Pevaquark, glad to hear from you. After we had that tussle about my quoting people I hadn’t heard from you. I thought I had offended you by defending the use of my lifetime 1 gigabyte database of scientific information.
Ok, Let’s define liberal christianity as Wiki does. Doesn’t that seem fair?
Liberal Protestantism developed in the 19th century out of a need to adapt Christianity to a modern intellectual context. With the acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, some traditional Christian beliefs, such as parts of the **Genesis creation narrative, became difficult to defend. Unable to ground faith exclusively in an appeal to [scripture]**(Religious text - Wikipedia) or the person of Jesus Christ, liberals, according to theologian and intellectual historian Alister McGrath, “sought to anchor that faith in common human experience, and interpret it in ways that made sense within the modern worldview.” Liberal Christianity - Wikipedia
I would guess many people here would not defend the creation account, nor the reality of the Fall, nor the reality of Noah’s flood–at least that is my experience. I hope this answers your sincere question. It is a sincere answer!
Given my match to both biblical data (the words contained in the account) and modern geology, I would be more interested in your comments on the fit of data to theory. Nitpicking about who is or isn’t a liberal christian is really kinda off the point–Please don’t miss the point of this article, that this account doesn’t have to be considered mythical. You are a physicist. Doesn’t a theory that matches facts have more weight than one that doesn’t? Calling Noah’s flood ‘mythical’ means none of the facts are matched with anything.
It definitely does not undermine any credibility if there are mythological elements to the story. We’ve been over this before where you can have Aesop’s fables that carry great lessons and truth to them despite being entirely made up. I’m not saying that’s the case for Noah’s Flood but even if it was, this statement is not true
.Yes we have been over it before. For some reason no one seems to understand simply logic of this issue. If god is so clueless and doesn’t know what happened on earth and is incapable of communicating to us the story of Noah and other things, then it is quite reasonable to ask, as many of your physicist colleagues and my geophysicist colleague do, is this God really there? I bolded Aesop. see below.
Now yes, I know people will say God didn’t intend to tell us anything real. I would like documentation of where anyone was able to determine what God’s intent is when for 1700 years everyone on earth thought his intention was to tell us a true history. What happened in the 19th century that gave mankind knowledge of what God intended? I am just asking for documentation of this belief–that is not an unreasonable request.
Sort of. The thing is that if we are talking about “exact” things which the Bible seems to not really be doing in many places (e.g. the numbers are more “theological” than meant to be “literal”), at best you could claim that the Bible’s details can be within the error bars of geological calculations but we really couldn’t be so precise as exact days perfectly rounded to things like 150, 400, or 200.
Sorry Pev, I didn’t say those numbers ‘matched’. the 200 days comes from a numerical fluid flow model of the Med and I said, if you would read it right, that it is awfully close to the 150. As you are clearly aware, in a model one can tweak the inputs to even match the 150 days by letting the opening be slightly bigger. But matching in a model doesn’t = truth This theory very well might be wrong, but, it is the only one that can check off the 7 points I laid out. and the 150 days was not one of those check points. It was something i found interesting. Tell me how the Mesopotamian flood does against that list, Please.
That’s good.
I am glad you approve. Your belief in the virtues of quantum are based upon the exact same criteria I use for this view of the flood—it matches observational data. Don’t use two different standards, one for what you like and one for what you don’t like.
I probably would guess that if someone believes the Bible is telling us exact scientific details, they necessarily find some details that match.
Not so. This assumes every possible scenario can be matched to the scientific data. I doubt you would say that YECs match much of the scientific data. If I am wrong in this assertion, please tell me where they match the scientific data.
For example, I mentioned the abundance of the molecule of water in the universe and then one student proposed that that’s what it was talking about on day 2 of Genesis where God separated the ‘waters above’ from the ‘waters below’ by use of the firmament (which he thought to be our atmosphere). In other words, when we have the prior belief that it is giving us historical details, that’s exactly what we will read into the text. The only problem is that despite your eloquent presentation here, lots of people will be just fine reading other things into the text which was a major challenge as far back as the 1700s in Britian.
I will agree with you in two points-- 1. Yes people will still be reading Aesop’s fables into the Bible after this presentation and 2. I do have to ascribe the names of the rivers to particular depositional systems. However, the northern Euphrates system obviously captured anything flowing off of Turkey close to the coast. Even today the Euphrates is only 60 miles from the Mediterranian coast.
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The Afiq channel I do have to identify as the Pison, but it is in the correct place draining the correct land mass. The only river that encompasses Cush is the Nile. that seems easy. This leaves only the Tigris a bit loose, but, 3d seismic data does show a BIG river coming into the Med just north of the Israel border.
Otherwise, what you are saying is basically a diversion. First off, every archaeological effort in the area of Biblical Archaeology compares what the Bible says to what they find. That recent excavation in Sodom that found a meteor airburst had happened, compared what the Bible said to what they found. That is standard practice for them. The discoverer of Troy used the Iliad to find it–Did he ‘read things into what he found?’
Secondly, You are saying this without having looked at the data that OTHER geologists have collected and published. I can’t make the geologic data say what I want it to say. I didn’t 'read into the data, a major depocenter coming out of Hatay province Turkey at 5.3 myr ago called the Nahr Menashe. and another depocenter coming out of the Nile at this time called the Abu Madi. Here is that data–I just believed the data the other scientists collected. Sources for this can be found here
This seismic data shows a 3km wide channel coming off the Levant shelf in what became lebanon 5.3 myr ago. It is just north of the Israeli border,
And the Afiq canyon of 5.3 myr ago drains the arabian platform. Apparently at that time it was tilted toward the Med, not towards the Indian Ocean. The Bible says that is where Havilah was–in Arabia. I couldn’t ‘read that into the Bible’. I also couldn’t ‘read’ into existence a channel which drained the area of Havilah.
Yossi Mart and William B.F. Ryan Abstract
“The offshore extension of Afiq Canyon is a deep valley, buried under thick Plio-Quaternary sediments beneath the continental slope off the southern coastal plain of Israel. … Additional valleys of similar dimensions and characteristics to the marine extension of Afiq Canyon occur elsewhere along the continental slope of the entire Levant, suggesting that several rivers of the fluvial system of the Levant, which drained northwestern Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea during the Oligo-Miocene, still prevailed in the Messinian. The Afiq Canyon and its offshore apron as well as equivalents such as the Nahr Menashe fluvial system off Lebanon, imply that the geography of the Levant during late Miocene differed from the present. The Levant Rift could not have been a continuous tectonic depression as it is in the present, but rather a sufficiently disconnected series of grabens that allowed large rivers to still flow in between. The presence of the Afiq apron of substantial volume and with a thickness approaching 200 m along its apex confirms active fluvial systems feeding their bedloads into the Mediterranean as recent as 5 million years ago.” View PDF
I didn’t read that description into existence. It is what they said. It matches what the Bible says about the Pison, which is located by the Bible itself via it’s own locating of Havilah.
I can assure you that in the 47 years of me generating theories of local earth history that many of my original ideas were totally disproven, sometimes by a well, sometimes by new seismic. But many of my views did pass muster with the data leading to a billion barrels of oil being discovered by the teams I managed. This theory is no different. If you want to disprove it, find contradictory geological information and lets have the debate. But please don’t think I don’t know the scientific craft I honed for 47 years. This is exactly what I did for a living, except for the theological part.
Thee is more evidence. I will discuss the strange hydrology of Eden and how it relates to this. Good theorys have facts fall into place. This is a good theory.
- While there are some details in the text, there were diverse and conflicting applications of the relevant texts, i.e. the fountains of the great deep had been linked to the abyss, comets, the ocean, water from caves, etc.
Ah, lets look at the fountains of the deep. The deep (t’hom) often refers to deep waters, the ocean etc. So, what would you call it when the dam at Gibraltar broke and the waters of the Atlantic ocean (t’hom) broke through and the oceanic waters poured into the basin at 223 mph or more? Would you disagree that this event (see below for numerical model of this) could be described as “the fountains of the great deep burst open”(Gen 7:11)? The red is 100 m/s. You can check my conversion to mph.
I would call this event the fountains of the deep breaking open even if it had nothing to do with Noah. I didn’t ‘read’ into existence the 100 m/s velocity.
- Some had a growing suspicion the texts were being used improperly…
- The sense grew that Scripture provided no single, incontestable, infallible diluvial scenario…
If this is your belief, then it would seem to me that the term defined by WIKI above does apply to you. It doesn’t apply to me. Obviously.