Nope. Not gonna say these miracles aren’t possible.
My point is … and always has been … that the story of the Ark and the Flood cannot be PARTIALLY accepted. You either believe ALL of the MIRACLES … and the many many more miracles that the Bible doesn’t even itemize about that story …
Or there’s no point in thinking the Flood is historical.
God invisibly feeding the thousands/millions of animals on that ark is quite reasonable to include on the list of miracles … in fact, it is a NECESSITY to imagine it.
There a number of unprovable assumptions in this scenario… and the main one is that carnivores can survive only on meat. As long as that is unprovable, the argument for it is not credible. In addition, the lack of imagination serves only to dig a deeper hole. Many people have survived for long periods of time on dried meat or salted meat. The potential for fishing, or for fishing out bloated carcasses from the ocean… I’m not arguing that God could not have used dramatic miracles, such as putting most animals into hibernation, or a dormant state, but what I am pointing out is that most of the objections even limit the natural potential, nevermind the miraculous. And personally I find that rather narrow-minded.
About salt water on the land: first, there are many many soils that are still salty today, that contain sodium concentrations in the clay somewhere down in the soil profile, within a meter of the surface. In most cases, this amount of sodium does not prevent crop growth. And chloride is often added today as a fertilizer ammendment in conjunction with potassium, and reduces plant disease, among other things So chloride is not a problem. Salt will not precipitate out of the water until it achieves a percentage about ten times as high as what the ocean presently contains. So it would precipitate out in areas where it was retained (locked-in) and then evaporated, which is what we have seen in various places, including salt flats, Dead Sea, Salton sea, etc. But in most places on the globe, the ocean would have simply washed off, not leaving significant salt behind. Plants would have been able to establish immediately.
Did God cover up the flood is an ancient question? Perhaps we should ask rather, did the flood cover up itself? Furthermore, the flood contention is that if there was a flood, we would find millions of fossils of all kinds of animals all over the world. And that is what we find; millions of fossils of all kinds all over the world, including seashells, jellyfish, vertebrate fish, in all kinds of locations all over the planet on dry land, including on mountain tops and in most sedimentary layers.
At the most, the question is not more difficult than the Cambrian explosion… if God used evolution, why did he cover up all the precambrian evolution in the fossil record?
Or… if God was perfectly rational and efficient… he wouldn’t have had to FLOOD the world to kill the wicked ones… he just would have killed the wicked ones…
Sure. If you were telling a tall tale, it would soon be evident. But, I just saw a video of a man bottle feeding a fawn and putting a brace on its foot. And two dogs (wolf derivatives) just peacefully rolling around, licking the fawn and letting it sniff them, looking for milk even. Lion cubs and cheetahs as pets we all know about. Trained elephants, not to mention baby elephants. I know about animals. Do you? But that aside, if God tamed the natures of these particular passengers on the ark, does that mean that everything had to be miraculous? And if everything was miraculous, what does that mean? That you couldn’t believe it? I’m not sure where you are going with your line of thought. None of your arguments really line up consistently.
Mt Everest… who says it was what it is today? Even evolutionists would not make that argument, so why make it here then? I never said it would have washed off with no effect, just that unless it evaporated in place, it would have taken the salt with it, and not left it behind. Obviously much erosion would have taken place, but that is the opposite of salt deposition. Remember that freshwater lakes empty and replenish… they are usually part of river systems. The few that are dead ends certainly do accumulate salt, as I mentioned, for Dead Sea, Salton Sea, and then also Manitou lake, and there are several others in various continents. They have higher salt content than the ocean. All freshwater lakes are not like distilled water, and all have some level of salts in them, depending on how stagnant and on how large the river or stream they are fed by.
If the ocean water was relatively fresh before the flood, and during the flood the saltiness increased due to underground aquifers contributing salt, and then during the flood recession, more salt was added due to erosion, then the ocean still would not have been as salty as today, since it would have been more dilute and at least 4500 years less salty than today. So freshwater lakes would certainly have been less salty than today, and then become even less salty simply due to the stream dilution effect. In addition, many northern lakes derived from ice melt, perhaps after the flood waters were gone. I don’t mind you making these comments, but you really must think them through.
Certainly water would have gone down several feet, likely much further than a mere few feet, since rain alone can cause that. But I don’t know what your point is on that. Who says it wouldn’t?
When the flood receeded, it took some time before everyone left the ark, right? Were they not waiting for the ground to dry up, for the boat to land? The ark lands on the seventh month, the mountain tops visible in the tenth month (three months for that amount of water to disappear… well it is a lot of water). Then about a month later, a bird comes back with a leaf. Another month and they see the dry land. Finally, after two more months, they leave the ark. This is three months after the bird comes back with a leaf. Are you saying this time is not recorded? Or are you saying they are two weeks short of being able to find green grass and maybe some carrots, and this puts them in big trouble? What exactly am I adding, compared to what you are adding or changing?
You are also entirely wrong about the cambrian explosion. Of course there are microbes etc pre cambrian, but that is not the point. The animals we would expect to find as transitional or precursors are not found. Maybe a very few, but not in the numbers or quantity, and not in the gradation or slow emergence that the theory predicts. That’s why it is called “an explosion”. That has not changed, although all kinds of spurious adhoc arguments are made to explain it. The point is not that soft-bodied creatures leave fewer traces, but that precursors to the Cambrian, which are plentiful, multitudinous and clear… the precursors are not found.
The questions about where are the large mammals, is a good one, although there are plenty of small mammals found with the dinosaurs. The questions about human fossils is a legitimate one, because even though there are plausible explanations (better explanations than those trying to explain the cambrian explosion), yet it does seem strange that none are in the same layers.
Keep in mind, that while I tend to defend a 6000 yr earth, mainly because so few others are doing it, this is not my main point. My main point is that evolution is not right merely because 6000 yrs seems untenable. So even if you were to prove beyond a doubt that 6000 years was not viable, you would not have answered the objections to evolution itself.
Many of the defenders of evolution concentrate on the impossibilty of the flood, Yet I have found their objections inadequate. That reduces the credibility of the defense of evolution. If you are going to talk about the flood, don’t use inappropriate arguments, because you are simply convincing me that evolution is likely wrong, if that is the type of reasoning used to substantiate it.
You know, it doesn’t exactly show this. The prediction almost always comes after the fact, not before. The assumption that dinosaurs died out 65 my ago, is not the result of a prediction, but the result of a lack of fossils after that strata. The prediction that the coelecanth was extinct was based on the same observation, even though coelacanth is still alive. It is entirely possible that some dinosaurs were alive for another twenty or forty million years, and left no fossils. We know it is possible, because we have seen the evidence for other species.
I lean more and more towards the YEC, mostly because of the inadequate answers I get on biologos.
The same argument that goes toward the flood being local also goes toward the animals on the ark being local. Eretz in Hebrew means land. The land flooded, not the world. Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the LAND. If I were a fieldmouse, and it had been raining for a week, in the desert, and I saw a three story boat sitting on the other side of my field, I would hustle my fuzzy butt onto that boat. Animals naturally seek high ground in a flood. This is the 2 by 2 described in Genesis 7.
Not only was the flood local, but the Garden of Eden was local. It was a garden. . . a locality, not the whole of creation. Creation was going on, directed by God, outside of Eden long before God created the garden, and specially created the animals in the garden, and formed Adam from the dust of the earth. The dinosaurs had long since died off or evolved into birds, before the creation of Eden. Eden is literally an example of the scientific method, used by God, to prove a hypothesis. The hypothesis proven by God to us, with Eden, is that mankind (us) choose to know the difference between good and evil, and therefore we choose to be culpable for our actions. I go into this in way more depth in my post Biblically Inerrant Theistic Evolution.
So, “science” is not at odds with the Bible, because the bible in Genesis 1 describes the evolutionary sequence which God directed. Then in Genesis 2, the Bible describes the scientific method used by God to answer the “Problem of Pain”. The flood and the ark were not a global event requiring a whole revisionist geology to explain, they were a local event that lasted for a year. All of the other miracles in the bible are events in history of which there is no physical evidence, and are therefore impossible to test or disprove.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it supposes that negating the story is not adding to it. Saying that the wolf would finish off the lamb in this case, is certainly adding to the story, and changing the sense of the story. There is no indication that animals died on the ark, or that they were starving, or that predators were big, or that Noah had no sleep because of all the work. When you add those things in, then that seems like a bigger problem than what you are accusing plain readers of. Clearly the animals came into the ark, and clearly they left again. This is not reading in anything. This is plain. How that happened might be debatable, but it is the starting point. So obviously the wolf did not kill the lamb. Why not? speculate the wolf was too small, or caged up, or had enough fish and dead carcasses to eat, or wasn’t hungry, but none of these things are “reading in”; they are merely potential and reasonable explanations. The story does not need to be rescued.
I don’t know. I do not have the expertise to say for certain whether the flood model would explain every lake. But in general, evolution and long age cannot explain the level of salt in the ocean. And the flood model gets closer to explaining these levels.
The netherlands reclaimed land from the ocean in several places, where the land was under ocean water not just for a year, but for thousands of years. Yet they are growing crops there now. Yes sodium and other salts does impact plant growth, but it is oversimplification to say that it would take four months or more to reclaim. Saline and sodic soils take much more than four months to reclaim, through complicated processes. If salts are more than a metre below the surface, then many crops can grow in the rooting zone above this, relatively unhindered. Salt at the surface is a bigger problem, because it inhibits germination of seeds.
In fact, on the dry land, only about 10 or 15% of the surface is arable land today. Partly due to ice, rock, mountains, canyons. So if a global flood created the effect you are saying, then the evidence is there, where 85% of the surface was rendered unarable. However, there were enough locations where sediment was left behind, that even with only 15% of the land, enough is there to produce crops for 9 billion people. In my region, there are places where nearly 800 feet of clay, mixed with a few layers of sandstone, were deposited. Removal of 90% of this would still leave a soil that could grow plants, although fertility would be low. Many trees in the mountains are growing virtually on bare rock and gravel. Do you now agree this is a non-issue?
You are worried about the leaf the bird brought back, or the distance it flew to get it. I have poplar shoots that grow two to three feet tall in my lawns every year, and if the large trees are cut down, they can grow four feet tall from the roots, in less than three months. You are worried about the carnivores, who probably had more food than they could ever eat, lying around in the form of bloated and decaying carcasses left behind by the receeding water. It’s not a problem, if you really think about it. There is no need to rescue the story.
And in fact, as an agrologist, I am probably better on plants and animals than I am on C14. But common sense also plays a big role.
This entire line of reasoning is folly … when God has the ability to execute the wicked without flooding the earth and all the plants and animals that have nothing to do with wickedness.
The Destroyer could travel through all of Egypt and pick out the First Born! That’s a pretty good trick, aye? And no plants were harmed at all! John, the story of the Flood is obviously a figurative parable … No great god would exercise such a privilege … it is the mark of a primitive Deity - - the ones the Sumerians believed ruled the Cosmos…
When you say that a local flood does not work, scripturally, what passages of scripture are you referring to specifically? I bet if we look at them we will find that a local flood does indeed work scripturally. It’s not “compromise” if it’s scriptural, and the local flood is scriptural.