Describing what the Biblical Flood would be like.

But Faith, we can and have proven those things.We know what conditions are necessary to grow Olive Trees and Grape Vines. In fact folk even make a living actually growing Olive Trees and Grape Vines.The conditions needed are not a matter of imagination. Yes, we know you say that but once again, reality proves you wrong. There is a way to deal with events in the past and that is to look at the evidence, the change, caused by those past events. We can tell that a volcano erupted by the layers of ash it emitted. We can tell if a comet or meteorite hit the Earth even if no one witnessed the event by the evidence left, craters and shocked quartz and iron fragments that match those of other meteorites and the micro diamonds and iridium layers left. We can look at the actual geology and tell a river ran here and those ripples were made by a flowing stream but these ripples are made by blowing sands and when we find the imprint of a leaf we can know a tree once grew nearby and when we find charcoal we can tell a fire happened at that location.Changes leave evidence. It does not matter whether it is recent or far past, witnessed or not witnessed; change leave evidence.Once again, reality simply proves you wrong. And that Faith is both wrong and simply more of your dogma. You need to stop posting falsehoods and misrepresentations of my position.

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.

You really have a hard time not continuing to misrepresent what I post, don't you Faith.Honestly, can't you read?Once again, here is what I really said in Message 3:

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There is yet more conclusions we can make based on the stories themselves.

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The stories say that the Ark came to rest among mountains. It also says (at least one of the stories) that one of the indications was a a freshly picked olive leaf.

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So what does that tell us?

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Olive trees have a fairly shallow root system but one that extends far beyond the canopy line, often as much a four times the diameter of the canopy drip line.

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They require a soil base, not lithified rock.

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That means that the recessionary phase of the flood did not strip away the soil even in mountainous areas and that the flood duration at that location did not last long enough to kill the tree.

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AbE:

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We can say a little bit more based on the story itself. Olive trees cannot stand waterlogged soil and so even if the area around the tree received lots of rain the base did not remain underwater for any extended period and the excess water from the rain or "fountains of the deep" drained away rapidly; certainly for far less than a full year.

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and in Message 13:

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In addition, the issue is not whether or not the soils before the imaginary flood were fertile, it is that the flood did not knock down the olive tree or cover the root system in water for more than a few days or harm the tree in anyway.

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Physics is still physics. Biology is still biology. Chemistry is still chemistry. Mechanics is still mechanics. The Olive tree would have been the same Olive tree both before and after the flood. The soil the tree is growing in is still the soil that was there before the alleged flood.

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and in Message 16:

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There is yet another piece of information we can get from the flood stories and that is in general almost none of the loose soil was washed away and somehow sea water did not rise up to cover the lands. That is another factor found in the stories, Noah planted a vineyard. Now grapes unlike olives have deep root systems often going down ten feet or more. Like the olive though they will not grow in soggy or water logged soil, or soil lacking nutrients or extremely acidic or alkaline soil.

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This tells us that both the depth of the soil and the makeup of the soil remained pretty constant and that the soil definitely did not spend a year under water or get flooded by seawater or salts washed down from higher levels.

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It seems the flood described in the Bible stories was far more like the annual Nile delta or Amazon basin flooding.

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What I am saying is that "If the Olive Tree and Vineyard stories are true here are the conditions that must have existed at that time."Also I am just looking at evidence in the real world. There is no evidence to support your assertion that "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."That is simply dogma and while it might be relevant in some Bible study class it is irrelevant in a Science thread unless you can provide support.

If the olive trees and grapevines had some non-magical but still imaginary properties before the flood that allowed them to survive the flood... why not the animals too? Why couldn't the pre-flood super-cows hold their breaths for a year? It would have saved Noah a lot of carpentry.

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.

The problem is not "educated imaginative reconstructions" it is conflicting explanations; explanations that are "imagined" to prop up a particular issue irregardless of how they effect explanations that have previously been put out to prop up other issues.Is it not your contention that the ENTIRE geological column is a product of the flood? And is it also not your contention that ALL tectonic activity occurred AFTER the entire geological column was laid down? Is it not your contention that the ENTIRE surface of the earth was wiped clean by the rising waters of the flood? And was it not you that declared mainstream geologic explanations to be bogus due to the lack of "livable landscapes" buried in the flood sediments? In this case, the roots of Mt. Ararat should be buried beneath flood sediments so as to be one of these so called "livable landscapes" you complain do not exist.Your "imaginative reconstructions" are not very educated, they are simply ad-hoc explanations to prop up your premises. You do realize these comments are just personal attacks, right? They don't support your argument, they simply belittle and condemn your opponent.HBD

How can there be "beneficial conditions" at the bottom of a flood? They would have been under fifteen cubits of water.

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.

Magical water, dont you remember? The kind that does not suffocate plants nor gets soil soggy.What speaks volumes about biblical inerrancy is the fact that it forces a cogent being surrender every shred of honesty and integrity. Ken Ham is a shining example of that - reality has no value to him and what makes him totally evil is that he's actively spreading lies to children unlike those who think like him but are at least decent to keep their delusion to themselves.What puzzles me a lot is that in order to make any "sense" of floodstories one has to invent alternative reality with water canopy or magical genetic material or 8 people being able to create big cities within few generations...

Faith, those are the conditions needed for ANY Olive tree or vineyard. If you wish to imagine some other conditions then it is up to you to provide the evidence needed to support your assertion. If one part of a Bible story is incompatible and contrary to other parts of the story that too is just fact and it is up to those who wish to deny such inconsistencies to provide evidence to support their position instead of simply denying that the Bible story says what it really says. This is a Science forum Faith, not a platform for preaching or dogma or propaganda or apologetics. Are you new here Faith? Is this thread not in the Geology and the Great Flood section of the Science Forums?I am not invoking anything that has not been the rules here for over a decade.You claimed ... I am simply describing the conditions necessary if the Olive Tree and Vineyard parts of the story were true. The fact that those parts of the story conflict with other parts of the story is just another fact. I simply acknowledge those errors and omissions and inconsistencies and contradictions and accept the evidence of what I believe GOD actually created over the stories written by man.

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.

The Lord works in mysterious ways