Did the Flood Really Happen?

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The Bible is clear on the matter. Just Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives. No more. But the Bible is (as a statement of fact) total nonsense.

Since the Bible is nonsense, why have a World Wide Flood (for which there is not an iota of evidence).

Give up the nonsense.

ruveyn

Well, I suppose it is good to see that some people don't waste words.


Well, right. I mean, if we are going to go non-literal in that kind of manner while defending literalism and as such it makes little sense to say "multiple Noahs".

I spend a lot of time and effort going through the hard quantitative data and trying to understand phylogenies. When some neophyte who could barely pass a high school biology class imagines he's refuted a major portion of the field with some completely BS story that barely sounds plausible even if you don't know any of the science, I tend to lose patience. It's somewhat akin to if someone was on here telling you that marginalism has been disproved.

Seriously though, do creationists believe marsupials to be a polyphyletic group? Convergent (micro)evolution just happened to produce the same strange reproductive characteristics in almost all of the mammals in one particular geographic location? Or do you believe (correctly) that they are a monophyletic group, in which case you must concede that evolution has produced quite a range of diverse species, from kangaroos to koalas to the marsupial lion?

Oh, but it has. Instead, the labor theory of value is more correct.

Which, again, comes back around to calling God a liar - He gave us a world, His creation, that tells us He did no such thing. I don't know why so many Creationists are happy with claiming that God is less reliable than Coyote or Loki...

I don't believe in it. May have been a local flood which was expanded on in mythology - I don't know.

I view the Old Testament as almost 100% mythological. The New Testament? I'm leaning towards belief. Don't ask why.

Both are best considered semi-historical. This includes the New Testament which tends to disagree with other historical counts on a number of points. This is not to say that a man known as Jesus never existed and didn't create a religious group of followers, only that much of the tale is embellishment and perhaps myth.

It's not a straw man. Most of what flood geologists put forward as evidence is bunk and it is generally not taken seriously by the scientific community. Mostly, this is because there is quite a lot of contradicting evidence as well as a lack of evidence for the mechanisms that flood geologists propose:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html#georecord.

It's a little funny that one of the arguments creationists used to put forward against macroevolution was that 'there wasn't enough time for enough mutations to happen to make the species diversify that much!' And then someone started arguing the 'kinds' theory about fitting species into the ark, and they all liked that so much that suddenly they all started claiming that evolution happens reeeeaallly fast.

Timeline please with actual names (such as William Paley, Douglas Dewar, Henry Morris, John Whitcomb, Duane Gish, Arthur Wilder-Smith, John Baumgardner, Russell Humphrey's, Wayne Friar, Kurt Wise, et al.) and what they individually propounded.

The straw man that you presented is this, "As ruveyn said, there was never enough water in the atmosphere to rain down a flood that could of covered the whole of the Earth's surface." That is not a view that is held, but rather that the continental plates shifted rapidly due to a trigger event (such as an asteroid impact) causing some of the sea basins to raise while land form sink to the sea basin, along with tsunamis and volcanic activity. That is not entirely the view held, but a short paraphrase, but it is closer than the straw man that you and ruveyn presume we think.

LKL can justify his approach within the thread itself, just by using n4mwd's own writings, and n4mwd's writings are not entirely unlike other things even found on this forum from other creationists. I believe that even you have made a similar case in this kind of issue. Now, I won't search as that is an utterly thankless task, but I won't have you attack someone's legitimate observation in such a manner.

Questions:

1. Where did all the sedimentary rock come from if there was no sediment?

2. Where does the Mid Atlantic Ridge Flood theory fail?

3. In the gulf, there is a spewing oil well that goes miles under the ocean bottom, how did all that oil get down there in the first place? It was once speculated that oil came from decomposing dinosaurs, but given that they would have been mostly water like us, and given how much oil is pumped out of the Earth every day, I'm thinking that the dinosaur theory may need revising.

4. Some people say that non-volcanic mountain ranges were cut by glaciers. If so, how come they all seem to nicely line up parallel to the mid atlantic ridge.


..

Yes I did mean creationists support Micro-evolution and not macro-evolution. Sorry for the typo.

As far as the Bible goes, yes, IF it can be proven that Genesis is false, then ALL of the Bible, including the new testament is also false. But there is no conclusive proof of macro-evolution.

I mean, somebody once told me that macro evolution had been proven because they took a bunch of fruit flies, bred them for thousands of generations, and then one day one of them, a fly that is, had a red eye and this was supposed to be a totally new species. To cover the truth, they gave them funny latin names that sounded important, but in the end, what they really had was still a fruit fly with a red eye. In reality, that experiment was no more valuable than a dog breeder breeding hundreds of brown dogs and suddenly getting one with a white spot on its head. But yet, people are hailing it as concrete proof of macro evolution.

Nor is there any proof that the flood did not occur - just questions that we don't have answers for yet.

I don't understand how that's even supposed to be a question.


Geology's not my thing, you'll have to find someone who's better informed in the subject. Google is your friend to get a basic idea of some of these concepts, though.


I don't think anyone has claimed that all our oil comes from dinosaurs. If I recall correctly, most of our coal comes from tress of the Carboniferous era, and presumably oil is derived from the combined biomass of many different organisms, not just dinosaurs.


It wasn't just the typo. Ignoring the misplaced letter, you just plain failed even to correctly parrot the already-refuted creationist line about macro versus micro. I mean, at that point you are demonstrating not only that you are ignorant of biology (otherwise you wouldn't have attempted to make that argument) but also that your reading comprehension is terrible (otherwise you wouldn't have butchered the argument so badly).


1) No, that really doesn't follow at all. There is no cogent reason why the Bible must be either absolutely 100% true or absolutely 100% false.
2) I don't see why you're even brining this up. I'm not trying to refute the Bible, or Genesis. I'm a Christian. I just happen to think that YECs don't understand what they're reading when they pick up their Bibles. Or, as evidenced in this thread, their biology textbooks or their math textbooks. Or, as evidenced plentifully elsewhere, their physics, geology, or archeology books.
3) Yes, actually, there is.


I don't know what example you're referencing, but we have watched speciation occur in the laboratory. At that point, macroevolution has occurred. Even iamnotaparakeet (and apparently yourself) accept that speciation occurs, and speciation is macroevolution.

The best evidence comes from molecular genetics and phylogenetics, but the techniques to understand either of those subjects is probably rather beyond your abilities. I can provide some links if you're interested in reading up on either.


You want proof of a negative? There is sufficient evidence to say that a global flood is completely implausible. It is inconsistent with all of our observations, and any timeline which tries to accommodate it is extremely unparsimonious.

n4wmd, I tend to agree with Orwell's earlier rude remark. I don't think you know what you are talking about. I am feeling very inconsiderate to incompetence today, so I apologize, I will not spend a lot of time to indulge your foolish fantasies, or keet's for that matter. I am sorry if this is taken as dismissive, but once again, the only real explanation for your "theory" being right has to include a secret conspiracy somewhere, and as a rule I reject conspiracy theories.

As it stands, the Bible is full of falsehood, even easily verifiable falsehood. As such, I don't see some reason to deal with people whose real drive is to maintain the faith that they had stamped into their brain at some point. I know this seems cruel, and I apologize, but I have given my response to conservative religion long ago. The idea is so wrong that it really needs to removed from the playing field just like a land-mine needs to be disarmed. There is no reason to make the gullible, emotionally weak, or any other person have to go through the foolishness you people continue to enslave yourselves to.

Even further, evolution is on the level of a fact. Just ask a biologist. An example that I've cited earlier, which was a lizard the developed a new physiological structure to allow it to be herbivorous, digestive structures to allow it to digest the leaves better, including a new muscle, and so on, certainly counts as an example of macroevolution and is not a matter of "different coloration" as you dismissively talk about. The fact that you don't understand science, and can't tell your head from your other end is your problem, and while I do try to be patient most of the time, there is no reason to try to teach someone who is an idiot of their own will.

Religion is the simplest way to teach and enforce morality on a large group of people at once. What is your ideal method of preventing amoral society and anarchy from raising their destructive heads?