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Member (Idle past 2885 days) Posts: 158 From: Mesopotamia, Ohio, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: About that Boat - Noah's Ark | |||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Why doesn't somebody build an ark according to the dimensions of the Bible and see how well she sails? Take a leaf from Thor Heyerdahl's book. Now there's a research program for creationists.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The reason the Great Flood is written in the Bible is because it was a clearly a MASSIVE event in the Christian faith. The world was destroyed by water, but the next time it is destroyed, it will be by fire. Why God chooses to do things the way He does is beyond us. He can do anything He wants to do, yet he chooses to flood the Entire Earth. Perhaps this is symbolic to being baptised. But isn't all that still very valid even if the flood didn't actually happen? I mean, the flood is clearly a very important lesson in the bible, but does it actually have to be a historical account to be a valid source of inspiration and learning?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The opening of the windows of heaven. How can this not mean "rain"? Where is heaven if not up?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
What has the "opening of the windows" have to do with rain? Windows keep out rain. When you open them, rain comes through. Obvious to me, at least.
Rainfall is hardly an adquate result to tie to the opening of the windows of heaven. Says you. It's a perfectly appropriate metaphor to me. For instance, why do people say "the floodgates of heaven opened up" when it's raining hard? I recognize that metaphors are not universal. But surely you can see how it's a valid metaphor? If not you're either unimaginative, or just being deliberately obtuse. We're in a world of metaphor, here. Obviously literal windows didn't open up in a literal heaven that the writer could see, even if we grant (for purposes of argument) that the flood did actually occur. But literal interpretation is clearly not the tack you want to take here. After all, that phrase isn't meaningless. If you won't take it to mean "rain", then you have to take it to mean literal windows in the sky, which are obviously impossible, and would thus falsify the flood account. Or otherwise you have to explain what you think that means. It has to mean something, or else it wouldn't be there.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
One might relate this to rain, but rain doesnt come from a cloudless sky. On the other hand, your pre-flood world would never have been cloudless. After all there's enough water vapor up there to partially drown a world.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Construction logistics doesn't discredit the ark because we have clear evidence of massive workforces and coordinated construction in the ancient Egyptians and Chinese civilizations. You mean, those Egyptian and Chinese civilizations that so inconviniently both pre- and post-date the flood, without any mention of the flood whatsoever in their records?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Even the supposedly well-established Egyptian chronologies could be out by centuries according to a recent shakeup regarding Mediterranean C12/C14 imbalance. They would have to be off by millenia for these civilizations to be entirely post-flood. It's ludicrous to suggest that our chronologies are that errant.
Why do world population estimates extrapolate back to Noah so nicely? Well, they don't. Not in the least. In order to get them to "extrapolate" in the manner that you do, you have to ignore almost every war, famine, and plague in human history.
You have a better explanation for the global distribution of flood legends? I'd like to hear it. It's considerably simpler than yours: every one of these civilizations lives, or has lived, where it has flooded. What about all the civilizations that you don't mention, the ones with no flood stories whatsoever? Oh, right. They just happened to forget about the most fatal cataclysm in Earth's history. Does that seem reasonable to you?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Wars and famine? And disease. The Black Plague killed a third of Europe's population in the mid-14th century. Even today the vast majority of human beings live lives beyond access to regular medical care. From this graph you can see the historical rate of population growth: As you can see it's entirely within the expectations of the evolutionary timeframe. There's really just as many people as we should expect given reasonable k values. This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-16-2004 03:59 PM
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
They used to quibble about decades, now it's 500 years. Documentation? Primary sources, please.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Read the link - it talks about Europe's plague and it's trivial effect on curbing population growth. E.g. "...the awful figures for natural disasters are very quickly made up for by the subsequent rates of increase among the survivors (Langer 1964)" That's a known effect, though. When calamity reduces a population significantly below k, the population quickly returns to k. What you're suggesting is that we can throw out the k altogether, without any reason why we should do this. Populations grow quickly until the approach k, and then they stop. This is well-understood by evolutionists, and confirmed by experiment, but you give absolutely no indication why we should reject this model.
Good point, and these are the countries with the booming populations. Their populations are not growing. What is growing is k, and the population follows suit, but it never exceeds the growth of k. I get the feeling I'm talking to somebody who doesn't know any ecology, or how to model population growth.
So recent world population growth cannot be attributed to modern medicine. That's exactly what it is best attributed to - modern technology raises k values for population areas. It's almost self-evident.
To fit an evolutionary timescale into this data you have to make out that mankind has been on the edge of extinction for most of history and then suddenly makes a recovery in recent (KNOWN) history. Which is exactly what has happened.
Anyone can plot these curves for and see for themselves; Indeed - they can see for themselves that there aren't nearly enough people to have built the Pyramids, or to inhabit the ancient, large civilizations that we know were there. For instance, at the time when the Bible says Moses was leading 600,000 Hebrews out of Egypt, the entire population of the world was 726 according to your model. This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-16-2004 05:34 PM
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
For 500 year issue, see previously cited But this isn't a case of revising dates; this is a case of explaining a calibration issue of radiocarbon dating that puts radiocarbon dates at a different age than the convergent dates of other methods, like dendrochronology. This isn't at all what you made it out to be, and I'm rather offended at the deception.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Yeah, we'd better hit the population stuff another time, in another thread. And I don't know the first thing about boats. Cya!
This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-16-2004 09:33 PM
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
It's erroneous to apply 20th century logic to the ancient world when the environment was so drastically different then that it's impossible to compare the 2. The laws of physics didn't change, did they?
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