Does the evidence support the Flood? (attn: DwarfishSquints)

Hi Wumpini,Let me try a simple analogy to explain why you have to take Rahvin's calculations seriously.Joe: "I just drove my car from New York to Los Angeles in 4 hours."Bill: "Impossible. I'm going to be as favorable to your position as possible by using very approximate figures slanted in your favor. We'll call the driving distance between NY and LA 2000 miles (it's actually around 2800). The maximum average speed you could attain has got to be less than 100 mph, but let's be as favorable to your position as possible and say that your average speed was 200 mph. It would take 10 hours for you to drive 2000 miles at 200 mph, therefore it would have been impossible for you to complete the trip in 4 hours."Notice that although Bill has used figures that deviate by large margins from realistic figures, he deviated in a manner designed to be as favorable to Joe's claim as possible.Rahvin did the equivalent thing for the flood. He used very approximate figures that were on purpose extremely favorable to the creationist position. More accurate figures would be much less favorable. Demanding more accurate figures would only show the flood to be even more impossible than Rahvin just demonstrated.The reason the possibility of Noah's flood is easy to refute is because flood theory wasn't developed by building a theory around data gathered from the natural world, but by reading Genesis. As luck would have it, unless God is playing games with us by placing false evidence in the rocks, Genesis is not an accurate historical account.--Percy

Concerning your hypothesis that conditions around the time of the flood must have been significantly different, you must ask yourself if this is attempting to explain evidence from the natural world, or if it is being offered to explain the Genesis story from the Bible.The answer to this question governs whether you're doing science or religion. If you understand that you're doing religion then I say good will and good travels to you. But if you think you're doing science then you need to find some evidence fast.In other words, and using your analogy, we have extremely strong evidence from the natural world that there were no cars or good roads or gasoline or even New York or Los Angeles around the time of Noah. But we have no evidence that conditions on the earth were significantly different 4000 years ago, and that includes evidence from both geology and biology, and so your analogy fails to accurately capture the situation.I guess what I'm saying is that I have less of a problem with believing in the flood than I do with believing there's scientific evidence for the flood. The former is harmless if maintained as a purely faith-based religious belief, while the latter has been a threat to science education for nearly a century.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

But you have no problem viewing yesterday naturalistically, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so forth. What changes for you as you look further back in time?Science is a way of examining the natural universe. The common creationist claim that science excludes God is untrue. Science no more excludes God than does knitting. Anything for which there can be no natural evidence can not be part of science. You may as well accuse football teams of excluding baseballs as accuse science of excluding God. If you're talking about ultimate truths, I hope so, too, but this has nothing to do with science. Science seeks what is true about the universe, not the ultimate truths of religion. Science cannot find meaning. All science can do is figure out how the universe works, but not anything about the why of the universe.The issue you're dealing with is that you hold some religious beliefs that make specific claims about the natural world (e.g., that there was a global flood just 4500 years ago) for which there is no scientific evidence from the natural world. That's a fact. How honestly your religion deals with this fact says little about science but volumes about your religion.--Percy