The Flood

By 'atheists' you clearly mean anyone who doesn't take the Noah Flood story literally. That group is very large and actually includes more theists than atheists.By 'theists' and 'biblicists' you seem to mean YECs invested heavily in scenarios popularized by Whitcomb & Morris in The Genesis Flood. It says floods occur.This is, in fact, a key reason flood stories exist. Str-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-retch!Black Sea, Planet Earth... a bit of a difference in scale.Difference in the physics, too. Softball. You even signal a conspiracy theory in case the bushers are too dim to swing at that slowball on their own.Put some stuff on that pitch, All-Star. Here's one for Team Whitcomb-Morris:

Does a regional flood that accords with the laws of physics constitute valid scientific evidence of a global flood that defies the laws of physics? If so, how?

__Edited by Archer Opterix, : title.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Thanks, but Carl Baugh is another thread.__Edited by Archer Opterix, : HTML.

Carl Baugh is oily and gives people gas. Don't look here or your luck will run out. I know, Petro. Don't mind me. I was just jamming a bit on your riff. Welcome to EvC.__Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

iceage: I like that word.Without it, the real estate market in Taiwan would be pretty flat.

Taiwan makes a powerful refutation of YEC Flood theories all by itself.As you have noticed, the island is a mountain range--a spectacular one. But there was a time when all of it was ocean floor.A crustal plate started sliding under another. Scientists place this event about 200 million years ago. As the bedrock of the lower plate slid into earth's crust, the layers of sediment on top of it collided with the layers of sediment on the other plate. The plates kept colliding and sliding, increasing pressure, increasing heat, increasing metamorphosis... and increasing height. The pileup breached the surface of the ocean. Today the mountain range is home to the highest peaks in Asia east of the Himalayas.And the process continues. International teams of geologists are all over this island as we speak, monitoring its continuing rise from the ocean.You can get a dramatic window on this story at Taroko National Park. Rivers have exposed huge expanses of rock in the mountainside. You can see layers and layers of stratified marble, twisted into S-shaped curves hundreds of meters high.Everything you're looking at--the laying of the sediment, the formation of the limestone, the uplift, the metamorphosis into marble, the bending and twisting into S-curves, the erosion of it by rivers--takes a lot of time to accomplish.And here's an interesting fact. We know that 6,000 years ago at the latest these mountains were inhabited by human beings. It would be interesting to hear a YEC apologist comment on any of it. If the earth was as young as they say it is, this island shouldn't be here.___Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo repair.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

NJ and Buz have each posted since you asked this, iceage. Still nothing about how those mollusks scaled mountains 12,000 feet high.It might interest both of them to know that we do have fundamentalist Christian groups in Taiwan. Ardent strains. The phenomenon is mainly an export of the US revivalist subculture, of course, planted here by missionaries.It's amazing how many things make the transition virtually unaltered. You hear groups singing the same hymns, asserting the same doctrines, making the same rationalizations. You see the same Jesus T-shirts and Polyglycoat hair styles. You see the same gestures: Bible thumping for the evangelicals, hand waving for the Pentecostals.But here's the really interesting thing.Ask one of the Bible thumpers how old the earth is and she'll tell you four billion years plus. Ask one of the hand wavers if he believes Darwin's theory of evolution is true and he'll say sure, of course it is. Young Earth Creationism does not survive the transition across the lake.Elsewhere fundies say that to believe in evolution is to deny God. Here no one says that. The foreign missionaries who believe YEC keep it to themselves. They know they will lose credibility the instant they try to push it.Interesting, yes?

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Not at all. There was only some conjecture early on that flood myths in central Asia, including the story told by the Hebrews, might be traced back to the dislocation caused by this event. That's it. I love it when fundies do this--suggest that a person they already know to be a con artist has somehow, completely by accident and in spite of having no interest in doing anything of the sort, made a bona fide archaeological discovery of stupendous proportions that escapes the combined attention of all the experts in the world.Right. And maybe one day Professor Harold Hill, with no practice at all, will wake up and play trumpet like Wynton Marsalis.And they say scientists trust in random chance...__Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Yep. Taiwan and the other islands of the Pacific Rim refute YEC beliefs as much as the Himalayas do.A YEC has to say whether this or that geological feature existed before the Flood or after. They can't make it all happen in one year. But however they call it, they're toast.Did Taiwan form before the Flood? If so, how does limestone and marble and jade form along with the upthrust in so short a (noncatastrophic) period of time? Was Taiwan formed during the Flood as part of the accelerated global mayhem? If so, it's a strange flood that buries mountains under water while raising mountains out of the water! Was Taiwan formed after the Flood? Then you face the same questions as before. And through it all you have to explain how all this upheaval took place even as people were living here. Did they grow their bananas on the ocean floor while it rose?It can't be made to work. If YEC were true, the island just wouldn't be here.One of our contributors on the 'REAL Flood Geology' thread said it well. The post described the world the way it would look if YEC beliefs were true. You wouldn't see any of the geological variety we see now. You'd have continental bedrock, a flood layer, and a thin layer of sediment that has put down in the years since. That's it. No one would be talking about tectonics because tectonic activity would be barely getting started. You wouldn't have the subduction zones and mountain ranges such activity generates. I've wondered as well why more YECs don't do this. 'Appearance of age' is a far simpler hypothesis and it causes fewer problems logically.I think they really did get the message that grand magic of this sort banishes an idea forever from public school science classes. They couldn't have that. They needed to make young-earth belief look like science. Along came Whitcomb & Morris with a new myth to fill the bill. It's the latter. We've seen some discussion about this very thing in the papers lately. Foreigners are telling the Tourist Board that they need to let more people know about the natural features of the island. People around the world know about Taipei 101 but they don't know about Taroko Gorge or Jade Mountain or the beautiful east coast. They're telling the board that visitors will come from all over the world to hike these mountains if they are just made aware that the mountains are here. I hope you can. Stay in touch.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

'Flood tectonics'! Yes--let's careen the India plate into the Eurasian plate so that it crashes and throws up the Himalayas in a single year--even as people are raising goats on the land--by pushing the continents around with a big garden hose.Buz, the truth is that tectonic theory is a bigger problem for YECs than the theory of evolution ever was.I wonder how long it will take for YECs as a group to realize it. Historically they are slow on the uptake.___

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Hey, Charley. Someone told me you're a troll.What do you say?