:smack: I missed the jaws reference - but now that you mention I can remember the scene…
And yes, I was being scarcastic 
I used to watch the original doc who…where one of the assistants got lost in the Tardis…
It really isn’t. It’s Science Fiction, at best.
Yeah I think the most interesting thing about the whole Noah story is how many different cultures across the globe all have similar stories. There was a Discovery show not too far back looking at how a meteor impact somewhere west of Australia may have caused a massive world-wide tsunami that could account for the myths.
Speaking of God smiting earth, as messed up as our governments been… with the hurricane a few days from hitting DC just after an earthquake, can you really blame ancient people for seeing God in natural disasters?
Don’t sell science fiction short, it is necessary and integral to science, it is their creative arm that inspires the next generation to reach beyond what it thought possible.
Will me giving them or not giving them an ‘out’ make any difference to their belief? I’d say no…belief doesn’t need logic or empowerment by a non-believer. I’m not selling out, merely nodding at reality. You aren’t going to make a person who believe in something, whether it be God, new age medicine or a 9/11 conspiracy theory throw that belief away by pointing out inconsistencies or a lack of logic inherent in their position…in fact, nothing you can say or do will cause them to turn away from their faith, and the more you argue with such people the more they dig in. They have to come to it themselves and on their own, not being told or lectured. That’s why most of these threads turn into a nom-fest of 'dopers trying to convince the people who aren’t open to be convinced, while really only reenforcing their own beliefs with people who are already convinced (in this case the vast majority of the 'doper community).
As for your questions, look at it from the perspective of a believer. Why did God ban all magic in modern times? Since all ‘magic’ comes from God, he can do whatever he likes…Gods will and all that. Why did he do it? His ways are mysterious and unknowable to us mere humans, but since he has a plan for the universe it must have something to do with that. Blah blah blah. Such questions are pointless because a non-believer is ALREADY convinced that there is no God, and a believer BELIEVES, has FAITH, and can hand wave any inconsistencies by admitting that fallible humans may have it wrong or that it’s a mystery, Gods Will™ and all that.
-XT
I’ve already addresses #2,3 and 4 of that cite with my proposed model.
Lets try a different model altogether, that I believe fits very nicely into naturalism and also spiritually consistent with scriptures. I am curious if this would be acceptable as you see it:
The flood is actually a series of smaller floods at different times. Each one of these small floods has devastated a major population center where only a remnant was saved including some local animals. The story of Noah is the collective effect of all those small floods as if it was one giant flood.
This is based on a passage of Revelation and a interpretation of it, the rider of the black horse, where food prices are at a all time high and oil and wine are not to be touched.
The interpretation is the use of biofuels (oil and wine/alcohol) and that effect on world food prices, where the price of food now equates to the price of fuel (this is the scales the rider is holding in Revelation).
Using the above example we have the spiritual reality of a actual rider viewed by St John, and we have the physical effect on our physical reality combined with the mercy of God. The rider of the black horse is a single person in the spiritual - as is Noah a single person, but the physical reality is that it is many people acting as a single person to enforce such pricing of food, and many people who preserved humanity and animals.
This model actually explains a lot including the extreme long live of the pre flood humans, why the water that covered the world only covered the highest mountain by 30 feet or so, how all the animals repopulated the world.
That was on Discovery? I can see the History Channel doing that, but Discovery has been taking the high road more often that not lately.
You don’t need a worldwide Tsunami to account for various flood myths. Early civilizations tended to live in places that were subject to occasional floods.
By the way, the story of Noah’s flood is lifted straight from the epic of Gilgamesh more than 1000 years earlier, point by point and in the same order.
This was one of the rules that Jesus came to remove, we are allowed under grace to use magic.
All laws and rules have been nailed to the tree with Jesus, there is no penalty for using/doing anything as long as you act in Love (God is Love).
I think Occam’s razor applies here. The simplest explaination is that Noah only took the speceis he had access to into the ark. However, since God created all species before the flood, they could certainly be recreated after the flood. If you believe such ideas.
When the flood waters receded, what food would the herbivores eat? It would take some time for the grasses and bushes and trees and forests to regenerate. Also, immediately after-the-fact, wouldn’t the predator-prey ratio be all screwed up? In a healthy population, prey vastly outnumber predators. If there are 200 deer and 2 lions, both survive. If there are two deer and two lions, both go kaput pretty quickly, the deer killed for food, the lions then starve. The bible is just plain wrong in so many areas, how can a modern human believe this tripe?
I love these debates where the Evil Atheists insist that God didn’t drown hundreds of thousands of innocent children, and the Righteous Religionists insist that he did.
According to my grandmother, God put all the animals in hibernation.
If you knew my grandmother, that was pretty much as far as you pushed her on Biblical inconsistencies. 
Tsk tsk Czarcasm:
Genesis 6:5 “…every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time…”
Hundreds of thousands of *evil *children Czarcasm; what sort of divine being would drown innocent children?! 
And what kind of human being would worship such a being that would drown hundreds of thousands of innocent children?
Doesn’t matter. You’re not doing science, for one very important reason - at the outset of your endeavour, you already know the conclusion you wish to reach.
You’ve been inventing pseudo-technical explanations, which some folks might think sound science-ey, but that’s not actually science.
I’m not claiming I’m using science, but claiming I’m using spirituality, but in some of my models, which again are spiritually deduced, there seems to be some agreement that aspects are scientifically possible, or in other words woo is not needed for certain aspects of that model.
And, no the conclusion I want to reach is unknown except to find out WTF did God mean by this, so you have mischaracterized me, and made improper conclusions about methods you seemingly have very little understanding of, and really don’t seem to value even the inspirational discipline of science fiction which inspires all science today. Perhaps you should stick to F=mA.
To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes ‘one must be careful, or one will find ones self changing facts to fit theories rather then theories to fit facts’. That’s what you are essentially doing…you start with a premise, and then attempt to twist ‘facts’ to fit the story, instead of looking (objectively) at the facts and then seeing how they fit together, without suiting them to fit a predetermined conclusion.
-XT
In post #71 you claimed your argument is science. It isn’t - it’s speculation that’s trying very hard to sound like science.
You’ve stated your assumptions up there in the thread (and again in the quote above). But if you’re not claiming to do science now, that doesn’t matter any more.
Which methods are you referring to here?
Actually, I’m an avid reader of SF. It might inspire boys to pursue scientific and technical careers, to an extent, it inspires the progress of technology, but ‘inspires all science today’? Hardly, I think - but if any actual scientists would like to weigh in and correct me on this, I’ll take it in good grace.
Oh quit pouting.
I understand what you are saying, but you are mis-characterizing what I am doing. I am looking how much agreement we can have between observed physical (scientific) reality and the spiritual reality as described in scriptures.
In other words what is the least amount of woo God could use to accomplish that story.
A position I’ve seen people seriously take.
“How can you worship a God who drowns babies?”
“They were evil babies!”