Did the Flood really happen?

But there was a Sun and there were oceans and the hydrologic cycle must have been operating.Unless some Occam's-Razor-smashing miracles happened.Otherwise it must have rained before the time of Noah.

Idyuts or idjits?Of course not: we see further only because we stand on their shoulders.But that's no reason to believe the myths they passed down. Otherwise you'd be offering up offerings to placate Hephaestus every time you were worried about a volcano.

If you want to be a bible literalist, at least be consistent. The "mists" stuff was only during the days of creation before humans were created, "...for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground..."

On the contrary, without religion we'd be in better shape. Good people do good things, bad people do bad things, but in order to persuade good people to do bad things you need religion or some other ideology that brings in enthusiastic fanatics.

I'll go with Ayn Rand: no mystics of spirit, no mystics of muscle.

The reference to mystics isn't part of the flood discussion. But since you asked:A character in Atlas Shrugged gives an explanation

quote:

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As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter”the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit”the destruction of his mind.

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The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive”a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society”a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth”to his great-grandchildren.

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No problem.

The flood would not have laid down many layers, it would have laid down a simple structure with larger stones precipitating out first and, of course no igneous or metamorphic strata. Consider the strata shown by the valley of the Grand Canyon. The flood certainly wouldn't have laid down volcanic basalt at a low level, sandstone in the Bright Angel formation, limestone and dolomite in the Muav formation, shale in the Supai formation, sandstone in the Coconino formation, shale in the Toroweap formation, lava and cinders in the Shivwits and Uinkaret formations and sedimentary rock on top of that lava.And that's just a few of the many, many different layers.

Volcanic layers appear at both old and young positions, with sedimentary layers in between and above.You claim that your flood could lay down different sedimentary layers, such as shale and sandstone, but how could it lay down multiple such layers interleaved? That is, how could shale be between two sandstone layers, or sandstone between two shale layers?

A flood miles deep lasting for months would have pulverized and melted the polar ice caps, not to mention every glacier on the planet. But the ice caps were there centuries before the birth of Christ. The records go back as far as Pytheas of Massalia. That's an impossibly short time for ice caps to form!

You say we're in the end part of an Ice Age. How many ice ages do you think there have been since the end of your flood (which took place, as near as can be calculated from the Bible, during the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty)?Even if there were only one Ice Age in the handful of centuries since the Sixth Dynasty, is that really enough time, considering the number of layers in ice cores and the slow rate of advance of glaciers?

You bring up a good point with the idea of "repeatable" phenomena. But while we can study beta decay or radio waves by watching ("detecting" rather!) them over and over, what about the happenings at the center of the Earth, or on a pulsar millions of light-years away? I'm sure you can think of many areas of science concerned with phenomena which cannot be manipulated "repeatably" with forceps and gloves on a lab bench!(Of course, we CAN directly observe evolution and we CAN conduct experiments, as I described in my original post EvC Forum: "Best" evidence for evolution.. Look at the links about such topics as Buffalo grass, Madeira island house mice, the "American goatsbeard" and Nereis acuminata, but that's for another thread.)

Your statement that species-to-species evolution hasn't been observed is no more true than a statement that beta decay or radio waves haven't been observed, as I described in my original post EvC Forum: "Best" evidence for evolution.. Look at the links about such topics as Buffalo grass, Madeira island house mice, the "American goatsbeard" and Nereis acuminata, but that's for another thread.

Your statement that species-to-species evolution hasn't been observed is no more true than a statement that beta decay or radio waves haven't been observed, as I described in my original post EvC Forum: "Best" evidence for evolution.. Look at the links about such topics as Buffalo grass, Madeira island house mice, the "American goatsbeard" and Nereis acuminata, but that's for another thread.

You wrote "I question the claims of science when they base models on nature and laws having been the same." But it's important in science to have a consistency of scientific laws. There's no point in scientific laws that work on Monday but don't work on Tuesday!