I gave it - satire - a shot recently. Your right, the AiG literature can’t be beat but its not hard to confuse other YECs into believing nonsense that sounds like their own work. There were people on FB arguing that what I said was a legit reading of Josephs famine. Answers from Genesis: Reclaiming the Biblical Authority of Joseph’s Global Famine – Naturalis Historia
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This made me laugh. As did the one linked in the comments over at GOE.
It’s like Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, but less thought out!
Remember that line in Cloverfield by a squaddie (GI)? ‘I dunno what it is, but it’s winning’. It’s anti-intellectuality.
PS The internet has facilitated it; the ultimate rumour machine. Whatever can be thought wrong, will be, on a mass scale. Rationality isn’t winning, it’s always been a minority pursuit and now its opposite is more powerful than ever. and cannot be opposed except by legislation, which, of course, is partisan to a terrifying degree in America as Texas shows.
I remember this old post. And I very much appreciated Socratic.Fanatic, one of our better participants.
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2 posts were split to a new topic: How do we define scientific reality, and does that differ from theologic reality?
I once had a Darwinist tell me this arose naturally. 
Ken Ham is great and I would take my kids any day to see it. The ark isn’t just fiction but IS an historical reality as stated in the Bible.
For all your badmouthing YECs, you got one here!
The most surprising thing to me when I visited the Ark Encounter was the assortment of cages holding mock ups of dinosaurs.
It is truly surreal.
Why would the dinosaurs be problematic? It doesn’t align with common decent? Looking at it from a biblical perspective, how is it problematic? I would imagine that God brought juvenile dinosaurs on the ark. All the animals likely hibernated so there wasn’t need of a lot of food.
Just a reminder that this is a nearly 5 year old post, and probably even the title would not be allowed today, I will separate out some of the current side issues into a new post or two, and if this one goes down the rabbit hole, will close it.
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Thomas, there are many reasons to recognize the flood story should bot be taken as a literal planet-wide flood.
Are you familiar with the NET Bible? It has excellent translators notes.
Consider:
- In Hebrew, the word translated world can also be translated land.
- In Hebrew, the word translated mountain can also be translated hill.
- In the Hebrew text, the ark landed on the hills (plural) of Ugarit. If it landed on multiple hills, they were not mountains.
When you use hills instead of mountains and land instead of world, it is a local flood.
Did you ever notice the time between the waters receding and the bird returning with the olive branch is shorter than the gestation period of an olive seed?
I could go on with more examples.
Another important indication that we are not to take the early chapters of Genesis as literal history:
There are two creation stories with different orders and methods of creation, both cannot be literal history as they literal disagree as to how God created.
And you might look closely at Genesis 4. It is a wonderful story of the creation of society, including the development of farming and herding, metallurgy, music, civil law. These developments are typically attributed to a single person. The same man who developed bronze also developed iron!
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Thomas, dinosaurs living with man 5000 years ago is problematic because the evidence that God has given us in creation shows dinosaurs are much more ancient.
We have scriptures that have been preserved and we have other evidence that has been preserved. We need to look at all God has given us.
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Listen to the video I link to and that responds to your post.
Friend,
It’s problematic because the dinosaurs lived and then died out millions of years ago, not because of common descent.
We can imagine and speculate much friend, but that doesn’t make it so. Let me ask you: what other extinct animals were on the ark? How do we know? And what, exactly, killed the dinosaurs?
All the animals hibernated? What about the animals that don’t or can’t?
-Joshua W.
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She doesn’t deal with the issues that I raised about what the Hebrew actually says.
And I will and another point:
She mentions the water rose 15 cubits above the highest mountains.
If you will look at the translator notes of the NET Bible, you will see the Hebrew text actually says the water rose 15 cubits and covered the high hills.
The text does not say the water rose 15 cubits above the hills. It says the water rose 15 cubits and covered the high hills.
In a few flat land like that found in large parts of the Middle East, a hill 15 cubits tall is very hill.
I will also add that “all” in the Bible does not mean 100% as it does in modern Western society. Consider these verses from Mark 1:
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
Did “all the people” of Jerusalem go out to John and get baptized? Even the chief priests and Sanhedrin? No.
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You make all these assumptions about the wording of the text but it makes so much more sense if it is a global flood. Why have the ark if God could cause the animals to go to another location to get away from the flood?
Gen. 6:7,8 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
Gen. 6:17 And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth will die.
In 2 Peter 2:5 also mentions the destruction of the ungodly with only eight surviving. It seems to me you do damage to the word if you read it in the fashion you do.
Hi Joshua.
It’s problematic because the dinosaurs lived and then died out millions of years ago, not because of common descent.
If you watched the video I linked to, you would see the part about dinosaur soft tissue. The fact that the DNA and cells are still in existence after millions of years should bring into question the actual age of the dinosaurs.
I am saying we can put forward a reasonable explanation of the events surrounding the flood showing it did happen. You assume the dinosaurs were extinct but that doesn’t make it so. Please listen to the video and it talks about the dinosaur soft tissue which brings into question the age of the dinosaurs.
What killed the dinosaurs? They likely died out after the flood, the difficult years following with the extreme global cooling.
I said all the animals likely hibernated. There may have been some awake but likely most were in hibernation caused by God. This idea that God could only use natural means to accomplish his ends is baseless especially with all the miracles we see in the Bible.
Gen 7:14 “They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing”
Nope. Not a mention of juvenile creatures of any sort, let alone dinosaurs.
Gen 6:21 "You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”
Sounds a lot more like alert people and animals needing to be fed than hibernating.
All of this YEC extra-biblical stuff about hibernation, juvenile forms, hyper speciation and ark “kinds” is just a pile of ad hoc rescuing devices which only arises due to our far greater awareness of the immeasurably vast number of species over time and geography. Nobody would be talking about juvenile dinosaurs if dinosaur fossils had not been uncovered, there is nothing in Genesis that gives the slightest intimation of their existence. What you imagine isn’t scripture, it is just made up.
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These aren’t assumptions about the text. It is not an assumption that the Hebrew words can be translated mountains or hills and earth or land. It is not an assumption that the text actually says the water rose 15 cubits and covered the high hills/mountains. It is not an assumption that the Hebrew text says the ark landed on hills (plural), not a particular mountain.
Did you look at the NET Bible notes?
And if you want to look at the evidence that God has given us in creation, look at the diversity of animals around the world. There are thousands of examples, but start with the dodo bird. How did the flightless, slow bird move from the ark 5000 years ago to an island in the Indian Ocean and nowhere else?
God has given us the example of the dodo bird, perhaps so we won’t insist the early chapters of Genesis are literal history. The scriptures also give us two creation stories with different orders and methods of creation, perhaps so we won’t insist the early chapters of Genesis are literal history.
I know it takes time to realize the things you were taught may not be right, it did for me. But we need to move past the teachings of childhood and into a fuller understanding of God.
One of the things that helped me understand the way the ancient Hebrews were willing to share stories that had wonderful pictures and truths was the story of David’s rescue from Saul. The actual events are described, with David avoiding the spear thrown, hiding with the Philistines, sparing Saul in a cave.
And then there is their second version—with God flying down on a cherub hurling lightning bolts with smoke pouring from his nostrils (found in Psalms 18 and 2 Samuel 22). The second version is not untrue, and it is not literal history.
Thomas, going back to making assumptions: you and the video are making a huge assumption: that the story is a lie if it is not literal history.
Jesus told a story about a Good Samaritan. He never said “this is a story, not literal history.” He wasn’t teaching history, he was giving spiritual guidance.
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