Not reading God's Word right is just wrong. No talking snakes!

If it was a local flood, then we really wouldn't have an argument.But the Bible specifically says that the entire world was covered, even the mountains. Is says that Noah took two or seven (depending on whether the animal was "clean") of every species onto the Ark, with which to repopulate the Earth after the Flood was over. It specifically states that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and that the waters stayed for about a year before receding.That doesn't describe a local flood. That's a global flood, one which is completely unsupported by physical evidence.A local flood is completely plausible - floods happen all the time, and it's certainly conceivable that an unusually severe flood could be the root of the actual flood story in Genesis. But the details of the Genesis account are factually incorrect - no global flood ever happened, least of all in the span of human history.

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Genesis:
6:6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
6:7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
6:13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
6:17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.
7:19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
7:21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
7:22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
7:23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

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Emphasis mine.Does that sound like a regional flood to you? The author is quite plainly setting us up for a global catastrophe. God wants to kill everything that he has made, everything with "the breath of life." You can't get any more direct than this.It would seem that you are the one "interpreting" the Bible, as opposed to taking what it actually says at face value. I have not, because it's irrelevant - I accept that a regional flood very well could have happened. I'm not disagreeing with you on that point at all. Floods, even severe floods, are commonplace enough that there's no point in debating whether a regional flood happened. It does not say that the entire civilized world was covered. Genesis clearly states that God set out to kill everything that he had made. Every. Single. Living. Thing. Not everything in the Sumerian region, unless you also claim that god only Created the Middle East, and not the rest of teh world. The text said that every creeping thing, every fowl of the air, every beast of the earth, and all men were killed. There is no textual limitation of a specific area - the text plainly is talking about the entirety of the planet, all of creation.It never actually happened, of course. There was likely a severe local flood, and the Genesis account is the end result of generations of embellishment and, basically, playing telephone with the original facts of the story, such that it has been turned into a myth. I think that we both agree on that point.But it's important to note that the Biblical account, if it is taken literally, is talking about a world-wide flood - just as Genesis also specifically states that all living things were specially Created by god, not evolved, that man was made from dust, not produced over generations from pre-existing animals, and that the Earth was Created in six literal days. You can practice some apologetics and "re-interpret" the text to fit what we know today from actually studying the matter, but the fact is that the Bible, read literally, makes certain claims that are not themselves "interpretations." I'm not making any interpretations here. I'm simply reading and quoting the Bible, verbatim. Genesis clearly states that there was a global flood.And interestingly enough, I don't see the word "global" in any of what I quoted. Genesis is speaking of a global flood, but this is clear simply by reading the whole text - god wanted to kill everything that he had made. That would be world-wide. It restates the same basic thing over and over again in slightly different ways. This isn't some translation "oops" where a translator screwed up a single word - the entire story is very clearly talking about a catastrophe that affects everything that god has made - which, according to earlier in Genesis, means the entirety of the world.The Bible very clearly claims that there was a flood that covered the entire world. There is no interpretation wiggle-room. The Bible makes a claim, one that is very plainly falsified by modern science. You can try to twist it all you want by identifying the root factual events that inspired the myth, but the facts remain the same. The Genesis author (or rather the people who carried the oral tradition until it could be written down) reported events that, while based on an actual flood, now contains more falsehood than truth. It's a perfect example of why the Bible cannot be taken literally as a history book, but is instead a collection of mythology.

...so long as you remove all of the details and context that are inaccurate by "reinterpreting" the text.The Bible describes a world-wide apocalyptic flood that kills every living thing on the entire Earth.You trace this back to the original, factual flood that inspired the fantastical myth, and claim that the Bible contains "accurate history."That's about as far from accurate as you can get. If you have to strip out all of the details that make the Genesis account what it is, clearly the Genesis account is not accurate.

The author of Peter is not the author of Genesis. What is relevant is what Genesis actually says, not what you think that a much later Biblical contributor thought about it.Genesis actually says that there was a flood that covered the entire world and killed every living thing that wasn't on the Ark. Full stop.

Let's redirect away from the flood for a second.

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Exodus
3:2 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
3:3 And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.
3:4 And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

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Did Moses or did Moses not have a conversation with a talking shrubbery that, while covered in flames, never actually burned?I can keep throwing out absurdities from the Bible all day long; from factually disproved or at least completely unsupported historical claims to outright embarrassingly ridiculous nonsense as talking vegetation.Is the Bible literally true when it claims that God made a bush talk and covered it with flames that didn't burn?You've shown yourself to be a die-hard apologist willing to bend the most liberal interpretation possible of the Bible to support your worldview, which maintains that both science and the Bible are accurate. I've been in that difficult position before myself, and it requires a lot of mental gymnastics.If you pick and choose when the Bible is being literal vs. metaphorical, how can you claim that the Bible is historically accurate? Do talking shrubberies really belong in history books? If the flood didn't happen in the same way presented in Genesis, can you really say the Genesis account was accurate? Should we teach the Exodus in history classes, despite the fact that outside of the Bible there is no evidence supporting the Exodus account? What if it were shown that the Exodus story was actually based on a real event, that some tens of Hebrew slaves were kept in an outlying Egyptian settlement, and they escaped? Would you then call Exodus "historically accurate" even though the numbers of the Hebrew population would be completely different by multiple orders of magnitude, with none of the Plagues, no killing of the firstborn, no parting of any sea (Red or Reed or otherwise), and not even a confrontation with any Pharaoh? This is analogous to what you're doing with the Genesis account - you claim that the flood myth is historically accurate because it was based originally on a real event, despite the fact that only certain details tie the Genesis story to the actual event, and the rest is a deluge of exaggeration.So, is the Bible really historically accurate, or is it not?

Irrelevant to a discussion as to whether the Bible is historically accurate.Does Genesis state that there was a world-wide flood that killed every living thing created by God except for the passengers of the Ark, or does it not? Yes, or no?Does Exodus claim that Moses had a conversation with a fire-proof, burning shrubbery, or does it not? Yes, or no?

Really?

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Genesis:

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1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

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1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

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God creates light, sufficient to differenciate between "day" and "night," before he creates the sun - the source of the light. Further, the Earth is created before the sun - which we know is incorrect. Stars form before planets.Is this an accurate preservation of events?

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1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

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The moon doesn't produce light, it just reflects the light from the sun. We also know that the moon was likely "created" by a collision with another massive body...long, long after the sun would have formed. Certainly not on the same day.Is this an accurate preservation of events?

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1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

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God puts the sun, moon and stars "in the firmament," which is described as beign a barrier that separates the "waters above" from the "waters below." But we know that the sun, moon and stars are all in space. "Above" and "below" have no meaning in space, and there is no barrier separating any "waters." The sun, moon and stars are not stuck in some dome-like firmament, but are varying distances away in empty space. Note that some of the stars are actually galaxies, galactic clusters, nebulae, supernovae, and even planets, not stars.Is this an accurate preservation of events?

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1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

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God creates whales and other livign things in the ocean, and then the next day creates all land animals and cattle. But we know that whales evolved from land animals - they're mammals, not fish, and they still have vestigial bone structures indicative of their land-mammal ancestry. Whale evolution is extremely well-uderstood and documented...and they didn't come before land animals.Is this an accurate preservation of events?

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2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

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God creates Adam from dust, and made him live through some sort of nasal CPR. But we know that human beings evolved from pre-existing animals, sharing a common ancestor with other apes that exist today. Human evolution is very well-understood and considered factual by virtually every biologist, anthropologist, paleontologist, and basically every other scientist who's studied the matter in the world. We didn't come from dust, and there is no magical "breath of life" that makes us live. Our life processes are not dictated by some mystical gas, but are actually a complex set of ongoing interdependant chemical reactions.Is this an accurate preservation of events?

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2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

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Supposedly god has Adam name every animal in the world. Yet we're still discovering new species all the time, and Adam would have needed to live within walking distance of Australia, Antarctica, the Americas, Europe, and other distant locations, while still remaining in the Garden of Eden, which is established to be near Ethiopia.Is this an accurate preservation of events?

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2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
2:22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

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God creates a woman from one of Adam's ribs in some magical cloning experiment that also makes the woman biologically distinct from Adam, having two X chromosomes insteaf oa an X and a Y. This is flatly impossible - species do not form spontaneously, and sexuality is not something that spontaneously forms. Sex-based reproduction evolved eons before humanity ever walked the planet. Woman did not come from man.Is this an accurate preservation of events?I'm only through Genesis 2, and I've skipped some. There are 50 chapters of Genesis.Do you really want me to go through the whole thing and point out all of the inaccuracies and outright silly mythological falsehoods?The Bible, particularly Genesis, makes a poor history book. It contradicts virtually everything we have learned about the world around us. Why should we believe an oral tradition that's a few thousand years old and has absolutely no evidence to back its claims, when we can right now make direct observations that allow us to develop testable models of actual reality?Or should we take your approach, and "reinterpret" both science and the Bible until they come to an agreement? After all, I suppose God could have made light magically before he made the sun, and the firmament nonsense could mean "space," even though that's not what the word means...right? Evolution could be how god created everything, and the whole "six days" thing and the incorrect order of evolution could all just me metaphor, right?All you have to do is compeltely ignore what Genesis actually says, and "interpret" it to mean what you wish it said.

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Though it is a reasonable interpretation to see a Global flood, it is also reasonable to see a regional flood.

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Are you incapable of reading comprehension, or are you beign dishonest?There is no room for interpretation in the Genesis flood account unless you completely ignore most of the story. It cannot be "interpreted" as beign an account of a local flood unless you totally ignore the many, many times it repeats the "destroy everything that breathes" mantra. It's not a translation error, because it says the same thing in different ways repetitively throughout the story. You're choosing to ignore the inconvenient bits to make the Bible fit the facts. That's intellectually dishonest. The Genesis account specifically talkes about a world-wide flood. It's not up for debate, it's right there in writing. You use apologetics to assuage the discomfort you feel fromt the cognitive dissonance caused by simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs - that the bible is factually correct, and that science is also accurate. This is one of the most clear cases in the entire Bible where the Bible makes specific claims that are directly contradicted by physical evidence. Bullshit. You've ignored half of the text of the flood story in order to force your square peg into a round hole. I'm not buying what you're selling. Occam's Razor still requires that you not ignore evidence. In this case you're ignoring all of the text in the flood story that specifically describes it as a global flood. That's a rather large portion fo the text. Parsimony requires that extraneous terms be eliminated, and states that the explanation that uses the fewest necessary terms is typically the correct one. You are leaving out a rather important necessary term - that the story specifically syas that the flood was world-wide in scope, and that all life on Earth was destroyed save the inhabitants of the Ark. Again, you're trying to force a square peg into a round hole - the Bible is inconsistent with reality. It is not accurate. Again, you're full of shit. The story talks about a world-wide flood that never ever happened. Period. Whether the boat was made of wood or reeds is irrelevant - how would Noah feed his family and all of the animals for a year floating on his little reed/wood boat? The list of items you need to compeltely ignore to force your square peg into the round hole is staggaring. Your "interpretation" also requires that the Bible say things that it does not say, and not say things that it does. It requires that you discard the actual words of Genesis in favor of your own version of the text.How "inspired" is a document that seems challenged to get even a single fact right, that describes a global flood when it actually means a local Sumerian flood?

What you're doing, greentwiga, is post hoc reasoning. Rather than reading the Bible and accepting that it says what it says, you're attempting to interpret what it says through the lens of modern science, and then choosing the interpretation of the text that you feel best fits your understanding of the facts.What you should be doing is analyzing what the Bible says on its own terms (and if that for you means going back to the oldest versions of the text we have, that's fine - but tracing Biblical manuscripts is extremely complicated due to all of the errors in translation or transcription and intentional alterations made over the years), and then comparing what the Bible says with reality.You're a textbook case of apologetics, bending and twisting your holy book until the actual words contained are meaningless, and it says what you want it to say.You cannot objectively establish an accurate worldview if you accept a given worldview as inerrant without even critically examining it. You've established a massive bias - rather than molding your understanding of reality to the evidence presented to you, you've latched on to the Bible, and are trying desperately to make your square peg fit into a round hole.If the Bible is truly a collection of inspired works, and its words are indirectly from an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent deity, shouldn't the Bible then completely and unambiguously match reality? Instead, to make the Bible sort-of, kind-of fit reality, you're forced to completely ignore large portions of the text that disagree with observable physical evidence.TO me, that's proof positive that the bible is no more accurate as a history text than the Koran, or the Iliad, or any other ancient text. Like Harry Potter, they may refer to real places, events, people, and times, but they are at their heart works of fiction. The reality of the bible doesn't resemble the reality you and I actually live in.

Here's your logic chain, greentwiga.PREMISE: The Bible is inerrant.HYPOTHESIS: If the Bible is inerrant, but a direct reading of the Bible contradicts scientific knowledge, the original author's meaning must have been lost in translation.FACT: Genesis recounts a global flood in which everything on teh Earth that breathes dies save the inhabitants of the Ark.FACT: Geology does not support a global floodFACT: Archeology does support a severe local flood in Mesopotamia circa 2900 BC.CONCLUSION: The author's original meaning was not a global flood, but was rather the local flood in Mesopotamia circa 2900 BC. The Bible is inerrant.Your conclusion regarding the author's original intent requires that you presuppose the author's inerrancy. You are assuming from the beginning that the Bible is inerrant, and therefore and preceived errors must be errors of translation. Without that basic assumption, your entire reason for re-interpreting the text to say anything other than what it plainly says disappears. Your conclusion is thus contained in your premise, and you are engaged in circular reasoning. How can you claim to be able to find the original intent of the author without even knowing the Hebrew rules of interpretation? You didn't learn this in your multiple degree programs at fundamentalist universities?

Before Adam?!The Bible is even more clear on this than it is about the global flood, greentwiga. Adam was supposed to be the first man. Not the first farmer, or the first farmer of wheat, the first human being, made in god's image. Eve was the first woman, made from his rib.What crazy Bizzarro-Bible have you been reading that supports the idea that Adam was anything other than the very first human being?

greentwiga, if your claim was only that the severe regional flood in Mesopotamia circa 2900 BC is the factual source behind the wildly exaggerated global flood myth of Genesis, I'd agree with you.The problem is also claiming that, because there was a real-world event behind the flood story, the Bible is true.It's true only if you remove all of the exaggerated features of the story that make it what it is.You've seen movies "based on a true story," right? Would you call them "fiction" or "non-fiction?" Are they typically "accurate recordings of history?" Do you ignore all of the alterations made to the actual historical record so that an entertaining and marketable movie can be made and claim "this movie is historically accurate" even though 90% of the movie was written by script writers, not historians?The fact is, the end result (the actual text of Genesis that's been around for the past few thousand years) is not historically accurate even if the person who first told the story was completely accurate in retelling a real-world event. The story in Genesis no longer resembles that story.I'm very sure that there are factual events behind most legends, including most of the stories in the Bible. I'm sure there was a man named Jesus around 2000 years ago who developed a cult following that grew into modern Christianity after his execution by the Romans. However, the Jesus described in the gospels almost certainly never existed; we have solid evidence that many of the sections in the gospels (including the "throw the first stone" bit) were added long after the original authors were dead. Some even think that the Jesus described in the gospels is an amalgamation of two or even more real people whose stories were combined into one.I'm sure there is a real-world basis for the Exodus, as well, though it certainly had nothing to do with the Pharaoh, there were no plagues, no slaying of the first-born, no 40 years of wandering, and those Hebrew slaves did not exist in anywhere near the numbers recounted in the Bible - the archeological evidence simply doesn't support any such thing. But I'm sure it was based on a true story originally.(note - when I say "I'm sure," I really mean "I find it entirely plausible based on the fact that many other legends and myths have been shown to have at least some small basis in fact, but in many cases there is no evidence and I would also find it entirely plausible that some of these stories were completely made up." "I'm sure" is just a lot shorter.)I know that you don't see the path of your logic the way I'm describing it - but then, very rarely do human beings think of their thoughts and personal curiosities in terms of premesis, hypotheses, and conclusions. The fact is, you're claiming that the Bible is inerrant...but your interpretations if the original author's intent require that you presuppose that the original author was accurate. Your conclusion (the Bible is inerrant) is contained within the premise that the original author was inerrant. Without that premise, all of your attempts to match Biblical myths to real-world events falls apart - if, for example, the Adam myth was literally completely false and made-up in the same way that Thor and Zeus and unicorns are completely made-up, then your line of reasoning would be completely invalid. You'd be chasing a red herring, because you're using circular reasoning.

I'm simply arguing against the position that the Bible is inerrant and literally true, as well as the position that the Bible really says y when the text plainly says x.I have absolutely nothing to say about what the Bible says theologically (at least not in this thread). If greentwiga treated the whole collection of texts as a series of parables, I wouldn't be having this conversation. He doesn't - he claims that the Bible's original meaning has been lost somewhere in translation; that Adam was not meant to describe the first man, but rather the first wheat farmer (though that makes the rest of the Creation story make no sense - Eve was created from the rib of the first wheat farmer? All animals were Created by God...and then he makes the first wheat farmer? It just doesn't fit the context); the global flood myth was actually talking about a regional flood (and as I said, I'll agree that the flood myth was originally based on a regional flood, very likely the one greentwiga was talking about) despite the text very plainly speaking of a global flood (everything god made was supposed to die, which would require a worldwide catastrophe).Basically, the "historical accuracy" issue is a cornerstone of greentwiga's position. I'm simply pointing out that, if the Bible is only historically accurate when you completely remove all of the mythologized exaggeration, then you're no longer talking about the stories as recounted in the Bible.