[quote=“Korvexius, post:39, topic:42691”]
I’d have to look more into it, but once again, the issues I see are significant. I don’t see how the evidence for divine inspiration is any less on the scenario where the whole thing happened 10,000 years ago or so in an area buried under what is now some sea. In any case, I received a response from the author of the video to what you wrote and he asked me to post it here. Here it is:
Here is why revelation is less. 10kyr ago, could be handed down via oral tradition. With the match to the geography 5.3 myr ago, no one could have known that until 1970 or so when DSDP drilled holes into the bottom of the Med and found that it had been a desert. In the former case, oral tradition might not have anything to do with a God. in the latter case, no one could have known.
Eden: His only criticism seems to be that כושׁ never can refer to anything but Cush, but there is no rule in Hebrew which forces this
Well, that seems like a pretty good criticism. If one can take words and make them mean whatever they want them to mean, as I said earlier, we could make the bible say whatever we wish it to say and that would fall into the criticism of renown atheist, Thomas Huxley
“If we are to listen to many expositors of no mean authority, we must believe that what seems so clearly defined in Genesis as if very great pains had been taken that there should be no possibility of mistake is not the meaning of the text at all. The account is divided into periods that we may make just as long or as short as convenience requires. We are also to understand that it is consistent with the original text to believe that the most complex plants and animals may have been evolved by natural processes, lasting for millions of years, out of structureless rudiments. A person who is not a Hebrew scholar can only stand aside and admire the marvelous flexibility of a language which admits of such diverse interpretations.” Thomas H. Huxley, “Lectures on Evolution” in Agnosticism and Christianity, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), p. 14
If we want a Bible like that, we are truly lost.
. For example the word Seraph typically refers to a snake (Numbers 21:8) but in Isaiah 6 it refers to angelic beings. So we have one word with two completely different bmeaings. I suspect gbob might reply that place names are different, but this is not true either, and one needs to look no further than the Table of Nations (Genesis 10). There are two nations of Havilah (son of Cush, son of Joktan), and two nations named Sheba (son of Cush, son of Joktan). Considering, that Genesis 2 refers to the garden in the east
East of what is the question. My place for Garden of Eden (Eden could mean desert), is in the eastern Mediterranian. Plus, deep basins are known to have rarer rain falls, but today, no land like Mesopotamia could claim to never having been rained on. That might apply to where I put the Garden of Eden. Just saying Mesopotamia is a bad place to match what the Bible says–but if we do what Huxley accuses us of doing and changing the meaning or ignoring what it says, we can make any theory work.
(v2.8) and Cush would have been south of Israel, it probably is referring to a different nation and the Kassites fit that bill. The fact that gbob is arguing from silence is not convincing. Remember, I relied on scholars for this.
No one said Cush was in the east. It was Eden which was in the east, and the description of the Gihon only matches the Nile. Where it splits into White and Blue Nile, those two rivers do encompass Ethiopia. The Kassite view would have to figure out a similar situation, but since they didn’t mention it before, doing so now would look a little ad hoc, force fitting to counter my objection.
Flood: This section is ironic to me because he accuses me of dishonesty when in fact the opposite might be true. However, I think he skimmed through El Bastawasy’s paper instead of reading it thoroughly which will explain the mistakes.
Well, he did exaggerate the extent of Bastawesy’s flood. He did exaggerate the extent of water going way up to 1500 ft to reach the foot of Mt Judi. I didn’t do that. I just pointed it out. So, I stand by my criticism that they stretched things to the breaking point.
Before that I want to point out, I never said the ark landed on the top of Mount Judi
And I didn’t say he did say that. I always talked about the foot of Mt. Judi which still requires a lump of water standing 1500 ft above sea level to get the ark to the foot of Judi, which I said I would agree is landing on the mountains of ararat, but it is this lump of water climbing uphill 1500 ft to get to the Blue green contour on this map.
![middle-east-topo-map-864.jpg|224x196]![Mt Judi elevation|690x306]
He is the one who puts flood waters in his movie that high, not me.
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Genesis 8 only says the region of Urartu mountains. I suspect the ark came to rest in a low lying region since the dove found an olive leaf.
I gave him his low lying area in my previous criticism. I didn’t claim the waters were on top of Mt. Judi.
I also never said the flood had to be a full year long.
Right there, we change what the bible says to make it fit our theory, rather than changing our theory to fit the Bible. If we change what scripture says to fit our theory we can make the bible say anything and follow Huxley’s law–and indeed, sadly, I think Huxley’s criticism of Christians is a law. We seem to invent numerous ways to show how we don’t agree with what the Bible says. The bible says, it lasted about a year–This guy doesn’t believe the Bible and thus follows Huxley’s law.
I think the lengths of Genesis 6-8 could be symbolic.
Yep, again not believing what Scripture says. There are other ways. As I have pointed out and Korvexxius, you never answered, the curse of [pain in childbirth](The Migrant Mind: When did Adam live? Part 4 Fossil Record & The Curse of the Big Brain) and sweat of the brow are both curses to be laid on a small brained hominid who is about to get a bigger brain. Why would God give a curse of pain in childbirth to a woman 10kyr ago or so, when her mother, her aunts and grandmother’s galore going back 2 myr all had suffered pain in childbirth? it would be like cursing me with ugliness. So what? Big deal, I already have ugliness. And a 10KYR Eve would have also said, 'so what?" It is the brainsize of the infant which causes pain in childbirth. Homo rudolfensis had pain in childbirth 2 myr ago. Homo erectus women had pain in childbirth. Humans have a unique birthing problem that is caused by the big brain of the child vs the birth canal size. See the link above for details.
As for the paper which he says I misrepresented, it seems he is conflating points made by El Bastawasy, namely the deluge path and the mega-lake that formed in the region. For example, gbob has the audicity to accuse me of dishonesty because he says, “Below is a picture of what El Bastawesy says was flooded. I don’t agree with it but here it is”
The guy’s link is broken (that has happened to me before so I don’t wish him bad for that) but anyone can go look at figure 7 in this paper
The figure is entitled “the estimated extent of the deluge path…” Here it is again.
There is no other picture in that paper showing the extent of what this author is claiming. And as I quoted the author, he has lots of uncertainty about his hypothesis. Further, there are no channel cuts that he pointed to in his paper. Maybe they are there and maybe they are not, but flood cut channels. without that piece of evidence his hypothesis is going nowhere.
He continues, “Now for comparison look at what the film does. They expand and distort what El Bastawesy was saying.” What gbob doesn’t realize he has conflated the “deluge path” with the “mega-lake” that would have formed. El Bastaswasy even says figure 7 is of the deluge path , “The estimated extent of the deluge path and its overflow arms that breached the high topographic barriers in Arabia.” But we all know water flows to the lowest level, and if you look at a topographical map there is only one place it could have gone:
(upload://u3WuMukiepixyWd4kLoe5yfBYEL.jpeg) (data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==)
Yeah, the Persian gulf at sea level is the lowest place it could have gone. The Persian Gulf at that time was open to the Indian Ocean and the water would have flowed into the Indian ocean, just like water from the Tigris and Euphrates flows out to the Indian Ocean eventually.
He link is broken again, I wish I could see this one.
The water from the deluge would have poured in and filled in the region. El Bastawasy even says on page 4, “On the other hand, the overflow of the Sirhan–Azraq basins may have overflowed eastward into Middle Iraq and westward into the Dead Sea (Fig. 7).”
Water isn’t going to flow uphill very much no matter what ‘expert’ one tries to cite. Momentum will carry water a bit up hill, like happens at a tsunami, but not hundreds of miles and 1500 ft uphill.
Middle Iraq is far up as Bagdad, and given the topography that could have streched up into the region of the Urartu mountains.
So he is standing by his lump of water that flows uphill. I have seen all sorts of mental gymnastics by people who want the flood to be in Mesopotamia, from a year long land based Hurricane, to having 8 people pole a big ark against the flow of water, which 8 people don’t have enough energy for. I have seen people say the wind blew the ark uphill, and that would mean wind changes with each meander of the river. Now we have water flowing hundreds of miles and 1500 feet uphill. This is a new one. Maybe the ark surfed up there but there wasn’t enough energy. mgh is a really important equation in physics, mass time gravitational acceleration time height.
Also, give the topography of the region, the mega lake would have drained into the Indian ocean that fast, and this is covered in the paper. So the water would have overflowed into the region and would have been slow to drain, and the El Bastawasy says this could have reached into middle Iraq, given elevation levels.
Really? I just searched for the word Persian and Indian in that paper. They don’t appear. Neither does the word ‘drain’ drainage channel occurs a lot, but this isn’t covered in the paper. go look.
The idea El Bastawasy didn’t back up his research for a sudden and rapid flood is absurd. For example, he talks about, “formation of thick lacustrine deposits in the extinct trough of Wadi Al Sirhan” and the “wide breaches” of the overflow fans and channels, which are several kilometers in length and tens of meters in-depth and are no longer connected. He sits other examples of what gradual following of a lake would look like
Thick alluvium can form by slow normal processes. This is why his theory has gone no where. Massive rapid floods cut channels, they erode because of their energy level. Slower processes cause alluvium to build up
, “Lake Kivu (2,220 km2, elevation 1,460 m) of the African Rift Valley empties into Lake Tanganyika (32,000 km2, elevation 773 m) via Ruzizi River.” The region of this ancient mega-lake doesn’t match the gradual filling of these other lakes, given the overflow channels, and the topography suggests it all drained into the lowest regions which were insufficent to drain the whole region.
I didn’t think Bastawesy’s mention of Kivu made much of a point.
El Bastawasy also does respond to early research like Schulz and Whitney (1986) on pages 7 and 8 and explains why they came to their conclusions and why new evidence shows a rapid flood, not a slow gradual change.
Even if they are correct and there was a massive flood, that doesn’t give the film maker the right to have water flow hundreds of miles uphill when the Persian gulf is open to the Indian ocean. He wants the water to take a right turn to go north from it’s easterly direction.
So it seems gbob left out several important points Bastawasy brought up and also misrepresented points made in the videos. That is all the time I have to respond to now, but if you go through the paper you can see El Bastawasy did a very good job of backing up his resrarch and responding to other theories of grafual flooding or rainfall.
I will stand by what I said.
