I guess I am confused about what the quote actually was. But, we have probably covered the issues on the Mesopotamian flood. Do you have any problem with the science of the Mediterranean flood?
Did Noah’s Flood Kill All human except his family?
Depends on how you define “humans.”
If human beings are just a biological species then I would say that this is impossible and does not agree with the genetic data.
But if human beings are more than just a biological species, as I believe, and have an entirely different inheritance of the mind as well, then it is entirely possible, as I think is the case, that the flood did kill all human beings except Noah’s family.
This is exactly what is suggested by the Bible with its indication that there are more people on the Earth than Adam and Eve and with the talk in Genesis 6 of the sons of God marrying the daughters of men.
Of course if people want to INSIST that human beings are just ANIMALS and all about having the right genetic code such as that of white anglo saxon bigots then people CAN try to hide from the genetic data by pushing Adam and Eve along with the relationship with God into near insignificance by giving a date to the flood which is millions of years older. Then people can look down their nose at not only other races but upon all of human civilization in general as having nothing of value to God whatsoever, who would much prefer a human beings as mindless animals obedient to a divine zoo trainer with no knowledge of anything at all let alone imagining that they have any comprehension of what is good or evil. I guess that might work but I would stay far far far away from any Xtianity like that.
If you say man=homo sapiens, then yes, that was gone before H. sapiens was here. Having spent 10 years reading 500 anthro books and 3000 or so anthro articles, I am of the opinion that human consciousness existed long before H. sapiens arrived on earth. Neanderthals most certainlly had human style consciousness as did the Denosovians, and I also believe H. erectus.
As I pointed out, evidence of religion exists in H. erectus which means, they were spiritual. I find it very hard to exclude them from God’s plan. I know pain in childbirth existed 2.4 myr ago, so H. habilis was post curse. I also know that both Adam’s and Eve’s curse involved them having bigger heads. And I find the Adam and Eve was really a Village to be a major re-write of Christian theology
As I said earlier, what you listed applies to Mesopotamia not my view.
The thing I find problematical about the liberal christian approach (defined in reply to Pevaquark), is that if someone doesn’t think something is real, they just make it mean something other than what the words obviously mean. Why not just rewrite the Bible to your . satisfaction and approval. Start by ditching Genesis 1 and writing about the Big bang, evolution of life, then ditching the embarrassing Eden part and talk about the evolution of morality, and then ditching the flood by just saying nothing of the sort happened? To me, that would be a more forthright approach to changing what the Bible means. At least no one is hiding that they are totally changing what Scripture says. Amazingly no one wants to do that.
I compare that to my advice to YECs. They should merely say the flood was a total miracle, the fossil record was a total miracle and no one can dispute them. But they too won’t do what is necessary to become logically consistent.
Apparently that would be all the scientists and people with the arrogance to get a university education and thus think they might know better than those who have real knowledge directly from God.
Mitch, another amazing agreement between us. I am certainly not one who has ever defined man as an animal.
First off, I think I am offended by this. Adam and Eve are everyone’s parents and there is nothing to that Japheth, ham and shem racist stuff, I don’t hold to that. Maybe you should ask what people believe before you rip off and condemn them for what they don’t beleive.
I haven’t looked down my nose at any ethnic group and you know nothing about my family. My grandkids are a mix of Arab, European, Spanish, Native American, Chinese, other East Asians, African and Jewish. So please cease your look down the nose attitude towards me You are picking on the wrong person.
If it doesn’t apply to you then you have no reason to be offended.
Doesn’t change my principle objection which has always been that pushing Adam and Eve back millions of years makes the relationship with God from Adam and Eve insignificant to human civilization. …and thus by implication that civilization itself is of little significance to God either.
Mitch start your own thread on this kind of snobbery. It doesn’t belong here. Frankly some of the smartest people I know of didn’t have a college education–Lets see, Michael Dell? Bill Gates?
I don’t think Adam and Eve were involved in our civilization observational data says the curses were long long before the Neolothic, but I guess data doesn’t matter to you
Mitch when you reply to me with that kind of trash talk, I have to think it is intended for me. YOu are, after all, REPLYING TO ME!!!
I have no problem with the fact that the Mediterranean was flooded millions of years ago, or that when it rose high enough it flooded the Black Lake to create the Black Sea.
Trying to turn Genesis 6-9 into literal history is quite problematic.
I always make this mistake of using “you” in a general sense and then people take it as referring to them specifically when I never intended this. I corrected this by replacing “you” with “people.”
It never flooded the Black Sea and the Black sea was never empty. No one in geology defends the Ryan and Pitman Black Sea flood anymore. Evidence says that the Black Sea was always flowing towards the Mediterranean
Trying to turn Genesis 6-9 into literal history is quite problematic.
so your problem is not that my data is wrong, it is simply that you don’t want the Bible to be true. I have never understood that from a Christian. I certainly understand that position if a person is an atheist. It confirms what I have said about Biologos—people prefer their Bible to be false, and people criticized me for stating what is obviously a truth at least with you. Why not just say it straight up and direct?.
Ok, I make that mistake often and of late, I have actually gone back through my posts searching for the word ‘you’ and trying to change it to ‘one’. But, I am still imperfect trying to change a life time of habit
In that case, I do agree with you that separating the three sons to be three races is unscientific and leads to racism
You are quite mistaken.
This is a common error that I have seen many times.
People decide a story must be literal history to be “true.”
And these people sometimes make false statements about people with a different interpretation than their wooden literalness.
Sometimes the desire for literal history leads people to imagine things and ignore true things.
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I hadn’t mentioned this, but I agree of course. …even though I am personally white anglo-saxon protestant myself. But my wife is Japanese so my children are facing this recent notion that the coronavirus is an invention of the Chinese. Looks to me like it is much more of a European and American thing now since that is where it is spreading the fastest.
Here is where my analytical philosophy grad work comes into play. The statements 'live a good life" or “be kind to your neighbors” (Aesop fable kind of stuff) can not be said to be true or false. Moral statements can not be shown to be true or false. They might be shown to be useful, but they can’t be said to be true. There are statements subject to the verification process.
Ayer stated: “The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume. Like Hume, I divide all genuine propositions into two classes: those which, in his terminology, concern ‘relations of ideas,’ and those which concern ‘matters of fact.’ The former class comprises the a priori propositions of logic and pure mathematics, and these I allow to be necessary and certain because they are analytic. That is, I maintain that the reason why these propositions cannot be confuted in experience is that they do not make any assertion about the empirical world, but simply record our determination to use symbols in a certain fashion. Propositions concerning empirical matters of fact, on the other hand, I hold to be hypotheses , which can be probable but never certain. And in giving an account of the method of their validation I claim also to have explained the nature of truth.” Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), p. 31
and
“A simple way to formulate it would be to say that a sentence had literal meaning if and only if the proposition it expressed was either analytic or empirically verifiable. To this, however, it might be objected that unless a sentence was literally meaningful it would not express a proposition; for it is commonly assumed that every proposition is either true or false, and to say that a sentence expressed what was either true or false would entail saying that it was literally meaningful” Alfred Jules Ayer, 1946 “Introduction” Language, Truth and Logic, (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), p. 5
The Bible says there was a Flood. That is a verifiable sentence. It is a literally meaningful sentence–subject to verification processes, or refutation. This isn’t a statement about ‘don’t rob banks’ or ‘it is not good to steal your neighbor’s wife’.
The Bible said, The springs of the great deep burst forth. That too is a statement with literal meaning and subject to verification so long as one can define the springs. So, no, this isn’t a ‘wooden literalness’ it comes from both the scientific method and from philosophical analysis of our language.
When in physics it is said "superpartners exist’ , that is an statement of literal meaning. In this case, verification has not happened, but it is that the sentence IS subject to verification that is important.
It isn’t that people decide a story is literally true, it is that the statement itself says, "I am capable of being subjected to the verifcation process.
A statement that 'Noah got on the ark" is not verifiable because we can’t travel back in time to meet this man. But the statement ‘My grandson got on the merry-go-round’ is verifiable for a short space of time.
When Christians take statements subject to verification and act like they are not such statements, they violate both language and the scientific method. For pete’s sake a flood IS a verifiable event. Think of the Washington Scablands. That was a major flood at the end of the glacial period
And by removing the possiblity of verification from Scripture, in effect I think we are saying “I really don’t believe that God could do that”, which then raises in my mind, 'then why would one think that God could raise a man from the dead?" At least this is what my atheist friends would say.
As to ‘magine things and ignore true things’ you have already indicated you have no problem with the Med being dry nor with it infilling. So what do you see me ignoring and what am I imagining? Noah being there? Maybe, but I have one thing going for me–the facts of this flood match the Biblical description remarkably well if I treat the account’s statements as statement subject to verification, it appears that the account is possibly verified by observational data. I didn’t imagine that
One of my sets of grandkids are half Chinese. I suspect they are more directly impacted by this ‘terrible’ thing. but, they are not so sensitive and not looking for reasons to be offended. They have not expressed any problem with this being a Wuhan virus. People can live their life looking for offence and find it everywhere, or one can go about one’s life and realize that not everything bad said about a country is racist. Live as best we can without manufacturing things to take offence from. Look for it and one will find all sorts of things to take offence from and live an incredibly unhappy life.
Edited to add; Lots of disease are named after their place of origin. How about Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome? My wife is Lebanese. She has never expressed a thought that this is a racist term. both China and Middle East are LOCATIONS.
The historical intent of Genesis is pretty clear, and while there is a treatment of elements in the Eden story as symbolic in the Bible there is very little to suggest that anything in the Noah story is symbolic. The only issue I see is the changing notions of what constitutes “the world,” which looks in the Bible far more like a table shaped section than the entire globe of the planet.
Job and Jonah don’t look very historical to me, but I never saw any merit or justification from scientific findings for going to such an extreme as treating all of Genesis as fictional or entirely metaphorical. Mythic, loaded with symbolism, and no reason to treat this quite like a science or history text, sure. But there is nothing science can say about whether particular individuals like Adam and Eve existed so long ago, let alone whether there was a flood which wiped out humanity’s first civilization which according to the story hadn’t spread out over the earth as yet.
I agree. I always find it odd that an account that seems to be written in historical style is suddenly verboten as possible real history.
What the world is depends on how Eretz is translated. Abram was told to go from his ‘world’ to a ‘world’ God would show him, seems to miss the point of Genesis 12’s intent. It is unlikely that Abram was an alien from another planet. Thus, leave your country/land and go to a country/land i will show you, makes more sense. this also illustrates something that is my pet peeve. When there are options for how to translate a word, why do so many translators chose to use words that make the Bible false. Making eretz in Gen 12 mean world leads to Abram being an alien. Making world mean all the land there is, leads to a global flood.
I knew when I came up with this flood idea back in the 1990s, that the biggest hurdle would be “Has God worked with mankind that long.?” Even if one limits image bearers to H. sapiens, God has worked with mankind for 200+ thousand years. By making Adam a Neolithic, it means God didn’t interact with man for 190 thousand years or so. He was deistic to them but theistic post Adam with us. I don’t like that implication that God might not have cared to deal with them. Once one has God interacting with mankind 200 kyr ago, then there really isnt a big obstacle to moving it back further.
There is nothing science can say about Adam and Eve living 7000 years ago either. And no, I can’t prove that people (concious image bearers) died in that flood. I can point out that this is right when hominids first appeared on earth, and that the flood matches the Biblical description. It is belief that this is Noah’s flood. I will continue to point out how closely this matches what we see at that time.
Further, I ran into this in early March when I got my new monthly Logos books:
" No rivers exactly fit the criteria of Gen 2, suggesting that the topography of the area has changed and making the four rivers criterion unlikely to be effectiv e"Mangum, D., Custis, M., & Widder, W. (2012). Genesis 1–11 (Ge 2:4–25). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press. Garden of Eden section
I don’t think he considered how much the geography changed and how long ago it was. lol
Again, I find it quite interesting that Gen 2:8-14 describes things as they really were that long ago. This is either pure dumb luck, or divine inspiration in my opinion.
I am going to post again on the strange hydrology of Eden. What Genesis 2 says about the water can ONLY happen in a deep basin, geologically speaking.
Jesus said “A man went down from Jericho…”
That is in the Bible. It is a story to illustrate spiritual truths. It is not literal history.
Jesus was not telling lies. He was also not detailing literal history.
Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho , and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.
As for the flood being a “verifiable sentence,” a world-wide flood that killed all but a boatload of people and animals can be verified as false many ways.
The existence of dodos on one island in the Pacific and nowhere else is proof. There are so many other proofs.
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Is the description of the rainbow symbolic?
Was there a change in the nature of light and atmospheric water that suddenly created rainbows after the flood?