This one issue is a microcosm of creationism in general; there might be an argument against any single point of evolution/mainstream science, but nobody seems to bother checking that all of these arguments can be assembled into a coherent whole. IMO, this betrays the true nature of creationism; it isn’t interested in truth, it’s only interested in trying to make inconvenient science go away.
Duh! Haven’t you been to a museum? Trilobites are fossils - they’re made of rock - all the dinosaurs, on the other hand, are made of fibre glass. It’s obvious the trilobites would sink.
On a more serious note, Interest, before you get in much deeper, please do me a favor and check out a book called The Map That Changed the World. It’ll give you an explanation of how modern geology came about and why your theories about layers are so implausible. The fellow who first investigated layers in rocks wasn’t out to destroy religion. He was simply indulging a bit of natural curiousity and taking things to their logical conclusion.
The world you’ve posited in this thread is so chaotic and illogical that there’s nothing save possibly the will of a hopefully benevolent deity to keep my home from being destroyed by a spontaneous and unprecedented earthquake or waterspout. If you’re arguing from a Christian perspective, keep in mind the first Commandment, according to Jesus, is to love God with all one’s mind as well as heart and soul. If you just find the prospect of chaos and sudden disasters exciting, let me assure you that the fun and excitement of them are vastly overrated.
If the entire earth was under 29,000 feet of water so that it covered the entire earth in just 40 days, calculate the rate the rain would have had to come down to cover the highest mountians,then calculate the rate of evaporation (as there would be no other way for the water to go off the earth) Consider the tiny windows at the top of the ark, the amount of animals, people etc, plus the feed needed to keep these beings alive for nearly a year. The humidity alone would be sufficient to smother the inhabitants. Then consider how a dove could find an olive branch on MT Ararat. If the Ark settled on Ararat it would mean there was still 15,000 feet of water left to go. In such a situation the pressure of the water and lack of light would kill off any trees, etc.Then consider the polar bears swimming north, the animals that could not swim getting to South Americia, Australia etc. Then ask why a God who could do all things would go through such a ridiculous way to destroy all of mankind except a few “Just People”,When he could have just let all but those few live by just his word, or some sickness?
Interest: Why are you wasting your time? (Never mind why all the rest of us are wasting our time. . .) As many, many Dopers have now helpfully demonstrated, your happy fun “theory” makes zero sense scientifically – unless you introduce divine intervention.
So essentially you’re saying “I believe that God stretched forth his mighty hand and made the Biblical Flood happen, and if there’s no scientific evidence of it, that’s just part of His plan.” If you feel like witnessing your religious beliefs to us, that’s fine; they can’t really be disproven. I hope your theology makes you happy (and leads you to love your neighbor as yourself, etc.) Just don’t pretend it’s something else.
shrug It was a slow day. Besides, we all have to take it in turn when these things sprout up like poisonous mushrooms. I hadn’t bothered nosing into one of these threads in a while, so I suppose it was my turn to give it the old college try. There are so many aspects of the global flood story that are simply impossible that we could do one of these a week and not hit the same points…especially if the OP is going to drag Noah into it too.
And thanks to Voyager (and others) I learned a ‘new’ one (well, one I hadn’t considered personally) dealing with the potential energy of such a downpour…and of course the massive vapor cannopy it would have taken. Yet another nail in the coffin of the global flood myth…though I don’t see the creationists/flood enthusiast conceeding defeat just because such things prove it couldn’t have happened…
No need to; you explained it yourself. During the Flood Noah taught a 200-day math class and all the animals slept through the whole thing. After math they were still too groggy to eat but even if they were hungry they knew better than to say anything to Noah or his kids (the TAs) lest they get asked something about what was mentioned in class.
Mangetout makes a good point about trilobites, being fossils, sinking to the bottom, but they were already there because they were bottom dwellers. And we know they were petrified because suddenly finding dinosaurs and wolves in their environment would scare anybody.
As usual, no one actually expects to be able to get through to Interest. The effort is undertaken to be sure that the peanut gallery at home is not misled by the errors Interest posts. (It would be pleasant to see Interest actually take the time to study some science and see where the ICR and AIG people have misled him, but I doubt that many of us hold any hope that will happen. The exercise is simply to ensure that sloppy anti-science is not permitted to be posted unanswered–and sometimes someone posts some new information that informs the rest of us: I do not recall a thorough discussion of the planet overheating in the rain in earlier threads.)
WHY would the earliest Egyptian pyramids NOT be older than about mid-2300’s? Do you want to rewrite all history and archeology? Or just that which upsets your fundamentalist apple-carts?
Guess what?! YOU are the one trying to intellectualize codified oral legends from a document that isn’t even self-consistent. The BURDEN OF PROOF is on you, not me.
Show me evidence of what you believe. While we’re at it, you might want to prove that the oldest LIVING trees are not from before your fantastic Flood, circa 2335 B.C…
(AN ASIDE: How many folks here think there is even a “debate” here???)
Actually, some creationist hypotheses are indeed falsifiable. The problem is, they have been falsified. (Many times over.) The problem is that instead of admitting their premise is wrong, they use a buckshot approach, spewing out inconsistent suggestions and using the “disproof through misunderstanding” approach in attacking science.
Disproof through misunderstanding: I don’t get what your theory actually says, so I describe what I think it says, which is absurd - thus your theory must be incorrect. Related to strawman, but the misunderstanding is not intentional in this case.
Humph. The museums I went to, coming from New York, had real dinosaur fossils, made out of rock. I don’t go to those roadshow museums.
This explains why some of the animals for which we have fossils are no longer with us. Noah took them all on the ark, but, as you said, some of them slept through the math class, and therefore, when they got off, they didn’t know how to multiply.
If you learned anything at all in High School Biology, you should recall that dating the age of trees is quite straightforward.
And no, I think there’s no real debate here, unless it’s about secondary issues, such as what the real-world effects of such a collosal deluge would be. In my experience, people who believe in a literal flood aren’t interested in debating it; they just want to use it as a vehicle for proselytizing, a la Jack Chick.
I was just at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City a month ago and they actually have sections of an ice core sample on display. In those sections, it is indeed easy to count the annual layers. You can see some description of it and even a (not all that great) picture here.
The usual argument against the ice cores is that they were not formed annually, they just look like they were. Never mind that alternate layers of summer and winter pollens can be found in them , never mind that we can count back through them and find traces of volcanic ash in layers corresponding to years with known eruptions (such as Pompeii); the creationists don’t want them to be annual, so they’re not, they’re not, they’re not!
Besides, we all have to take it in turn when these things sprout up like poisonous mushrooms. I hadn’t bothered nosing into one of these threads in a while, so I suppose it was my turn to give it the old college try. There are so many aspects of the global flood story that are simply impossible that we could do one of these a week and not hit the same points…especially if the OP is going to drag Noah into it too.
