers a week? But why would they do that when the growth is related to the activity of the algae in them which photosynthesises during the day and stops at night. How do you alter that cycle of activity from 7 times a week to 7.7 times a week?

Or maybe you think that the longer term pattern of 400 such cycles within the long term cycle is due not to any yearly seasonal variation but to some other mysterious cycle that happened to be 400 days long. I wonder what that could have been.
Glenn

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Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:

My position is not that *all* present day geology is, as it is, because of The Flood. Indeed I was surprised to see that Talk.origins presents that as the “creationist” position. Fossilisation and sedimentation will have been occurring since creation. We have no idea whether or what upheavals there where before The Flood or what changes (and when) happened after. The question that interests me is what “mark” did The Flood leave behind and how much of that “mark” can be seen and identified, 4000 years later?

It seems to have completely passed by the Chinese living in China at that time.

afish, it would help us to know what kind of flood you are talking about. Global or local? Preceded by millions of years or not? If global, then how deep at the time, and how much mountain building was needed afterwards? These are crucial questions.

Glenn

--------------------
This entire doctrine is worthless except as a subject of dispute. (G. C. Lichtenberg 1742-1799 Aphorism 60 in notebook J of The Waste Books)

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Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
Glen
My bullet metaphor as with all such illustrations has its limitations but the point it makes, that as material evidence all we have is a used bullet and that there is no way to verify which gun fired it, stands. The fact that the marks on the bullet are changing even as we examine them is a complication rather than a support for any particular gun theory. In extrapolation data backwards into the distant past there are always unverifiable assumptions involved.

OK afish, here is another one.
Plate tectonics is now a tremendously well established theory based again on multiple and independent strands of evidence. Now, South America and Africa have certain rock strata in common and amongst these strata are fossil bearing ones with fossils unique to them indicating that they were once joined. Now one can use this to estimate how long ago the two continents were joined and thus how fast they have been moving apart. The age of the strata in the geological column has been well worked out using stratigraphy and radioactive dating. So the age of the most recent strata that the two continents have in common was worked out at about 100 million years. Since they are now about 4 to 5000 kilometres apart it was estimated that the average rate of sea floor spreading/continental drift has been about 4 or 5 centimetres a year.

THEN in 1987 using laser beams and satellites the actual present day speed of spreading was measured and found to agree with this. (The actual speed varies along the mid Atlantic ridge - at the southernish end it is 4cm).

So once again we have two sets of observations (on the one hand strata and on the other laser measurements) each set is interpreted using quite independent theories (there is no hidden circularity here, interpreting a fossil does not depend on theories about how laser beams work, so there is no question of the assumptions behind one theory generating the same result in both cases by some hidden presuppositions). And the conclusions agree very well together. Very impressive! How would you respond? Chalk up yet another co-incidence? How many such co-incidences does it take before you will start to think that there is something in this stuff? It is the cumulative effect of these kinds of results that make modern geology one of the most exciting and compelling sciences around.

(Ref: Frank Press and Raymond Siever Understanding Earth third edition 2001 WH Freeman and Co (wonderful book!)

Glenn

--------------------
This entire doctrine is worthless except as a subject of dispute. (G. C. Lichtenberg 1742-1799 Aphorism 60 in notebook J of The Waste Books)

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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

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Well of course there has been a global flood and it is going on right now.

Most of the planet is covered with water. Only those low-density continents stick up out of it.

Which is why we know exactly what happens to things when they are under lots of water.

--------------------
Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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afish
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# 1135

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Toby
quote:
“Ask yourself this question: Would a twelfth century person read the same literal meaning into the words of the Bible as a person today? I think not.”
Any thoughts as to how this twelfth century person’s “literal” reading of The Flood would differ from mine and why?

Jim T.
quote:
“ … Noah did not write the story of Noah. Not one single story in the entire book of Genesis was written by the person in the story.”
Breathtaking Jim! From whence comes this certainty? Do you have access to information that us ordinary mortals are denied?
I don’t know which particular person wrote out the Noah portion of Genesis or any of the rest of it. What I was saying was that The Story (The Bible) has been written by the people involved in it whether they are mentioned by name in The Story or not.

Karl
quote:
If The Bible were not, as a whole, a literal historic story told by God but rather a collection of myths told by humans, a mish mash of more or less historical facts and other stuff what would it reveal to us? Certainly not a God Who is literal and historic.
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I really don't get this at all. Why must a God who is active in history produce an inerrant Bible?

Because He is inerrant.

As to the history/myth thing, I don’t get how a myth can reveal God to us. A myth may say something concerning God, then I have to decide, cerebrally, whether what it says is true or false or a mish mash.
Firstly, without some revelation/ knowledge of God to start from how does one decide?
Secondly, if my raw material is myth, that is events that didn’t happen involving fictional people, any god that is spoken about or any words that are put into his mouth will remain mythical, fictional, a human concept, unreal and unrelatable to.
When I read about God and Noah the things I am shown/told about God are many and wonderful.
He communicates directly/verbally with mankind.
He sorrows.
He judges and punishes sin.
He’s into boat designing.
All nature is subject to Him.
He is merciful.
He gives promises and makes covenants.
…… and always more.
If it never actually happened and God didn’t actually say to Noah “Build a boat and build it like this.” Then it tells me nothing certain about God at all.

Glen O.
No, a fictional play by Suetonius about a someone called Julius Caesar could not, of itself, be the basis for believing that the guy really existed. Is not the reason that we are “… reasonably certain that Julius Caesar was a real historical character.” because there are literal, historic accounts that mention him?
Nathan’s story to David wasn’t a mish mash of historical fact. It is and was quite obviously a parable. Even if David thought it was a true story while being told it, he very quickly realised what it really was.

Alan C.
I’ve read the extract from Augustine ‘s “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” and find nothing that I disagree with (I’m sure he’ll be relieved to know that). But I also find nothing that indicates that he believe that The Flood and the other recorded events did not happen as recorded.
He places an importance on “the context of Scripture” that I was underlining when talking about The Bible being a whole, one story.
quote:
“… least we should choose an interpretation in keeping with the context of Scripture and in harmony with our faith."
It seems plain to me that even with parables and proverbs and songs the context of the whole Bible is historical, real people, real events, along a real time line, with a real God.
As for the non-science of textual criticism and questions about Cain’s wife; Alan you’re a mountain man what are you doing messing about in bogs?
><>

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"Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much"
Bob Dylan

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Bonzo
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# 2481

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quote:

Originally posted by afish

If it never actually happened and God didn’t actually say to Noah “Build a boat and build it like this.” Then it tells me nothing certain about God at all.

And why shouldn't this uncertainty be what God wants. Perhaps Her intention is for you to find Her and learn about Her through your relationship rather than book learned fact? Or perhaps She wants you to find Her by reading between the lines?

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Love wastefully

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Toby
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# 3522

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:

Toby
quote:
“Ask yourself this question: Would a twelfth century person read the same literal meaning into the words of the Bible as a person today? I think not.”
Any thoughts as to how this twelfth century person’s “literal” reading of The Flood would differ from mine and why?

afish, you seem to have either not read what I was saying or deliberately misinterpreted it. I was not talking about the Noah story specifically but the reading of the Bible as a whole as a historical text, and the misuse of 'historical' in this discussion. Read what I said about history again and you will see what I am saying here. If you read the Bible as literal truth you will not be reading it as a historical text because the act of reading something as a historical text involves processing critical interpretation and integrating it with our understanding of changing worldviews.

As for how a twelth century person would read the story of Noah, for one thing they would have thought there to be a lot fewer animals in the ark (in my mind, biogeography, disparity and diversity make up the strongest argument against the idea of a global flood).

In the twelth century, they had ideas about sex, life after death, angels, astronomy, cosmogany, politics, and many other areas of religious and secular life (if such a boandary existed back then, which is debateable) that seem bizarre or heretical to us now. Where did they base (or at least justify) many of these seemingly strange beliefs and worldviews: their literal reading of the Bible, and what they saw as literal truths in it.

And please, if you are going to reply, look at the overall argument of this post (or my last) and reply to that rather than picking one bit out of context and trying to score irrelevant points off it.

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'Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt'
Allan Quartermain

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JimT

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# 142

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:

Jim T.
quote:
“ … Noah did not write the story of Noah. Not one single story in the entire book of Genesis was written by the person in the story.”
Breathtaking Jim, whence comes this certainty?

<snip>

What I was saying was that The Story (The Bible) has been written by the people involved in it whether they are mentioned by name in The Story or not.


I was taking it as a given that Moses wrote the book of Genesis. Not exactly "breathtaking." The tablet theory is "breathtaking" to my breath at least. You have some other theory?
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Ham'n'Eggs

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
Karl
quote:
Why must a God who is active in history produce an inerrant Bible?
Because He is inerrant.
So why did an inerrant God create a world which has errors in it?

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"...the heresies that men do leave / Are hated most of those they did deceive" - Will S


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Karl: Liberal Backslider
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# 76

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Really, Afish, your inability to gain truth from a myth is not something I share. I'm sure He'd be willing to help you if you wish. If the Holy Spirit guides people in reading the Bible, can't He ensure you gain the truth that was intended to be communicated through these passages? Anyone would think you were on your own reading the Bible...

Incidently, how do you learn about God from say the parable of Dives and Lazarus - or do you propose that in order to learn from this story it also has to be literally true?

We have to start from reality. The following points are real facts we have to come to terms with, like it or not. You can cast unreasonable doubt on them, sure, but there's people out there who can cast unreasonable doubt on the heliocentric solar system model:

(1) The Earth is, give or take, 4.5 billion years old.
(2) Life has gone through a series of changes. Both morphological and genetic evidence show that these changes have come about through descent with modification.
(3) Whilst a number of sometimes large scale floods can be found in various places and at various times in earth history, there is no support whatsoever for the concept of a world-wide flood at any point, much less during human history.
(4) The above points 1-3 conflict with a literal historical reading of Genesis 1-11.

Quite frankly, the creationist/literalist viewpoint is a simple ostrich-head attitude towards points 1-3 above.

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Might as well ask the bloody cat.

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Alan Cresswell

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# 31

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
I’ve read the extract from Augustine ‘s “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” and find nothing that I disagree with (I’m sure he’ll be relieved to know that). But I also find nothing that indicates that he believe that The Flood and the other recorded events did not happen as recorded.

Of course he doesn't say much about the Flood ... both On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis and Genesis against the Manichees deal just with the first 3 chapters of Genesis. My reference to Augustine was in relation to Creation rather than Flood (my bad for raising the spectre of that equus simplicidens).

quote:
It seems plain to me that even with parables and proverbs and songs the context of the whole Bible is historical, real people, real events, along a real time line, with a real God.
Yes, the Bible has a real historical context. But, certainly in the case of literature like parables and songs, that is the historical context of the time when they were written rather than the events they tell (which were, very often, fictional) - they are written by and for particular people in particular historical situations. That they apply to others in other situations is part of the reason they were reproduced, preserved and eventually included in the canon of Scripture.

As I've said before, Genesis is an account of the origin of the people of Israel - a myth that forged a group of slaves into a coherent nation. The principle historical event for Israel is not Creation or Flood but the Exodus; the historicity of an exodus event (not necessarily precise adherence to the story - but that's another tangent) is important, the earlier events are much more like the stories of Brutus and Scota Louise mentioned back on p7.

quote:
As for the non-science of textual criticism and questions about Cain’s wife; Alan you’re a mountain man what are you doing messing about in bogs?
Cain's wife is not a question of scientific textual criticism but logic. It's patently obvious that on the basis of the story alone there were only 3 people - Adam, Eve and Cain (and the corpse of Abel) ... yet there are more than 3 people - a wife for Cain and people for him to fear. The only options logically available are:
1) the story isn't complete and doesn't mention a lot of other children for Adam and Eve, incl. Cains wife (which adds to the story additional facts)
2) Adam and Eve were just 2 of loads more people and hence not the first humans
3) The story is not a factual historical account

My experience is that Creationists and other Biblical Literalists tend to add additional details to stories to enable them to be read as literal history without the logical inconsistancies inherent in the stories. So, in relation to the Flood we get such concepts as a water canopy to account for the water, massive post-Flood mountain building, massively accelerated evolution and birth rates to repopulate the earths animals and mass migration with animals all reaching their "homes" leaving no trace en-route.

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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

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ken
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# 2460

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quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
My experience is that Creationists and other Biblical Literalists tend to add additional details to stories to enable them to be read as literal history without the logical inconsistancies inherent in the stories. So, in relation to the Flood we get such concepts as a water canopy to account for the water, massive post-Flood mountain building, massively accelerated evolution and birth rates to repopulate the earths animals and mass migration with animals all reaching their "homes" leaving no trace en-route.

Lots of literalists do not accept the "Genesis Flood" and young earth partly because to do so requires making upo all these other stories to add to the Bible account. Young-earth creationism is not a literal reading of the Bible.

When I say "lots of litertalists" I include people like Scofield of the well-known Scofield Reference Bible, which was more or less the textbook of the 19th and early 20th century dispensationalists; or people like the authors of the series of boos called "The Fundamentals" which were the origin of 20th-century fundamentalism.

Young-earth creationism and the Genesis Flood are not based on a literal reading of the Bible. They are based on "The Bible And..."

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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markporter
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# 4276

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quote:
As I've said before, Genesis is an account of the origin of the people of Israel - a myth that forged a group of slaves into a coherent nation. The principle historical event for Israel is not Creation or Flood but the Exodus; the historicity of an exodus event (not necessarily precise adherence to the story - but that's another tangent) is important, the earlier events are much more like the stories of Brutus and Scota Louise mentioned back on p7.
well, I'm beginning to afree in part with some of what you say, but I'm not cconvinced that anything post-Abraham should be considered myth, I think that the evidence points otherwise.
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Alan Cresswell

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# 31

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quote:
Originally posted by ken:
Lots of literalists do not accept the "Genesis Flood" and young earth partly because to do so requires making upo all these other stories to add to the Bible account. Young-earth creationism is not a literal reading of the Bible.

Yes, you are, of course, correct that not all Biblical Literalists are YEC and believer in a global flood. Though, my experience is that people who take the Bible literally and reject the YEC position tend to not use the word "literalist" to describe their position because of the problem of being misunderstood and summarily dismissed as a loony - likewise I know several fundamentalists who don't call themselves fundamentalist, evangelicals who qualify themselves as "broad"/"open"/etc evangelicals (heck, I'm one of them) for similar reasons. I've just shown myself guilty of the same sloppy use of the phrase Biblical Literalists as those who effect a change in the meaning of the term among the general populace. [Embarrassed]

I think I'd dispute that YEC and Global Flood are not literal readings of Genesis. I think they are - just not the only literal readings, nor even the best literal readings, indeed they are probably totally incorrect readings ... but still literal.

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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Alan Cresswell

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# 31

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quote:
Originally posted by markporter:
I'm not cconvinced that anything post-Abraham should be considered myth, I think that the evidence points otherwise.

Myth does not equal completely fictitious. A true story can be myth. But, the purpose of a myth is such that strict adherence to the facts is not the primary concern.

An example: there is a stereotypical ideal in Britain of being our best in the face of adversity, this is encapsulated in a myth that has given a name to this attitude - it gets called the "Dunkirk Spirit", the myth is a story of ordinary people sailing whatever boats they had at hand towards the sound of the guns to rescue the British army from the beaches of Dunkirk. Now the story is romanticised (how many of those boats were commandeered by the government and ordered to go?) but essentially true.

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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

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JimT

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# 142

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quote:
Originally posted by Karl - Liberal Backslider:
We have to start from reality.

I cannot express how vigorously I agree with this.
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Glenn Oldham
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# 47

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
Glen O.
No, a fictional play by Suetonius about a someone called Julius Caesar could not, of itself, be the basis for believing that the guy really existed. Is not the reason that we are “… reasonably certain that Julius Caesar was a real historical character.” because there are literal, historic accounts that mention him?

Er, yes afish, but Suetonius (AD69 - c. 122) is one of our sources for that history. The Twelve Caesars is NOT a play and Suetonius was a biographer, but he still uses quite a lot of frankly incredible material in with the more believable history.

I used him as an example to show that your earlier statement that:
quote:
If The Bible were not, as a whole, a literal historic story told by God but rather a collection of myths told by humans, a mish mash of more or less historical facts and other stuff what would it reveal to us? Certainly not a God Who is literal and historic.
is an argument that doesn't work. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius is a mish mash of more or less historical facts and other stuff that does tell us quite a lot about the real, historical Julius Caesar.
Glenn

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This entire doctrine is worthless except as a subject of dispute. (G. C. Lichtenberg 1742-1799 Aphorism 60 in notebook J of The Waste Books)

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afish
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# 1135

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quote:
“Originally posted by afish:
1. Concerning the pressure problem, it would be interesting to see in mathematical detail what a model(s) of maximum, above earth, water storage would give for total possible one off rainfall. But of course whatever the amount of water coming down there is also the water coming up, so.”
Response from Ken,
--------------------------------------------------
“I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by this. It looks like unintelligible waffle to me.”

Response from Alan C.,
“I think I understand where this is coming from. There seems to be two questions here: 1) how much water vapour/clouds can the atmosphere sustain without it raining? 2) how much greater can the atmospheric pressure be than present and the earth still be habitable? afish - if I've misunderstood your question just speak up.”

--------------------------------------------------
Alan
It’s good to know there are people out there who can understand unintelligible waffle. Though describing two sentences as waffle is, I think, a misuse of the English. The Beckham’s Stone saga, however, though sort of intelligible, is a prime example of wadding (a sub-genre of waffle, denser and less digestible).
But back to the plot. So you are proposing that a 40ish m. rise in sea level caused by rainfall alone is a possibility. Well that doesn’t seem to me to be, “an insignificant amount of water”. Would that have been enough to cover the highest land by 7m.? I don’t know but there is still the water coming up from the fountains of the deep. My conclusion is still that there are just too many unknowns involved for even the best of scientists to state categorically, this could not have happened within the parameters of natural laws.

Glen O.
quote:
“afish, it would help us to know what kind of flood you are talking about. Global or local? Preceded by millions of years or not? If global, then how deep at the time, and how much mountain building was needed afterwards? These are crucial questions.”
Sorry I thought my position was clear. I believe that all land was covered, destroying all land life; that The Flood happened 1656 years after the creation of Adam; we have no idea of what the total rise in sea level was; we know what the heights of mountains are now, exactly how and when they were formed and how long it has taken we don’t and can’t know.

Plate tectonics and continental drift is an interesting theory. That S. American bulge just looks so right fitted into that African curve. I have sometimes wondered if, “the earth was divided” in Genesis10:25 refers to the forming of the continents? But having said that I would need to know a lot more about the extent of geological equivalences between continents before I made a transfer from my theory folder to my fact folder. As an evidence of the earth’s age, you are wholly dependent on the dating of rocks being correct (unverifiable) and the assumption (unverifiable) that the drift has been constant at around 4cm a year.
Why does some fossilised coral appear to have grown 400 layers in year whereas these days they only grow 365? I don’t know. Is it proof that they are 38,000,000 yrs old? I don’t think so.
How long is needed to make mountains, form a band of sediment a mile thick and so on? Well, I know this is getting boring but we don’t know. Maybe I’ve got an over developed imagination but it seems to me that a lot can happen in a hundred years and in a thousand even more. How much did the one year of The Flood contribute to the geology that is visible to us now? Again we don’t seem to know. The only scenario that makes sense to me is that the surface of the earth that we have now became much as it is now during the 3000 years after The Flood.

Ken
quote:
“Lets say we find a large isolated, rounded, granite rock, weighing a few tons, sitting all on its own on top of a hill made of some sedimentary rocks, many miles from the nearest granite.
If we saw that in Britain today our first assumptions would be either that people put it there, or that it was left behind by the ice. We could make various investigations to see which was more likely. That would be science.”

Maybe “science” should not make assumptions and just stick to the facts? Yes I know this is an extreme way of putting it but it makes the point.
What I was trying to focus on is not how a lump of rock got where it is or the Beckham phenomena or fairies. The questions are these;
Does God sometimes intervened and override the natural laws of the material world?
Can someone who is both a scientist and a Christian legitimately claim that this first question has no bearing whatever on scientific research and theories derived from that research?

As for this Omphalos thing, God is not a deceiver or a trickster but He, in the beginning, certainly made earth exactly however He wanted it. What was earths geology in the beginning? How old would it have measured with present day dating methods? Again and again and again, we don’t know. Any claim that we do is not science just hubris.
><>
ok will read with interest most recent posts. I see Bonzo is advocating the virtues of The Unknown God.

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"Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much"
Bob Dylan

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markporter
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# 4276

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quote:
What was earths geology in the beginning? How old would it have measured with present day dating methods?
I do think that this is an interesting point....would it be possible to create something like the earth without any appearance of age whatsoever?
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SteveWal
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# 307

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Maybe “science” should not make assumptions and just stick to the facts? Yes I know this is an extreme way of putting it but it makes the point.


Isn't this precisely what science should be doing? Positing hypotheses then attempting to prove/disprove them?

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If they give you lined paper to write on, write across the lines. (Russian anarchist saying)

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JimT

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# 142

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How is it possible to "posit an hypothesis" without making assumptions? It is not possible. An hypothesis is an assumption that must be proved or disproved. By definition it is an assumption. If science only "sticks to facts" all it can do is list facts. There would be no need to test them.

I think the opposite question is better. Shouldn't religion stick to moral and spiritual truths and not attempt to assert that all natual scientific truth can be found in its ethical and moral writings?

It is easy to defend the notion that science should be "allowed" to make assumptions. It is not so easy to defend the notion that the Bible is a natural science textbook in addition to being the source of moral truth.

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ken
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# 2460

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quote:
Originally posted by markporter:
quote:
What was earths geology in the beginning? How old would it have measured with present day dating methods?
I do think that this is an interesting point....would it be possible to create something like the earth without any appearance of age whatsoever?
Probably not - which is the very serious philosphical point Gosse was making in Omphalos

There is a huge difference between that sort of thing, which at least faces up to some of the absurdities, and some of the shit talked by the so-called creation scientists.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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ken
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# 2460

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quote:
Originally posted by SteveWal:
Maybe “science” should not make assumptions and just stick to the facts? Yes I know this is an extreme way of putting it but it makes the point.

YOu can't do science by staring vacantly out into the cosmos. You always bring background with you - asssumptions, axioms, hypotheses, theories. Good scholarship recognises its own biases, or at least is transparent enough to allow others to recognise them. But there always are biases.

Saying that "science should stick to the facts" is not a scientific programme, but a political one; and an impossible one at that. "Facts" cannot be communicated outwith a language, and any means of communication, any language, neccessarily comes with baggage.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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ken
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# 2460

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
The questions are these;
Does God sometimes intervened and override the natural laws of the material world?
Can someone who is both a scientist and a Christian legitimately claim that this first question has no bearing whatever on scientific research and theories derived from that research?

If that's all you are saying, then there is no argument between us about science. I'm glad to see that you don't believe this "Flood Geology/Creation Science" bullshit. If God has intervened miraculously and suspended the natural processes in order to make the world look as it does now, than there is no argument - in fact no contact - between Biblical scholars and scientists on these points. Presumably the Biblical scholars can respect the scientists for honestly describing God's stage sets.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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afish
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# 1135

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quote:
“And why shouldn't this uncertainty be what God wants. Perhaps Her intention is for you to find Her and learn about Her through your relationship rather than book learned fact? Or perhaps She wants you to find Her by reading between the lines?”
Bonzo
Between the lines I see nothing but white space. My God is not white space. From the beginning He has made Himself known to us by deed and word. He is consistent in character therefore when I read what He did and said in the time of Noah that helps me to understand what He is doing and saying in this time and in my personal relationship with Him now.
Relationships with others, that is knowing them, involves having knowledge about them.

Toby
quote:
“afish, you seem to have either not read what I was saying or deliberately misinterpreted it. I was not talking about the Noah story specifically but the reading of the Bible as a whole as a historical text, and the misuse of 'historical' in this discussion. … If you read the Bible as literal truth you will not be reading it as a historical text because the act of reading something as a historical text involves processing critical interpretation and integrating it with our understanding of changing worldviews.”
No I have not misread nor “deliberately misinterpreted” what you said. I am also talking about The Bible as a whole and put the question about how a 12th century person’s literal interpretation of The Flood would differ from mine because I am genuinely interested in the answer. I doubt that there would be any great difference. A medieval man who read The Bible literally would believed just as I do that God said to Noah “of birds after their kind, of animals after their kind, and of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind will come to you to keep them alive.” and that is what happened. The fact that he knew nothing about kangaroos and I do would make no difference.
I don’t read The Bible as an historical text nor as a scientific text. I read it as The Word of God which is historically and scientifically true. In the world there many world-views and many cultures but God’s view of the world and its cultures, as revealed to us in The Bible, is the one by which all things are to be judged.

Jim T.
“ … Noah did not write the story of Noah. Not one single story in the entire book of Genesis was written by the person in the story.” …
“I was taking it as a given that Moses wrote the book of Genesis. Not exactly "breathtaking." The tablet theory is "breathtaking" to my breath at least. You have some other theory?”

It is impossible for us to know for certain who originally wrote out or *did not write out* any part of Genesis. That is why I find breathtaking your assertion that you do know. Was it Moses who was responsible for writing out the whole of Genesis as we now have it? Maybe but it certainly isn’t a given. It is also possible that he also brought together (under God) already existing texts, even text written by Noah.
I haven’t yet looked at The Tablet Theory, mainly because I don’t see any need for a theory. There are only 26 generations between Adam and Moses with wide overlapping. The father of Noah, Lamech was 56 when Adam died. Knowledge was passed from generation to generation then as now. Knowledge of God’s word would have been much more meticulously passed on and safeguarded than the ordinary stuff.

Hamn’Eggs
quote:
“So why did an inerrant God create a world which has errors in it?”
He didn’t. Read your Bible.

Karl
quote:
“If the Holy Spirit guides people in reading the Bible, can't He ensure you gain the truth that was intended to be communicated through these passages?” …
“Incidently, how do you learn about God from say the parable of Dives and Lazarus - or do you propose that in order to learn from this story it also has to be literally true?”

One can find truths in myths and parables sure, *and* also lies. So how do we tell which is which? Yes I too believe that The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth and I have in part experienced that. But the truth within that promise needs careful unpacking. The reality (remember, the place to start from) is that Christians, like everyone else, believe lies and get deceived.
If one came across the story of Lazarus and Dives on it’s own and did not know it had been told by The Lord Jesus and was in The Bible then it might be difficult to decide if is was a parable or a factual account but you might still decided that as a narrative it contained worthwhile truth but equally some one might decided that is was a load of junk. The question is *still* on what basis would you make the decision?

quote:
“The following points are real facts…. You can cast unreasonable doubt on them, sure, but …:
(1) The Earth is, give or take, 4.5 billion years old.
(2) Life has gone through a series of changes. Both morphological and genetic evidence show that these changes have come about through descent with modification.
(3) Whilst a number of sometimes large scale floods can be found in various places and at various times in earth history, there is no support whatsoever for the concept of a world-wide flood at any point, much less during human history.
(4) The above points 1-3 conflict with a literal historical reading of Genesis 1-11.”

Karl, the doubts I cast are in complete accord with my reason which I believe is as reasonable as yours. 1&2 are unverifiable hypotheses, 3 is wide open and on-going and 4 we agree on.
Road runner meets ostrich? No, think it’s more a case of [brick wall] meets [brick wall]

Alan Cresswell
quote:
“Cain's wife is not a question of scientific textual criticism but logic. It's patently obvious that on the basis of the story alone there were only 3 people - Adam, Eve and Cain (and the corpse of Abel) ... yet there are more than 3 people - a wife for Cain and people for him to fear.”
“My experience is that Creationists and other Biblical Literalists tend to add additional details to stories to enable them to be read as literal history without the logical inconsistencies inherent in the stories.”

This really puzzles me. To me it is patently obvious that “in the process of time” (verse 3 of chapter 4), there were many many more than three people around. There is nothing illogical or inconsistent about not giving every contextual detail concerning Cain and his wife. Why should God give us mankind’s complete family tree and earths total population at the time of Cain’s marriage????

Glen Oldham
quote:
“Er, yes afish, but Suetonius (AD69 - c. 122) is one of our sources for that history. The Twelve Caesars is NOT a play and Suetonius was a biographer, but he still uses quite a lot of frankly incredible material in with the more believable history.”
“The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius is a mish mash of more or less historical facts and other stuff that does tell us quite a lot about the real, historical Julius Caesar.”

Well if Suetonius is a biographer yet you judge that a lot of what he says is unbelievable then the question I’ve outlined to Karl comes into play. How do you decide which bits are believable and tell you a lot about the real, historical Julius Ceaser? If you know that Suetonius lies then everything he says is suspect?

><>

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"Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much"
Bob Dylan

Posts: 168 | From: France | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
Alan Cresswell

Mad Scientist 先生
# 31

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Sorry, this is a long post (but I'm on shore leave so I'm sure you'll forgive me!)

quote:
Originally posted by afish:
But back to the plot. So you are proposing that a 40ish m. rise in sea level caused by rainfall alone is a possibility. Well that doesn’t seem to me to be, “an insignificant amount of water”. Would that have been enough to cover the highest land by 7m.? I don’t know but there is still the water coming up from the fountains of the deep. My conclusion is still that there are just too many unknowns involved for even the best of scientists to state categorically, this could not have happened within the parameters of natural laws.

Well, 40m of water isn't insignificant ... but in terms of a Flood covering the highest mountains it is. Yesterday we took a cable car ride up the side of approximately 1000m of mountain side, starting over 1000m above sea-level. And, that is just a small mountain compared to the Rockies where we're heading later this week. Even to claim that these mountains are recent uplifts you are talking about a colossal amount of mountain building since the Flood to account for them unless the flood waters were several km deep - and compared to even 1km of water an extra 40m give or take makes no difference. Which was my point ... if you're going to stipulate that there was that much water from the "fountains of the deep" then you need to explain that source of water ... going on about a water canopy is relatively pointless; you need to explain the bucket of water not the extra drop.

quote:
Plate tectonics and continental drift is an interesting theory. That S. American bulge just looks so right fitted into that African curve. I have sometimes wondered if, “the earth was divided” in Genesis10:25 refers to the forming of the continents? But having said that I would need to know a lot more about the extent of geological equivalences between continents before I made a transfer from my theory folder to my fact folder.
Well, there are far more bits of evidence than just the shapes of the S American and African coast lines ... continuities of geology in Scotland and N America for example. I'm sure there are some good sites out there which will provide all the data you could possibly want ... but try the academic sites on uni geology depts. Though, ....
quote:
As an evidence of the earth’s age, you are wholly dependent on the dating of rocks being correct (unverifiable) and the assumption (unverifiable) that the drift has been constant at around 4cm a year.
you will find that most academic geology sites will use verified dating techniques within their discussions of plate tectonics. Radio-isotope dating fundamentally relies on one assumption, the same assumption that underlines all of science. That is that the universe functions in accordance with unchanging order such that an experiment performed in different labs or at different times will yield the same result. Basically that if I was to measure the rate of decay of 40K today and got into a time machine and repeated the experiment 10000y ago or a star ship and went to the Andromeda galaxy I would still measure exactly the same half-life for 40K. You may argue that the laws of physics do change, or have been changed by an outside force, but there is no way to actually do science on that basis ... how do you determine how physics works somewhere you can get no data for? As it is, there is a very large, entirely consistant, body of data that unambiguously points to an earth that is 4.5 billion years old (give or take a bit), with a surface formed through processes of plate tectonics and volcanism (with minor additional features like meteor impact) subsequently weathered and eroded, that has always had (at least since there were large continents) very high mountain chains formed by tectonic uplift at plate boundaries. Which brings us back to some of your other points

quote:
Why does some fossilised coral appear to have grown 400 layers in year whereas these days they only grow 365? I don’t know. Is it proof that they are 38,000,000 yrs old? I don’t think so.
You're right, it doesn't, of itself, prove very much. But taken with other evidence the case becomes much stronger. This was introduced as an example of predictions from modelling the tidal interactions between earth and moon that the length of the day is changing, slowly. The laws of physics are clear, if the earth is as ancient as we believe, then if we look at something like coral which records diurnal and annual growth patterns there will be a correlation between age and number of days per year. Which is exactly what we see. If you reject the dating evidence then you need to come up with some other explanation ... science doesn't tend to start looking for additional explanatory variables when there is already a consistant explanation without any unexplained gaps.

quote:
How long is needed to make mountains, form a band of sediment a mile thick and so on? Well, I know this is getting boring but we don’t know.
But, we do know. At least for many cases. We can actually measure the amount of sediment in rivers and how quickly that is accumulating in lake beds or on the ocean floors. We can actually measure the rate of many tectonic processes - there are roads across the San Andreas fault for example where it is possible to see how much it has moved. Now, I know you don't like radio-isotope dating, but that shows very clearly the rate of build up of many geological layers. But, even without radioisotope dating, we can determine long term process rates using luminescence or cosmogenic isotope production methods over the past few thousand years. Again, it comes down to giving a good reason why processes that have been shown to be uniform over time scales of tens of years to several thousand years would be radically different just before then (ie at the time of and shortly after the theorised Flood).

quote:
The questions are these;
Does God sometimes intervened and override the natural laws of the material world?
Can someone who is both a scientist and a Christian legitimately claim that this first question has no bearing whatever on scientific research and theories derived from that research?

And, yes these are the questions. Does God intervene to override the natural laws? I don't know - he certainly can do if He wishes. But has He? Even if He had, it is outside the realms of science to determine that ... the best science can do is say "here's something we don't understand" and a good scientist will add "yet". I don't think it makes any difference here whether a scientist is a Christian or not ... science deals exclusively with the material, introducing the immaterial to the question is not science. If I was to write a paper on the distribution of radioactive materials in the esturine environment of the Solway (which I may well do at some point given the amount of data we've collected there) and postulate that it got there by some supernatural means no scientist would take it seriously because even if we didn't know the process we know the God didn't put it there. There is fundamentally no difference if the paper was relating to a hominid fossil discovered in Africa. I could, as a Christian, of course comment on the ethics of discharging radioactive material into the Irish Sea, or the ethical implications of common ancestry of apes and humans in how we treat chimps. But that's something beyond science.

quote:
As for this Omphalos thing, God is not a deceiver or a trickster but He, in the beginning, certainly made earth exactly however He wanted it.
But, the problem is that science does unambiguously prove that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that the biological organisms that live here have evolved through gradual adaptation and variation. If that is not the case, and infact the earth is only a few thousand years old and evolution is false, then God clearly is a deceiver or a trickster.

[Left your UBB coding powers home, did you Alan? [Razz] ]

[ 25. June 2003, 16:14: Message edited by: Scot ]

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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
dj_ordinaire
Host
# 4643

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The biologist Theodor Dobzhansky (who is accredited with the maxim that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution") rejected creationsism not on scientific grounds but theological ones - he had had an Orthodox upbringing and believed the suggestion that the Lord is capable of deception was heretical.

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Flinging wide the gates...

Posts: 10335 | From: Hanging in the balance of the reality of man | Registered: Jun 2003  |  IP: Logged
JimT

Ship'th Mythtic
# 142

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Being old enough to recall the revolution in geology brought about by plate techtonics, I can add to Alan's excellent post that briefly, "sea floor spreading" or the outward movement of sea floor crust from mid oceanic rifts was confirmed via noting symmetric, equally aged bands of magnetic polarity in the rocks on each side of mid-ocean ridges. Having already determined that the earth's magnetic poles periodically reversed polarity, and having developed techniques for measuring the polarity in rocks, scientists measured rock polarity on either side of the ridge. Beautifully symmetric stripes were seen on either side of the ridge, proving as conclusively as can be expected that new crust is created at the ridges, polarizes with the earth's magnetic field, then spreads outward from the ridges. An excellent description, with pictures, can be found here.

Afish, you are right that your interpretation is the same as a 12th century person. Please, won't you join us in this century?

Posts: 2619 | From: Now On | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

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Dobzhansky was a hero.

And afish - there were Christian scholars in the Middle Ages who thought the world was very old. Lots of them. Maybe not the majority, but a great many. Some of them even from the 12th century (why pick on the 12th century? A wonderful time for scholarship!)

Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002  |  IP: Logged
Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76

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Dear oh dear.

We are going round in circles aren't we?

Is there any point? It doesn't matter what evidence is presented, Afish will say he doesn't think it proves anything. Fortunately, reality doesn't require anyone's sayso to be.

Question: Afish - given that you do not believe we share a common ancestry with apes, do you have an explanation for:

(a) common retriviral insertions between man and apes Here

(b) the Chromosomal fusion event that links our genome with that of the apes. Here and Here (nice pictures in the second link)

I assume that you have scientific models that match the data as well as the mainstream ones? Or is it the case that whilst your "reason is as good as mine", it may be that your reasoning here is not as good as that of mainstream science?

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Might as well ask the bloody cat.

Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Ham'n'Eggs

Ship's Pig
# 629

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quote:
Originally posted by afish:
Hamn’Eggs
quote:
“So why did an inerrant God create a world which has errors in it?”
He didn’t. Read your Bible.
I did. It says that God created the world. And saw that it was good.

And any observer can see that it has errors in it. For example, defective genes, accounting errors, the actions of people who remove themselves from the gene pool by pissing from bridges onto rail power cables.

Are you going to tell me that all errors are a figment of my imagination?

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"...the heresies that men do leave / Are hated most of those they did deceive" - Will S


Posts: 3103 | From: Genghis Khan's sleep depot | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged
Sine Nomine*

Ship's backstabbing bastard
# 3631

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A friend just sent me a link to this fascinating website.

Anyway, I suggest scrolling down to high school level: 2nd Place: "Maximal Packing Of Rodentia Kinds: A Feasibility Study"

Posts: 10696 | Registered: Dec 2002  |  IP: Logged
JimT

Ship'th Mythtic
# 142

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Folks, you gotta visit Sine's link. Not only do they pack rodents into the ark like sardines but the prove that "Women were Created for Homemaking" (women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences shows that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay) and they study the Thermodynamics of Hell.
Posts: 2619 | From: Now On | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Glenn Oldham
Shipmate
# 47

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I'd love to have a look at the site Sine mentions but am I alone in finding that the link leads to http://download.startsurfing.com/ and not to the site shown?
Posts: 910 | From: London, England | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Glenn Oldham
Shipmate
# 47

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Darn! I did not mean to post another link to download.startsurfing. I did not use the Instant UBB URL boxes [Mad]

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This entire doctrine is worthless except as a subject of dispute. (G. C. Lichtenberg 1742-1799 Aphorism 60 in notebook J of The Waste Books)

Posts: 910 | From: London, England | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Chedorlaomer
Shipmate
# 4611

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Classic! I particularly enjoy the biographies and pen pics. Although taking Paley's name is an unfair slander on Wm Paley himself, I must say. Unfair, but highly amusing! 'Theobiology'! [Killing me]

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Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Posts: 119 | From: Auckland, NZ | Registered: Jun 2003  |  IP: Logged
Chedorlaomer
Shipmate
# 4611

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Oh! Sorry for the double post - gotta mention the Zounds! Christian rock ministry.

http://objective.jesussave.us/zounds.html

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Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Posts: 119 | From: Auckland, NZ | Registered: Jun 2003  |  IP: Logged
JimT

Ship'th Mythtic
# 142

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We really should stop this tangent but I can't restrain from mentioning that the Youth Rock Ministry of Zounds sells boxer shorts "specifically branded to promote abstinence." "Chastity Shorts" anyone? I submitted it as a "Gadget for God." Thanks Chederlaomer!
Posts: 2619 | From: Now On | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Gracious rebel

Rainbow warrior
# 3523

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quote:
Originally posted by Glenn Oldham:
I'd love to have a look at the site Sine mentions but am I alone in finding that the link leads to http://download.startsurfing.com/ and not to the site shown?

No but for me it led to a dodgy portal site that I sometimes get redirected to. I think I've got some Spyware or something on the PC that sometimes takes over the browser when it is pointed at certain sites.

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Fancy a break beside the sea in Suffolk? Visit my website

Posts: 4413 | From: Suffolk UK | Registered: Nov 2002  |  IP: Logged



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