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Author | Topic: Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood | |||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I found I couldn't read the review until I broke it up into paragraphs, that's why I edited it. Then I tried to find the book on the web and discovered that wmscott (aka William Scott Anderson) is the author. The book is listed at Amazon where Mr. Anderson has listed the identical review:
Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood Authors are more than welcome to plug their books here, but please reveal you're the author when you do so. So, William, can I presume that the paragraphs divisions in the review were lost in the cut-n-pastes and that the book itself has paragraphs? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
What do you think of the theory of William Ryan and Walter Pitman that flood mythology is based upon a real event, the flooding of a then much smaller and freshwater Black Sea by the Mediterranean about 7000 years ago through a breach at the Bosporus. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, uncovered support for this theory when he located an ancient freshwater shoreline at a considerable depth.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
You're going to have to fill me in more on what your book says. I got the impression from your review that the end of the most recent ice age plays a significant role, but that ended 10,000 years ago, while the Black Sea flooding only occurred about 7,000 years ago. Does your book somehow draw these two events together? Or is its source of the flood water not glaciers?
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Hmmm. I've seen estimates ranging between 10K and 11K years ago, never 30K. The 10,000 years-ago figure for the end of the last ice age and the 7,000 years-ago figure for the Black Sea flood are in normal years, not radiocarbon years, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. And aren't the uncertainties of radiocarbon dating tiny compared to the 3,000 year difference?
I can see how that might happen, but how do you address the issue of where this water is now, since we haven't returned to an ice age and refrozen all the water into glaciers? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I'm not so sure about this. Most laypeople aren't aware of radiocarbon years, and at a minimum I'm certain that articles written for laypeople are rendered in normal years. The National Geographic article about Ballard, Pitman and Ryan's work in the Black Sea says: By studying core samples of sediments and dating seashells, they determined that the flood most likely occurred about 7,500 years ago and that the shoreline of the ancient lake could be found 500 feet (150 meters) below the surface. I'd be pretty surprised if these were radiocarbon years. And regardless whether they're both radiocarbon years or normal years, they're obviously both in the same units, and so you have, at least according to this article, a 4500 year gap. About the sinking of the ocean basins and rise of mountains, is there any corroborating evidence? I can think of a few non-confirming points. First, rapid deformation generates heat, and in the case of the world-wide deformations you propose it seems likely the heat would have been pretty devastating. Second, geological studies indicate that mountain ranges are underlain by a much thicker mantle. The tectonic movements which push up mountain ranges evidently push down, too. This thicker mantle underlying mountain ranges is inconsistent with your view that the land in general, particular that most covered by glaciers, was pushed up by pressure generated from a sinking sea floor. Third, shouldn't continental shelf areas around the world show signs of the repeated deformation of stretching and compression as various ice ages came and went? And don't you have the same problem with the lack of evidence for extensive flooding that YECs have? For instance, shouldn't there be global signs of flood retreat? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I believe that outside the technical literature years are rendered in regular years, not radiocarbon years. Where the excerpt from National Geographic says 7,500 years ago and 12,000 years ago it means regular 365.25 day years. Don't you have the same problem as YECs, namely no evidence of a sudden global flood ever, let alone in the last 10,000 years. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I want to revisit radiocarbon years.
If articles written for laypeople indescriminately mix radiocarbon and calendar years without making clear which is which, then rampant confusion can result, and according to Scientific American, this occasionally happens: The distinction between radiocarbon years and calendar years is important. A report earlier this year described a 13,000-year-old skeleton found in California and compared it to 12,500-year-old Monte Verde, without mentioning that the former date was in calendar years and the latter, radiocarbon years. Some readers understandably thought that the California skeleton was older than the campsite at Monte Verde. But in calendar years, Monte Verde is 14,700 years old. (Scientific American, September, 2000, Error – Scientific American - it includes a conversion table) When writing your book I assume you didn't just throw up your hands and say, "Radiocarbon years, calendar years, who knows?" You took the time to investigate and you compared calendar years to calendar years or radiocarbon years to radiocarbon years, and you therefore know that by the most recent estimates you have a gap of some thousands of years between the end of the ice age and the estimate for the Black Sea flood postulated by Ryan and Pitman.
Experimental error is understood, but three points. First, radiocarbon researchers have not been sitting on their hands since Gwen Schultz wrote Ice Age Lost in 1974, which seems to be where your impressions of the efficacy of radiocarbon dating originates. If you visit The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit website and click on Radiocarbon in the sidebar you'll read about the tight calibration back 11,000 years that's been achieved using tree ring data. Second, radiocarbon error is coming to be reported in the manner you describe, ie, a range with a confidence factor, though the Oxford unit provides a 95% value, not 90%. But you would be wrong to conclude that there's a 5% chance dates are off by the thousands of years required for your theory that the Black Sea flood was caused by the end of the Wisconsian ice age. Three, the confidence factor increases dramatically as you make more measurements, and the number of dated samples relevant to the end of the last ice age must be very large by now. While researching this post I found no mention of a trend toward lower dates. Your Gwen Shultz quote is an honest assessment of the uncertainty of dating techniques in 1974, but while it's a caution to be conservative she's optimistic about the future because she goes on to say, "It can be foreseen, though, that as absolute-dating techniques are perfected they will reveal enlightening and startling results." And this is just what has happened. You also cut her short with your quote, "Will the trend someday change, shrinking the tape measure, requiring us to shorten our time scale?" While she bemoans the search for antiquity being reduced to a contest to find the oldest, she balances her comments by continuing, "Or are we in for still more staggering surprises about the antiquity of our world and the age of its people?" --Percy [This message has been edited by Percipient, 01-12-2002]
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I'm moving a copy of this thread to The Great Debate forum.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
A quick scan of Ryan and Pitman's book reveals that Glenn Jones of Woods Hole also dated a set of cores (Radiocarbon Chronology of Black Sea Sediments, Deep Sea Research 41, no. 3, 1994, 531-557), and his dates jived with Ryan's. There's probably other corroborating evidence in the book, but I only looked long enough to falsify your claim that the dates were based on a "single set of bottom cores tested at one lab."
The problem with this argument as the primary rationale for older dates is that you are as prone to human foibles as everyone else on the planet. This argument applies as much to you as the scientists with whom you disagree, even more so since you're a laymen. I'm not claiming the Ryan/Pitman dates are perfect and inviolate, but neither were they pulled out of thin air. To challenge these dates you must address their specific evidence, not just say, "Well, nobody's perfect, they could be wrong." In other words, they have evidence, you don't. You even say as much:
About carbon reservoir adjustments you say:
Unadjusted dating of marine sediments yields older dates, so if the Ryan/Pitman samples were contaminated from the higher marine levels their dates would be too old, not too young. Adjusting for possible contamination would make the Ryan/Pitman dates younger, not older, causing yet a greater discrepancy with the end of the last ice age. Other evidence you've offered so far is whale bones in Michigan and a species of arctic seal in the Caspian Sea. You need a broad pattern of corroborating evidence for a world-wide flood only 10,000 years ago, not just a couple anomalies on opposite sides of the globe. I assume your book goes into much more detail, but can you lay out a brief overview of your evidence? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I'm a bit tied up and can perhaps respond to the main body of your post another time, but the account of Jones noticing his dates agreed with Ryan's can be found at the top of page 149.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
You initially claimed there was only one date, but when I found another you changed your claim to two. If I find another will you change your claim to three? Are you sure you've researched this area? Even if there were only two dates, that is two more than you have. The accepted date for the end of the last ice age is the one most consistent with the evidence, and there's a lot of it. The anomalous cases you cite may indeed be clues that the date is wrong, but if that is what you believe then your task should be to uncover a broad supporting pattern of evidence as well as explanations for why the larger body of contrary evidence is wrong. You shouldn't be urging others to accept a theory insufficiently supported by evidence. There is much evidence that at the end of the last ice age "great lakes" formed at the margin of the melting polar ice sheets and drained to form more "great lakes" elsewhere, such as the Black Sea. These "great lakes" are so well established that they have names, like those listed on page 156 of the Ryan/Pitman book: Upper Dnieper, Upper Volga, Dvina-Pechora, Tungusta, Pur and Mansi. If there can be explicit evidence of these "great lakes" then there can be just as explicit evidence that these lakes at one time were so large they formed a continuous world-wide inundation.
What you describe is not the accepted theory. The fresh water Black Sea was formed at the end of the last ice age by water draining from the Eurasian ice sheet, and the Black Sea drained into the Mediterranean. As the ice age came to an end and the supply of meltwater feeding the Black Sea diminished, evaporation eventually exceeded the supply from incoming rivers and the Black Sea's level dropped below that of the Mediterranean. It's a safe bet there were many landslides and earthquakes in this geologically active region, but that isn't what separated the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. Certainly general uplift could have been a factor, though I found no mention of that possibility in my research. The theory you describe is not the accepted theory, and so your rebuttal isn't relevant.
The amount of salt added by rivers and streams is minute and takes millions of years to build up, not a mere few thousand. The rest of your argument is based on this incorrect assumption and so needn't be addressed.
When the Mediterranean Sea formed by flooding through Gibraltar millions of years ago, the land region between the Caspian and the Mediterranean was lower in elevation and they formed a single sea. Later Uplift separated them. Probably measurements of genetic distance between related organisms in the two seas would confirm this.
Typically, theories become accepted when they explain more, not less, than existing theory. Your ideas might address some of the problems that interest you, but they create tons more problems in their wake, problems that are already neatly addressed by existing theory.
These aren't mysteries - this region was covered by meltwater lakes at the end of the last ice age. You need evidence of a global inundation.
The extinction of many large mammals at the end of the Pleistocene has a few possible explanations, among them over-hunting by ancient man and too-rapid climate change. How is a global flood an acceptable explanation? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Are you sure you've interpreted your source correctly? In my reading of the article, the passage you quoted is explaining that the evidence is inconsistent with glacial transport but more compatible with wind driven mechanisms. He goes on to describe an alternative scenario, saying that it "highlights eolian [wind driven] transport."
Are you proposing that a world wide flood would wash across glaciers rather than float them? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Good question! When you post a new message, the software creates a new version of the HTML webpage with your message at the bottom. When your browser sees that it's posting a webpage that it already has in its cache it doesn't bother refetching it from the website, it just redisplays the version in its cache. Most browsers will occasionally check for new versions, but only every so often, not every time a page is fetched. If you don't see your message, simply hit the refresh button on your browser. You can also cause Internet Explorer (and probably in Netscape, too) to always fetch the page. Select Tools->Internet Options, then click on Settings under Temporary Internet files and click on "Every visit to the page." --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I think I see where you're coming from. With those receptive to scientific arguments you argue from a scientific position, but with those to whom scientific arguments are less, um, accessible but who appear to be people of faith you employ a faith-based approach. With DoctrBill you felt both approaches were available, but it turns out the faith-based approach wasn't appropriate because you interpret key passages differently. Changing the topic slightly, you often express a willingness to be flexible in your Biblical interpretations. For instance, in message 79 you say the rise in sea level may have taken longer than 40 days. What is it about the Biblical account of the flood that leads you to believe it must have been an actual world-wide event? Do you believe other events described in the Bible such as the 6-day creation also happened as presented? Or is it just the flood you accept? The evidence for a world-wide flood wouldn't be scattered and scanty, like whale bones in Michigan and diatoms in Antarctica. Such evidence would be copious and plentiful, and geologists would long since have traced the flood-caused silt layers everywhere throughout the world. Not only is your evidence sparse to non-existent, but you express far too great a willingness to tolerate large disparities. Dating is a good example. You advocate the much older date of the LRM (H1) which preceded the Noachic flood by thousands of years, but you brush off the disparity as a problem in dating. You've cited the Michigan whale bones several times, but they've been dated to be no more than a thousand years old, but that, too, is just dismissed as just another problem in dating. To have a workable hypothesis you must at least have consistency with existing evidence or strong arguments for why that evidence is wrong. You have neither and so are left with a hypothesis strongly contradicted by known evidence. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22394 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
You've already been informed of the problems, and your reaction to them thus far is to claim misinterpretation and error. You need to address the complete lack of evidence for a global flood in a more forthright way. Such evidence would not be subtle. The inundation of the land by a rapidly encroaching ocean would have had a devastating impact on the geological landscape that would be visible to this day, not to mention on the flora and fauna. Examples of the geological evidence would be massive flood deposits left from material floated from the land, major erosion points where water overflowed a barrier then wore the barrier down, silt layers resulting from the inundation, patterns of flow visible from satellites, and a layer on the sea floor of massive amounts of material washed from the land. The inundation would have killed almost all land life, a major extinction event dwarfing even the Permian extinction. A workable hypothesis would involve finding and identifying the expected evidence, or explaining why the evidence one would normally expect is missing. In the absence of either one your hypothesis remains in considerable conflict with the existing evidence. --Percy
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