I understand what you are saying. But on what ground you can say this is how it is. Why could the Flood not have been a global event that destroyed the earth and killed all the land-animals like it says in the text.
It is the same with the other stories. Like the Tower of Babel where God brought confusion by giving different languages.
Or what is said about Sodom and Gomorra. Peter mentions that together with the Flood. And Jesus speaks about it in Mat 10,15. in connextion with the day of judgement.
So: how do we know something happened or it didnât. Why would we be able do distinguish ?
Science.
By being disinterested.
I was talking to Laura. Now I get your answer Martin Peter. It looks like you do not take my question seriously. Or do I not understand you?
Sorry dirk, I take your question seriously; thatâs a serious answer. How do we know something happened or it didnât? Science. Rational inquiry. The kind that happens in a courtroom. Or your garage. Why would we be able do distinguish? Why is an interesting word if thatâs what you mean and not âhowâ. Why as in what is the purpose? The purpose of our being able to distinguish is not to shut down inquiry, but broaden it. As science easily reveals that the Flood didnât happen (and that the Earth is deeply old), what is the purpose of the story among others?
Not a problem.
Well, I know we like to say that âwith God all things are possibleâ (though we often take it out of context), but in the sense of God being an all-powerful creator, he certainly could have found a way to flood the entire globe if he wanted to, including Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other people groups who had no contact with the people of the mesopotamian area. So for me itâs not really about what God is or is not capable of, but what actually happened â I believe in both the flood and the Tower of Babel, I just think the scope of those events is seen through the eyes of a Hebrew writer in their own time, not in ours.
When I believed the earth was young, I believed the flood had to be global because it was the only way to explain away the fossil record. Once I accepted an old earth, it wasnât as big a deal to me whether it was local or global, especially after seeing that âeretzâ can be translated as âland,â but I also came to accept the assertion from geologists and other scientists that earthâs geology is not consistent with the entire globe being catastrophically flooded a few thousand years ago. If youâd like more information, Joel Duff is a Christian geologist who has an entire section on flood geology on his blog:
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I am still curious about your thoughts on the same
Language used as shown in my comment 3 days ago. It talks about it. The textual analysis.
science does not tell us the Flood did not happen. Many many scientists think the Flood was real. Nobody of us was there. So we can only know because God let it be written. As you will know there are lots of floodstories among the peoples. That is because such event took place worldwide. All people have names for the survivers. Sometimes they even became their gods. Geology is developed from Hutton and Lyells hypotheses.
A friend of mine, excevating DINO s, was a student chemistry , a non believer. From his studies he started wandering about timemmessuring of rocks. Finallly he came across believers and creationists. The Millions of years is a choice of paradigme. It is not science. And I want te believe the Word of God as the true revelation. Jesus says that not a single word of scripture will be lost. He takes the Tenach very serious as the true revelation. How then can we as followers of Christ speak differently. I am a biologist myself and not anything in bioscience has been able to cinvinced me of evolution. Let us take the revelation God gave us in both OT and NT as the guide in our life and understanding.
Itâs OK dirk. We have completely different ways of establishing truth.
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lol what? We have the data that shows heavily that the earth is millions of years old, if it wasnât then it should show the earth 6,000 years old. So is science in a conspiracy to cover up the age of the earth? Who then? Freemasons? Illuminati? Papacy/Jesuits? Zionist? I also use to cling to conspiracy theories back in my YEC days claiming that the Papacy/Jesuits were covering up the true age of the earth to deceive God-fearing, Bible-believing, Protestant Christians and trick them into the NWO one world religion. But as I thought more deeply about the issues and looked seriously at the science I saw that YEC was wrong and came back to EC.
And He did, in fact more faithfully then we Christ followers ever wish to in the 21st century here in the West. Once we see the ancient context of the Bible and see it for what it is in light of the 21st century we can take out the spiritual kernels of truth out of the dead husk of the cultural product of documents in what we call the âBibleâ which was a series of ancient documents written thousands of thousands of years ago by an ancient people to an ancient people over ancient topics and issues. As you say below
And that He did, but He knew what as the spiritual truth to be taught and left the cultural baggie behind. Thatâs why he always was in conflict with the religious teachers of the law, they always held ancient traditions or things outside of the commands of God and held them as if they are needed. But Jesus taught us that the two important commands are to love God and love neighbor. Again, we would be much better at seeing the Bible and getting value from it if we were able to understand the ancient near eastern context of it. Again, the Bible is a series of ancient documents written by many people (and at times with conflicting agendaâs) directed to an ancient audience but that doesnât mean we can learn something out of it by gleaning it and seeing what we can apply to the 21st century. Though the Bible is for us indeed no doubt, not everything written in the Bible is to us or for us.
I agree with you on that, but we need to properly divide into what is ancient and thus no longer valid to us either due to cultural separation and/or the New Covenant of Jesus Christ (example almost all of the laws of Leviticus) and the spiritual teachings and truths that universally apply to us throughout all time. (example the sermon of the mount Matt. 5-7)
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The rocks were there.
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It is the concept of world and meaning of âworldwideâ which has changed just as our understanding of the universe has changed. But while we have good reason to extend Godâs act of creation to the whole universe as we understand it now, we donât have good reason to extend the flood over the world to a flood over the whole planet as we have come to understand the world to mean. There are so many reasons this simply would not make any sense. For example⌠we estimate that there are 6.5 million species of animals on the land and clearly no boat could ever contain that many animals. It just isnât reasonable to equate the world of the OT which is described as a table with the that of the entire globe of the planet Earth. Furthermore all evidence in every single science disagrees with there being such an occurrence. Certainly the genetic evidence is quite conclusively against such a drop in the population of all the land animal species to such a tiny number as would be implied by the story referring to a planet wide flood.
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to Laura:
no concspiracy. But the messurements are clearly not reliable at all . Many have shown that. Gert-Jan van Heugten from the Netherlands even came towards believing from all the mistaken parameters he found while studying chemistry. Please read the good stuff . Thank You for the dicussion, it take me a lot of time, I will not continue. Sometimes you might read something of me at the en site of biologos, because it saddens me that people are drifting away from the truth and bring harm to their relationship with the Lord.
Know what is sad.
I disproved your point on the biblical understanding of the whole world using scripture. I repeatedly alluded back at it to you. Yet you ignore it and continue on with this lack of understanding about scripture and science.
Not only does scripture itself point towards a smaller flood, and pints towards a hyperbolic ahistorical set of tales throughout scripture, but science disagrees with your misinformation and misunderstanding. Loving the truth does not cause people to drift further away from God. But not being like the noble bereans and pursuing the truth God reveals to us in scripture and through nature, his creation, causing this inaccurate view to be forced on to others is what causes people to drift further and further from God.
I understand â thank you for discussion as well, and God bless you.
Yeah, and no doubt you believe Jesus sat down to write the King James version in English. This makes about as much sense as everything else you have been saying. Do you also believe that the whole planet is flat as a table and held up by pillars? Frankly the nonsensical slippery slope argument works far better for science and all the information God sends us in the Earth and sky than it does for the Bible. We have no problem whatsoever believing that Adam, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus were real historical people. So maybe this has more to do with you being raised in a cult-ure which rewrote the Bible to fit an anti-science agenda.
What we read in the Bible, whether in Genesis, 2 Peter, Matthew or Hebrews, is not anything like the description of globe shaped Earth or a 7 continent globe spanning civilization (no such thing existed at the time, let alone in the awareness of Peter or any other person in the Bible). Why are you altering the words of the Bible?
I would not bring such a judgement upon you. This is just science, only one activity of many activities which human beings engage in. Itâs not salvation . Unfortunately for you however, Jesus has made it very clear in Matthew 7 that the people will be judged by the same measure they judge other people and thus by these words you have condemned yourself. Wise up!
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Getting back to the original question, it seems that there is too much focus on the flood itself and what came prior, rather than the events immediately following. The flood was Godâs Ctrl-Alt-Delete on a sinful world, sparing only righteous Noah and his family. The meaning of the flood event follows from what happens after the waters recede. Righteous Noah sins, and it is immediately clear that the flood event did not result in a holy Utopia. Humankind is inherently sinful, and only a holy God can redeem us.
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