Did the Flood really happen?

No, that's not it in your case. You don't know the terminology and when you're asked to explain what's wrong you merely repeat your claims

What situation is that?The situation where you don't know all of the facts and where religious dogma puts you in an intellectual straight-jacket?Yeah, that would be tough. Please provide an example. How how do you label a theory that is based on known facts and interpretations that are consistent with each other as ad hoc?

You should stop replacing your disallowed words with words that don't fit. Your disallowed words appear in peek mode, but since you've changed them no one can know what they were. Where possible I change the word to my best guess. That is really false. You're fooling no one but yourself. You've been forced by "Biblical input" that there absolutely was a flood into making ridiculous and goofy and counter-factual pronouncements about the geological column. You're making a concerted effort to ignore the facts. Like right now. Therefore your views are Biblically based, when in this thread they must be factually based. You're trying to make it fit the flood, and where does the idea about the flood come from if not the Bible? We believe that you really believe that. Faith, please, stop talking about yourself because you keep saying things that are patently untrue. For instance, it is untrue that you haven't challenged the tree ring evidence. You've challenged it countless times, basically saying we don't know how many rings used to form in a year.When you talk about yourself you inevitably lie, so leave yourself out of the discussion and concentrate on the topic. What's impossible and ludicrous are the ideas you keep proposing, like that the Supergroup layers tilted while buried without disturbing the layers above and causing cubic miles of rock to disappear, or that floods can sort fossils, or that specially controlled flumes that deposit layers at angles (not horizontal a la Steno) are how the flood layers happened, or that worldwide floods are special floods that don't act like normal floods and can do anything you need them to do, or that worldwide floods can transport intact entire landscapes from one place to another, and so on. You're not charged with claiming the Bible said anything specific about ideas like superfast tree ring formation and Supergroup tilting and so forth, but every one of those silly ideas is driven by your need to prove the Flood. Let's be clear again that you're not talking about observations in the sense of fact gathering and analysis, but in the sense of rendering opinions or making pronouncements. The absurdity of your view of geology's interpretation of the geological column is not the topic. The topic is whether the Flood really happened, which means evidence for the flood should be what gets discussed.We know it is untrue that your pronouncements are "independent of any biblical reference and in fact has nothing to do with the Bible in itself," because you've used the Bible to support your views in this thread over and over again. These examples are just from this thread:

• Message 285: In attempting to address the fact that several civilizations that existed at the time flood didn't seem to notice it, you replied by citing the Bible.
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• Message 191: "All I know is that things were different before the Flood, and how exactly doesn't matter to me. I don't know what a lot of the terminology means. But whatever it means it's God's revelation and the later Bible writers believed that and treated it all as God's truth, including Jesus. The Flood changed the climate, people lived much much longer before than after and so on."
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  Message 181: "Why are the Bible writers taken for such idiots? Of course they knew their own experience didn't define the world, and the Bible itself makes that clear. If the earliest writers were that limited certainly the later writers weren't and they wouldn't put up with the earlier accounts if they knew them to be false. But they treated them as God's own revelation. They knew there was a worldwide Flood, Peter described a worldwide Flood.
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  "Well, being a Bible literalist myself, though that term is not really accurate as some ppeople misuse it, but anyway since I take the Bible as a revelation of the truth about everything, I know there were no rainbows before the Flood because it didn't rain before the Flood."
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• Message 146: "So their existence is evidence of Noah's flood, as remembered by his descendants all over the world with the usual distortions we should expect of human storytelling. Only the Bible is presented to us as an accurate accounting of history, and its circumstantial details alone give credibility to that claim."
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• Message 81: "Science does not judge the Bible, the Bible judges science and all of us and everything else."
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  [bible quote]
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  "Pretty clearly talking about one Flood there, as is also the case wherever else in the Bible the Flood is referenced."
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• Message 36: "It doesn't say there was a Greenland either, or a North America or continental drift. Putting together a scenario for the Flood has to take into account whatever seems to apply as long as it doesn't contradict the Bible, and I don't see how any of that does."

Please stop using the Bible to support your views, but first stop denying that that's what you've been doing. All attempts like this at self-justification fail because they force you into transparent lies. We are now. Kinds are definitely part of any discussion of the flood with you. It always comes up because you claim all the species in existence today sprang from many fewer kinds on the ark. And it's just another idea you have that is Bible-based. Let's be clear again that by "observations" you mean "expressions of your opinion," not fact gathering. And observations you make about kinds are definitely Bible-based. If you didn't believe in the Biblical flood you wouldn't be making up confabulous stories about geology and biology that have no supporting evidence and are contradicted by the known evidence. You are seriously delusional. You have a host of reasons for ignoring evidence presented to you. It's too white or you're too tired or it's too complicated or the message was too long or you're not reading their messages anymore or you'll come back to it or you just never reply and on and on it goes. It is unambiguously false that evidence is not presented to you. I have no idea what this means. Stop messing with the raw text because it screws up peek. So you believe that any "scientific fact" about the geological column is part of an absurd interpretation that is not scientifically defensible, and that just making that declaration somehow constitutes discussion of the evidence. You don't see a problem with your perspective on how to discuss evidence? No, Faith, you have not. I did not make up that list of excuses you've invented for not confronting the evidence. If anything it's incomplete. In this thread alone you've ignored 107 messages so far, more than half the responses to you. What *you* say has no evidence and is contradicted by the existing evidence, and much of it is impossible. This is as wrong and as self-serving as could be. Facts by themselves are not intended to change anyone's point of view. Discussion of facts and ideas about them is what changes peoples' minds, and this kind of discussion is something you refuse to do. By your own admission you've been ignoring what people say and just repeating your own opinions ad nauseum. In this post right now you're avoiding discussion of the facts by instead talking about yourself and justifying your own behavior. Yes, we're well aware that this is one of the tactics you employ to avoid dealing with the facts. This complaint was already old years ago. Give it up. Drowning in what? Certainly not facts, because you haven't touched a single one. Oh, what a surprise, you're going to ignore messages to you again. Then discuss it instead of you. You are not the topic.--Percy

If you can't, you shouldn't be saying anything. No, you don't often give your reasoning. You say some words that make little or no sense, then you don't respond to challenges and requests for clarification, then still later you claim you already explained it. The Flood is the topic of this thread: Did the Flood really happen?The discussion, if you would actually engage with it, is about the flood. Calling things names like "absurd" and "scientifically impossible" is not the topic. People are just telling you the insufficiency of doing that. It is not discussion. If all you can do is call things names then you shouldn't be here. You're missing the point. If scientists are unwilling to take the word of a genius like Einstein, if even Einstein has to prove what is intuitively obvious to him, then don't you think us normal people must also prove what we think intuitively true?Also consider the implications of your view that it is sufficient to call something absurd. The other side could call your ideas absurd, and now what? You might actually have to start discussing the facts. Oh my heavens! I'm aware that this has been explained to you many times, about the history of how first the periods were identified as being in an invariant order and later how times were determined through radiometric dating. You claim that for you the jury is still out on radiometric dating, but is that really true, or is the actual truth that, as seems here, you've already decided that even though you can't prove radiometric dating wrong that you're going to ignore it and declare the Bible true anyway. Your summation of the geological view is pretty good. Can you explain what makes it absurd? Okay, but why absurd? And even if we assume geology is wrong, how is that evidence that the Flood really happened? Maybe this is true, maybe not. You've used it so frequently as a debate tactic that who knows?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

You're trying to make it sound like you're following a scientific approach, but that would mean gathering the facts and then seeing what conclusions you can draw from those facts. But you give the lie to this in your very next point: You say you're trying to look at the evidence independent of your preconceptions, but that the ToE is wrong is a preconception. Just a reminder, this is a flood thread, not a ToE thread. You say that you're looking for evidence for the Flood and against the ToE, but one's mainly geology and the other is mainly biology. I think what you meant to say is that you're looking for evidence for the Flood and against the traditional views of geology.--Percy

Why are you changing words from your disallowed word list into other words also on the list so that when looked at in peek what you say makes no sense? Is this some kind of passive aggressive thing? If you have no facts then you are bereft and have no means of persuading anyone of anything.People have many times given you examples of the kinds of facts you need. Find rabbit fossils in the Cambrian at a variety of sites (just one or two could be the result of a rare sequence of geological events). Find non-inverted strata with out-of-order radiometric dates. Find the exit ports for the fountains of the deep. Analyze the paleosols left over from the antedeluvian world and show how much more lush the world was back then. Find DNA evidence of the kinds from the ark. Find the ark. Find evidence of how animals from all over the world traveled to the ark, and how they traveled back again after the Flood. Find evidence that the civilizations already in existence at the time of the Flood have been misdated. Show how worldwide floods can sort fossils by increasing difference from modern forms. Show how worldwide floods can sort sediments as they actually appear in the geologic column rather than just by size/density. Show how worldwide floods can sort sediments by type (shale, limestone, sandstone, etc.). Find the discontinuity in the geological layers between the top of what was left after the Flood swept everything away and what lies above. Develop a rational explanation for how buried layers can tilt while layers above lay undisturbed. Enormous abundance? You're just making things up again. Some strata have many fossils (coastal sea beds) and some have very very few, almost none. Again, what abundance? Give an example or two of strata far more fossil-rich than we should expect. Of course you can't give statistics. That would require facts. It seems intuitively wrong, and you've provided no facts that support your viewss. We all assume that the wait for statistics from you, a topic you don't understand, will be infinite. No one has ever argued that fossilization is not common. Most life never becomes fossilized. But fossilization is highly variable and depends upon local conditions. Strata of former coastal sea floor will be fossil rich, while deep sea strata will be fossil poor. Floods certainly bury things, but they sort only by size/density, so how do you explain strata of greater size/density lying above strata of lesser size/density? Why are some strata fossil rich and others fossil poor? Why are no mammals or dinosaurs found in any Grand Canyon strata? The transport mechanism for chemicals is water, which would be compressed out of the lithifying rock and forced upward, not downward. Why not? It varies. The odds of becoming fossilized on a seabed full of life that is accumulating sediments is pretty good, for example, this Wenlock Limestone fragment from Dudley, England: This is why it is far more common for only bones to be preserved in fossils. The soft parts are only rarely present. Were recently living carcasses deeply and suddenly buried whole under great pressure then impressions of fossilized soft parts would be very common. Our thinking does not lead to this conclusion, but since your thinking does why don't you take us through the chain of logic that begins with the facts and arrives at the conclusion that there was a global flood 4500 years ago. You've described facts in this message? Wait, let me read up to this point again...Okay, just reread the message up to this point and I see no facts, other than that we agree fossilization is rare. What facts are you talking about that support a young Earth and a global flood 4500 years ago? You haven't said anything factual, and much of what you've said has been either questionable or so qualitative as to be unassessable. Again, no facts, no explanations, just claims that we'd see how absurd it is if we would just think about it. It's as if you believe it isn't substance that's important but the mere stringing together of sentences and paragraphs. They're *increasingly* different from modern forms with increasing depth. And if modern mammals, for example, were swept away and buried and fossilized by the flood just like all other life not on the ark then where are they in the fossil record? Though there's an element of progression from simple to complex, it is not a general rule. Evolution is better described as change over time than as increasing complexity. So to you monkeys and gazelles and giraffes and elephants and whales and dolphins and squirrels and wildebeests and hippopotamuses and camels have a paltry collection of differences? Why are you saying something so obviously untrue? And as you go deeper in the geologic column the differences become greater and greater. Again, according to you the life we see today also lived before the flood. Where are they in the fossil record? You think that the upper reaches of the geologic column contain modern life forms? Where? There are special cases like the La Brea Tar Pits that contain recent fossils, such as saber-toothed tigers, but for the most part there hasn't been sufficient time for any modern life to be deeply buried, fossilized, then exposed through erosion. That's why we don't generally find fossils of modern animals, that I know of anyway.Again, the modern forms existed before the Flood, too. Only one pair of each modern form were saved on the ark. If the Flood had happened the way you say then the modern forms would have been buried and fossilized just like all other life. This is one of your more ridiculous ideas. What's RAZD got to do with whether you understand Walther's Law? Walther's Law is constructed from evidence. It is not itself evidence. What you say is a non sequitur. If by "rising sea water" you're not referring to a slowly transgressing sea but to your global Flood, then no, rapidly rising sea water does not sort sediments in the way seen in the geological column. If you think it does then please explain how it does this. Well of course you can, because those are things that Walther's Law *does* describe. What has any of that to do with a global Flood? You've been saying stuff like this for the past four hours while churning out post after post. Why should we take anything you say seriously? Quit the drama.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix typo in title.

Wow! Inconsistent much? Here's the diagram again: First you say all the distortion is tectonic: And then you say some of the distortion is caused by water: Perhaps you can explain how your Flood water that only leaves behind miles of flat strata does this. I've magnified the diagram and put the layer with the little circles in roughly the center. Looking at the boundary between that layer and the one immediately below, please explain how your Flood did that. Or looking at the irregular boundary in the lower left corner of the diagram, please also explain how your Flood did that. You can't just answer "the water did it." You need to explain how your Flood created these irregular boundaries at the same time that it's supposed to leave behind miles of flat strata.And underground flowing water did not carry the material away. Its way too deep for there to be flowing water that erodes and carries material away. Even if it could happen it would have caused the overlying material to collapse into the emptied space, which obviously from the diagram did not happen: You're ignoring the diagram right before your very eyes. Obviously some of those boundaries were originally horizontal, and just as obviously some were not. You can't just mindlessly repeat the mantra, "Everything was originally horizontal. This tilted one was originally horizontal, that tilted one was originally horizontal, this irregular one that isn't even close to flat was somehow originally horizontal, this tilted boundary formed from the vertical end of a stratum was originally horizontal, etc..." Surely you can see that obviously some strata were originally flat and horizontal and some just as obviously were not. But the diagram shows far worse than mere deviations from perfect "flatness and straightness." Strata just end abruptly, almost as if they'd been sheared off by some force like (gasp!) erosion at the surface. Other strata have extremely irregular surfaces, almost as if they, too, had been affected by (gasp!) erosion at the surface. If the Flood did it then please explain how, preferably using processes that aren't obviously impossible. If it were true that a layer tapered out because that part of the Flood's sediment load was diminishing then as it peters out we would see larger/denser particles on the bottom (because they fall out of suspension first) and smaller/lighter particle on top. But that's not what we see, so you need another explanation. The geologic column in any location is just a vertical sequence of rock formations, so of course granite is part of the geologic column. In your Flood scenario, how did this granite boulder end up sitting in the middle of the woods. How did water so violent that it could suspend a boulder this size also first deposit the soil upon which it was set to rest: --PercyEdited by Percy, : Provide improved image.

You don't even pretend to do an "honest exploration of physical reality." Most of your ideas are physically impossible, but you understand so little of science and how the world works that you don't realize it.--Percy

In your narrative the pre-Flood world in which the patriarchs lived was wiped from the surface of the Earth by the Flood, and yet archeology is able to study sites, some Biblical, that predate the Flood, so obviously they were not wiped away. Examples of such sites are Ur, Jericho, Sidon and Rujm el-Hiri.--Percy

No, I can't think of any layer of granite; it's not part of the geological column, but there's a lot of it beneath the Tapeats layer in the Grand Canyon, along with schist.I have no idea how the boulder got there; probably nothing to do with the Flood, something that happened afterward.And I sincerely do believe I was looking at the geo column without input from the Bible.Sorry was confused about the strata beneath the UK. Of course the whole thing was tectonically created when the strata on the island tilted, but the differences in the thickness of the strata do suggest the effect of water afterward -- it is all underwater of course.CheersEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

None of those sites existed before the Flood. You are welcome to your different view of the dates, but my view is biblical and the Flood is as far back as anything goes. Evidence for either view doesn't really exist.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The Bible doesn't say that the flood destroyed every trace of what went before. Its only purpose was to kill, not destroy.

I guess we could consider what might have survived, but the Bible DOES say that whole world perished:2 Peter 3:6

Bullshit Faith. You can only assert that "Evidence for either view doesn't really exist" by being willfully ignorant or utterly dishonest.The evidence for the existence before the alleged dates of either Biblical Flood story exists in position, chemistry, geology, radiometric dating as well as every other testing method yet devised. There is No evidence of either Biblical Flood other than the stories in the Bible.

What "perished" is not the issue. You were talking about sites such as Ur, Jericho, Sidon and Rujm el-Hiri. The Bible doesn't say anything about such sites being destroyed.