No, James. You’re reading too fast.
I didn’t say that the evidence of the Flood hides itself from everyone. I said (just as Peter says), the evidence of the Flood “hides itself” from mockers!
I agree with you about Romans 1:20f. But don’t you see, even this evidence “hides itself” from atheists. It’s evidence that is very clear to see by those of us who aren’t bent upon mocking God; but it’s evidence that is completely lost to those who are set upon mocking and ridiculing God.
“Hiding itself” is a figure of speech! It’s personifying the evidence as playing “Hide and Seek”–and winning at the game!–from those who are bent upon mocking God.
And the point is, seeing the truth is not merely a function of intelligence. Rather, it is also a function of the will. Over and again, Jesus gave clear evidence to the Jewish leaders that He was and is the Son of God. But rather than believe in Him, they became more and more intent upon killing Him.
So, one who is intent upon disbelieving God, Jesus, the Flood, the 2nd Coming, etc. etc. will often blind himself even to evidence right before his eyes.
In other words, evidence “hiding itself” is a function of a person’s own resistance to that evidence–he is actually blinding himself to the evidence.
“Not very mobile,” to say the least. In fact, not mobile enough at all to transport and deposit (with the Sauk transgression alone) 3 million cubic kilometers of mostly ocean sediments across 75% of North America.
You say, “5 mm” per year? That’s about 1/4 inch per year. So, how does an ocean transgression hold in suspension 3 million cubic kilometers of sediments–to be deposited across 75% of North America–while moving at a blistering speed of 1/4 inch per year?
In fact, the Sauk transgression also eroded a great deal of bedrock granite–thus forming the Great Unconformity–even gouging large boulders out of this granite, on its depositional mission across North America. How would ocean waters moving at 1/4 inch per year have the power to work such erosion?
How does evidence of the Flood know when a mocker is coming down the road? And what about when a group of people including both mockers and the faithful walks by? What does the evidence do in that case? I mean, what is the default response? Hide or not?
You’re putting too much on “fathers” here. These mockers are dismissing the 2nd Coming of Christ by arguing that "all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation. In other words, whoever the “fathers” were, they argued that no big events had occurred on earth, ever since the Creation event.
So, Peter points out that God had used water in Creation and then He used water in the Flood–water that, in fact, “destroyed the world at that time” (obviously not just a local Flood!).
But such a big event as the Flood “escaped their notice”–that is, they had blinded themselves to the evidence of this Flood. Blinded themselves by their own mocking.
And, consequently also blinded themselves to the final Big Event.
I didn’t say that you said that evidence of the Flood hides itself from everyone, Don. But when mockers don’t take evidence into account, it is because they are ignoring the evidence, not because the evidence is ignoring them.
Now let’s get one thing straight about what mocking is and what it isn’t. As I’ve said before, evidence has rules and honesty has rules. You are more than welcome to bring evidence to our attention if you believe it is being overlooked, but you do need to expect it to be scrutinised. Expecting your evidence to obey the rules of basic honesty and factual accuracy, and rejecting it if it does not, is not being “intent upon disbelieving God, Jesus, the Flood, the 2nd Coming, etc. etc.” and it is not “blinding yourself even to evidence right before your eyes.” As I’ve said before, it’s one thing being mocked at for being a Christian. It’s a completely different matter being “mocked at” for not getting your facts straight.
how is that…i am not the one who wrote all of the scholarly work of Myer, Behee, Snelling, Wise…produced the series Is Genesis History containing a compilation of research from a large number of Christian Scientists.
Your answer to all of the above is to play the “bohoo, Adam is anti gay” or “Adam is telling everyone his own expert opinion card”.
What in fact you do is whenever you are presented with scientific evidence researched by the PHD veterans of science is to scoff at their work citing the views of atheists as being your primary source of evidence.
In all good conscience, a true Christian would not scoff at Christian scientist’s work when that work is clearly well researched and presented in a very logical and consistent manner. All these guys have done is to take the bible as written and then try to develop sound science that is consistent with the Bible writings in Genesis.
For one thing, the mere fact that you prefer to follow atheists who refuse to accept God and still cannot produce a single shred of evidence that supports how the energy and matter started the Big Bang.
The most absurd thing about atheism is that it attempts to portray us as naive…then is quite happy to accept ridiculous proposals (dark matter) on the origin of the universe given the above dilemma.
So what in effect I see scientists now proposing is that empty space is something…i think stupidity is gaining traction in the humanistic scientific community and TEists blindly continue to follow that group.
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe.[1] Dark matter is called “dark” because it does not appear to interact with the [electromagnetic field]
(Electromagnetic field - Wikipedia), which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is, therefore, difficult to detect. Various astrophysical observations – including gravitational effects which cannot be explained by currently accepted theories of gravity unless more matter is present than can be seen – imply dark matter’s presence. For this reason, most experts think that dark matter is abundant in the universe and has had a strong influence on its structure and evolution
At the end of the day the solution for me is really really simple…it should be this simple for all Christians:
Start with a philosophical position (science does not predate the philosophical questions that drive our search for knowledge)
The philosophical position is either God created or there is no God.
If God created in Six Days (4th commandment reinforces Genesis Chapter 1) then,
YEC is true and TEism is false.
You didn’t read far enough. The 40 nearly complete whale skeletons are not found at sea bottoms today--they are only found in sedimentary rock layers.
Which tells us, the conditions for their becoming fossilized, rather than being consumed by bacteria, required rapid, complete, and deep burial in sediments. And such conditions do not exist when the bones of a marine animal merely drift down into ocean sediments.
So, we might say that, for fossilization of bones to occur, massive sediments must suddenly fall on the bones…not the bones fall into the sediments.
Or, put another way, ancient inland seas did not give us fossils. Rather, catastrophic ocean flows of sediments did.
Adam, whether you are anti gay or not has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Atheism has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
The issue at stake is honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information.
In other words, sticking to the rules.
Nothing more, nothing less.
absolutely I agree with this!
Again, where do you start with your basis for investigation?
Do you start blindly without an driving force…no “need for knowledge”?
I would strongly argue that if you attempt to make the claim that your search for knowledge is not based on a philosophical principal, then you are a fool. Educators all over the world have consistently proven that we search because we have a desire to know. Kids naturally do this from a very young age…indeed from birth really.
So, then you face a dilemma…which philosophical position do you take before your search for this kind of knowledge begins?
You have but two options…there is a God or, there is no God!
If you take the position there is a God, then I challenge you to please print out the 4th commandment and place it on the back of your toilet door where it will be a constant reminder to you who God is and what he considers important.
Oh, yes, he did!
Chile’s stunning fossil whale graveyard explained - BBC News
“Identified in the beds were over 40 individual rorquals - the type of large cetacean that includes the modern blue, fin and minke whales.
“The team immediately noticed that the skeletons were nearly all complete, and that their death poses had clear commonalities. Many had come to rest facing in the same direction and upside down, for example.”
How does a layer have mud that takes days to settle out of still water in it if the layer was transported?
No. That sediment washed off of the continents, was precipitated from ions in the water into skeletons, or came from volcanic ash or meteoritic dust, drifted to the bottom, and has sat there. The fact that the sediment is unsorted and contains fine mud is completely incompatible with mass-transport.
They don’t. But ordinary wave action, hurricanes, and flooded rivers over the course of a long time do. Hurricane Camille dumped over 40 inches of rain in parts of the Virginia Blue Ridge, flooding the James to the point that boulders in tree roots got transported all the way to the coast. The James is not a huge river.
Deuteronomy 25:13-16.
And if you take the position that there is a God, then I challenge you to please print out Deuteronomy 25:13-16 and place it on the back of your toilet door where it will be a constant reminder to you who God is and what he considers important.
¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
I wish I had a better knowledge of geology, as I find it fascinating, but just a quick read makes me think you have misunderstood sequence stratigraphy. It does not even remotely hold that sedimentary deposits are formed by mass transport of sediment from the ocean bottoms onto the land. They always go downhill from higher land to lower levels. Of course, due to uplifts and depressions, sometimes what is uphill and downhill changes. From what I see, sequence stratigraphy does not change the view of deep time, and even provide support for it, as it proposes that something like a sandstone formation may be an ancient valley that was later filled with sandy sediments (from highland erosion) when sea levels rose.
Perhaps the most striking example is when around 5 million years ago, the Mediterranean nearly dried up, and an ancient Nile river precursor cut deep canyons draining into the deep basin left behind. Later, when the Mediterranean filled, those ancient canyons filled with water, much like fjords, and sediment filled the deep canyons with layers of gravel and sand washed down from the highlands by the Nile until filled. Wells drilled into the Nile delta show this infilling. A much more detailed review can be found on Joel Duff’s blog here, as well as a similar series on the Dead Sea: Squeezing the Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt into the Young Earth Paradigm: An impossible* Task – Naturalis Historia.
Note that this link takes you to first of a series of blog entries, of which the third is the most descriptive of the actual process.
You want me to “comment on the issues” you raise in this quote?
First, you challenge God on why He should command certain animals to be sacrificed. Animals sacrifices are propitiatory–point to Christ (Leviticus 17:10,11; John 1:29). So, this was God’s revealed will. Is that not o.k. with you?
“They desperately need to set up a shelter and find a source of fresh water! And now they must farm in saline muck filled with bloated animal carcasses. Good luck! I’d rather die in the flood.”
Yet, the biblical account says, that when they existed the ark, “And God blessed Noah and his sons…” (Genesis 9:1). Actually, that does sound like “Good luck!” to me. And they quickly got back to living–no indication of any temptation to suicide here!
And…if you had just disembarked from that ark, I seriously doubt you yourself would have been looking for a strong rope to hang yourself with. (And…I seriously doubt that you would have been denying the historicity of the Flood!).
hmmm if one maintains that the uniformatarianism approach is to be ones source of all scientific discovery, then it is no surprise that these whales are claimed to have died 2-7 million years ago (btw a long range of time there) from an algae bloom.
Personally I think that Creation Science puts forward a view that not only maintains philosophical consistency with the Biblical flood, it makes sense…
The sandstone strata containing the whale fossils are contained within a local area called the Caldera basin (figure 4).11
Similar localised basins are found at a number of places along the western coast of Chile. Although the basins are relatively small for Flood deposits, the characteristics of the sediments in these basins (figures 2 and 5) and the abundant fossils contained in them indicate that deposition took place during a period of rapid and major coastal subsidence.12 Coastal subsidence of this nature is exactly what we would expect in the second part of the Flood when the ocean basins sank, the continents rose and the floodwaters flowed into the ocean. And major coastal subsidence explains the rapid burial of the whales and other creatures because rapid burial was needed soon after death to preserve the fossils. After the ocean basins had mostly subsided and the waters had almost completely drained from the land, the whales and other animals that perished in the catastrophe were buried—toward the end of Noah’s Flood. As Robert Raeburn commented on one of the web news reports, the mystery disappears when we interpret the rocks and the fossils from a Bible perspective.Chile desert whale fossils
Well, the dietary laws hadn’t been given yet, so how can Noah tell clean animals from unclean ones?
If Noah is able to farm in saline muck that sounds like magic to me! Shouldn’t reality be considered?
Is this how science works? Betting on the odds of at least a few whales “beating the system”?
Bacteria have supposedly been on the earth for 3.8 billion years. And they have been busy at their jobs, voraciously consuming whale (and other) bones in oceans and seas…for 3.8 billion years. But… you are betting that a very small percentage of these whales somehow slipped by some napping bacteria, in some sleepy ocean waters “once upon a time”…and got themselves fossilized!
It just had to have happened to at least a few, out of all those billion whales!
Is this really how science works?
And? How did The Flood kill them?
“Broken up” crinoids. In fact, also lots of broken up bivalves, too.
Doesn’t that evidence catastrophic waters? How do broken up crinoids and bivalves evidence a relatively peaceful death? How would peaceful waters end up depositing such widespread “brokenness”?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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