Noah's flood discussion with a YEC

[Wertbag]

I’ve been having a discussion with a YEC online about Noah’s flood.  Here in New Zealand we have plenty of Christians but the vast majority appear to be OEC, I've therefore found it quite interesting to see someone quoting Ken Ham with complete conviction.  Equally amazing was that the discussion has managed to stay civil, which for a comment section is a rare thing indeed.

The effort to justify his beliefs is quite impressive.  Subjects touched on:

• Only 10,000 super animals on the Ark which then underwent mega evolution to become the millions of species we now see.

• All plant life survived either via floating seeds or magic.

• All animals came to the Ark then returned to their homes plus all of their diets and unique environmental needs are covered by a blanket “magic” answer

• The world was flat so that the amount of water needed was small, most mountains grew at huge rates during the flood

• Noah was 600 when he built the boat and 900 when he died but that is perfectly fine because he was genetically superior

• Noah had all human genes, so was white, black, Hispanic and Asian, while having blonde, brown, black and red hair.  His children could therefore be individual races unlike their father.

• All fields of science are wrong, all geology is wrong, all dating methods are wrong, basically because they need to be.

• All of human history occurred after the flood (around 2500BC), the people were one tribe until the tower of babel when they spread around the world creating massive empires where ever they went.  The speed of human population growth and the diverse locations appears to be magic to fit in the millions of people coming from 8 within the limited timeframe available.

• 8 people using inbreeding to form the whole world population (and the 2 of each animal inbreeding to become the billions we see today) was all fine because God didn’t mind and with super genetic code they didn’t suffer infertility that we would expect.

• Noah didn’t use workers, he just made the boat with his family in 120 years.  He wasn’t mentioned as rich so probably cut down the 10,000 trees required himself, dragged them back, cut them to size and built the boat all with bronze age tools.

   

I can understand some of the more mundane ideas being easy to accept to make this view fit what you believe, but there is so much denial required to make the majority fit.  I also forwarded a link to a Christian website saying a global flood was wrong, the bible should not fight science.  The article was interesting in that it said the word used in the original text was “eret” which could be translated either to land or world, but more commonly land.  A local flood is therefore completely compatible and there should be no need to force all this other junk on top to make it work.

The thing I struggle with is under-estimating the crazy.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Under-estimating the crazy. Some folks are so motivated to have it all be true that any mental gymnastics they have to do suddenly to them become obvious truth. Kinda like the professor in "A Beautiful Mind".

I know a guy like that, and some of his reasoning is so contorted, but to him so clear. This is a guy who cannot not believe, so he has to make reality fit a silly old myth.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

I'm not an expert in the field of genetics; but it is a discipline I have studied in some depth.  There is simply no way the Noah could have carried all human genes in his personal genome.  

 

First of all, there isn't a single "race" gene.  "Race", where genetics is concerned is a combination of several distinct and separate alleles, which produce distinct phenotypic traits--skin color, eye shape, straight hair.  No single gene or allele controls all of these traits.

 

Secondly, a simple 4 quadrant chi square easily refutes the notion that Noah carried the genes for more than two different eye colors, which means that the multiplicity of eye colors we observe in humans simply could not have come from one individual (or two individuals, for that matter, owing to the nature of dominant vs. recessive expression).  Noah, if he was indeed human, would have only carried two alleles for eye color expression.  They may have both been dominant; they may have both been recessive; or there may have been one dominant and one recessive.  But the one thing that is NOT possible is for either allele to express more than one eye color.  

 

In the case of a dominant/recessive combination, one allele may code for brown, and the other for blue.  This would lead to expression of brown (dominant) over blue (recessive) in Noah himself, while leaving open the possibility of Noah's sons expressing blue (especially if Noah's wife also carried the blue allele).  But a single, individual allele coding for expression of both colors is simply not observed in nature.  Thus, even if Noah had an allelic combination that allowed for the expression of two eye colors, the multiplicity of eye colors we see still cannot be accounted for.

 

We could even assume that Noah's wife carried heterozygous alleles that coded for both green and grey eyes; but the nature of dominance over recessive, through successive generations,  would lead us to an entire population of people with either brown or green eyes.  And since green is recessive to brown, eventually there would only be brown eyed people.  There would certainly be no blue eyed boys in this world.

 

Again, I'm no expert; and some of what I've said may be wrong.  But a Google search of Mendelian genetics would certainly not hurt anybody interested in the subject of inheritance or genetic expression.

[nutrichuckles93]

I was dragged by my small group to see "Is Genesis History?" by my small group back in February, and the reasonings were the same as the OP's post.

 

Making history and evolution fit the Babble because the Babble is truth, rather than looking at history and evolution to see if the Babble could be true. Working backwards from the answer to convince themselves.

 

It's honestly kind of scary that so many intelligent sounding men can believe such drivel. And that they are willing to stretch so far for it.

[L.B.]

It's a magic fucking boat.

 

Pandas. How did the giant pandas get to Palestine?

 

Kangaroos - same question.

 

Sheesh. What amazes me is not the mental gymnastics per se - we have all tried hard to justify wrong ideas at one time or another.

 

It's the stupid, blind belief in things that can EASILY be refuted; that's what stumps me.

 

I can understand complex reasoning and wild theories and stream-of-consciousness contemplations - I am a Deadhead, after all.

it's just that you might need complex ideas to explain complex things, but kangaroos swimming or flying or being magically transported to the Middle East - it's too simply impossible for there to be ANY explanation that would make sense.

[Jds22]

I live in a small town in the midwest and am surrounded by people that believe like that.

 

One thing I never heard until recently was a YEC's answer to early human fossils and why their skulls look so different from ours.

He said they are the human just like us but since people used to live to be 600-900 years old the skulls became misshapen during their long life spans.

 

He 100% believes this to be true.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

2 hours ago, Jds22 said:

I live in a small town in the midwest and am surrounded by people that believe like that.

 

One thing I never heard until recently was a YEC's answer to early human fossils and why their skulls look so different from ours.

He said they are the human just like us but since people used to live to be 600-900 years old the skulls became misshapen during their long life spans.

 

He 100% believes this to be true.

I heard a purported science teacher once explain to her class that all of the "so-called fossil skulls" were actually either deformed human skulls or deformed monkey skulls.  This, she claimed, was proven by the fact that there have never been any "regular" human skulls found from the same time period.  

[Jds22]

^^^^

Makes perfect sense.

 

[disillusioned]

My favourite retort to YECs regarding the flood has to do with beetles. Are we really to believe that we went from a single beetle pair to over 350000 known species (with many more unknown) in just 4000-6000 years? Seems a bit much, no?

 

I just don't understand how they think that they can have it both ways. They want evolution to be wrong, but also to work really, really, really well.

[Lucy]

I was taught Ken Ham's theories in my school books as the correct factual model. The animals all came to the boat via a migration instinct mechanism that god put in animals but not humans. Also, those migrating animals didn't get on the Ark. They had babies and those healthy young babies boarded the ark, after weening age of course. That way there was more space to store many types of animals, including young dinosaurs. (However, wouldn't it have been better if god only had Noah store the eggs of egg laying animals on the Ark? Less feeding and poop shoveling that way... The Bible doesn't say anything about storing eggs, so baby dinosaurs it is.) After the flood, the earth was still in a "Pangaea" form which split apart after the "migration instinct" spread the animals back out. Blah, blah, blah. The mainstream evolutionary model was also taught but always accompanied with thorough debunking. The problem is if you grow up in that worldview, your cognitive biases will enforce it. It's normal. Education doesn't really seem to help it. Less intellectually curious people will just believe it without bothering to question it. And the intellectually minded develop more intricate nuances to support the model.  I feel the mind would prefer to continue being duped rather than admit to itself that it has fallen into fantastically incorrect worldview because it would cause you to re-evaluate other core beliefs about reality. However one who fully believes the young earth model would also say the same about those who believe in old earth model.

 

I actually went to Ark Encounter last month. I felt nostalgia for my childhood teachings. Although I was more interested in my family's reactions. Mom was happy someone is finally making an accurate museum that tells the truth. Step-dad just looked at everything and asked me later if those people really believed it. He actually thought it was an intentional "monument to a myth" as if the people running it didn't really believe it. Several people were giving their own random beliefs, like, "The real Ark is currently in Morocco." One man had a bunch of children and was excitedly using it as a field trip for class study, asking many Bible quiz questions to children eagerly answering. The Great Indoctrination continues on.