As long as we’re just saying, can I be taller? 
Biscuit, we had a poster back on he old AOL SD message board, a young fundamentalist from Tejas who went by the screen name JWB. He insisted that wherever the Bible appeared to be in conflict with established history and/or science, the Bible was right. When confronted with the fact that the Chinese had a richly detailed history that easily bridged the supposed flood era, he deduced that the flood really occurred and, therefore, the Chinese were lying and making up their pre-flood history.
Sheesh.
Of course it was meant to be taken literally. Much was that has been shown to be untrue, from celestial architecture to the notion that Jesus was to return within the lifetimes of some of his audience. When faced with the fact that a religion contradicts known reality, tortuous paths must be taken to reconcile the two.
Some religions just out and out deny, or lie to their followers. Jehovah’s Witnesses publish anti-transfusion propaganda that, rather than merely asserting transfusion policy to be a matter of faith, try to paint a picture of transfusions as being far more dangerous medically than they are. They lie to their “flock” and steadfastly deny the evidence that shows their views on the efficacy of transfusions to be false.
Other religions merely “reinterpret” scripture as they go along, and when the language cannot be stretched any further, call it a parable.
So what’s worse? Is it better to simply deny the evidence and insist on biblical literalism like the creationist adherents do? Or should you just, in acknowledging reality, redefine your canonical texts as parables?
I don’t think either is a good way to go, but at least with the latter I don’t have to listen to any lame arguments like “variable lightspeed” and such creation scientist claptrap.
Cogito ergo sum…I think.
biscuit:
You’ve got to read your bible more closely. Those “other” nations that spoke “other” languages all stem from the breakup of the single society that tried to build the tower of Babel.
sdimbert, it’s still indicative of Biblical error. It’s historically proveable that, in the period described in Genesis 11, pre-Babel, the world was most certainly not of one people and one language.
Larry Borgia:
No it’s not. It’s certainly a difficulty, but it could be answered any number of ways. Maybe G-d did take care of it miraculously, or through natural mechanisms that would involve improbable, but not physically impossible, occurrences. Maybe the children and grandchildren of Noah actively resettled the animals. However, the Bible doesn’t say, so we don’t know, so we don’t claim to have an answer.
But to call it a “huge problem” is seriously underestimating the resilience of Biblical interpretation.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
CMKeller said:
He’s right. When you’re a creationist, nothing is a “huge problem” because you can always use magic to get yourself out of it. Have a contradiction? Poof! It was a miracle. Simple, really…
David B said:
well, duh, that’s why you don’t argue with religious people.
Than a kangaroo?
HOW THE KANGAROOS GOT TO AUSTRALIA
Please assume Noah’s Ark as a given.
Noah, not being able to clean up after everyone sufficiently, lets everyone off for a potty break at Australia. Everyone but the Aussie animals gets back on and the ark leaves. Unfortunately, Noah does not realize this until some time later. Oops.
Mattmanz said:
Guess we won’t be seeing much of you around here in Great Debates…
A while back, i said:
Since this thread has dropped a bit, I will reveal the explanation I heard and let the crowd rip it apart. here goes:
The flood story has two problems I want to bring up:
[ol]
[li]There isn’t enough water in the Earth’s water table to cover the surface of the globe to a depth of six miles (the depth figured by Rashi, a classic Biblical Commentator).[/li][li]The fish didn’t die (since the punishment was to kill by flood). That seems unfair; all other animals died![/li][/ol]
I’ll deal with the second question first. The only reason animals deserved to be destroyed was because they had been corrupted by Mankind. Since fish enjoy the unique status in the animal kingdom of being the only creatures unable to co-exist with man, they were uncorruptable. Hence, they were the only creatures on the globe to not be punished.
Once we understand that, then the kangaroos are no big deal. At the time of the flood, mankind lived in Messopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization, the Fertile Cresent. That was somewhere in Europe/Asia. That’s a whole different continent from Australia. Mankind had no ability to corrupt the places it didn’t live, so kangaroos, indiginous to a different continent, were spared, as were all creatures out of man’s limited reach.
That helps us solve problem number one - the lack of enough water. When the Bible says that the entire Earth was flooded, it means that the entire corrupted Earth was flooded - the neighborhood in which Man lived. Outside of his reach, there were no floodwaters.
Comments?
PS - This Preview thing is AWESOME!
Ok… so we’re putting aside for a moment all of the evidence for human inhabitation circa 2000 BC of the Far East, Africa, the Americas and Australia for a moment, and assuming that the only human corrupted area of the earth was the Middle East/Egypt etc…
Well… YMMV, but in my experience water finds its own level and doesn’t like to sit in lumps. If we dump a lot of water in one spot then it will spread out until it is level, so if we assume the Middle East flooded to a depth to cover mountains then either:
a) it will keep finding its own level until we will flood the rest of the planet to a similar depth.
b) we will need a wall of some sort*.
c) it’s a miracle.
*Assuming that people didn’t build the wall in (b) then that too is a miracle and really a sub-set of ©.
So… we have either a global flood or a miracle, and since, as you already mentioned, there “isn’t enough water in the Earth’s water table to cover the surface of the globe to a depth of six miles”, a global flood will require a miracle too.
**
Yup.
Yup, again. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. What makes the original question work is the assumption that there is a “God” who flooded the Earth to punish Mankind.
But, if such a scenario occured, what we know about science raises two problems - the two I listed above.
What makes the problem so elegant is it’s use of the scientific method to approach an issue of faith. It merges both science and belief to come to a moral, educational and satisfactory result:
Namely, that God created, the he flooded, but only enough to make a point.
Errrmmm… OK, I’m confused. What’s the point? 
Not of course to insist that there must be a point, or that point-free discussions aren’t fun… but where’s the debate?
The premise that you appear to be offering here is an approach to the biblical flood that attempts to reconcile science (lack of water) with doctrine (everything corrupt dies) and explain away some basic problems (kangaroos in Oz).
The problem is that to do this we have to discount human habitation of the rest of the planet at that time, as well as some basic fluid mechanics, and fall back on “It’s a miracle!”… which seems, at least IMHO not to satisy the scientific requirement.
Perhaps you could expand on this a bit?
Cheers,
Martin
Apollyon:
You wrote:
I guess I yupped a bit too soon.
I am unfamiliar with this evidence. Care to share?
You wrote:
OK - I’ll admit it - I started this thread because it’s cheaper than therapy. 
You see, I read those EvsC Debates all the time. I can’t decide where I fit. I’m a religious person, believe God created, etc. But I also have an unwavering, Scully-like faith in science (“faith” in “science”?!?). I occupy the tenuous position that believes that there are no real contradictions between science and the bible.
I guess I’ve left myself wide open there, huh? I hope DavidB isn’t watching this thread anymore.
This particular question and answer satisfy me because of the elegant co-dependence between science and faith that you describe.
I guess that’s the point.
sdimbert wrote:
OK… let’s nail down a time frame first.
Quote from Talk.Origins Noah’s Ark FAQ: “Biblical dates (I Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation lengths given in Genesis) place the Flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first temple. … The building of the first temple can be dated to 950 B.C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood
around 2250 B.C.”
As an aside, this is some 300 years after the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza, built for the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty around the year 2560 BC.
OK, as to other peoples circa 2250 BC, and using just the on-line resources to hand…
Australia: Aboriginal occupation of the Sydney district is considered to date back between 20,000 and 40,000 years based on archeological dating of layers of occupation using food scraps or pollen from plants and carbon-14 dating and other methods.
Americas: From “Archaeological Overview of Alaska” (http://www.nps.gov/akso/akarc/early.htm)
And…
Asia: From “The Ancient Indus Valley” (http://www.harappa.com/har/har0.html)The Indus Valley civilization flourished around 2,500 B.C. in the western
part of South Asia, in what today is Pakistan and western India. It is often referred to as Harappan Civilization after its first discovered city, Harappa.
I could go on here, but I think the point is well covered in a wealth of archeological literature that you may wish to peruse. Perhaps have a look at http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Anthropology_and_Archaeology/Archaeology/Regions/ as a starting point.
One of the basic assumptions of the Special Flood Theory you mentioned is that people only lived in the fertile crescent at the time, and I would suggest that there is a mass of evidence against this claim.
If we are forced to accept human habitation of other areas of the world at the time to which the Flood is dated then we are also forced to accept one of:
a) a global (and hence miraculous) Flood.
b) an inconsistency – not all life was destroyed… in fact even Egyptian civilisation fails to record the flood or the fact that the Great Pyramid was under water. 
c) a non-literal interpretation of events.
sdimbert wrote:
Not really… it is a position that my father-in-law (a Methodist minister) also holds.
He believes in God, and is also willing to trust scientific evidence. He has a deep interest in evolution and believes this to be the observable mechanics of the method by which God created all life over a period of billions of years.
As you might surmise, he is not a biblical literalist, but rather thinks of the stories in Genesis as being the ancient hebrews best attempt at understanding the workings of God, in the same way that evolution or stellar mechanics are ours.
However, if you wish to be both a scientist and a biblical literalist then I do think you have a hard road before you, and IMHO at least, any literal interpretation of Genesis and the scientific method and evidence are going to make very uneasy bed-fellows. 
You said in your first post that you didn’t want to start another CvsE Debate, so rather than drag all of it up here, may I suggest that you have a look over the Creation FAQs at Talk.Origins (The Talk.Origins Archive: Arguments against Creationism and Intelligent Design FAQs)
and given your interest in a scientific solution for the Flood (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faqs-flood.html)
Good luck, and I hope you find what you are looking for.
Regards,
Martin
phew!
Martin, I know when I am in over my head. Looks like I’ve got some reading to do.
BTW, I feel that there is some difficulty with your use of both Archeological data and the Bible’s geneoligies to determine, for example, that the Great Pyramid existed at the time of the Flood.
The problem is that the Bible’s chronology can be shown to be inconsistent with chronologies demonstrated by science. Again, without entering the debate, someone has got to be wrong!
We could always hope.
OK, it may have been a bit flippant.
Pyramids aside, the bible genealogies were used to determine the Young Earth creationists age for the world – Archbishop Usher, 4004BC and all that, and they would seem to be the only source of a date for Noah’s flood.
One of the premises of the Special Flood Theory you outlined is that only the part of the world inhabited (and hence corrupted) by humankind needed to be flooded, and an implication of this is that a fairly small area of human habitation is needed in order to end up with a reasonable amount of water.
The problem with this is, that even if we use 4000 odd BC as a flood date, there is ample evidence for human habitation of Australia (to use a single example). So… wide area, too much water, and we’ve got scientific data that doesn’t fit with the Special Flood Theory.
Yup.
“On the surface, [holy scriptures] may appear to have been composed as conscientious history. In depth they reveal themselves to have been concieved as myths: poetic readings of the mysteries of life from a certain interested point of view. But to read a poem as a chronicle of fact is - to say the least - to miss the point. To say a little more, it is to prove oneself a dolt.”
-Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God