How did Noah get all the animals on one boat?

[Guest Annatar: Bringer of Gifts]

I know that God is infinitely powerful and could have handled all of the problems I mentioned in my earlier post through miracles, but a couple of things about the scenario give me pause. For one, it seem's surprising that God would do so many astounding miracles at one time and then fail to mention them in the Bible. To keep every single species of life on earth (including insects, birds and fish) from dying in the flood would have required God to suspend nearly every law of nature concerning the functions and survival of living organisms.

This touches upon the other problem: if God is omniscient and infinitely wise, why would he create his creatures to be so delicate and then hit them with a massive flood, a flood which seemingly would have required him to temporarily abolish the laws of nature (which he himself had crafted) to keep them alive? I don't claim to know if such a thing is contradictory to God's nature, but it doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that God would do.

[Bread_of_Life]

Hey Fiosh

Mountains look stable and unmoveable don't they? They look like permanent and colossal features of our landscape.

The truth is very different though - mountains really do move - of their own accord, up and down. Ironically, one of the first papers noting this observation was written by Charles Darwin and presented after his Voyage on the Beagle. Essentially, mountains act as a very slow moving fluid. They are created from the collision of tectonic plates, pushing land upwards (such as the collision of India with the Indian Subcontinent forming the Himalaya).

Then slowly, through downdrop as the plates settle and through erosion, mountains go down the way, and eventually disappear. This often causes large gaps in the fossil record in an area - called unconformities - because as the mountains erode the fossils are exposed and lost. This occured in the Grand Canyon national park - there are two major unconformities because of mountainous build, downdrop and erosion.

Most land, including mountains, has at one point existed under the sea. For example, all of the UK was once submerged as part of a larger atlantic ocean - the white cliffs of dover are formed from massive accumulations of marine fossils - forming a fine chalk. Therefore, we often find marine fossils on land (in fact, most marine fossils are found on land) including on mountain tops. We also find, such as in the Grand Canyon national park, some layers of strata formed underwater, some formed in a coastal environment, and some on land, such is the flux of tectonic movement. In fact, there is one particular layer in the Grand Canyon where a coastline is a clearly delineated - sandstone on one side, shale on another.

Of course, tectonic plates don't only cause upward movement, they move sideways a lot too! For example, what is now Scotland used to be the centre of a single continent - and contained tropical rainforest which was roamed by dinosaurs. Of course, that was about 200 million years ago. Still, if you're ever in Glasgow, you can visit the "fossil grove", which is a well preserved rainforest landscape, proof of its tropical past. Strange to think when you're there that it could ever have been described as tropical.

But yeah, there you go.

Nik

[Bread_of_Life]

The part where I called him Fiosh, or the part where I said the fossils were 200 million years old?

Also, saying that it is "pure speculation" without any actual backing to your argument, I take it, is a way of avoiding the substantive issues of how we know things really are very old. Are you willing to actually debate methods of dating - or are you here purely to make insubstantial attacks on sciences you know very little about?

[Bread_of_Life]

Whatever. I aced physical geology in college, so I know about so-called radio-isotope dating, and I am quite familiar with other methods of fossil dating as well.

Oh really? Excellent, then our discussion should be very fruitful, because you will be starting with a good knowledge base, and I won't need to go into too much background. But, of course, this discussion will never occur, not because I bat away arguments or refuse to answer questions as you claim, but because, in actual cold-hard fact in the light of day, you cannot back up your previous statements about dating methods being "pure speculation".

[Fiosh]

Hey Fiosh

Mountains look stable and unmoveable don't they? They look like permanent and colossal features of our landscape.

The truth is very different though - mountains really do move - of their own accord, up and down. Ironically, one of the first papers noting this observation was written by Charles Darwin and presented after his Voyage on the Beagle. Essentially, mountains act as a very slow moving fluid. They are created from the collision of tectonic plates, pushing land upwards (such as the collision of India with the Indian Subcontinent forming the Himalaya).

Then slowly, through downdrop as the plates settle and through erosion, mountains go down the way, and eventually disappear. This often causes large gaps in the fossil record in an area - called unconformities - because as the mountains erode the fossils are exposed and lost. This occured in the Grand Canyon national park - there are two major unconformities because of mountainous build, downdrop and erosion.

Most land, including mountains, has at one point existed under the sea. For example, all of the UK was once submerged as part of a larger atlantic ocean - the white cliffs of dover are formed from massive accumulations of marine fossils - forming a fine chalk. Therefore, we often find marine fossils on land (in fact, most marine fossils are found on land) including on mountain tops. We also find, such as in the Grand Canyon national park, some layers of strata formed underwater, some formed in a coastal environment, and some on land, such is the flux of tectonic movement. In fact, there is one particular layer in the Grand Canyon where a coastline is a clearly delineated - sandstone on one side, shale on another.

Of course, tectonic plates don't only cause upward movement, they move sideways a lot too! For example, what is now Scotland used to be the centre of a single continent - and contained tropical rainforest which was roamed by dinosaurs. Of course, that was about 200 million years ago. Still, if you're ever in Glasgow, you can visit the "fossil grove", which is a well preserved rainforest landscape, proof of its tropical past. Strange to think when you're there that it could ever have been described as tropical.

But yeah, there you go.

Nik

Well,BoL, personally, I take exception to the part where you call me "him".

Duh, yeah, plate tectonics. I claim "fuzzy brain"---I'm home with the flu. It's been a loooooonnng time since college geology.

I did so love hunting fossils in the creek when the boys were younger. It was like a treasure hunt. To know that you hold in your hand a fossil that has "seen" millions of years of earth changes. If only they could talk, eh?

How awesome our God is! How magnificent His creation!

[Bread_of_Life]

Fiosh!

Sorry!!! I always somehow assume that everyone's a guy!

I did so love hunting fossils in the creek when the boys were younger. It was like a treasure hunt. To know that you hold in your hand a fossil that has "seen" millions of years of earth changes. If only they could talk, eh?

How awesome our God is! How magnificent His creation!

Absolutely! Praise the Lord!

You know, there's a place in the city of London, near where I work - just a non-descript office building. There are some ordinary looking grey steps up to it. The steps have small irregularities in them - barely noticeable as you walk up them - they just look like little chips or irregularities in the smoothness of the surface.

But, if you take playdoh and push it into these irregularities, and take it out - hey presto you have the shapes of hundreds of fossilised marine animals, who died hundreds of millions of years ago when the Atlantic Ocean was still forming, and were lucky enough to form part of the sedimentary rock that made the British Isles, and would one day be dug up by a bunch of humans and made unknowingly into stone slabs and steps to this office building.

It just awes me that people walk up and down these steps every day, thinking the 70 year passage of their lives and their business so important - never realising that at their feet lies hundreds of millions of years of natural history - secrets to the very creation of our country - the origin of our species and the species around us. Knowing that such an amazing history has occured, and that it's all around us, even on the steps to our buildings and the rocks we use to build things, and the sheer scale of it next to ourselves - is a humbling thought that I like to consider as I walk through the streets of London.

[refugepsa91]

Fossils how fun....me and my kids will sit for hours outside and look for rocks...we love to find interesting ones...we do that at the river too...take our mesh baskets and we're off. We have found a couple arrow heads...that was neat.

Sorry didn't mean to hi-jack

Love and Blessings,

Angel