Describing what the Biblical Flood would be like.

I ALSO looked up the conditions necessary for olive trees and vineyards. You imagined soggy soil and let that dictate your rejection of the Biblical account. I assumed beneficial conditions. Neither can be proved, both are the product of educated imagination, but I trust the Bible and you don't. That's the whole of it.The Bible says the Flood covered the earth. Period.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I apologize for imputing too much of the argument about soggy soil to you, though you did mention waterlogging as a problem. But the principle still applies. You imagined a deficient amount of soil due to the Flood and let that imagination discredit the Biblical account of the olive tree. The Biblical account says the dove brought back a living olive leaf. That proves that the conditions were sufficient for an olive tree to live wherever it was planted. No further ponderings are necessary.

[qs] And I'm pointing out what I've often said, there is no way to deal with events in the past EXCEPT by imagination, by educated imaginative reconstruction, and you can't get any closer to the truth than a reasonable plausibility. What I'm objecting to is your accusing me of making up stuff as if that's an error when that's all you are doing too.And I'm going further and saying that my imaginations start from the basis of the truth of God's word whereas you don't bother to respect what the Bible says but freely come up with imaginings that discredit it. You assume things about the Flood that make the account of the dove's bringing back an olive leaf false; you assume things about the Flood that make the account of Noah's vineyard false. There is no reason to assume such things about the Flood. We can't know such things about the Flood with the certainty you seem to claim.But whatever the Bible says about it should be taken as the truth, which you don't do. So I read up on olive trees and vineyards and construct a scenario that supports the Flood in opposition to your kneejerk debunkery. You put your own thoughts above God's. In contrast, I'm looking for possibilities in the real world that support the Biblical account.And they aren't all that hard to come up with. Clearly the soil was NOT completely destroyed by the Flood even if you imagine it should have been. The higher the tree was planted the more likely the soil would have survived. Whatever the reason, the Bible is clear there was a living olive tree even if we can't imagine how it was possible.More time may have passed than you assume before Noah planted his vineyard. It may have been planted on a well-drained slope. Of course I'm imagining, but I'm doing it in the service of supporting what you are trying to tear down. Neither of us can possibly know what happened, but your trusting in your own guesses as if you could know, against God's word, is reprehensible in someone who considers himself a Christian. No you aren't. You are selectively imagining a few things that might have been the case. There are lots of other possibilities you aren't taking into account. And you can't prove any of it, it's pure speculation, there is hardly the certainty you impute to it, as "what must be seen" as if you have prophetic hindsight or something. And there are not two stories of the Flood. As scripture tells us, even the demons believe that much, and they tremble at the knowledge. How do you let yourself assert such a fallible human perspective as if there is any real basis for it other than your fallible prejudices? The Bible is God's word, inspired by Him through His own chosen representatives. You are pitting yourself against God. He gave us His word because without it we don't stand a chance of interpreting His character accurately, and especially not events of the past where we are blind as bats and subject to the influences of our own fallen nature aided and abetted by Satan. In that you are pitting yourself against all the Biblical writers and all the believers in God's revelation and God Himself. Your brain is FALLEN. You'd be a lot better off if you checked it at the door. Trusting in your own fallible impressions is a deadly mistake. There is no loss of intelligence involved in belief; it is simply to be applied in the service of supporting God's word instead of destroying it. And that's what I did too. Only you allowed yourself to treat them as fiction, which no Bible believer should ever do with God's word. And it isn't necessary. There are many ways of imagining the conditions to support the olive tree and the vineyard. All we have is imagination, you let yours oppose God as the fallen human mind always does. You need to be regenerated and receive a renewed mind. You flatter yourself. There is no reason to imagine conditions conflicting, it's your fallen nature that does that, not the requirements of reality.Edited by Faith, : correct punctuationEdited by Faith, : ParagraphingEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

I didn't say they were, speaking of misrepresentations.What I said was:1) You are imagining that the necessary conditions were not present for the olive leaf and the vineyard to be true accounts. There is no reason to do that. You made up the circumstances to turn the Biblical account into a lie.2) You are also imposing a uniformitarian assumption on the olive tree and the vineyard of scripture. Since Noah and his sons lived many hundreds of years after the Flood there is clearly a vitality that was imparted to them in their pre-Flood lives that carried them through that long. This extra vitality would also have been the case with olive trees and grapevines. It took some centuries after the Flood for the perfect created world to cease its influence and the fallen world to manifest completely.

And I'm saying you have made up the conditions that would have existed for the tree and the vineyard and since they discredit the Biblical account they are wrong. Clearly those are not the conditions in which the tree and the vineyard existed. Which is the uniformitarian assumption I was talking about, which does not apply to the pre-Flood world. However, THAT world was no less "real" than the current world, despite your attempt to create that illusion. Of COURSE there is no evidence in THIS world for all that. It's all spelled out in scripture -- for the very reason that we couldn't imagine such things if God hadn't revealed them to us. Trusting in the conditions of THIS world, which is what uniformitarianism is, is what leads you to dismiss the Biblical revelation. Which I've already said many times. You merely confirm yourself in disbelief in the Bible by trusting in "evidence" that is guaranteed to conflict with it. You will forever deprive yourself of knowledge of things that can't be gained in this world or through our fallen minds. I look forward to the reinstatement of the original Creation and then some, through Christ's redemptive work, so I happily try to understand what it was like as far as the scanty information in scripture allows. Why you would want to discredit it all and deprive yourself of that is beyond me. I think it was Chesterton who wrote a wonderful book about why Christian dogma is the only way we can ever know anything of importance, but be that as it may, I expect the dogma of the Biblical revelation to guide me in the end to a completely new creation of such vitality and glory I can't even imagine it. What I learn from the Flood is how we lost the splendor and vitality of the first creation. But God sent Christ to give us hope of something even better.\So now you want to invoke the Science restriction on me after all this? OK, fine by me. I'm not interested in the judgments of Fallen Science against the realities revealed in God's word.

I assumed the olive tree and the vineyards also had beneficial conditions, not merely their own vitality.

An unsupported accusation it seems to me. That is my working hypothesis. That is also my best guess based on the evidence, but I'm open to rethinking it. I don't think I said anything that blatant, and whatever I said started with the rain as saturating the earth so that it would have been liable to mudslides and so on and so forth. How complete the scouring would have been how should I know? Huh? My thread on that subject is still open, and it's about the apparent implication that each time period represents a landscape based on the "depositional environment" interpreted from clues in the rock layer that is assigned to that time period, which I maintain is a fiction. "Buried in the flood sediments?" What ARE you talking about? You've somehow managed to garble the topic so badly I don't even know what you are talking about. They're educated in the exact sense I used the word, as based on reading up on the conditions required for healthy olive trees and vineyards. Beyond that, if they are ad hoc, so are jar's and any other attempts at imaginative reconstruction of the conditions applied to the Biblical text, and his discredit the Bible; mine don't. Seems to me what I said is a completely factual description of what he is doing. I also included some preaching that could have been left out, a couple of statements, but the preaching was the response to his attacks on me. He preaches worldly science with no less dogmatic belittling and condemnation of the opponent, as you all do, and I'm not always in a mood to take it lying down.

Why do you assume the "bottom?" The Flood was abating, the mountains were visible, the ark was either already at rest on Ararat or about to arrive there, I forget the timing. Why not assume the olive tree grew in the mountains?The vineyard was planted after they'd left the ark and were living on the land; and it is very possible it was years after they had disembarked that he planted it, scripture does not say.

For the reference to the bottom of the Flood water see my Message 70. Misrepresentation. The canopy was based on some clues in the Creation account. Misrepresentation. There is nothing magical about heterozygosity. Misrepresentation. Go do the math, compute the numbers of sons born to Noah's sons and then to their sons, assume as many daughters, continue another couple of generations and you'll see that many settlements would already have to have been the result. Large cities grow from the settlements.

You are misrepresenting my argument in many ways but I'd LOVE to get off this thread, now that you've decided to stop encouraging Biblical reasoning and invoke Holy Science against it.

If the tree was growing high in the mountains it wouldn't have BEEN underwater for a year. The Flood wouldn't have reached it until the very last stages, then it would have sat underwater maybe a couple of months before it saw the light of day again as the water receded from the higher land.

I did think that at one time, but I've modified my older hypotheses. Walther's Law came up later and gave me a different angle on things. It gave a picture of OCEAN sediments being brought up onto the land so that now it seems to me those account for probably most of the volume of the deposited strata. The huge chalk cliffs of Dover wouldn't have resulted from the scouring of the land of course, nor the thick limestone deposits, nor the huge deposits of sand either despite all the notions of "dunes." This I just answered separately. Wow have you made mush out of what I was saying. There was ALWAYS landscape PRE-EXISTING the Flood, the created world for pete's sake, that would have been covered by the sediments, the exact opposite of what you claim I said does not exist. What doesn't exist is the imaginary "landscapes" that are posited to have covered the surface of the earth during each "time period," and that's because there WERE no time periods, only the sedimentary layers that were built by the Flood.As for Mt. Ararat, whatever mountains pre-existed the Flood are generally thought to have been a lot lower than those we have today, which are thought to have been pushed up by the tectonic forces that occurred in relation to the Flood, some say during, I usually think afterward. How Ararat might have been affected I haven't studied, but it seems fair at least to suppose it was high enough to escape being covered by the Flood until the very last stage. By that time I have the impression there was less sediment being deposited for some reason, a topic which has come up on the Timescale thread recently. Probably the base of the mountain was covered in sedimentary deposits as you say, but on the other hand I don't know where all the strata got deposited and some places never got strata or not much. However, your idea that I denied that such a phenomenon would have happened is false. You somehow got a wacky idea about what I meant by the landscapes that don't exist. MAYBE my fault, that's always a possibility, but maybe not. Well, there's no way the mountain formed after the Flood, so you can scratch that one. Then for your second scenario you could try to prove that the base of the mountain was never covered in sediments, in which case you should also show evidence that there is no strata in that region, or you could prove that it wasn't tectonically affected later so as to be pushed up above such deposits, or to incorporate the deposited strata into the mountain. In any case there's no problem with the idea that at the end of the Flood a tree growing in its upper reaches could have emerged from the water after a relatively short dip to provide the dove with a branch to take to Noah. Now now now, please read the above, and could you please stop being so... irritable? Just as jar read up on what the plants need in today's world, so did I. Instead of imagining a soggy soil for the vineyard I imagined a circumstance that would provide the good drainage that grapevines need. I imagined that the Flood didn't eradicate all the soil for the olive tree. I also imagined pre-Flood vitality such as Noah and his family obviously had, and all living things before the Flood, so that they could survive some hardships. Sources? The Bible for the pre-Flood vitality of course. For the rest, maybe Wikipedia but I don't remember. Look up "growing conditions for olive trees" and the same for grapevines or some such. And PLEASE try to be less cantankerous. No, he is wrong because he doesn't respect the Bible as God's word, which is something nobody who calls himself a Christian should do. You put more words than that in my mouth.And you all preach at me all the time to give up the Bible as the final authority and bow down to Science instead. At least I'm preaching from the truth.But as I keep saying I really don't want to remain on this thread anyway.

The mountains weren't very high anyway and there were no cold spells in the pre-Flood world and the pre-Flood vitality would have carried it through that much hardship anyway. This olive tree was born and reared in the pre-Flood world with the vitality to withstand hardship.Source: Genesis.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Provide a cross section of what? The pre-Flood world? You're joking? I have no idea what such a cross section would do for you. You got some very wrong idea about what I meant by a landscape, and I tried to correct your misimpression. I can't tell yet if you got the message. I said I was only talking about the Geo Timescale imaginary "landscapes" invented to illustrate what the clues in the rocks seem to suggest, but there was always A landscape, that would have been covered in sedimentary layers Now you want a cross section of that? Whatever for?Oh, to find out if Ararat was covered with strata? First wouldn't you have to find out if sediment was eroded away from Ararat in the first stage of the Flood, during the long period of heavy rain?If you aren't cantankerous you are doing a fine job of seeming to be, making irrelevant demands in a very dictatorial tone and so on.Yes there is no time frame for the vineyard, Noah could have planted it years after the Flood for all we know. I was answering the idea that the soil would be soggy by putting it on a hillside where it would have the necessary drainage. But if it was planted years later there wouldn't have been any problem with soggy soil anyway.You are also making tyrannical demands about what I should have learned from what I read about olive trees, and defining "education" to suit yourself as well. What's going on with you? What I described was not all that controversial. I read enough to answer the specific claim about the olive tree. Too bad if I missed a part that would have supported my position better, but your contention that proves I didn't read anything about it at all is twisting things to fit some scenario that allows you to upbraid me. I imagined things according to what I understood the plants needed. That's what educated imagination means. There is nothing wrong with that and no of course it didn't come from Wikipedia. What is wrong with you?So now you are going on and on with your uniformitarian assumptions as if they are simply fact. Sorry, creationists pretty much all agree that the pre-Flood world was not the same as the world now, that the mountains were lower, that the climate was warm, and there is every reason to impute great vitality to all living things if only based on the longevity of the line of patriarchs and Noah and his family. But you dictatorially insist on forcing your "scientific" uniformitarian opinion on us against the evidence of scripture that we rely on.But what else should I expect from a "Christian" who is willing to let his own educated imagination trump what God's word says? Yes, NOW you can get really pushed out of shape.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Do you know what a paradigm clash is, Coyote? It doesn't sound like you do. It's where DIFFERENT IDEAS ABOUT THE WORLD conflict. You keep insisting on your own paradigm as if there were no other. Your hundreds of millions of years of layers belong to YOUR paradigm. Based on YOUR paradigm you misrepresent the creationist view of the olive tree. Just once step outside the box, meaning outside of your own paradigm, long enough to see that the creationist paradigm or worldview is entirely different from yours. There were no hundreds of millions of years of layers. The olive tree could not have lived millions of years ago, not even your "scientific" 60,000 years ago; that's all based on YOUR worldview or paradigm, not ours. Ours says the millions of years are bogus and that the world is thousands of years old, the Flood WAS some 4500 years ago and the olive tree grew in the world that preceded it. You are welcome to your own paradigm, but you are misusing it in this context.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.