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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Noah's Flood
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Evensong
Shipmate
# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
Global flood or not one thing is beyond question.
Noah was undoubtedly the best businessman ever.
The only person to float a company when the rest of the world was in a state of liqidation.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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a theological scrapbook
Posts: 9481 | From: Australia | Registered: Apr 2009
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanc:
quote:
by Alan Cresswell:
No, there is not one iota of probability that a global flood has occurred.
I'm taking this certainty with a grain of salt. The earth is almost covered with water, and the earth's highlands are diminutive compared with the earths ocean trenches, it's not that hard to postulate that a little agitation of the water will cover the land mass.
It would actually need to be a very substantial agitation. Yes, the ocean trenches are deep, but it's still a relatively small proportion of the earths water in them. Even to raise the ocean surface by 1km, not enough to cover all the mountains but enough to effectively innundate most of the places people live, would take an upheaval of the sort that lifts the ocean floor by a feww hundred metres, and then a second upheaval of equal magnitude to put them back in their place. Certainly something that would leave an undeniable record in the geology of the earth.
Of course one can't discount the possibility that the Flood occured by the miraculous intervention of God suspending the normal way things happen. He could have created the water from nothing, and uncreated it afterwards. He could have ensured fish and other aquatic life survived the changes in salinity and water pressure, and done the same for the plants soaked in brakish water. And, He could have removed all evidence that it ever happened except for the folk memory of people that eventually got written down as the stories of Noah we're familiar with. But, one would hardly call such speculation 'science'.
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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
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanc:
Why is global flood so threatening to science while global warming, global ice age, global etc. are not?
Global flood isn't the least bit threatening to science. Science doesn't care a whit what a bunch of deluded Christians think. There is no evidence for global flooding, and science is based on evidence.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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pjkirk
Shipmate
# 10997
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by sanc:
Why is global flood so threatening to science while global warming, global ice age, global etc. are not?
Global flood isn't the least bit threatening to science. Science doesn't care a whit what a bunch of deluded Christians think. There is no evidence for global flooding, and science is based on evidence.
Not to mention that the mechanisms by which global warming and ice ages can happen are understood. For an actual global flood to occur to an elevation of Mt. Ararat would require nearly three times the water that exists on the planet, and to the height of Everest would require more than 4 times the water that exists on the earth.
I'm sure "science" is more than willing to entertain any theories once you can determine how this much water existed for a time, and then disappeared again, without leaving a trace of its existence. ![[Two face]](graemlins/scot_twoface.gif)
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Dear God, I would like to file a bug report -- Randall Munroe (http://xkcd.com/258/)
Posts: 1177 | From: Swinging on a hammock, chatting with Bokonon | Registered: Feb 2006
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
There are some senses in which a Global Flood is a threat to science.
In a resource limited environment, a suggestion that scientists should spend time addressing issues of a supposed Flood wouldn't go down well. We've more than enough to do without chasing non-scientific conjectures. Though, I don't think that there's currently any danger of the government of any nation insisting that geology be conducted within a philosophical framework that includes something like a global Flood.
Perhaps more worrying (because it might be something that happens) is if a Global Flood was introduced into science lessons as part of the curriculum. With limited time to teach the science kids need to know to have a reasonable grasp of the subject giving Flood Geology time as a supposed scientific theory would make things even harder for teachers. Now, I would say that teaching kids the skills needed to critique junk science is actually very important, and in that context you could include Flood Geology. Unfortunately education has moved from imparting skills to imparting knowledge, and in a framework of imparting knowledge (especially without already teaching the skills to critique that knowledge) there are potential dangers when that knowledge is actually untrue.
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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
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
Global flood or not one thing is beyond question.
Noah was undoubtedly the best businessman ever.
The only person to float a company when the rest of the world was in a state of liqidation.
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif)
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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anglocatholic
Apprentice
# 13804
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Posted
I was under the impression that the story of Noah's Flood, like that of Adam and Eve, was 'myth''.As such, not to be taken literally, but a means to teach certain truths about God.
Pax
Jeffrey
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An Anglican from Sydney but not a Sydney Anglican.
Posts: 34 | From: Australia | Registered: Jun 2008
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Amarante:
The story of a flood pre-dates the written Book of Genesis. It circulated in Abraham's country of Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC. This record is preserved in the famous epic of Gilgamesh and tells of the building of a vessel in which to save all human and animal life in a flood to be sent by the gods (plural).
I remember reading a story, in which the Flood was when the Mediterranean first flowed into what is now the Black Sea. In the story it took many weeks for the water levels to equalize, so for that period there was a great waterfall sending up a massive plume of spray, which could be seen from miles around as a permanent rainbow...
Your version sounds much more plausible, but not as good a story.
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
Posts: 3169 | From: rural Ireland | Registered: May 2001
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
Anglocatholic
You might live down under
but the impression you were under is 100% correct
Posts: 1914 | From: from the abyss of misunderstanding | Registered: Mar 2010
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fletcher christian
Mutinous Seadog
# 13919
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Posted
I'm still very disappointed that not a single flood believer has even attempted to answer the questions I posed earlier
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'God is love insaturable, love impossible to describe'
Staretz Silouan
Posts: 5235 | From: a prefecture | Registered: Jul 2008
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by fletcher christian:
If it really did happen, even in a small way, I'd have a few questions that modern zoo's might want to know too.
1. How did they deal with all the animal crap?
2. How did they feed all the meat eating animals? What did they feed them?
3. How did they stop the reptiles from getting metabolic bone disease after being kept out of direct sunlight for so long?
4. Was there two of every kind of animal and then a food store of animals to feed other animals?
5. How did they get the animals to breed after they left the ark? Some of these animals surely wouldn't stick together and the chances of them meeting up again after release would be fairly slim.
6. Two of every kind of animal would mean the gene pool was pretty shallow. Even with two very good examples of species, brothers mating with sisters is going to lead to inevitable genetic problems. How did they stop this?
7. Wouldn't the human survivors on the ark mean that their descendents would end up marrying their cousins? (ok a modern zoo doesn't need to know this!)
Well, if it'll make you happy. . .
Keep in mind that I am not setting myself up to be the authority on this one. I haven't studied the matter in any depth (which is why I haven't been following this thread) though it's on my list (along with about a zillion other things to do, goodness knows, I'll doubtless get to it thirty years after I die.) But it'll amuse you no doubt.
1. How did they deal with all the animal crap?
Shovel it overboard, I expect. I imagine there are a few engineers here who could do a damn sight better at designing a sluice system than I, but I'm thinking something along the line of what early European towns had. A sewer more or less right down the middle of major and minor arteries. Horribly stinky and disgusting, but if each branch ends at some sort of port to the outside, you basically need a "shover" to guide the shit along the channel (and a strong stomach). Hey, nobody said they were HAPPY on that boat.
2. How did they feed all the meat eating animals? What did they feed them?
Um, read the text. According to the text, meat eating was not an issue yet. What you SHOULD be asking is how they carried enough feed for all the herbivores (basically everybody).
3. How did they stop the reptiles from getting metabolic bone disease after being kept out of direct sunlight for so long?
Raise the ante here to "everybody." AFAIK there was no deck for the humans to walk on either. I'd say that this is one of those cases where they would figure that God handled the matter.
4. Was there two of every kind of animal and then a food store of animals to feed other animals?
No, see "herbivore" above.
5. How did they get the animals to breed after they left the ark? Some of these animals surely wouldn't stick together and the chances of them meeting up again after release would be fairly slim.
See "God handles it" above. Alternately, figure that the wanderers go extinct.
6. Two of every kind of animal would mean the gene pool was pretty shallow. Even with two very good examples of species, brothers mating with sisters is going to lead to inevitable genetic problems. How did they stop this?
See below.
7. Wouldn't the human survivors on the ark mean that their descendents would end up marrying their cousins?
Same problem you have with Adam and Eve and co. Yes, inbreeding would definitely lead to major problems at the present day; but these people and animals were considerably closer to Eden than we are, and presumably much healthier genetically (which also explains the longer life spans). Plus, I have wondered whether God might not have "packed" additional DNA sets in the gamete-forming cells of these "founder" people and animals. If we could do the same today, it would solve certain theoretical space colonization problems.
Okay, feel free to point and laugh.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
2. How did they feed all the meat eating animals? What did they feed them?
Um, read the text. According to the text, meat eating was not an issue yet. What you SHOULD be asking is how they carried enough feed for all the herbivores (basically everybody).
I've heard a lot of Biblical literalists claim that all creatures were herbivores prior to the Fall, but this is the first time I've heard the claim made that all post-Edenic creatures were herbivorous at one point. Can you cite this passage, and what is the point in time where you think carnivorousness came in to being?
For myself, I find it hard to reconcile strict vegetarianism with a society that practices animal sacrifice.
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
7. Wouldn't the human survivors on the ark mean that their descendents would end up marrying their cousins?
Same problem you have with Adam and Eve and co. Yes, inbreeding would definitely lead to major problems at the present day; but these people and animals were considerably closer to Eden than we are, and presumably much healthier genetically (which also explains the longer life spans). Plus, I have wondered whether God might not have "packed" additional DNA sets in the gamete-forming cells of these "founder" people and animals.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. How would such DNA "packing" work? Would the extra genes be expressed, or would some factor prevent this? If the former, wouldn't this create all kinds of problems? If the latter, what would allow offspring to express these genes that were non-functional in the parents? And how "close" do you have to be to Eden to have this advantage? Noah was supposedly nine generations removed from Adam and his sons would have been ten. We have no idea how far their wives are removed from the purported first couple since we have no details of their descent (or even their names).
I've always thought that finding scientific explanations for stories like the flood was an example of faint-hearted theism. Once you postulate an omnipotent magical being, why not simply have the courage of your convictions and say "it's magic/a miracle" and be done with it rather than crafting complicated and fantastical "scientific" explanations like herbivorous wolves and extra genes?
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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W Hyatt
Shipmate
# 14250
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Okay, feel free to point and laugh.
I'm not inclined to point or laugh, even though I personally take it all as symbolic, but I do wonder if you couldn't gain some advantage by pointing out that in Genesis 7:2 God instructs Noah to include seven of every clean animal.
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
Posts: 1565 | From: U.S.A. | Registered: Nov 2008
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Thank you. Actually, as I mentioned, I haven't been following the thread, and I thought you guys had covered that already. Also the herbivore bit. I mean, it's right there in the text--when they get off the ark (I think it's Gen 7, but am about to be hailed off to bed by my ear so can't look it up)--at that point God says to Noah that meat is on the menu now. This was an addition to the specified menu for Adam (fruits etc.). We are also told that from that point on the animals would be wary of people as a general rule (sensible, if they weren't to wind up as hamburgers)
Re gene expression--God knows I am not a scientist, just an ordinary layman with a basic scientific education, but from that limited standpoint, I'd say no, I did NOT imagine the genes I spoke of being expressed. One set (the complement needed for the individual) would be fully functional; the rest, I hazily imagine, might (note the speculation here) MIGHT be stored away in the sex cells, one (half)set per, so that the offspring would possess traits not expressed in the parents. It would certainly make for a rather varied family group! But of course, this would be temporary, just until genetic diversity was sufficiently ... sufficient. I don't imagine it goes on today (though I wonder about exactly how Mary's chromosomes managed to come up with a male parthenogenetic offspring).
But again, this is all speculation on my part.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Ah, missing points (COMING, dear!)--
"the courage of one's convictions" aka magic--well, you (plural) DID ask HOW, which I took to be a question about possible means employed. If God chose not to employ means, that would be his decision (duh), but from what we've seen of his general mode of operations, he seems to like doing things in good order.
And as for how far from Eden one had to be, I haven't the faintest. I suppose the effects of genetic corruption would come on gradually, and perhaps more quickly for certain unlucky individuals and lines than others.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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pjkirk
Shipmate
# 10997
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Posted
Well, there is lots of agreement in population genetics regarding population bottlenecks in that past. However, the timescale employed is far outside the dates estimated for the flood (100,000+ years ago). Also, the numbers are still in the 10,000ish+ range for effective breeding females (i.e. genetically distinct). So, that'd be an additional 10,000 chromosomes which would need to be stored. That, or over the next hundred generations there'd need to be tons of directed mutagenesis by God in very stables regions of the genome.
Of course, none of this matches with the fossil record, animal lineages seen (or species diversity), etc.
I think, just like with a virgin birth, a Goddidit works best. It's at very least the most respectable answer since it doesn't involve trying to rewrite science. After all a miracle/divine interaction is just that! (Goddidit is what I went with as a Christian too, for that matter).
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Dear God, I would like to file a bug report -- Randall Munroe (http://xkcd.com/258/)
Posts: 1177 | From: Swinging on a hammock, chatting with Bokonon | Registered: Feb 2006
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Thank you. Actually, as I mentioned, I haven't been following the thread, and I thought you guys had covered that already. Also the herbivore bit. I mean, it's right there in the text--when they get off the ark (I think it's Gen 7, but am about to be hailed off to bed by my ear so can't look it up)--at that point God says to Noah that meat is on the menu now. This was an addition to the specified menu for Adam (fruits etc.). We are also told that from that point on the animals would be wary of people as a general rule (sensible, if they weren't to wind up as hamburgers)
The verse you're referring to is Genesis 9:2-3, but as near as I can tell it seems to only apply to humans. There's no positive indication that all animals were herbivores before the Flood. And if that passage does apply to animals, doesn't that mean that certain animals are disobeying God's instructions by not devouring other animals?
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Re gene expression--God knows I am not a scientist, just an ordinary layman with a basic scientific education, but from that limited standpoint, I'd say no, I did NOT imagine the genes I spoke of being expressed. One set (the complement needed for the individual) would be fully functional; the rest, I hazily imagine, might (note the speculation here) MIGHT be stored away in the sex cells, one (half)set per, so that the offspring would possess traits not expressed in the parents. It would certainly make for a rather varied family group! But of course, this would be temporary, just until genetic diversity was sufficiently ... sufficient. I don't imagine it goes on today (though I wonder about exactly how Mary's chromosomes managed to come up with a male parthenogenetic offspring).
But again, this is all speculation on my part.
You might be able to specify some extra, unexpressed genes of unknown origin hiding in the female gametes, but given the difference in the process used to generate sperm (and the stuff's much more limited shelf life) I can't see the male crew of the Ark as a font of genetic diversity. An interesting corollary of this is that since all the male humans on the Ark were father and sons there should only be one Y-chromosome in humans (unless Noah wasn't really the father of all his 'sons'). Or, for that matter, all "unclean animals" should have a single, unvaried Y-chromosome for the same reason.
[ 18. May 2010, 03:56: Message edited by: Crœsos ]
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Jamat
Shipmate
# 11621
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by pjkirk:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by sanc:
Why is global flood so threatening to science while global warming, global ice age, global etc. are not?
Global flood isn't the least bit threatening to science. Science doesn't care a whit what a bunch of deluded Christians think. There is no evidence for global flooding, and science is based on evidence.
Not to mention that the mechanisms by which global warming and ice ages can happen are understood. For an actual global flood to occur to an elevation of Mt. Ararat would require nearly three times the water that exists on the planet, and to the height of Everest would require more than 4 times the water that exists on the earth.
I'm sure "science" is more than willing to entertain any theories once you can determine how this much water existed for a time, and then disappeared again, without leaving a trace of its existence.
The earth is actually 2/3 water on its surface and like a marshmellow underneatth its crust. Volcanoes and earthquakes can push up the hills and lower the trenches. Not beyond God's capability anyway.
The 'evidence' thing I find amusing since anyone finds evidence for what they want to be true and rationalisation is our great human gift.
Science, that great ediface is pretty built on theoretical constructs that we tenaciously hold on to whether the emperor turns out to have clothes or not. I don't know anything really but I believe the Bible so there was a flood that killed the mammoths and the horses and you have to admit, it neatly explains the mass graves thing.
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Jamat ..in utmost longditude, where Heaven
with Earth and ocean meets, the setting sun slowly descended, and with right aspect
Against the eastern gate of Paradise. (Milton Paradise Lost Bk iv)
Posts: 3228 | From: New Zealand | Registered: Jul 2006
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jamat:
I don't know anything really but I believe the Bible so there was a flood that killed the mammoths and the horses and you have to admit, it neatly explains the mass graves thing.
Except for why the Flood neatly sorted the creatures it buried. Why can you find rhinos and horses buried together, but no stegosaurs? It's almost as if they were buried at two different times!
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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pjkirk
Shipmate
# 10997
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jamat:
The earth is actually 2/3 water on its surface and like a marshmellow underneatth its crust.
Your point being? Mine was there's a certain amount on the earth, and it's nowhere near enough to land an ark on Ararat.
quote:
Volcanoes and earthquakes can push up the hills and lower the trenches.
Note that these kinds of things leave lots and lots of clues behind. I'm very curious also then why, if the flood was remembered long enough to write down, why the rest of it wasn't worth a mention?
quote:
The 'evidence' thing I find amusing since anyone finds evidence for what they want to be true and rationalisation is our great human gift.
The "evidence" is all planted/fake/a lie! Oh noes!
Please - can you be less boring with your "trump cards"?
![[Snore]](graemlins/snore.gif)
quote:
I don't know anything really but I believe the Bible so there was a flood that killed the mammoths and the horses and you have to admit, it neatly explains the mass graves thing.
Except for the non-global nature of them, the wrong timing, and vastly different timing between them. Yeah...neatly explains a lot of stuff
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Dear God, I would like to file a bug report -- Randall Munroe (http://xkcd.com/258/)
Posts: 1177 | From: Swinging on a hammock, chatting with Bokonon | Registered: Feb 2006
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jamat:
The 'evidence' thing I find amusing since anyone finds evidence for what they want to be true and rationalisation is our great human gift.
This is solipsistic. Yes, we can sift evidence, yes some evidence is actually better than other, and no, there is no evidence for a global flood. But to deny that there is actually evidence for the scientific model is sheer wilful self-imposed ignorance.
quote:
Science, that great ediface is pretty built on theoretical constructs that we tenaciously hold on to whether the emperor turns out to have clothes or not.
This is patent nonsense. There have been myriad paradigm shifts in vitually all the sciences. Unless you mean by "theoretical constructs" that we can learn about the world by observing it, or that the behaviour of time and matter and energy in the past was a lot like today (at least in the time the Earth's been around), or that conclusions based on repeated observations, testable models, and verifiable (or at least falsifiable) theories produce (relatively) trustable conclusions. Then, yeah, they underlay science (well I've probably mangled them but one of our scientists can fix that). But there is no evidence that would support a naked emperor.
quote:
I don't know anything really but I believe the Bible so there was a flood that killed the mammoths and the horses and you have to admit, it neatly explains the mass graves thing.
So do giant flying bats carrying buckets of quicksand and dumping them on innocent and unsuspecting earthbound animals at the behest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's younger brother Ziti. Actually that explains it better because the bats can easily be construed to work at different periods in the Earth's history, whereas the "evidence" for a global flood supposes that various fossil beds happened at the same time, which is refuted by the actual evidence.
Oh wait, evidence doesn't count.
[ 18. May 2010, 04:18: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
Somebody asked what they did with all the crap.
Best answer I heard was to the effect that they shovelled it overboard where it fell with an alimghty PLOP and there it remained until Christopher Columbus discovered it in 1492.
Posts: 1914 | From: from the abyss of misunderstanding | Registered: Mar 2010
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Liopleurodon
Mighty sea creature
# 4836
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Posted
The trouble is that creationists/flood believers will dismiss science by holding it to standards that they themselves don't feel any need to reach.
What's more, when scientists look at some evidence and see that it confirms what they thought before, creationists say they're "holding on to dogma." When scientists look at evidence and revise their thinking, creationists say "Look! They got it wrong! What else have they got wrong? How about EVERYTHING?" When scientists don't agree on what the evidence shows, creationists say "Look how they're all fighting amongst themselves! They can't even agree with each other!" There is literally nothing that a scientist can do which is not taken by creationists to reinforce their point of view.
And all of this fuss is generally over the tiniest of details, so that a minor disagreement about one fossil will be presented as a refutation of evolution as a whole. In the meantime explanations for which there is no evidence (such as 'extra DNA') are brought in on an ad hoc basis. Big glaring issues such as why the animals are neatly sorted into layers and only found in certain bits of the world are ignored. Anyone going to give an explanation for that?
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Our God is an awesome God. Much better than that ridiculous God that Desert Bluffs has. - Welcome to Night Vale
Posts: 1921 | From: Lurking under the ship | Registered: Aug 2003
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
How kind of you, Shamwari.
Re the gametes (and a few other things)--
It might help to keep in mind that what I'm daydreaming about is NOT the kind of process you'd see today. I have no doubt that if we tried to re-enact the whole thing on human terms and efforts, we'd seriously (probably fatally) screw up everything.
To be crude about it, I'm wondering if some of those ladies, in particular, came with more than the usual limited assortment of eggs. And the men--I realize that sperm is produced throughout life, yes, but the cells at the back of the whole complicated process--need they all have had exactly the same genetic range? They would today, of course, and under any normal circumstances in the past. But if God was in fact shepherding this whole process through, there are likely to be abnormalities. I'm simply suggesting this is one possibility.
Really, it amounts to nothing more than speculating that God used the human beings--AND the forerunner animals--as individual living gene banks. So instead of the hypercooled technowizardry full of gametes we might employ in a modern Noah's ark, he used living beings. And proceeded to offload the formerly dormant genetic material (which must have varied greatly) in each succeeding offspring.
For that matter, there's no reason to suppose the offloading took place in a single generation. Perhaps daughter 1 got a tenth of the gene bank (all still dormant except what she needed to be herself), daughter 2 another (possibly overlapping) tenth, and so forth. Sons slightly different after their own processes.
Speculation. But interesting, at least to me.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
It might help to keep in mind that what I'm daydreaming about is NOT the kind of process you'd see today.
...
Speculation. But interesting, at least to me.
And, of course, if you're speculating about processes radically different from those observed today we're back in the realm of "God changed the way the universe works, and left no sign that he'd done so". Which is a logically consistent position. It's just not amenable to any sort of scientific analysis. It could be amenable to questions like "what does it say about God that He did that?" and you need to decide whether you like the idea of a God who made things look radically different from how they actually are - ie: if God created all things in 6 days within the last 10000 years, and at one point destroyed everything except a handful of people and animals, why does all the evidence indicate beyond all reasonable doubt that the earth is billions of years old and there was no global flood? Is there any answer to that except God deliberately set out to deceive us?
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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
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Petaflop
Shipmate
# 9804
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
It would actually need to be a very substantial agitation. Yes, the ocean trenches are deep, but it's still a relatively small proportion of the earths water in them. Even to raise the ocean surface by 1km, not enough to cover all the mountains but enough to effectively innundate most of the places people live, would take an upheaval of the sort that lifts the ocean floor by a feww hundred metres, and then a second upheaval of equal magnitude to put them back in their place. Certainly something that would leave an undeniable record in the geology of the earth.
Of course one can't discount the possibility that the Flood occured by the miraculous intervention of God suspending the normal way things happen. He could have created the water from nothing, and uncreated it afterwards.
And, in fact, the Bible tells us exactly what he did. He opened the windows of heaven Genesis 7:11 to let the water in. Heaven was the name given by God to the metal dome of the sky Genesis 1:8, on which the stars are mounted, up to which the birds can fly, and to which the tower of Babel aimed to reach (also Genesis), and above which were storerooms for the snow (Job).
This is the Hebrew cosmology, you can find more of it in other early writings, e.g. Enoch, which describes the holes in the dome through which the sun and moon enter.
So why, if the flood is literally true, are the dome and the windows and the store rooms and the holes not also literally true? There seems to be a slightly inconsistent hermeneutic concerning the different parts of the narrative here.
Posts: 650 | Registered: Jul 2005
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fletcher christian
Mutinous Seadog
# 13919
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Posted
you mean the earth isn't flat?
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'God is love insaturable, love impossible to describe'
Staretz Silouan
Posts: 5235 | From: a prefecture | Registered: Jul 2008
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Petaflop
Shipmate
# 9804
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jamat:
Science, that great ediface is pretty built on theoretical constructs that we tenaciously hold on to whether the emperor turns out to have clothes or not.
Now that is an important observation. So the question is, what is the emperor wearing?
You are right about theoretical constructs - science is based on chains inference (or at least pretty much everyone except Popper holds that it is). Let's take an example.
How do we know how far away the stars are? Well, we start by measuring the distance to Venus by bouncing a radar signal off of it. Then we compare the orbital period of Venus and Earth, giving us a ratio for their orbital radii. Combine that with the distance, and we get the size of the Earth's orbit. That's our first ruler.
Then we observe that some starts move back and forth slightly over the course of the year wheras others stay still. Look out a window and move your head back and forth - distant things stay still, but closer things move relative to them - the closer the more. You can work out what is happening by drawing a picture. From the size of the movement you can tell the distance, if you know how far your head is moving. So, given we know the size of Earth's orbit, we can get distance estimates to nearby stars (those that move) by comparing their positions to very distant ones (those that don't).
Than only works out to about 1000 light years, after that the movements are too small. But looking at the nearby stars and comparing their distances, colours and brightnesses we find a pattern: stars with similar spectra (colours) tend to have the same range of brightnesses. If we assume distant starts follow the same pattern, we can estimate how bright the star is from its colour, and so how far away it is from how bright it appears to be.
So we've constructed this big ladder of assumptions, estimates and theories which give us distances to a whole load of stars. It's a big, fragile mess of data and hypotheses. If it ended there, we'd have some estimate of distances and some theories about how stars work, but it would all be a bit dubious.
Fortunately, it doesn't stop there. You build the edifice, a step at a time, a suddenly you get to a point where you can do a new experiment to test it. So for example, you come across a globular cluster and can use dynamic parallax to get an absolute distance measure. Or Cephid variables, or pulsars, or eclipsing binaries, or simply drawing a map of the galaxy and spotting that it comes out the same shape as the distant galaxies we see.
Suddenly, you find an experiment you can do, which can test your tower of assumptions. The more assumptions you've stacked up, the more likely something is to be wrong, and the easier it is to break the whole thing. But similarly, the more fragile the stack, the more convincing it looks when you do an experiment and find out that it was in fact spot on. Which is what happened with the cosmic distance ladder.
So coming back to the start, science is a big edifice of theories and hypotheses, but also of data and measurements. The property of data is that it breaks theories. Data is really good at smashing theories. When I started out as a scientist, I reckon that 90% of the ideas I had were wrong. How do I know? Because when I tried them out, they got broken by the data. The ones that survive are the ones that didn't break.
And most branches of science today are swamped in data - terabytes, petabytes, exabytes depending on the field.
And so are you. You're using a computer right? So it's got a CPU with several hundred million transistors, of which probably a million switch each clock cycle, and there are a billion clock cycles per second. So that is 10^15 transistors switching every second. Each of those is a little experiment, a test of one of the weirdest and yet most wide reaching theories in science: quantum mechanics. For you to have read this message probably involved 10^20 little QM experiments, and for your computer to have worked, they must pretty much all have turned out the way the theories say they should. Well done - in reading this message, you've done some convincing science!
Posts: 650 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Liopleurodon
Mighty sea creature
# 4836
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Posted
Jamat, If science is as rubbish and biased and unfounded in fact as you seem to think, it does work remarkably well. Science has enabled you to turn the lights on, use a computer or a car, fly to another country and enjoy a vastly increased life expectancy compared with your ancestors. This all stems from a pretty straightforward process of observing stuff, making predictions, seeing if these predictions bear out in reality and then revising ideas and starting again from the top, and yet it's done all of this. To be honest, I find that pretty damn impressive.
Posts: 1921 | From: Lurking under the ship | Registered: Aug 2003
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Petaflop:
quote:
Originally posted by Jamat:
Science, that great ediface is pretty built on theoretical constructs that we tenaciously hold on to whether the emperor turns out to have clothes or not.
Now that is an important observation. So the question is, what is the emperor wearing?
You are right about theoretical constructs - science is based on chains inference (or at least pretty much everyone except Popper holds that it is).
I'm not sure why you feel the need to drag poor Karl Popper's name through the mud. There is also a fair bit more to science than 'chains of inference', which is something Popper (and countless other philosophers of science and practising scientists before and since realised).
In the earliest days of modern science there was an idea that science should proceed by purely inductive reasoning based on empirical evidence. That you could measure the brightness, spectral characteristics and distance to nearby stars and determine a universal law linking these properties. I'm not sure if that's what your example was trying to show. Pure inductive reasoning didn't stay in fashion long, because of several weaknesses. The biggest being it just describes the data, it doesn't provide any insight into why stars with similar spectral characteristics have similar brightnesses.
So, inductive reasoning was replaced by hypothesis statement and testing. You come up with an idea that would explain a given phenomenum (eg: stars with similar spectral characteristics have similar brightnesses because of the interaction between gravity and nuclear fusion, and the proportion of different elements in stars as they age), and you devise tests (further observations) to verify your theory.
Initially, positivism was popular. You make a prediction, if it works then your theory is verified. It was, however, soon realised that you could never rule out the possibility that tomorrow you'd make another new observation that didn't fit your theory. Also, with any finite data set there can always be more than one theory that explains the data. So, positivism fell out of fashion too.
Popper came along and took up the growing idea that if you can't prove a theory true, you could at least prove it false. Which has come to be known as Falsificationism, and often attributed to Popper (though, it predates him a bit, and he quickly saw the flaw in it). The big flaw, as Popper pointed out, is that you can't falsify a theory any more than you can prove it. A statement that "this theory is false" is also potentially false! Which means that falsification can't be done on the basis of single anomalous observations, but on a body of data that fail to fit a theory.
Popper went on to describe science as a construction on a swamp, with foundation piles driven deep into the swamp but never quite reaching the bedrock of empirical truth. But, despite the not 100% secure foundations, the whole edifice is sufficiently sturder to enable constructive progress in building the structure of scientific advance on top. There are times when we manage to drive those foundation piles a wee bit deeper. Popper also recognised that at times foundations are shown to be rotten and are abandoned in favour of newer, stronger and deeper foundations. Later, Kuhn would use the same idea and call it a paradigm shift.
So, in a sense, Jamat is correct in describing science as an edifice built on theoretical constructs (with the additional comment that 'theory' in science also includes a considerable body of observational data in support of it ... we would use 'hypothesis' or 'conjecture' for something with less observational support). And, he'd even be right in saying those theoretical constructs are less than 100% certain. As Kuhn recognised, scientists (being human) will cling to the known long after the evidence suggests they need to change. But, when the evidence is compelling, science does change. It just takes a lot of evidence to convince anyone that what's been long established as a reasonable foundation is wrong.
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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
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NJA
Shipmate
# 13022
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
They spelt mutton wrongly
(or is it: they spelled mutton wrong?)
Wrong.
Have you considered a career in teaching?
Posts: 1283 | From: near London | Registered: Sep 2007
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
It might help to keep in mind that what I'm daydreaming about is NOT the kind of process you'd see today.
...
Speculation. But interesting, at least to me.
And, of course, if you're speculating about processes radically different from those observed today we're back in the realm of "God changed the way the universe works, and left no sign that he'd done so". Which is a logically consistent position. It's just not amenable to any sort of scientific analysis. It could be amenable to questions like "what does it say about God that He did that?" and you need to decide whether you like the idea of a God who made things look radically different from how they actually are - ie: if God created all things in 6 days within the last 10000 years, and at one point destroyed everything except a handful of people and animals, why does all the evidence indicate beyond all reasonable doubt that the earth is billions of years old and there was no global flood? Is there any answer to that except God deliberately set out to deceive us?
Actually, there is an answer to that.
But before I start yaffling about it, I need to say that I don't hold to all the YEC things that you folks probably assume I do. I know, for instance, that the Hebrew phrase "was the father of" can just as easily mean "was the ancestor of," and so I'm not one of those "add up the ages and you've got the world's age" people. I'm also aware that whatever is meant by "there was evening and there was morning, the xth day", it is likely to be a wee bit different than our concept of midnight to midnight (hey, no sun or moon yet, remember?). I would be all right with those first few days being more like ages. Which is not to say that I sign up to the "everything evolved from a single cell" model either.
Okay, time to yaffle.
I'm coming at this from a literary standpoint, as you've all heard me going on about ad nauseum. When you write a story, you never begin at the beginning--at least, not if you're a moderately skilled writer. You begin in media res, and you have unwritten "backstory" that may or may not make its way into your book at some point. So unless you're writing Tristram Shandy, you do NOT start with your hero's conception; you start with the moment he decides to take the job, or not to jump off that cliff, or looks at the pillow next to him and says "Who the hell is THAT?"
Then you spend the next several chapters gently inserting bits of necessary backstory into the ongoing present time flow of the novel. Thus you find out in conversation that your hero's father has always been against him joining the army, or that the hero's love interest is standing at the bottom of the cliff trying to fix a flat, or that the hero lost his room key some weeks ago and has been finding interesting visitors (never the same twice) in his bed for several days. Whatever.
Now I see God as writing a story--a very complex and wonderful story, and one that has the added interest of characters who can make their own choices. And like any creator, he has to come up with a setting. Only a dunderhead would come up with a setting where everything is so new-appearing, it even has price tags hanging off it. Where's the beauty or depth in that? Get creative, for goodness' sake. Build some backstory in, even if (in the strictest sense) that backstory "never really happened" in the main time line of the novel.
Please note: I am not suggesting that Neanderthals et al never existed, nor do I think dinosaur fossils are fake. For some ill-defined reason it seems to me that might be going a bit too far into outright deception. But I have no problem with the idea of mountains being created already uplifted, or the ocean being at least somewhat salty to begin with, or the life forms that exist having begun as something considerably more like themselves today than an amoeba.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
For that matter, there's no reason to suppose the offloading took place in a single generation. Perhaps daughter 1 got a tenth of the gene bank (all still dormant except what she needed to be herself), daughter 2 another (possibly overlapping) tenth, and so forth. Sons slightly different after their own processes.
Speculation. But interesting, at least to me.
Actually there is such a reason. If you're speculating that extra genetic code was "stored" unused in gametes (or their root cells), then you run into the problem of genetic overload if you stipulate that a whole lot of extra genes get put in someone before they've developed either gametes or their root cells. If you've got a single-celled fertilized egg with several hundred versions of the same gene with slightly different instructions for doing the same thing, how does the egg know which set to follow? Your initial proposal required re-wiring the gamete-generation process. Your suggestion of gradual unloading requires developing a whole new gestation process.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
Have I got it wrong?
I was taught that the Hebrew 'history' was written backwards.
i.e. that the formative event which constituted Israel as the 'People of God' was the covenant on Sinai.
That the story of the Patriarchs (who were tribal leaders of various clans) was added to this foundational belief.
That subsequently the story was taken back to the beginning of things by the incorporation of various accounts of 'creation' etc. (Genesis 1 - X1). The purpose of these stories was not historical but theological.
That during David's reign the traditions of each of the 12 tribes were brought into relationship with each other, an event necessitated by the fact that David had united the 12 tribes into a single nation. The Jahwist writer being responsible for this.
Following a re-writing during the Exilic period we eventually came to the position as we have it now; an edited version of many accounts / traditions.
In which case the Flood story comes into the same category as creation and the Garden of Eden. To my mind the attempt to read it as historical only gives rise to the kind of angst on this thread.
Or have I got it wrong?
Posts: 1914 | From: from the abyss of misunderstanding | Registered: Mar 2010
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Petaflop
Shipmate
# 9804
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
quote:
Originally posted by Petaflop:
Now that is an important observation. So the question is, what is the emperor wearing?
You are right about theoretical constructs - science is based on chains inference (or at least pretty much everyone except Popper holds that it is).
I'm not sure why you feel the need to drag poor Karl Popper's name through the mud.
Um, no, that wasn't supposed to be dismissive of Popper. I tend to think of a Bayesian version of falsification as a starting model for 'normal science' (as opposed to paradigm shifts, in which social factors become important too). However, I don't think Popper's claim to have 'solved the problem of induction' reflects the way science is actually done on the ground.
This is the problem with all the philosophers of science - they try to describe either 'how science is done' or 'how science should be done', and do so by examining past discoveries. They come up with different models because they make different selections.
This leaves me with a certain sympathy for Feyerbrand - that there is actually no 'scientific method'. Different 'scientific methods' have been applied in different cases. The thing they seem to have in common is a intention to try and extract something objective from the subjectivity of the scientist.
(However, for what it is worth, Popper would have rightly criticised my last paragraph. Multiple identical experimental failures-to-falsify do not add to the weight of a theory, even in the Bayesian model. That example should have been saved for an argument for naturalism and uniformism.)
[ 19. May 2010, 10:41: Message edited by: Petaflop ]
Posts: 650 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
In which case the Flood story comes into the same category as creation and the Garden of Eden. To my mind the attempt to read it as historical only gives rise to the kind of angst on this thread.
That's right. No one could possibly have had a perspective on a literal creation story, since people weren't created until the sixth day. In which case those theoretical people would have had to have been told the story by God.
And then you have thousands of years before anyone was able to write it down. Even the best oral traditions couldn't be accurate for that long.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Actually, I believe I was suggesting a form of chimaerism. (I vaguely recall reading a medical report on such a case sometime in the past couple years--the chimaerism centered around the woman's eggs rather than being widespread throughout her body, and resulted in her bearing a child whose bloodtype was "impossible" for her to be the mother of. Investigating that was how they discovered the chimaerism.)
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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fletcher christian
Mutinous Seadog
# 13919
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Posted
ok, ok, maybe I lost the plot somewhere along the line of this thread, but are folk like Lamb Chopped really saying the flood could have happened, or are you playing devil's advocate?
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'God is love insaturable, love impossible to describe'
Staretz Silouan
Posts: 5235 | From: a prefecture | Registered: Jul 2008
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Alan Cresswell
Mad Scientist 先生
# 31
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Petaflop:
I tend to think of a Bayesian version of falsification as a starting model for 'normal science' (as opposed to paradigm shifts, in which social factors become important too). However, I don't think Popper's claim to have 'solved the problem of induction' reflects the way science is actually done on the ground.
I think in a sense the 'problem of induction' was solved long before Popper - to get beyond mere induction (which basically describes what's observed) to explain why things are as they are you need to postulate and test hypotheses. Popper proposed a solution to the new problems that hypothesis postulation and testing generated - namely that any finite data set can be described by multiple theories (one solution to that problem was proposed by Okham, that if all else is equal go with the simplest theory), and that no amount of positive results can prove a theory because a negative result can be produced tomorrow. Popper proposed that if you can't prove a theory true then might be able to prove it false, and suggested that a definition of a scientific theory should include tests that could in principle falsify it. Popular understanding of what Popper said tends to stop there, and indeed take the whole concept of falsification far further than Popper himself did, without recognising that Popper himself quickly realised that you can no more falsify a theory than prove it.
Personally, I think the majority of scientists tend to function with some form of critical realism approach to science. We work in relatively narrow disciplines, dependant upon theoretical constructs developed by others. We work on the assumption that those constructs are probably true, although recognise that they are less than 100% certain. We actually have no real choice, because testing each of those theoretical constructs is too labourious a task, and often well beyond our expertise and competance. And, sometimes the evidence becomes pretty compelling that actually something is seriously wrong somewhere with one or more of those theoretical constructs and it needs a major examination.
That approach is pretty much where Popper got to in describing science as a construction on a swamp. I think it's a pity that people talk about Popper as though all he said was "a good scientific theory can be proved false", when he went a good deal further than that. I quite like Kuhn too, not because paradigm shifts add very much in terms of the mechanics of how we come to question fundamental concepts but that he was so open in accepting that scientists are human and various entirely human elements come into play - including defending ones reputation and ego, herd mentalities etc.
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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
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Petaflop
Shipmate
# 9804
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
I think in a sense the 'problem of induction' was solved long before Popper - to get beyond mere induction (which basically describes what's observed) to explain why things are as they are you need to postulate and test hypotheses. Popper proposed a solution to the new problems that hypothesis postulation and testing generated - namely that any finite data set can be described by multiple theories (one solution to that problem was proposed by Okham, that if all else is equal go with the simplest theory), and that no amount of positive results can prove a theory because a negative result can be produced tomorrow. Popper proposed that if you can't prove a theory true then might be able to prove it false, and suggested that a definition of a scientific theory should include tests that could in principle falsify it. Popular understanding of what Popper said tends to stop there, and indeed take the whole concept of falsification far further than Popper himself did, without recognising that Popper himself quickly realised that you can no more falsify a theory than prove it.
Actually, I think I also want to withdraw my original parenthesis on Popper because I was conflating induction and inference.
I agree with the rest of your post, except for the problem of induction. The reasons why I don't think the problem of induction is solved by Popper of before (and that in any case it doesn't apply to what happens on the ground) are as follows:
Firstly, in order to test a hypothesis, you need to have some idea of what a severe test might be. A hypothesis will in general lead to many conclusions. Alternative hypotheses may lead to the same conclusions for some tests and differing conclusions for others. To determine what is a severe test, you therefore need to make up a 'hypothesis space' of possible hypotheses against which you are going to test your hypothesis. (This is made explicit in the Bayesian construction.)
The hypothesis space you create is in practice arbitrary and shaped by your preconceptions of the problem. As a rest, the test you come up with and your perceptions of their severity may also be biased by those preconceptions. (This is again made explicit in the criticisms of Bayesian approaches. For Bayes to work, you have to have precisely bounded areas of ignorance.)
Secondly, following Kuhn's argument, I think hypotheses are often accepted into the 'consensus view' having passed some initial test(s) and having some innate elegance, or even just good marketing. They then don't get tested, because they form part of the current paradigm.
All that sounds pretty pessimistic, but that science works anyway. Here's how I see it:
a) Hypotheses which are have passed some crude test and which are interesting quickly become the basis for further hypotheses. We build up chains of inference on the basis of them. As the chains of inference become longer, they become more fragile and ends span a greater volume of 'observation space'. Thus it becomes more and more likely that a later test will falsify a hypothesis. At that point, further testing may mean that multiple links in the chain get re-evaluated, and an earlier broken link may be falsified and alternative hypotheses explored.
b) Kuhn's paradigm shifts occur because a link deep in a chain of inference needs replacing. As a result, paradigm shifts come in a continuum of scales on the basis of how deep the link was.
I guess you could call that a sort of Popper-Bayes-Kuhn hybrid.
Now, if I were a science historian I'd roll out some case studies to support my model, but I'm not. And actually I guess what actually goes on probably varies a great deal from field to field depending on how heavy theories are, how broad their predictions, and how costly the predictions are to test.
Posts: 650 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Actually, I believe I was suggesting a form of chimaerism. (I vaguely recall reading a medical report on such a case sometime in the past couple years--the chimaerism centered around the woman's eggs rather than being widespread throughout her body, and resulted in her bearing a child whose bloodtype was "impossible" for her to be the mother of. Investigating that was how they discovered the chimaerism.)
I got the whole germline chimerism angle of your proposal, and it's at least theoretically possible. However, you then suggested that "there's no reason to suppose the offloading took place in a single generation", which would suggest some sort of heritable version of chimerism. This doesn't sound like any version of chimerism I've ever heard of, but then I'm not a life scientist.
At any rate, this "gradual offloading" refinement of your original hypothesis seems to call for divine intervention at so many different points that it would be simpler to just assume that God just directly changed whatever genes He felt needed greater diversity. Sort of the genetic equivalent of the Tower of Babel.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
Croesos, did I not tell you that I am not a scientist? And did I not call it speculation?
If I MUST go on elaborating in order to make an even bigger fool of myself to please you, I'd suggest that generation A had a certain amount of variability in the eggs/sperm forming cells, possibly through an un-heard-of degree of specialized chimaerism; generation B were also chimaerae, though of a considerably less degree than their parents, and that this occurred through the mechanisms that chimaerism typically occurs today (IIRC, through the "sticking together" of gametes/fertilized ova/whatsit (not a scientist, remember?) which creates a single individual with more than one genetic code; that the third generation in turn were chimaeric, but to a lesser degree than either gens 1 or 2, and so forth, until the total unpacked genetic variability of the population was such that chimaerism was no longer useful. At which point it reverted to being an occasional occurrence and curiosity.
And yes, of course I could say "Godidit" and be done. But I do have a mind, and I assume God intends me to use it. Mental laziness is not a virtue.
You might consider that the only difference between you and someone like me is that I am working with what I in good faith believe to be an extra set of data. I cannot simply toss it out on a whim, anymore than I can toss the fossil record out. That would indeed be mental laziness.
If the two sets of data fail to make immediate coordinated sense with each other, I need to a) re-examine both sets (and I do--do you seriously think all Christians just swallow whatever we're told whole without consideration?), b) keep both sets of data and the inferences drawn from each in a state of "I don't know yet, let's wait and find out" (what Keats calls "negative capability"), and c) continue to explore (even through speculation, when that's the best on offer at the moment) any possible connections between the two data sets.
I do realize that you consider one of my data sets to be complete hooey; that's your privilege. I'm not forcing it on you. But there's no reason to sneer at me for hanging on to it when I have not yet been intellectually convinced that it is worthless.
I happen to be convinced that certain researchers have data sets that are hooey, and are therefore finding mares' nests; but that doesn't entitle me to sneer at them unless I can bring positive proof of intellectual dishonesty. There are such things as mistakes, skewed data, sample errors, and even honest disagreements.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Myrrh
Shipmate
# 11483
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Posted
quote:
History of ClimateThe sudden rise at the left side of the plot, at about 9,000 BCE (i.e. 11,000 years ago), was the end of the last ice age. The abruptness of the termination is startling. Agriculture, and all of our civilization, developed since this termination. The enormous glacier, several kilometers thick, covering much of North America and Eurasia, rapidly melted. Only small parts of this glacier survived, in Greenland and Antarctica, where they exist to this day. The melting caused a series of worldwide floods unlike anything previously experienced by Homo sapiens. (There had been a previous flood at about 120 kyr, but that was before Homo sapiens had moved to Europe or North America.) The flood dumped enough water into the oceans to cause the average sea level to rise 110 meters, enough to inundate the coastal areas, and to cover the Bering Isthmus, and turn it into the Bering Strait. The water from melting ice probably flooded down over land in pulses, as ice-dammed lakes formed and then catastrophically released their water. These floods left many records, including remnant puddles now known as the Great Lakes, and possibly gave rise to legends that persisted for many years. As the glacier retreated, it left a piles of debris at its extremum. One such pile is now known as New York’s Long Island.[/url]
wiki, etc. - and a large part of what is today the North Sea was dry land connecting Jutland with Britain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period
Shrug, where else would all that ice melt go but to cover the earth? How couldn't it have been world-wide? 360 ft rise is a lot of water.
What is the North Sea now was mostly dry land 10,000 years ago, that's when and how Britain and Ireland became islands.
Myrrh
Posts: 4467 | Registered: Jun 2006
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pjkirk
Shipmate
# 10997
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Posted
And Myrrh returns, in full force
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Dear God, I would like to file a bug report -- Randall Munroe (http://xkcd.com/258/)
Posts: 1177 | From: Swinging on a hammock, chatting with Bokonon | Registered: Feb 2006
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John Holding
Coffee and Cognac
# 158
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Posted
If that Wiki article is correct, North America and NOrthern Europe were once covered by glaciers thicker than Mount Everest is high? Several kilometres?
I think whoever was editing that entry needs professional help.
John
Posts: 5929 | From: Ottawa, Canada | Registered: May 2001
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Dave W.
Shipmate
# 8765
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Posted
That depends on how you interpret "several". Britannica says the Laurentide ice sheet had a thickness of 2.4-3 km or more in places; Everest is 8.8 km.
Posts: 2059 | From: the hub of the solar system | Registered: Nov 2004
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Myrrh
Shipmate
# 11483
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Posted
But.. the Himalayas were not so high 10,000 years ago..
quote:
Interestingly, a vast shallow sea, the Tethys, existed where the Himalaya stands today. The submerged landmasses on either side started pushing towards each other, giving birth to these mountains. This was a relatively recent occurrence in the geographical time frame, so the Himalaya is considered a young and fragile land formation. Scientists speculate that the whole process took five to seven million years. Fossil finds at heights of over 8,000 metres (26,000 feet) support these theories. The Himalaya has risen about 2,000 metres (6,600 feet) in the past 20,000 years and continues to rise at the rate of 7.5 to 10 centimetres (3-4 inches) a year. travel-himalayas
I wonder how much effect the rebounding of land mass has contributed to this rise since the beginning of the Holocene as the miles deep ice melted over Asia?
Anyway, my point in bringing this up was to bring in what science we have to date re global flooding. It existed, and it existed comparatively recently. Certainly in the memory of survivors who passed it down to us in stories which are the generally garbled versions we have now. I'm sure the creative powers of posters here could produce the equal of Gilgamesh.
And then there's the Sarasvati which came and went during this period, once the greatest river in India according to the Rig Veda.
the ancient river lost in the desert
Myrrh
Posts: 4467 | Registered: Jun 2006
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
People have existed for less than 2 million years. The Himalayas were raised 7-8 million years ago. If there was a global flood in which people were saved by boat, it would have to have been after the Himalayas were raised. So much for saving water.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
People have existed for less than 2 million years. The Himalayas were raised 7-8 million years ago. If there was a global flood in which people were saved by boat, it would have to have been after the Himalayas were raised. So much for saving water.
Okay, I read wrong. Sosumi.
But let's look at the numbers. Say the process took 5 million years, which makes the rate of rise faster not slower (you will see why this is important in a moment). Also say that the rise started at sea level (which is very generous I'm sure you'll agree). Everest is 8850m tall. Assuming a steady rate of rise (tectonic plates don't generally accelerate much that we know of), this means a rise of about 0.00177 metres per year. This means that 10,000 years ago, Everest was 8832.3 metres tall.
The problem of where the water came from and went to is, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same.
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Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Myrrh
Shipmate
# 11483
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Posted
quote:
the first Greek lawmaker and statesman Solon had recently - c. 560 BCE at Sais, a cosmopolitan city of north-east Nile delta - conferred with the Egyptian priest Sonchis.
This was what Sonchis and his scholars told Solon:-
"O Solon, you [Greeks] are all young in your minds which hold no store of old belief based on long tradition, no knowledge hoary with age"
"The reason is this. There have been, and will be hereafter, many and diverse destructions of mankind, the greatest by fire and water, though other lesser ones are due to countless other causes"
Scroll down to bottom of page to continue
I think the problem we have with this subject is scattered knowledge, who now in Egypt has the knowledge Sonchis was so sure of because kept in his temples? (But it wasn't a global natural catastrophe which did for the temples..)
How can anyone not be awestruck by the thought that thousands of years ago in India they were calculating creation in billions of years?
One outbreath of Brahma is around 4.2 billion years, corresponding to the beginning of our solar system for example - followed of course by the same time to its destruction, when, as we now know, our sun will die around about then.
There's a fairly standard conflict evident in this argument, between the 'scientific' and the 'religious', but it's more interesting than that. Dogmatic bad science is just as distracting as dogmatic bad religion when it comes to unravelling our history, and attempting to see our future..
Myrrh
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