Thanks for the advice re. typing...
No problem. You may also want to check out
this thread, as it helps explain all of the formatting options the board uses. It helps make posts easier to read, and makes quotes of other posters more obvious.
Sorry if my link was not directly to the question I was trying to address...I had pasted it from my browser...not sure why it wasn't the exact page...anyway...
If you can give us the link once more and mention what specific section you are addressing, as well as your own argument that the link supports, we could discuss it further.
Re. change in the plates...you really think having the whole Earth completely covered with water would not affect the plates in significant ways?? Though I would certainly not argue that everything re. plate tectonics has been fully understood (I don't think even an evolutionist would say so either actually), I have read plenty to conclude creationists may be onto something...don't see any harm on everyone working from their own perspectives to see what comes up. Either way, not sure anyone can be dogmatic about it at this point. More work to do yet on both sides to understand tectonics.
Re. mountain uplift, marine fossils have been found on Mt. Everest's peak so it seems to me anything's possible. Of course, you are assuming that it takes several billions of years worth of energy to make geologic changes necessary in a few thousand years...another assumption YEC's don't hold to... I have to say, the doctrine of uniformitarianism that evolutionists tend to believe, really does seem to blind them to other possibilities. It wouldn't be the first time evolutionists got their time estimates for things to happen wrong.
As I said, catastrophic plate tectonics is absolute drivel. I think I'll start a new thread on it once I figure out how to do some of the necessary math to show exactly how bad the idea is, but suffice it to say that any scenario that involves moving the crust of the Earth to the degree we see in the geologic record would require massive amounts of energy. Expending that much energy over the course of a year-long Flood would cause disasters that make a global Flood look like child's play. A wooden boat, even if it
were possible to contain the animals required, would never survive, let alone anything else. I'll work on getting some actual numbers instead of my own simple estimates, but I'll at least mention the non-physics issues here.
To quote an article on the subject at talkorigins:
quote:
1 Much geological evidence is incompatible with catastrophic plate tectonics:
* Island chains, such as the Hawaiian islands, indicate that the ocean floor moved slowly over erupting "hot spots." Radiometric dating and relative amounts of erosion both indicate that the older islands are very much older, not close to the same age as catastrophic tectonics would require.
* Catastrophic plate tectonics says that all ocean floor should be essentially the same age. But both radiometric dating and amounts of sedimentation indicate that the age changes gradually, from brand new to tens of millions of years old.
* As sea-floor basalt cools, it becomes denser and sinks. The elevation of sea floors is consistent with cooling appropriate for its age, assuming gradual spreading.
* Guyots are flat-topped underwater mountains. The tops were eroded flat from a long time at the ocean surface, and they sank with the sea floor. Catastrophic tectonics does not allow enough time for the sea mountain to form, erode, and sink.
* Runaway subduction does not account for continent-continent collisions, such as between India and the Eurasian plate.
2 Catastrophic plate tectonics has no plausible mechanism. In particular, the greatly lowered viscosity of the mantle, the rapid magnetic reversals, and the sudden cooling of the ocean floor afterwards cannot be explained under conventional physics.
3 Conventional plate tectonics accounts for the evidence already and does a much better job of it. It explains innumerable details that catastrophic plate tectonics cannot, such as why there is gold in California, silver in Nevada, salt flats in Utah, and coal in Pennsylvania (McPhee 1998). It requires no extraordinary mechanisms to do so. Catastrophic plate tectonics would be a giant step backwards in the progress of science.
As I said, if I can find a way to get a mathematical estimate of the actual energies required under CPT and apply those effects, I'll start a new thread exclusively on the topic. But CPT is, frankly, even more rediculous than the Flood itself.
Re. the location for the animals, I don't think any creationist would seriously argue that the land masses, their flora and fauna, or even the climate would be the same pre-Flood vs. post-Flood. Perhaps there was only one land mass pre-Flood? So who knows what the distances involved were? There is another answer at the end of the article you linked for me that addresses your issue re. Koalas etc....surprised you missed it...actually I'm not really, as it assumes a creationist position which you don't hold to. That's one of the things I've learned about this debate as a former atheistic evolutionist myself...in order to understand the opposing camp's views, you must accept ALL of their presuppositions first (however temporarily or permanently)...only then can you see their logic...without that, you're always groping in the dark.
It has been proven (most recently in last Christmas' tsunami) that animals will tend to flee from areas where inclement weather is coming before the effects of weather can be felt by us. So this notion that at least two of each of the animals could not congregate in the same area of their own accord is a little ungenerous to animals. Not saying they knew where the Ark was, but that where the Ark was may have been the last place to be affected by the global change causing the Flood. That's not even bringing God into it, which would also be a possibility.
Who knows what the distances involved were? You're arguing from ignorance, my friend, and that's a logical fallacy. You can't argue with "who knows." As for your suggestion that animals fled before the disaster, and happened to have two of every "kind" at the Arks construction site, that's simply not plausable. How much warning do you think the animals had? They seem to pick up on such things before we do, but not months or years in advance. If we are talking even about just the African continent, it would take months or years for even fast animals to travel from one end to the other. If we assume some sort of Pangea single-continent model to account for geographically unique species like Koalas, the distances are even greater. The local fauna in Asia did not know of the oncoming tsunami
months in advance.
Re. the Epic of Gilgamesh...if you have two documents about a Flood...assuming they are both talking about the same event, where one describes a seaworthy vessel, the other one describes one which is not seaworthy...which one is more likely to have been written first?? On that basis, most historians would say the former because the other is probably a corrupt version of the first...the Biblical account is the one with a seaworthy vessel (the only one out of all of the world-wide Flood stories, so far as I know).
That's hardly a good method for determining the authenticity of a story. If I write about how someone survived Hurricane Katrina, and somebody takes my story and embellishes it to say that the character survived a flood that covered the whole world in a canoe, does the canoe story somehow seem more relaistic just becuase the vessel was an actual type of boat? In no way does the "seaworthiness" of hte vessel show the authenticity of a story! I find it much more plausible that the GIlgamesh story, since it
predates the oldest Biblical texts we have, and since it describes an event that
could have actually happened without breaking the laws of physics, is far more likely to be based on truth.
Re. animal kinds, as a creationist, I have never questioned microevolution (evolution within a 'kind' e.g. birds changing into other breeds of birds, dogs changing into other breeds of dogs), only macroevolution (evolution from one 'kind' to another i.e. reptiles to mammals etc.)... after all, in your quote there, ligers are still cats, wholphins are still aquatic mammals.
And what mechanism stops "microevolution" from turning into "macroevolution?" There
is a thread going on about this subject right now - if you post there, I'll discuss it with you in the appropriate thread.
While we are getting a bit off-topic, I think we can tie this back to the subject of this thread by saying that some of the events of the Bible simply could not have happened barring a miraculous coverup of evidence. Since the literal truth of some Bible stories is absolutely false, it's foolish to read the Bible as the literal Word of God.
Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.
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