According to this news story, numerous whale bones, including 25 complete skeletons found in a Chilean desert have led many to argue that this is evidence for the Great Flood.
Whales…
Drowning…
In a flood…
It’s going to take a LOT more evidence to overturn what science has learned about the Earth.
If the bones are 2-7 mill years old, I can think of a number of quite reasonable ways they could end up there without invoking the supernatural. Tectonic plate movement, tsunamis, changes in geology, changes in sea levels, and more…
It may not have been drowning, but beaching by receding of waters.
From the Great Flood.
Which never happened.
I guess we could ask why God needed to kill animals when he was concerned with the Sons of Man, but my point is that they were whales. And they died because it rained a lot.
Well yeah, all of that water got into their blow holes.
You’d think God could have given them some of those inflatable water wings or some kind of blow hole umbrella kind of thing.
Or at least a higher BMI.
Will you quit saying that? That’s not what the article says at all. There is one line about “social media” that contains the reference to the great flood, and “drowning” doesn’t appear at all. The article contains one quick throw away about what sounds like a couple of idiots debating on Facebook, and you obsess about that. And then you even get the claim wrong.
Now go obsess about the Hooter’s waitress at the career day for special needs kids like normal people.
I’m a special needs person. I have a special need to see hooters. Giggity giggity!
Great. Now I’m picturing whales wearing Pinkie Pie’s hat.
Deluge aside, if it rained enough to upset the salt balance of the seas, I can see it pretty much killing off all the water animals. Freshies because of the salt, salties because of the lack of salt. You can’t exactly toss a salt water fish in a freshwater lake and have it survive. Not that the Deluge happened, but if it had, yes, it would have killed whales.
Well, if you want to see obsessive, there are actually two lines including, ‘[O]thers are saying they should “accept the biblical account of the flood.”’
Furthermore, my quote from your response doesn’t say drowning, it says: they died.
Good point, although some cetaceans such as the Amazon River Dolphin spend time in both salt water and freshwater environments (the river dolphin spending the majority of its time in freshwater).
Perhaps more to the point, if the salt balance had been upset to that point, the seas would be desolate for years and likely never return to antediluvian conditions. Animals that were on the arc, but which fed primarily on sea life would have never have continued.
And since there are many locations which were once oceans and are now on dry land, there should be so many whale graveyards as to make one more, with a measly 25 complete skeletons, seems quaint.
After a liitle research I realize’tis a silly idea.
[sup]I realize a whale isn’t a fish, but the critique holds.[/sup]
I feel I should also mention that a very little research has demonstrated to me that marine life might be more susceptible to certain extinction events. That is not uniformly true, and the superior fossil record for marine life plays a part in the importance of marine life in detailing extinction events.
Nonetheless, most extinctions are measured in ka: thousand years.
The only estimate I can find puts the Great Flood at just over a year in duration.
Excuse me. But what does God need with a Whale???
Bones, stay here. Spock, you’re with me…
God needs a whale to eat Jonah.
sigh
Oh look, more pointless creationist bunk with about as much science behind it as the claim “I have photos of Jesus riding a dinosaur, but they turn invisible when you look at them”. The great flood never happened, the earth is 4.5B years old, yadda yadda we’ve been here before.
Just out of curiosity- would the salinity of water seriously affect whales?
Fish it affects because of the osmotic pressure, (except some estuarine species, which are adapted to deal)- does the same follow for whales, or is their skin a good enough barrier to prevent it? Anyone know?
It’d probably alter their buoyancy I suppose- which would be lower in fresh water, so I guess they’d have to put more effort into staying afloat… Doubt it’d enough to cause a risk of drowning except maybe for babies.
I guess starvation would be the main problem, in the hypothetical flood scenario, but I’m just wondering generally- dolphins seem to have made the transition to fresh water a few times, after all.
I’m no expert, but I would worry about their kidney load and blood sodium levels. They are simply not adapted to drinking fresh water. All their sodium intake is going to be from salt water. If you take that away, sodium levels will drop and do serious damage to their nervous system. That would probably kill them in about a month.
To expand on the above a little bit, the kidneys of a whale allow them to survive by excreting super-concentrated urine with a salt content higher than that of the surrounding sea water. I’m not sure that the kidneys would be able to back off enough from the concentration they usually try to excrete to maintain proper sodium levels if they are in fresh water. The kidneys of mammals have an ability to adjust, but the change in environment may be so far different that they can’t adjust enough and the whales develop problems in their central nervous system because the kidneys are still dumping too much sodium.
But again, I’m not a whale urologist. (Is that even a thing?)
Couldn’t you as easily ask: What does God need with a Llama, or with a Shrew, or with a Cat?
I know I miss my dog! She was a sweetheart.
What does God need with a Human?