Noah's Ark

[Captain Kremmen]

I say not always, because evolution templates do fit many excavations, but not all, but a flood theory fits them all, and that's where the students make their mind up.

How does the flood theory cope with the same animal fossils generally turning up in the same geological layers?
More than could be allowed for by chance?

I wonder if you can give a good straight scientific answer to this question?
Or will you try to avoid answering it?

@Fraggle
Is my punctuation correct above , or should I drop some of the question marks?

 

[Rhaedas]

I already addressed this with him. His only response that I saw was...

The layer dating works when the layers are in a certain order as found in hand drawings of an evolution publication. In reality, those layers are so mixed up that there is absolutely no consistency with them.

and

The situations vary from gentle progressive settling to mixed and violent settling, then again settling/sedimentation was only one process of many that embedded animals etc. Some animals were packed in frozen mud, others jammed into rocks. Then after the flood fossilization did not stop in swamps etc. adding more consistent factors.

So I gather that he thinks that any order found in the strata is either lies from scientists or...well, I can't see how else it would happen. Unless God made it that way later to fool the non-believers. But that's another road, and I'm assuming that most believers don't want a god who would deceive them and cover up evidence of his lesson to the wicked.

 

[sideshowbob]

Yes, and then I make my own mind up, and after that, experience and time tell how much I understood.

So, when you read Treasure Island, do you conclude that Long John Silver really existed and that the treasure they left behind is still there?

 

[Aqueous Id]

I don't believe that the bay is getting any wider. The bay is a coastal valley that was flooded when the sea level rose at the end of the last ice age. What's happening is that part of the peninsula - not all of it, and not the part on which San Francisco sits - is moving northward at an average rate of about 2"/year or something.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/earthq3/move.html

I'm not sure how folks understood this in the 50s and 60s when the TBT was purely a concept, but it seems they wanted to allow for 2-3" of creep a year for something like 100 years. There is also a slip joint where the TBT marries the SFO underground. It's got a massive damper that resembles a shock absorber, magnified perhaps 100x.

 

[Aqueous Id]

How does the flood theory cope with the same animal fossils generally turning up in the same geological layers?

I already addressed this with him. His only response that I saw was...
- and - so I gather that he thinks that any order found in the strata is either lies from scientists or...well, I can't see how else it would happen. Unless God made it that way later to fool the non-believers. But that's another road, and I'm assuming that most believers don't want a god who would deceive them and cover up evidence of his lesson to the wicked.

By magically charging a magically sequestered underground ocean with a magically cosmic quantity of kinetic energy, God is able to magically carve mountains (some pretty nice sculpting at that), the Tibetan plateau, and of course the enigmatic sculptures of Everest, McKinley, etc, which would entail the piling up of miles of rock and then slicing and carving them in his magical cosmic terra~sculpting rubber bottomed washing machine~thingy. Besides, if God were to simply utter "Sasquatch" or "Shazizzle" or really just anything that pleased him -- maybe it's "red rubber baby buggy bumpers" -- I mean who are we to judge?--- then all of that sonic utterance, I mean just the overtones, since Charleton Heston already proved God has a rich manly baritone register -- the overtones at one gazillion Pascals would act like a cosmic ultrasonic cleaner, resonating the rocks with extra cleaning power of magically turbinated water wave action. At the proper frequency the face of a cliff could be reduced to sand and gravel, then lifted a few miles and dropped down on top of Kilamanjaro or the Andes. Yay, brethren, all known sites of licentiousness like that.

With all that effluence stirred up, all the dead stuff was agitated by this magical energy, which at times sorted the plant and animal remains from A-Z, and in other layers from Z-A, and in other layers it went crazy and did random sorting and/or mixing according to whether God was uttering "Sha-" or "-zizzle". Y'all go ahead and do a frequency analysis on that and tell me that's not a scientific fact. Magical sky high water wave turbulence works wonders here on the just-for-the-hell-of-it fossil layering puzzle, you just have to have the deluxe model, which comes with the magical dial labeled "pre-sort and filter". And you already know God is a prankster, just look at the babies with spina bifida and cleft palette. It's part of being God, a branding strategy, creating the mystery, that sort of thing.

After all, what would you do in your spare time after creating the biggest bang in your whole existence, especially after all that tedium managing a trillion trillion black holes, and, as priorities do change, turning to the egregious issue of enforcing tougher laws on circumcision and the consumption of yeast among this small tribe of illiterate goatherds out in a desolate region of this speck upon a speck upon a speck on the long arm of a speck of speck of a ... well, whatever...here. Just how would you spend your time off? Even God needs a hobby. But what, you ask?

Cosmic washing machine design, obviously. That'll teach'em to grow foreskins and eat yeast.

The Bible says that when it was over, Noah got drunk and passed out. This was understandable, after all his hard work: construction of his full scale prophetic rendition of the Titanic, all in wormwood and tree sap, the global species roundup (except the ones he omitted, like T. Rex, and his low brow neighbor, Homo Erectus, who borrowed and never returned the stone axe Noah needed to cut the mizzen~capstan~thingy, etc. etc. may he rot in hell) and of course riding it out with all those smells and noises, poop-scooping the stalls, and feeding the little beasties manna day and night, that will make a guy crave a little walk on the wild side.

Of all the questions I have for Noah: Why did you save the roaches and the ants? ...Wasps? Scorpions? The Black Mamba? In my Sunday School coloring book, I just X-ed him out, usually with a curly black mustache and a few scars with stitches running across them, or an occasional swastika. Could be why I was always in time out conspiring to grow up and do radiometric dating for a living.

Anyway, after all his hard days' night Noah just wanted to hit the sauce and put his feet up. But when asked, I think Noah told God his reason for drinking so much wine was that he was thirsty but there was simply not a fresh drop of water to be found, having been contaminated by the ocean water and all that debris, no to mention about a million skunks. Drinking that swill would be way nastier than gnawing on a crust of leavened bread--so God, who can sometimes be a clean freak with a food aversion, said: "Let there not be salt on the waters that sit upon the face of the land" (Catholic version, holed up in a Vatican vault) and Ouila! Presto-chango, all the lakes and streams just magically transmuted into something else, which was neither pure water or not, and which includes the countless mud puddles, stagnant ponds, lagoons, swamps, slime heaps and peat bogs which proves once again God is more artist than scientist.

What the scientific skeptics and atheists don't quite realize is that doing all of this remodeling and cleaning up afterwards is really just about on par with managing a trillion trillion singularities. And proof of the worth of this effort is the dearth of foreskins and yeasty breads prevailing worldwide. Must be something to this, huh?

What is wrong with you science nuts? Have you no faith? Just wait, you're gonna pay. After your dead,though. That's so you can have plenty of opportunity to get into a ton of trouble during your full life. That way, there's plenty of torture for God to inflict on you downstream, since managing the universe can be ... well ... I think it is written in the Apocrypha that all work and no play makes God pretty damn mad.

Now if you people in front will please step away from the communion rail so the ushers can get through. Y'all can drop all those bills you're waving at me in the collection baskets, currently on their way up from the back rows. Amen, y'all. Remember to be good out there. God love ya.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

...The only stuff that matters is the literature of the Early Bronze Age. This covers only three cultures: the Mesopotamian/Levant (Middle East), Egypt and India. These myths correspond to local flooding of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, and the Ganges rivers.

All of the other stories which originate a thousand years later, or more, are useless to this discussion.

.

I accept the findings within these key geological areas. Local flooding does not automatically rule out a global flood many years prior.

The reason they found evidence of local flooding is because they looked for it. They have not found evidence of a global flood because they won't look for that evidence. Their whole reputation is at stake.

I find a similar declension with other investigations like how the pyramids were built, the theories of early man and so forth. Everything is minimised to fit a narrow mind set.

It won't be long before they are exposed as fraudulent, not by an outsider, but from within.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

I already addressed this with him. His only response that I saw was...

So I gather that he thinks that any order found in the strata is either lies from scientists or...well, I can't see how else it would happen. Unless God made it that way later to fool the non-believers. But that's another road, and I'm assuming that most believers don't want a god who would deceive them and cover up evidence of his lesson to the wicked.

That's pretty much it, thankyou.

There will be consistencies with those three samples from the Grand Canyon and there will be inconsistencies world wide.

A God covering up evidence? Humans are renown for not finding the obvious.

 

[arfa brane]

The reason they found evidence of local flooding is because they looked for it. They have not found evidence of a global flood because they won't look for that evidence. Their whole reputation is at stake.

What you're saying here just demonstrates that you have little idea what geologists do, or how long they've been doing it.
Modern geological science began in the 19th century; if there was any evidence of a global flood it would have been found in several locations by now.

So your claim that they "won't look" for such evidence is countered by the fact that geologists have been looking at a lot of evidence for nearly 200 years, and found precisely zero evidence for a global flood thousands or even millions of years ago.
The people who "won't look" for evidence are those who prefer to believe stories in books, who claim the Grand Canyon is only 6000 years old and who have to cast aside two centuries of geological science and investigation to retain their belief rather than let facts get in their way.

So this:

There will be consistencies with those three samples from the Grand Canyon and there will be inconsistencies world wide.

... is nothing but your opinion, since you seem to have next to no understanding of geology. But I bet the story makes you feel safer, right?
But why should anyone else do that, just because you and a group you identify with think it's some kind of "answer". Do you even understand what the question is?

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

So, when you read Treasure Island, do you conclude that Long John Silver really existed and that the treasure they left behind is still there?

I'd discuss it with the author.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

What you're saying here just demonstrates that you have little idea what geologists do, or how long they've been doing it.
...So your claim that they "won't look" for such evidence is countered by the fact that geologists have been looking at a lot of evidence for nearly 200 years, and found precisely zero evidence for a global flood thousands or even millions of years ago.
...So this: ... is nothing but your opinion, since you seem to have next to no understanding of geology. But I bet the story makes you feel safer, right?
But why should anyone else do that, just because you and a group you identify with think it's some kind of "answer". Do you even understand what the question is?

Would you expect me to communicate something which is not my opinion?

By the way, I have never come across a university publication where the writer tried to prove the flood right. He would not graduate if he did.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

By magically charging a magically sequestered underground ocean with a magically cosmic quantity of kinetic energy, God is able to magically carve mountains (some pretty nice sculpting at that), the Tibetan plateau, and of course the enigmatic sculptures of Everest, ... After your dead,though. That's so you can have plenty of opportunity to get into a ton of trouble during your full life. That way, there's plenty of torture for God to inflict on you downstream, since managing the universe can be ... well ... I think it is written in the Apocrypha that all work and no play makes God pretty damn mad.

Now if you people in front will please step away from the communion rail so the ushers can get through. Y'all can drop all those bills you're waving at me in the collection baskets, currently on their way up from the back rows. Amen, y'all. Remember to be good out there. God love ya.

I don't know what circumstances shaped your life and views, but going by what religions do to people, I would react the same way as you.

You are quite comical, but there is nothing funny about what would cause you to say these things...

In religions there is a typical miscarriage of ordinary human justice, through misrepresentation of the character of God and the terms of relating.

Unspoken agendas, insinuations of guilt, conformities and meaningless rituals,

What happened to the rights of an individual to make contact with God through the measure of faith issued to them before birth?

No one can claim a clean life record. And a false concept of God is certainly a cause.

 

[arfa brane]

By the way, I have never come across a university publication where the writer tried to prove the flood right. He would not graduate if he did.

Why is that, do you suppose?
Not because they would be proposing a theory that has no evidence to support it?
So they would need to write a pretty convincing storyline; however, it wouldn't be published because of the lack of facts (recall that no evidence whatsoever has been found in ~200 years of geological searches, and flood evidence is quite well understood nowadays, so it's highly unlikely it's been missed somehow).

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Why is that, do you suppose?
Not because they would be proposing a theory that has no evidence to support it?
So they would need to write a pretty convincing storyline; however, it wouldn't be published because of the lack of facts (recall that no evidence whatsoever has been found in ~200 years of geological searches, and flood evidence is quite well understood nowadays, so it's highly unlikely it's been missed somehow).

I think that's a fair statement from how it looks from there... at the moment... because it's changing as we speak.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

A correction to some remarks.
There is evidence of a flood in the Mediterranean region.
The topography and geology of the area are much affected by a whole series of catastrophic floods,
but none of them are within the very recent advent of human beings.

A catastrophic flood refilled the Mediterranean Sea 5.3 million years ago, at the beginning of the Zanclean age that ended the Messinian salinity crisis. The flood occurred when Atlantic waters found their way through the Strait of Gibraltar into the desiccated Mediterranean basin, following the Messinian salinity crisis during which it repeatedly became dry and re-flooded, dated by general consensus to before the emergence of modern humans.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbur...Mediterranean_Sea_.285.3_million_years_ago.29

 

[Aqueous Id]

I accept the findings within these key geological areas. Local flooding does not automatically rule out a global flood many years prior.

This is called confirmation bias. You are ignoring the fact the myth arose in Iraq, not in Canaan. It arose in the land of Ur, where you think Abraham originated. The myth arose at the dawn of writing in Iraq. This is your cradle of civilization that you call Eden. Ur, Uruk - where God was Marduk, patron of Babylon, who slew a She-monster, Tiamat, and strew her dragon body parts across the sky to create the Milky Way.

Babylon, home of Hammurabi, who was the first to write "eye for eye, tooth for tooth", some 1,600 years before any extant Hebrew text.

This is when your sacred text began to take root . . . in Iraq.

The reason they found evidence of local flooding is because they looked for it.

Baloney. They were looking for ancient sites like Ur and Nineveh. The evidence I gave you shows that wherever you dig, if there were evidence, it would be found.

In the examples I gave you, they discovered the layers by accident. The extent of flooding was massive. You may be confusing this with the Creationist who went there and dug until he found some clay and then proclaimed that the whole area had been submerged. It's not. He was just lying, like all pseudo-scientists do.

Local flooding does not automatically rule out a global flood many years prior.

No, what rules it out is that it's a myth. However, geological evidence shows there never was a global flood in the human era. The more elaborate mega-wave/rubber-earth scheme you're propounding here is contradicted by massive natural evidence that refutes it.

They have not found evidence of a global flood because they won't look for that evidence. Their whole reputation is at stake.

So far you're the only person not looking for evidence. From my vantage point, everyone else has their sleeves rolled up and is knee deep in dirt and data. You can go get what they've been digging up at your local museums and libraries, at any university, at Google, Wikipedia and just about anywhere you look for it.

I find a similar declension with other investigations like how the pyramids were built,

That's nuts. Which pyramids? There are many. You mean Egyptian? Go ahead and read about it. Can you Google? (I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic.)

the theories of early man and so forth.

I understand your aversion to reading science, but you sound like you've never been to a museum.

She's not a man, but Ardipithecus is definitely early:

Everything is minimised to fit a narrow mind set.

In the Creationist this is true. Just about everyone else is curious. Students and scholars all over the world are researching science at this very moment, with that broad mind that studies, defines, tests -- and actually learns -- what the state of the science is. You should try it sometime.

I do recognize, of course, that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

It won't be long before they are exposed as fraudulent, not by an outsider, but from within.

Too late. The cat's out of the bag. It's just a myth, all the evidence is available at your fingertips to discover for yourself. All you've got to do is belly up to the bar and put your money where your mouth is. Of course it's free, so all it will cost is a little time and, in your case, a lot of effort.

I still say: just start reading geology. Until you do, all you will able to say about the Earth's natural history amounts to nonsense.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

This is called confirmation bias. You are ignoring the fact the myth arose in Iraq, not in Canaan. It arose in the land of Ur, where you think Abraham originated. The myth arose at the dawn of writing in Iraq. This is your cradle of civilization that you call Eden. Ur, Uruk - where God was Marduk, patron of Babylon, who slew a She-monster, Tiamat, and strew her dragon body parts across the sky to create the Milky Way.

Babylon, home of Hammurabi, who was the first to write "eye for eye, tooth for tooth", some 1,600 years before any extant Hebrew text.

This is when your sacred text began to take root . . . in Iraq.

Baloney. They were looking for ancient sites like Ur and Nineveh. The evidence I gave you shows that wherever you dig, if there were evidence, it would be found.

In the examples I gave you, they discovered the layers by accident. The extent of flooding was massive. You may be confusing this with the Creationist who went there and dug until he found some clay and then proclaimed that the whole area had been submerged. It's not. He was just lying, like all pseudo-scientists do.

No, what rules it out is that it's a myth. However, geological evidence shows there never was a global flood in the human era. The more elaborate mega-wave/rubber-earth scheme you're propounding here is contradicted by massive natural evidence that refutes it.

So far you're the only person not looking for evidence. From my vantage point, everyone else has their sleeves rolled up and is knee deep in dirt and data. You can go get what they've been digging up at your local museums and libraries, at any university, at Google, Wikipedia and just about anywhere you look for it.


That's nuts. Which pyramids? There are many. You mean Egyptian? Go ahead and read about it. Can you Google? (I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic.)


I understand your aversion to reading science, but you sound like you've never been to a museum.

She's not a man, but Ardipithecus is definitely early:

In the Creationist this is true. Just about everyone else is curious. Students and scholars all over the world are researching science at this very moment, with that broad mind that studies, defines, tests -- and actually learns -- what the state of the science is. You should try it sometime.

I do recognize, of course, that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.


Too late. The cat's out of the bag. It's just a myth, all the evidence is available at your fingertips to discover for yourself. All you've got to do is belly up to the bar and put your money where your mouth is. Of course it's free, so all it will cost is a little time and, in your case, a lot of effort.

I still say: just start reading geology. Until you do, all you will able to say about the Earth's natural history amounts to nonsense.

The flood story began before Iraq, and before Israel, just after the flood, by the desendants of Noah, at the base of Mt Ararat.

By the way, I have been thinking about the layers in the earth, and how they made an orderly preservation in the Grand Canyon samples, of all the various stages in life forms, in each respective layer.

It is very interesting that only fossils of fully formed creatures were found in each successive layer, the same creatures as today, except for most of the dinasours.

Each after their kind, there are no inbetween creatures that prove any gradual developments, no "Ignoramus" creatures can be found, and they have not changed to date, except in species and size.

How do you explain that?

And I am grateful for your interesting posts, you bring a lot of info to view, and you have a thorough approach. And I appreciate your recommendations with education in geology etc.

It seems like I am uninitiated with geological sciences, but I am aware of all the arguments put forward in this thread so far, and knew most of them in High school and Uni.

 

[Rhaedas]

1) Not sure what you mean by "fully formed". Full fossils are actually quite rare, as fossilization requires almost perfect conditions to preserve the characteristics, both in the death, protection from scavengers and other forces, and then the actual fossilization process. Actually, if it was just a matter of them getting swept up and buried like you think they were, we'd likely find a lot more than we do.

2) "Same creatures of today" - You account for dinosaurs, but you might want to research the thousands(millions?) of other species we've found that don't exist today. Aside from the many, many dinosaurs, we don't find mammals, insects, amphibians, plants, arthropods...there's a lot. And how could you have nor forgotten the trilobite?

3) Missing link - we do find them. Given what I said about fossils and their rarity, we're not going to find a completely perfect record laid out for us. It's the ultimate jigsaw puzzle, and a LOT of pieces are missing, or worse, duplicated and/or replicated. Piecing together a creature from various sets of half mangled jaw bones and legs is no easy task. And yes, we've made mistakes and used the wrong pieces for the wrong thing...but we're still learning, and as we get better, we figure those mistakes out.

But back to the missing link part...think about this. What if your only family record was your parents, and then your 5th great grand parents? You can see some resemblances, but because you don't have evidence of the people in your family tree between, does that invalidate the heritage? Of course not. Recreating genetic trees from incomplete fossils is a lot more complicated, but it's basically trying find certain characteristics that are shared and grouping them together, and when some are very much alike and from the same time frame, we create our human category that we call "species". Some fossils we put together might actually not be exactly the same, but we have to work with what evidence we do have, and when we learn more, we can adjust. That's how science works.

There will always be missing links, because every link is a creature, and almost all creatures in the past did not get fossilized. That's right, 99.99...% are lost to us.

To finish out the missing link thing...we've found many creatures that bridge gaps, that share characteristics of two different species. The ancestor of whales, the evolution of the horse, the proto-mammals, the start of flowering plants...and of course, the ascent of hominids to current man, which bothers some religious types, and is a primary reason why evolution is so attacked by believers. It shakes their faith's foundation...if they discarded the first part of the Bible as a myth, what's to prevent the rest of it from following?

 

[sideshowbob]

I'd discuss it with the author.

The authors of Treasure Island and the Bible are all dead. So how do you really assess the accuracy of books that you read?

 

[Aqueous Id]

The flood story began before Iraq, and before Israel, just after the flood, by the desendants of Noah, at the base of Mt Ararat.

No, it's a myth. it never happened. Your story comes to you in Hebrew, a language younger than others in the region. The older version of the story is from Mesopotamia, and it has nothing to do with Yahweh, Elohim, or Noah. Your own book tells you the Canaanites came out of Ur, one of the Mesopotamian cities buried by local river flood waters long before the myth took root among the Hebrew people. Of course you're reading it literally, while disregarding all the artifacts and historical knowledge that is needed to make a reasonably informed conclusion. This is why all of you conclusions are so unreasonable. It's by design.

By the way, I have been thinking about the layers in the earth, and how they made an orderly preservation in the Grand Canyon samples, of all the various stages in life forms, in each respective layer.

That's not a good idea. The more stuff you invent in your mind, the further you deviate from reality. If you want truth, you need to seek it. You have to start by studying the evidence. Avoiding the evidence dooms all of your conclusions. The layers in the canyons are the same as layers everywhere else. They were laid down one on top of the other over long periods of time.

It is very interesting that only fossils of fully formed creatures were found in each successive layer,

That's one of the bogus statements that comes from refusing to look at the evidence. I just showed you an incomplete skull. I have no idea why you persist in misrepresenting facts. Fossils are found at the layers in which they lived, died and fossilized. To say otherwise is ridiculous.

the same creatures as today, except for most of the dinosaurs.

Nonsense. The fossil record is full of extinct taxa as well as others that survived until present. There are many species nnot found throughout. Humans are nor found, for example, until the most recent of eras.

Each after their kind, there are no inbetween creatures that prove any gradual developments,

This has nothing to do will fossil evidence. It's just a fabrication.

no "Ignoramus" creatures can be found,

This makes no sense.

and they have not changed to date,

The bacteria or viruses that will bring you your next cold will have already have adapted to the immunities your body produced last season. That is, they are evolving in real-time.

except in species

Fossils are often marked by shifts in genera.

and size

No, that's absurd.

How do you explain that?

Nothing you've said so far can be explained by anything other than your refusal to acknowledge the real world, by examining real specimens and the studies that explain them, and all the wealth of information that's available at your fingertips.

As long as you rely on garbage in, you will produce garbage out. You need facts, not wild ideas.

 

[gmilam]

No "Ignoramus" creatures can be found

No, we've found plenty of them...