Noah's Ark, I mean really??????

[Tim TP]

I would sooner think Joshua 10:12-13 is literal than the Gen. Flood. All that would need to happen is for time to slow around the earth relative to everything else. A global flood would take a whole lot of water.

That's another "God has faked the sky".

You said .... A global flood would take a whole lot of water.

Earlier I pointed out that 72% of the world is under water right now
Much of the remaining 28% is only a few feet above sea level
So , other than the mountain ranges it would take very little to cover the earth

Most likely the mountains were pushed up as the flood receded
That would explain the same fossils on Everest and Baja Ca.

That would not at all explain the depostis which can only be formed on the bottom of an ocean or sea over many hundreds of millions of years being crushed up to form the Hymilayas. Or most other mountain ranges.

 

[Dodo_David]

I would sooner think Joshua 10:12-13 is literal than the Gen. Flood. All that would need to happen is for time to slow around the earth relative to everything else. A global flood would take a whole lot of water.

Uh, time cannot slow down or speed up because it is abstract. Time is a metric, a measurement.

 

[Tim TP]

Uh, time cannot slow down or speed up because it is abstract. Time is a metric, a measurement.

Experienced time is, according to the theory of special relitivity, experienced at differing rates but you would be able to tell if you were traveling faster than the universe around you or had been. It will not fit as a possible excuse to take Genisis at all literally.

 

[Dodo_David]

Tim TP:

This site's Statement of Faith describes what this site considers to be the essentials of the Christian faith.
Believing that a global flood literally took place is not one of those essentials.

Plenty of Christians accept the spiritual lesson of the Genesis flood story without insisting that the flood was literally a global flood.

The Gospel message isn't about the natural history of planet Earth.
The Gospel is about God giving us the opportunity to have a life that is abundant and eternal.

 

[Tim TP]

Arnie Manitoba seems to disagree with you.

Also the Christians who stand in the town centre looking for converts all seem to want the world to be more simple than it is.

This is damaging to themselves and to society in general.

 

[Dodo_David]

Arnie Manitoba seems to disagree with you.

Also the Christians who stand in the town centre looking for converts all seem to want the world to be more simple than it is.

This is damaging to themselves and to society in general.

Tim TP,

I am not at all concerned if someone else here disagrees with what I have written about this subject.

I merely want you to know that this subject isn't something that is vital to the Christian faith.

 

[Arnie Manitoba]

'
Tim ....

You claim most of the earth was all under water at one time .... but you say it could not have been Noah's flood .... why not ??

You have no idea how the universe got here but you are positive it did not involve a creator ... how can you know that ??

 

[Tim TP]

You claim most of the earth was all under water at one time .... but you say it could not have been Noah's flood .... why not ??

Most of the world's present surface has been under water at some time or other.

Not at the same time, just at some time. The way the land masses of the earth float around the place leads them to bob up and down. The seas between them get crushed up into mountain ranges. These processes, over very long time periods, have produced the limestone mountains and coal deposits under our feet. There's lots more, the detail makes it unaviodable in every natural cliff face.

Noah's flood would be a sudden single event. The unmistakable marks on the earth would involve the massive reshaping of every river valley with a straight corrilation of flood channel size with the catchment area of the upstream land. Rivers have a ratio of river size to meander size. A massive flood will leave a vast channel with a tiny river meandering around at the bottom of it.

The world flood would have swept the land clean of soil and any lose material which would have been deposited as the flood waters left the land and entered the sea. This single layer would, like all flood deposits, have the biggest, heaviest, bits at the bottom of the layer as they droped out first and then a continious grading of material to the fine sand and clay at the top of this world wide single layer. No such layer exists.

You have no idea how the universe got here but you are positive it did not involve a creator ... how can you know that ??

If the universe was created by any sort of being which in any way thinks like us then he has spent 13.7 billion years since the start of this hobby of his with it left on a shelf and then, according to scripture, come down and given messages to some extremely dodgy individuals without clear evidence to back it all up, then sent his "son" down to do a part very similar to pre-existing myths (Perseus etc) for a bit then gone back to putting the toy back on the shelf. Nope, I don't think so.

 

[aspen]

so Tim, why does it matter? who cares if some people want to believe in a literal Flood? What is your point? do you really believe that proving there was not a literal worldwide Flood discounts the validity of the Bible or disproves the existence of God? and you wrote the word metaphor - like it was a bad thing........

 

[Dodo_David]

Plenty of Christians (and plenty of Jews) reject a strict literal interpretation of every minute detail of the flood story in Genesis, and yet they still believe in God's existence.

I will quote a statement made by biologist Dr. Kenneth R. Miller:

“My friends and colleagues in nonscientific disciplines will often claim science as their authority. Clearly they believe that scientific inquiry has ruled out the divine. Unfortunately for them, as I will argue, nothing of the sort is true. Their attitude towards religion and religious people are rooted not so much in science itself as in the humanist fabric of modern intellectual life.”1

Then there is this statement by atheist philosopher Keith Augustine:

“In utilizing methodological naturalism, science and history do not assume a priori that, as a matter of fact, supernatural causes don't really exist. There is no conceptual conflict between practicing science or history and believing in the supernatural.”2

It isn't Science that causes atheists to be atheists. It is something else.


Quote Sources

1 Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s god (Cliff Street Books: 1999), p. 19.

2 Keith Augustine, Naturalism (Infidels: 2009), http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/ .

 

[Quantrill]

[SIZE=16pt]Genesis Flood[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] Plenty of leaders of modern-day Western churches believe that every detail of every verse in Genesis is literally true. However, this belief is not universally accepted by Jewish and Christian theologians. The ancient Hebrews did not think the same way that modern-day Western people think, and the book of Genesis is of ancient Hebrew origin. So, modern-day theologians take into consideration the way that the ancient Hebrews interpreted Genesis. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] Regarding the proper way to interpret ancient Hebrew writings, Christian theologian William Barclay quotes Old Testament scholar Rev. C.J. Ball as saying the following:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]“The Rabbi embodies his lesson in a story, whether parable or allegory or seeming historical narrative; and the last thing he or his disciples would think of is to ask whether the selected persons, events and circumstances which so vividly suggest the doctrine are in themselves real or fictitious. The doctrine is everything; the mode of presentation has no independent value. To make the story the first consideration, and the doctrine it was intended to convey an afterthought as we, with our dry Western literalness, are predisposed to, is to reverse the Jewish order of thinking, and to do unconscious injustice to the authors of many edifying narratives of antiquity.”[1]#_ftn1[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] Barclay adds, “This is to say that Jewish teachers were more concerned with truth than with fact. They are not interested in the momentary historical events of any story; they are interested only in the eternal truth which the story is designed to illuminate and to convey.”[2][/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] Jewish theologian Gunther Plaut writes, “The contemporary reader familiar with the history and the nature of the text will have to remember that a literal translation of the Torah may lead to grave misconceptions. Even the ancient Jewish sages, who believed that the Torah was a divinely authored book, did not take the text literally.”[/SIZE][3]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] Jewish theologian Nahum Sarna writes, “The literalist approach serves to direct attention to those aspects of the narrative that reflect the time and place of its composition, while it tends to obscure the elements that are meaningful and enduring, thus destroying the biblical message and destroying its relevancy.”[4][/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] Indeed, modern-day Christian clergy don't insist on a strict literal interpretation of every Old Testament verse. For example, Joshua 10:12-13 states the following:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt]"At that time Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] The above verses say that the Sun stood still, reflecting the ancient belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth. We now know that the Earth revolves around the Sun. We understand that the above verses reflect how things appeared to Joshua, and yet we also understand that, if any celestial body stopped moving, then it was the Earth, not the Sun.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt] So, if a strict literal interpretation is not applied to a Bible verse, then the verse can still be authoritative and teach a spiritual truth. Although the Sun did not literally stand still in Joshua 10:12-13, that passage still tells us that God is in full control of events, and that God used his omnipotence to help the Israelites defeat the Amorites in combat. It didn't matter which celestial object (if any) actually stood still. What mattered is that the God of Israel was the one responsible for the miracle, and the God of Israel was glorified as a result.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt] Regarding the flood story in the book of Genesis, as German science reporter Werner Keller details in his book The Bible As History, plenty of archaeological evidence exists that ancient Mesopotamia was subjected to extensive flooding, with traces of such flooding reaching all the way to the city of Nineveh.[5][/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] In 1929, British archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley was leading an archaeological dig at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, when Woolley and his workers unexpectedly discovered evidence that the region around Ur had been subjected to a massive flood. Keller writes, “According to Woolley the disaster engulfed an area north-west of the Persian Gulf amounting to 400 miles long and 100 miles wide, looking at the map we should call it today “a local occurrence” – for the inhabitants of the river plains it was however in those days their whole world.”[6][/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt] As seen in Joshua 10:12-13, a story in the Old Testament can contain a detail that is not scientifically accurate because of the perspective of the story-teller, and, yet, the story can still be about an event that actually occurred. Thus, the flood story in Genesis could be about a flood that actually happened even if the perspective of the story-teller was not scientifically accurate. As explained by previously-cited theologians, according to the way that the ancient Hebrews thought, every little detail of a story did not have to be literally true in order for the spiritual lesson of the story to be true.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt] Today, plenty of Christians do not accept as being literally true the description in Joshua:12-13 of the Sun standing still. Likewise, plenty of Christians do not accept as being literally true the description in Genesis of the entire Earth being covered by a single flood, because empirical data does not give evidence of a global flood.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=16pt] What all Christians do accept as being literally true are the death, burial and resurrection of Christ Jesus, historical events that took place within a period of three days. Nothing in science does away with those events.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=16pt] So, one does not have to believe that the entire Earth was literally covered by a flood in order for one to accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=10pt][1][/SIZE] William Barclay, The Mind of Christ (Harper & Row: 1961), p. 79.


[SIZE=10pt][2][/SIZE] Ibid.


[SIZE=10pt][3][/SIZE] Gunther Plaut, Torah Commentary (Union of American Hebrew Congregations: 1981), p. xx.


[SIZE=10pt][4][/SIZE] Nahum Sarna, Understanding Genesis (Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America: 1966), p. 66.


[SIZE=10pt][5][/SIZE] Werner Keller, The Bible As History (Barnes & Noble Books: 1995), p. 49.


[SIZE=10pt][6]#_ftnref6 Ibid., p. 48.[/SIZE]

Are you saying you don't believe in the flood because science doesn't agree? Are you saying you believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ because science cant' disprove it?

Why believe in the Resurrection of Christ and not the flood?

Quantrill

 

[Dodo_David]

Are you saying you don't believe in the flood because science doesn't agree? Are you saying you believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ because science cant' disprove it?

Why believe in the Resurrection of Christ and not the flood?

Quantrill

Uh, no.

Sociologist Dr. Mark A. Foster writes the following:

“Like virtually all scientists (physical, biological, or social), I am a methodological naturalist. However, I am not an atheist (an ontological naturalist). As a methodological naturalist, I reject that science can be used to demonstrate the existence of God. I do not reject that the existence of God can be demonstrated through other means.”*

There is plenty of historical evidence for the resurrection of Messiah Jesus.

That is what Josh McDowell discovered when he tried to disprove the resurrection.

[*Quote Source: Mark A. Foster, “The Captain’s Personal bLog”, My Looking-Glass Selves (Sociosphere: 2001), http://editorials.sociosphere.com/arc20020301.html .]

 

[Quantrill]

Uh, no.

Sociologist Dr. Mark A. Foster writes the following:

“Like virtually all scientists (physical, biological, or social), I am a methodological naturalist. However, I am not an atheist (an ontological naturalist). As a methodological naturalist, I reject that science can be used to demonstrate the existence of God. I do not reject that the existence of God can be demonstrated through other means.”*

There is plenty of historical evidence for the resurrection of Messiah Jesus.

That is what Josh McDowell discovered when he tried to disprove the resurrection.

[*Quote Source: Mark A. Foster, “The Captain’s Personal bLog”, My Looking-Glass Selves (Sociosphere: 2001), http://editorials.sociosphere.com/arc20020301.html .]

uh, no, what?

You haven't answered anything.

Why believe in Christ's resurrection, which involves the power of God, and deny the flood, which involves the power of God also?

Did you come to Christ by faith, or by reason? Did someone prove Christ death and resurrection to you first?

Quantrill

 

[Tim TP]

Here's my view;

There's those Christians who do the religion light thing of only applying the bits they want to their life and thinking. This has only some negitive effects on their abilities to think and understand the world, and what is, and what is not, true.

Then there's the more hard core who have a greater need to block out the complexity of the real world. They need the answers to every questio to be in one place for all time. They have never actually read the Bible from cover to cover. They will avoid doing this as it will show them that it's not up to the job. This thinking-avoiding mindset is the most noisy in religious culture. This really trashes the ability to think straight.

 

[Quantrill]

Here's my view;

There's those Christians who do the religion light thing of only applying the bits they want to their life and thinking. This has only some negitive effects on their abilities to think and understand the world, and what is, and what is not, true.

Then there's the more hard core who have a greater need to block out the complexity of the real world. They need the answers to every questio to be in one place for all time. They have never actually read the Bible from cover to cover. They will avoid doing this as it will show them that it's not up to the job. This thinking-avoiding mindset is the most noisy in religious culture. This really trashes the ability to think straight.

I have no problem with the real world. Its full of sin and liars and the misinformed and is opposed to all that is God. Pretty simple really.

I have read the Bible many times and study it. It is very much all that God intended His Word to be. It supplies all I need.

As to the flood, it occurred just like God said in the Bible. Total. Above every mountain.

You say it was impossible....so what? God. You say you have no explaination or I have no explaination,...so what? God. You say science can disprove it...so what? Science doesn't have all knowledge. It is still changing its mind as it grows in knowledge. God is omnipotent. I will believe His Word over your unbelief and sciences unbelief anyday.

Quantrill

 

[Dodo_David]

Did you come to Christ by faith, or by reason? Did someone prove Christ death and resurrection to you first?

In John 6:44 (ESV), the LORD Jesus says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day."

I became a Christian because God the Father drew me to Messiah Jesus.

 

[Quantrill]

In John 6:44 (ESV), the LORD Jesus says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day."

I became a Christian because God the Father drew me to Messiah Jesus.

Well pardon me, but that doesn't have anything to do with what we are talking about. Reason as opposed to faith. You gave sufficient information to lead one to believe you only accept the resurrection of Christ because it can be proven. Which means it is not by faith. Thus the flood as told in the Bible, you say, cannot be proven by science, thus you deny the Biblical record.

So, don't try and confuse the issue.

Quantrill

 

[aspen]

Reason and faith are not opposites

 

[Dodo_David]

Reason and faith are not opposites

Thank you, Aspen. I was going to say that, but you beat me to it.

Anyway, I answered Quantrill's question. Apparently, he didn't expect the existence of a third way to answer, a biblical one at that. ^_^

 

[Quantrill]

Reason and faith are not opposites

The 'reason' that is being discussed here is opposite of 'faith'.

The Christian can 'reason' after he has come to the truth and knowledge of Christ by faith. That reason is on a spiritual plane of 'knowing' due to the revelation of God through the Bible and His Spirit.

The world's 'reason' is based upon the scientific method of experiment and proofs. If such 'proofs' are not available, then they don't believe it. And that is exactly what Dodo-David is saying with the flood. The scientific methods of proofs doesn't support it. So he opts not to believe it as it is recorded.

Quantrill

Thank you, Aspen. I was going to say that, but you beat me to it.

Anyway, I answered Quantrill's question. Apparently, he didn't expect the existence of a third way to answer, a biblical one at that. ^_^

No, you didn't answer the question. Just because you used the Bible doesn't mean you answered the question. Did you come to Christ by faith? Or did you come to Christ by reason?

And, why believe God can raise Christ from the dead but not flood the whole earth? Which He says He did.

Quantrill