LLC

Yes that sounds fine. We shall continue this thread elsewhere.

Why is there no mention of the Flood in the records of Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations which existed at the time? Biblical dates (I Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation lengths given in Genesis) place the Flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first temple. We can construct reliable chronologies for near Eastern history, particularly for Egypt, from many kinds of records from the literate cultures in the near East. These records are independent of, but supported by, dating methods such as dendrochronology and carbon-14. The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B.C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood around 2250 B.C. Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have written records dating well back before 2250 B.C. (the Great Pyramid, for example dates to the 26th century B.C., 300 years before the Biblical date for the Flood). No sign in Egyptian inscriptions of this global flood around 2250 B.C. How did sensitive marine life such as coral survive? Since most coral are found in shallow water, the turbidity created by the runoff from the land would effectively cut them off from the sun. The silt covering the reef after the rains were over would kill all the coral. By the way, the rates at which coral deposits calcium are well known, and some highly mature reefs (such a the great barrier) have been around for millions of years to be deposited to their observed thickness. How did diseases survive? Many diseases can't survive in hosts other than humans. Many others can only survive in humans and in short-lived arthropod vectors. The list includes typhus, measles, smallpox, polio, gonorrhea, syphilis. For these diseases to have survived the Flood, they must all have infected one or more of the eight people aboard the Ark. Other animals aboard the ark must have suffered from multiple diseases, too, since there are other diseases specific to other animals, and the nonspecific diseases must have been somewhere. Host-specific diseases which don't kill their host generally can't survive long, since the host's immune system eliminates them. (This doesn't apply to diseases such as HIV and malaria which can hide from the immune system.) For example, measles can't last for more than a few weeks in a community of less than 250,000 because it needs nonresistant hosts to infect. Since the human population aboard the ark was somewhat less than 250,000, measles and many other infectious diseases would have gone extinct during the Flood. Some diseases that can affect a wide range of species would have found conditions on the Ark ideal for a plague. Avian viruses, for example, would have spread through the many birds on the ark. Other plagues would have affected the mammals and reptiles. Even these plague pathogens, though, would have died out after all their prospective hosts were either dead or resistant. How did short-lived species survive? Adult mayflies on the ark would have died in a few days, and the larvae of many mayflies require shallow fresh running water. Many other insects would face similar problems. How could more than a handful of species survive in a devastated habitat? The Flood would have destroyed the food and shelter which most species need to survive. How did predators survive? How could more than a handful of the predator species on the ark have survived, with only two individuals of their prey to eat? All of the predators at the top of the food pyramid require larger numbers of food animals beneath them on the pyramid, which in turn require large numbers of the animals they prey on, and so on, down to the primary producers (plants etc.) at the bottom. And if the predators survived, how did the other animals survive being preyed on? How did animals get to their present ranges? How did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the Arctic, etc., when the kinds of environment they require to live doesn't exist between the two points. How did so many unique species get to remote islands? How were ecological interdependencies preserved as animals migrated from Ararat? Did the yucca an the yucca moth migrate together across the Atlantic? Were there, a few thousand years ago, unbroken giant sequoia forests between Ararat and California to allow indigenous bark and cone beetles to migrate? Why are so many animals found only in limited ranges? Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in western Indonesia? Why are lemurs limited to Madagascar? The same argument applies to any number of groups of plants and animals.

OldEnglishsheepdog, thanks for answering my questions with clarity. However, your responses bring new questions to my mind.

Sorry for my lack of clarification Shiloh;not from you. That was in response to some earlier discussion with OldEnglishsheepdog.

Viole, I never thought evolution and belief in a deity are completely incompatible. After all, theories such as evolution draw upon modern science - how were people back 2000 years ago to understand what we now know today to be true? It was impossible given their technological progress. I think as more scientific discoveries are made, and we learn more and more about the universe we inhabit, we must also change our interpretation of the bible and such texts. I always believed that religion was the answer to 'why' and not 'how'.

Very interesting . Now, back to the flood. In order for your assertions to be true OldEnglishsheepdog, the flood must have been world-wide. To me, this seems improbable, especially because there is only a certain quantity of water on Earth. Where did the Flood water come from, and where did it go? How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood? Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up? How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions. Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up? How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence of fossils in the deposits? Roughly 1.5 x 1015 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits. How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter. How does a global flood explain angular unconformities? These are where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top. They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed.

Ok. This is off-topic, but take it as comedic relief. Wouldn't a wooden vessel of the size mentioned in the bible have collapsed under its own weight when floating on water?

We are lucky to have so many fossils as it is! Fossils only form under rare conditions indeed.

Thank you OldEnglishsheepdog for actually providing evidence instead of telling me to 'look at the sky or a tree'. A lot of this information suffices as evidence to support the biblical claim of the flood and disproof for evolution. If you are trying to convince me that the Story of Noah's ark is in fact true, than all of this information is extremely relevant. However I do not accept the assertion that if we can prove the Bible to be true on one account, then it must be true on all accounts. The need for specific and relevant evidence for Creation still remains.

It is the best available explanation for the biodiversity we currently observe on our planet. This is kind of off topic, but it has been brought up a lot; Evolution does not account for the emergence of life. It takes over only after life had been created.

I'm glad that you don't read the Bible as a science textbook; I believe that no person should. However you still fail to provide empirically verifiable evidence for Creation. As mentioned before, evidence against evolution is not evidence for Creationism. We are looking for the most scientifically accurate explanation for the complexity of life we currently observe. Please read the whole thread before you comment next time.

Joe, thanks for your insight. However, for the sake of this conversation I am looking for the same type of empirically verifiable evidence that was demanded of me for my previous assertions.

You have convinced me that evolution is false and the approximated age of the earth (4.558 billion years) is far from the truth. If everything that has been said about the means by which evidence for these theories have been collected, plotted, and interpreted, there should be no reason for me, or anyone in the scientific community, to believe in them. Now that we got that out of the way, show me your empirically verifiable evidence for both creationism and the real age of the earth (about 6000-10000 years). Don't show me Bible verses (I know what the Bible says), show me the same type of evidence that you demanded from me for my previous assertions.

I don't think the earth has to be 6,000 years old exactly, but I do think it's thousands not billions, and the suggestion that billions is a fact is so very often put forth and never successfully defended. I submit, materialism has blurred what people define as facts, so that it can claim speculations and philosophies as facts. As a physicist with a keen understanding of radioactive decay and radiometric dating, It is pretty obvious to me that the methods in which the data in this Scholarly article were obtained were precise and accurate. In order for claims of the earth's age to be true (Thousands of years), either these scientists (and all others who repeated this experiment) must have made up their data, or made extremely grand errors (equivalent to misplacing a decimal point by five powers). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V66-3YYTKC0-7Y&_user=130907&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F1995&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=gateway&_origin=gateway&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1731651280&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000004198&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=130907&md5=e246edfb91dd8ef1ca23023dd2d52202&searchtype=a False. Radiometric dating relies on a host of demonstrably false assumptions, and relies on compounding calculations all of which leave enormous room for error, and the end result of which is reconciled to expected results by the elimination of unwanted findings under the lable of 'outlyer' of the apologies afforded by 'contamination', 'leeching', or instrument sensitivity. I've already pointed out that you can't just advertise your propaganda. Make a case, if you can, and address the points I've already mentioned, or I'll just point you to another source that disagrees... Like Dr. Emil Silvestru, and accomplished geologist who's also a young earth creationist. See how that means nothing? Either you're participating in a discussion or you're white noise. Sure, radiometric dating is faulty and there is room for lots of error. This is why Willard Libby and his colleagues at the University of Chicago in 1949 first demonstrated the accuracy of radiometric dating by accurately estimating the age of wood from an ancient Egyptian royal barge for which the age was known from historical documents. After many repeated trials with objects of known age, the method was considered to be accurate with an error proportionate the respect age of the object being tested. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/110/2869/678 So, is the earth exactly 4.558 billion years old? Probably not. The date will probably change throughout this century as better technology is developed. Does this mean that it is possible for the Earth to be close to 6000 years as you suggest? Probably not. The error associated with this claim would be the same if calculated the distance from New York City to San Fransisco to be 7.4 yards.

First of all OldEnlighsheepdog, I would like to thank you for giving my post a worthy rebuttal. My debates with you have been very stimulating and informative, but unfortunately I have but no more responses. I can point you to studies and experiments proving that the earth is older than ten thousands of years, or that evolution is the best available theory to explain the complexity of life in the world we see; but I cannot force you to read them or understand them. Ultimately, I do not care what you or anyone else beliefs, as long as their is a rational justification. I think the most that anyone could do is to be a good person and live their life to the fullest.