I keep trying to join in on this but it is just so childish - I don't know what to say. It is clear that Gerhard will not listen to any logic or reason and will simply make up stuff to support his beliefs. It is like trying to argue with someone about the existence of aliens on mars - the crazies are coming out of the woodwork with youtube 'evidence' from the new pictures from mars.
I don't know about your conscience, would not want to, but you'll notice that the theme of many posts in this thread is not even about Noah's ark, its opposition of the Bible and any of its contents. People have a problem with it, and will bring out reems of objections from any subject to avoid the flood implications. If the Bible and myths are just false stories, then why the fuss of trying to prove it wrong? There is a strong correlation between a good conscience and an open mind. The flood story is not a threat, but if it is true, the implications are. If it is true then the Bible is true, and so are its statements on morality, and if that is true, then watch the barrage of opposition. Not sure what kind of addiction is worth keeping really.
It's mayhem in the sandbox. There are only two reasons why someone cannot comprehend a global flood, the mind is unfamiliar with its enormity, or shear opposition to the Bible. You just have to skim through the posts, and hear the bellowing about how much hogwash the flood story is, and no surprise coming from men who are holding on to other things...
About the story of Noah's Ark in the Bible: why do you think it might be true? Why do you think no evidence has been found for a global flood? Do you have a problem with the stories in the Bible? Note this is a science forum. Science doesn't believe in stories, it believes in evidence (supposing there is some). Do you believe you have an open mind? Since, given what you go on to say and your own opposition to people saying Noah's Ark and the Flood are mythical, but perhaps based on real events such as the flooding of the Black Sea or other parts of the globe that were inundated by glacial lakes which collapsed thousands of years ago, there does seem to be some doubt about your open-mindedness. You're saying if one Bible story is true then all of them are? Is that your version of having an open mind, or are you the kind of person who needs to believe things that can't be verified? Do you know what "having an open mind" actually means?
Have you ever read Creation magazine? Millions understand the flood, the "no evidence" thing must be very local. Part of being open minded is going outside, which I hope you are able to do. Go for a drive and look at the road cuttings, the mountains, and all around you is evidence for the global flood. Not a mountain or valley in the earth without fossils of both land and sea life. Hardly a place without sedimentary rocks. Layers and layers of evidence. You are standing on evidence.
Yes, several prominent scientists were willing to buck the Christian doctrine: The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early nineteenth century was the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. His motivation was to explain the patterns of extinction and faunal succession that he and others were observing in the fossil record. While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low-lying areas by the sea, he did not make any reference to Noah's flood. Nor did he ever make any reference to divine creation as the mechanism by which repopulation occurred following the extinction event But the Creationists countered: Robert Jameson would interpret Cuvier's work in a very different way. Jameson translated the introduction Cuvier wrote for a collection of his papers on fossil quadrupeds that discussed his ideas on catastrophic extinction into English and published it under the title Theory of the Earth. He added extensive editorial notes to the translation that explicitly linked the latest of Cuvier's revolutions with the biblical flood, and the resulting essay was extremely influential in the English-speaking world. But enter Sir Charles Lyell, to the rescue: The geologist Charles Lyell built upon Hutton's ideas during the first half of 19th century and amassed observations in support of the uniformitarian idea that the Earth's features had been shaped by same geological processes that could be observed in the present acting gradually over an immense period of time. Lyell presented his ideas in the influential three volume work, Principles of Geology, published in the 1830s, which challenged theories about geological cataclysms proposed by proponents of catastrophism like Cuvier and Buckland. As Grumpy noted, isolated cases of natural catastrophism are now recognized. But isn't it bizarre that hundreds of years after this question surfaced, and nearly two hundred years after it was (mostly) resolved, we still have lay people telling scientists what time it is. Note the dishonesty of Jameson, so similar to the modern Creationist movement. This tendency just won't go away.
Explain how you get layers and layers from one flood. Also explain how that single flood sorted out particular creatures into their own layers, without mixing them up. I won't even bother getting into actual dating of those layers, I'm sure you don't believe any of that.
What this post essentially says is that people get it wrong, and therefore... note the logic...the Bible is wrong. Or Aq is supported by many who agreed that another party of people got it wrong and therefore... note the logic... the Bible is incorrect. Common science, which it is, dismisses the Bible, so why are you posting here? It seems like you can't make your mind up where you fit.
Have you ever seen those sandglass pictures, you tip them upside down and the sand filters down to make mountains out of various layers. That will give you some idea. The layer dating works when the layers are in a certain order as found in hand drawings of an evolution publication. In reality, those layers are so mixed up that there is absolutely no consistency with them.
Take what you posted with what I said, and think about it a bit. Natural settling will not get what we find at all in geology.
When people like yourself are strenuously insisting that the false stories are in fact literal truths, readers are probably going to express some skepticism. That's to be expected. But if somebody's mind opens too wide, they fall prey to simple credulity. We have to keep our wits about us and shouldn't just toss our intelligence over the side. (Besides, I don't see you agreeing with what other people write. So what's up with that? Is your mind closed to anything that threatens to contradict your own interpretation of the Bible?) The flood myth seems to be much older than the Hebrew Bible. The ancient Hebrews basically appropriated a cosmological story that was already widespread and traditional in the fertile crescent, and adapted it to their own religious purposes. Whatever literal truth the story might actually have (probably none) isn't likely to be dependent on the story's later Hebrew employment.
I think if you make the entire sky one huge involuted spherical fire hydrant it works out. It requires magic, but what the heck, a lot of that was already in progress by the era of Noah. What the Creationists ought to gain by doing this simple calculation (they just need to understand exponential notation!) is that it's just plain dumb to take this literally even as an act of magic because it's too absurd. The logical way for God to do a mass extinction is to clap his cosmic hands and everything drops dead. The ancients seem to have had a little trouble believing that's how the gods interacted with the physical world. Thus all the anthropomorphism and the machinations with nature, I suppose. They sure had a handle on metaphor by the time the Jesus story arose. Yet the NT writers are sometimes prone to cite the OT literally. And they had hundreds of years of Greek eloquence to further develop their literary chops. It goes to Capt K's earlier remark - he was wondering how the ancients actually viewed this story. Even in the era of the Holy Roman Empire I think there was considerable back and forth opining about literalism vs metaphor generally. (The perennial issue: was Jesus literally the Son of the Father.) Wouldn't it be funny, though, if some Bronze Age author of this material were to (magically) pass you on the street and ask: You know the Flood Story is just metaphor, don't you? I mean, at some point we regard them as ignorant and clueless, but then something happens, they get a little smarter, and that's where you might wonder how much they might scoff at the modern hardcore literalists. Talk about hilarious irony.
And they only killed certain creatures, and deposited only certain types of rock? But not everywhere the same? Doesn't make sense.
Hmm. Have you ever read DC comics? You're saying the lack of evidence is local? How extensively do you believe scientists have looked for evidence? How long have they been looking? Layers of sediment occur because weathering isn't constant over geological periods; layering isn't caused by single "flood" events. Your naive model of the fossil record and layering skips over scientific dating methods. Perhaps you believe that isotopes don't decay? What about when the layers are in a certain order as found in actual geological locations, not drawings in some publication? In reality, most sedimentary layers are distinct, not mixed up like in a sandglass picture, which is a staggeringly naive model of geological processes that says almost nothing about how sedimentary layers really form?
That problem comes from extending the age of the earth into squillions. Make a problem, have problems.
The situations vary from gentle progressive settling to mixed and violent settling, then again settling/sedimentation was only one process of many that embedded animals etc. Some animals were packed in frozen mud, others jammed into rocks. Then after the flood fossilization did not stop in swamps etc. adding more consistent factors.
Are you saying isotope dating methods are a problem? Or are you just deflecting the point, since you need to have an "open" mind about it. So no attachment to some belief system, then? No impressions of having to defend your open-minded position by shutting things out, or closing your mind to them? Wait, that looks contradictory. This open-mindedness thing sure is a tricky customer.
