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Goodbye Jesus

Why The Bible Claims Are Bs - Creation Vs. Evolution


LivingLife

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I thought I would start a thread here to repeat my arguments with the YEC folk and bible literalists

 

Most are Biblical literalists, though, so try to fit in science with the Bible.

And this is where they shoot themselves in the foot.

 

Surely one should realise, hey folk from all over the world believe evolution is factual and barring a few exceptions, it seems to only be Americans that holds to this so tightly.

 

When we look at the evidence of the natural world exempt from evolution, we see a plethora of evidence for a very very old earth. That should be your first clue. The bible clearly has dates of creation and other stuff by the mere fact there a genealogies mentioned, you know the begats, add up the years etc and you get an approximate time this was supposed to happen. After all the traditional BC and AD dating ran for a long while before it changed to a religious neutral BCE and CE (before current era and current era)

 

Now if the earth is older as various scientific proofs present, you must ask is there a global conspiracy or is this plausible. If you think all the scientists are in on some mass deception, ask yourself why would they need to lie? Just to disprove the bible? That is not what is driving science. Science is the tool whereby we seek real answers that the bible fails to mention and whatever the discipline is, the methods to arrive at conclusions are all pretty much the same, it must be falsifiable. That does not mean open to interpretation.

 

If you can accept that there is no global conspiracy, then we must examine certain biblical claims like the flood. There are many proofs I have posted numerous times and no one yet has refuted it in any way other than a simple dismissal. A global food was impossible as none of the proofs bear witness to such an event. Bear in mind, according to scripture, this was only ~4500 years ago.

 

What are these proofs?

  • Antarctic Ice cores dating between 400k and 750k (no flood as there would only be 4500 years of data)
  • Very old trees older than 4500 years (tree rings, one for each year) Even evergreens make one ring a year
  • Lake Varves (sediment layers spanning thousands if not millions of years - no evidence of a flood.
  • River deltas (None of these deltas would have formed to their current size in a mere 4500 years) The geology of these have no traces of any global flood
  • Impact craters all over the world

How would 5 different pieces of evidence be tampered with. The evidence is irrefutable. There are plenty more like canyons, cave formations and the like and ALL of these extend way past biblical time lines.

 

So was the flood just local?

 

The flood is the key issue and remember the lineage of Jesus traces all the way back to Adam (allegedly)

 

Now look at the biological diversity in both the plant and animal kingdoms. For all this to have been replenished in 4500 years, we are talking evolution on a scale not even scientists claim.

 

The scientific evidence just is not there.

 

Now there has to be another answer. This is where evolution steps in. Not going to go there right now.

 

What we find with sites like AiG and the creation institute, they introduce any evidence that may support a YEC world view. They feebly attempt to misguide people by actually misquoting and quote mining scientific journals as in reality; they have no evidence outside of blind belief in the bible.

 

Before DNA was discovered, the key was a "missing link" or a transitional fossil as this palaeontology stuff was digging up and dating fossils that built on the Darwinian theory of evolution. Dinosaurs came back to skeletal life and yet these YEC folk suggest humans co-existed.

 

All this stuff we have discovered in the last 150-200 years of enlightenment raises many questions the bible has absolutely no answer for.

 

Now folk say we do not know what initiated all this but we have some pretty good ideas and none of them seem to need a Jewish god. We probably will never know but that is far more honest than assuming some god did it.

 

The other areas of cosmology show us the cosmos is far older than 6000 years. We have dated rocks and found 4.5Bn years age for the earth and an estimate or 13.5Bn for the cosmos

 

Now if this time frame is accepted as more plausible, you can get into the nitty gritties of evolution.

 

Back to DNA. Wow was that a let down from the YEC folk. DNA/RNA mapping shows common ancestry for all living things but we do not have a complete assembled puzzle yet. We do know what we have and predict what we need to find and thus we keep adding pieces to this incomplete puzzle.

 

What did the creationists do?

 

They simply stated this DNA is too complex and this is an indicator of intelligent design and he was guiding evolution all along. Really there is no god particle in any of this and only folk who are floored by complexity want to assign god to the bits of the puzzle we do not yet know. That is about as far as my evolutionary knowledge goes, I am no expert but I do know a hell of a lot more than pseudo doctor Kent Hovind and the cronies that work for him.

 

Is this enough reason to become agnostic?

 

Probably not. Many have managed to accept what science is presenting and still maintain belief.

 

If religion was not so dogmatic, it probably would have morphed into something more akin to science. Theistic evolution it is not; but it is at least a start.

 

Now back to the bible.

 

If the flood never happened, then Noah is likely a myth, and so too is Adam and Eve.

 

We find that there are host of other creation myths that this A&E story was borrowed from. This comes from assimilation between different cultures when their stories were exchanged and merged.

 

W/o Adam, the whole basis for redemption now is rendered moot.

 

So did Jesus exist?

 

Now you keep digging down the rabbit hole and eventually you discover that much of his legend is also made up and a conglomeration of earlier myths. He becomes just one more man made god.

 

Make no mistake, the Roman Empire extended widely and the influence of the new state religion was simply worked politically with the Royalty of the day and as such this religion spread by decree of the king. Many religions were absorbed, festivals merged and you have what you have today Christianity, most of which follow Pauline doctrines rather than the Jesus stuff.

 

I predict that in the next 100 years the Vatican will be simple a tourist attraction of a mind set passed just as we look at ancient monuments like Stonehenge.

 

One need only look at how the church refused to accept the heliocentric solar model from Galileo and that only in 1992 did the church apologise. He was right.

 

As time marches on, we just keep finding more and more leaving mankind to either accept this as more reliable than the bible or not.

 

In this age of technology, you can no longer hide the truth from the next generation. Without non questioning people, the church knows it's days are numbered.

 

Huzzah I say.

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It's cool. Christians have just kicked the can down the road and said, "Well, we don't know how the Universe came into existence."

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Thank you for this straight-forward explanation, LL!

 

On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that? Let alone the science of it, which I am still very much learning about. it really just hit me with more force than ever before, just how ludicrous the whole idea was.

 

And if the whole earth flooded... How exactly was that physically possible? Where did all the water come from? It just doesn't seem possible, let alone likely.

 

What is your take on that boat that the YEC's are always talking about, that they found up on some mountain somewhere? What do you make of that?

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Read Genesis 1

 

We shall ignore the sequence of the sun and plants creation order and the second creation account. Some of the various thoughts of the age of the earth and when this happened.

The earliest post-exilic Jewish chronicle preserved in the
language, the
, compiled by
in 160 AD, dates the creation of the world to 3751 BC while the later
to 4339 BC.
The
has traditionally since the 4th century AD by
dated the creation to 3761 BC.

 

 

Young Earth creationists have claimed that this view has its earliest roots in ancient Judaism, citing, for example, the commentary on
by
(c. 1089–1164).
Shai Cherry of
notes that modern Jewish theologians have generally rejected such literal interpretations of the written text, and that even Jewish commentators who oppose some aspects of
thought generally accept scientific evidence that the Earth is much older.

 

The
has traditionally been calculated to
around 5500 BC, while the
around 4300 BC

Some of the known geological occurrences globally that refute this are;

 

Victoria Waterfall gorges dated approx 100,000 years

 

Over at least 100,000 years, the falls have been receding upstream through the
, eroding the sandstone-filled cracks to form the gorges.

th_Falls1.jpg

 

The Cango Caves

 

The
Cango Caves
are located in
at the foothills of the
range near the town of
in the
Province of
.

 

Precambrian (It spans from the formation of
around 4600
(million years) ago to the beginning of the
Period, about 542 Ma)

220px-Cango_Caves_Oudtshoorn_1.jpg

(
)

 

Antarctic Ice Cores dated approx 780,000 years old

 

The new
Antarctic ice core has revealed that between 400,000 and 780,000 years ago, interglacials occupied a considerably larger proportion of each glacial/interglacial cycle, but were not as warm as subsequent interglacials.

antarctic620_1769142b-550x344.jpg

 

Oldest Lake Varves

 

A
varve
is an annual layer of
or
.

 

The word 'varve' is derived from the
word
varv
whose meanings and connotations include 'revolution', 'in layers', and 'circle'. The term first appeared as
Hvarfig lera
(varved clay) on the first map produced by the Geological Survey of
in 1862. Initially, varve was used to describe the separate components of annual layers in
, but at the 1910 Geological Congress, the Swedish geologist
(1858-1943) proposed a new formal definition where varve described the whole of any annual sedimentary layer.

300px-Varve1.gif

The Green River formation in eastern Utah is home to an estimated
twenty million years worth
of sedimentary layers. (
)

 

This demands a verdict.

 

Obviously, four distinctly different studies in SCIENCE cannot be colluding in some global conspiracy to fool creationists nor are their methods of calculation the same.

 

Thus the creation story and the biblical timeline of the age of the earth ARE MYTHS.

 

Something else happened to form the earth billions of years ago.

 

You can choose to ignore this which is wilful ignorance OR accept the bible DOES NOT explain the origins of the earth.

 

How do theists get around this conundrum?

 

The Flood.

 

The flood never happened as reported and we have debated that to death. In the examples above, something as cataclysmic as a global flood would be seen in them but we find, wait for it... NOTHING as reported. Furthermore, we know that no two pairs(kinds) of critters can repopulate an entire species and the time line for the biblical flood circa 2500BCE leaves just too little time to account for the known species identified and still being discovered.

 

This demands a verdict.

 

The global flood is a MYTH.

 

Exodus

 

It never happened.

 

We have three key components disputed, the age of the earth, the flood and the exodus. It is in the exodus event that the "laws of god" were decreed. If there are no archaeological traces of 2+ million folk wandering around the desert, plus the known requirement for 2 litres of water per human per day to survive dehydration, the exodus event never happened and ergo, the laws were NEVER given at Mt Sinai.

 

These are 3 key issues referred to in the New testament.

 

Now to deal with contradictions to god's unchanging law.

 

The Jewish law decrees that a father should not do the dirty with a daughter in law, you can look that up for yourself. Yet we have this god descending and impregnating Mary to conceive Jesus. Of course you will argue that this is not the same thing but let us not forget the three aspects already refuted by physical evidence.

 

The father of creation need not have mated with his creation to make a point. After all, according to the creation story, he simply spoke everything into existence.

 

We are now in a situation that if the creation did not happen as reported, the aspect of original sin is moot, the repopulation of the globe post flood is meadow muffins, the laws were never really given any time as reported; then the whole Jesus story is just as fictitious as the rest of the bible.

 

This is a quote mine of the bible as we know it refuted by physical evidence and in the trend of YEC folk disputing evolution in like manner, please explain to us rational thinkers what is left to base a belief on creationism?

 

My conclusion and verdict is that the entire bible is an unreliable document and falls in the same category as ancient legends and myth, no different to the Greek, Roman and Norse gods. If you study these pagan gods, you will find many similarities for your Jesus and follows the then traditional concept of a demi god (the offspring between a god and a human)

 

What that really leaves you, is the Paulinist doctrines OR a religion based on selective cherry picking that has led to so many sects and divisions in the "Christian faith", each of whom are as real as the ancient religions aka man made.

 

Have I provided enough evidence to challenge the authenticity of your God belief?

 

If you say NO, then you are in fact admitting my assertion, you are simply making one up that suits your "needs" whatever may drive that need.

 

We are continually told that we cannot disprove God.

 

Well I think I have by examining the simple world around me and showing the core biblical claims regarding your "faith" are nonsense and NEVER happened.

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Thank you for this straight-forward explanation, LL!

 

On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that? Let alone the science of it, which I am still very much learning about. it really just hit me with more force than ever before, just how ludicrous the whole idea was.

There are many records pre-dating the biblical time line. The epic of Gilgamesh has clay tablets dating to about 9000BCE

And if the whole earth flooded... How exactly was that physically possible? Where did all the water come from? It just doesn't seem possible, let alone likely.

Magic...

What is your take on that boat that the YEC's are always talking about, that they found up on some mountain somewhere? What do you make of that?

We had one (now deceased) YEC that was on about this alleged ark on Mt. Ararat but is likely just a rock outcrop. The folk at Answers in Genesis (ex Aussie BTW) have oodles of misinformation. There is also a Aussie site that counters all these claims No Answers in Genesis and points out all the absurdity of their claims and quote mining of scientific journals.

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Thank you for this straight-forward explanation, LL!

 

On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that? Let alone the science of it, which I am still very much learning about. it really just hit me with more force than ever before, just how ludicrous the whole idea was.

There are many records pre-dating the biblical time line. The epic of Gilgamesh has clay tablets dating to about 9000BCE

And if the whole earth flooded... How exactly was that physically possible? Where did all the water come from? It just doesn't seem possible, let alone likely.

Magic...

What is your take on that boat that the YEC's are always talking about, that they found up on some mountain somewhere? What do you make of that?

We had one (now deceased) YEC that was on about this alleged ark on Mt. Ararat but is likely just a rock outcrop. The folk at Answers in Genesis (ex Aussie BTW) have oodles of misinformation. There is also a Aussie site that counters all these claims No Answers in Genesis and points out all the absurdity of their claims and quote mining of scientific journals.

 

Oh yes, I am fully aware of Answers in Genesis, and their unfortunate association with my own country! I saw plenty of their publications growing up, and unfortunately believed for far too long that dinosaurs walked beside humans!

 

I always thought it was interesting that the "boat" found on Mt. Ararat wasn't properly examined- I think the excuse they give is preserving it or some bullshit.

 

And I was fairly sure last night, though I could think of any examples off the top of my head, that human history pre-dated YEC idea of the age of the earth- just had a vague recollection from Year 8 Ancient History. Not that I paid too much attention back then, or connected any dots between the fallacies of YEC and historical records! I wish I had!

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The arguments against I have made are irrefutable. I take my criticism to derive a logical conclusion so you will often see I use; if that did not happen, then neither did this. Each apologetic can be refuted with simple logic.

 

I will do exodus next.

 

The one thing the YEC folk latch onto as far as the Antarctic Ice cores go, the bring up some tale of WWII planes that landed on a glacier in Greenland and now are under 260 feet or 400 feet of snow/ice.(depends where they get their misinformation from) Firstly the precipitation in the Arctic is far higher than the Antarctic which is less than 2 inches per year. The ice cores there reveal histories spanning 400-780 thousand years.

 

Ice floats

 

So if there was a fludd, there would only be 4500 years of data.

 

The latest trend is to take all flood myths and derive a false conclusion that because so many cultures report or have a flood story, then the Noah's fludd was real. Logic does not work that way as the fact we have all these myths/legends proves that Captain Noah never existed.

 

The other more recent one is a real evidence of something that caused a huge chunk of the Antarctic to slide off the continent and cause a rise in sea levels 11000 years ago. This increases the level of the sea (obviously) but did not submerge the entire land masses.

 

Latching onto any flood explanation is necessary as the jeebus lineage traces back through Noah all the way back to Adam. Any flood myth will this suffice to make their babble story stick. As we all know they simply make shit up as they go along and are not very smart doing it.

 

The other aspect of the ark is that no wooden ship that size would survive a storm let alone accommodate the known exiting species of ±100M and the millions that have gone extinct already. Australia and their strange animals is always a headache for YEC folk, I wonder sometimes if Americans are aware of Aus and their fauna and flora? Based on the arguments we see from them, it certainly appears they do not.

 

The backyard of the US is teaming with evidence too. We have trees pre-dating the flood, the grand canyon with oodles of evidence for an old earth but the selective points of inconvenience are simply ignored.

 

Just compare the similarities

 

Grand Canyon USA (click link for thumbnails)

 

250px-Grand_canyon_hermits_rest_2010.JPG

 

and

 

Blyde River Canyon SA (click link for thumbnails)

 

320px-Blyde_River_Canyon%2C_South_Africa_2.JPG

 

The US woos suggest that the GC was carved out by the ice receding in the last Ice age - seems plausible as the US is connected to the North pole.

 

However for South Africa, that does not work as the distance between the Antarctic and Africa is too big for an Ice bridge. Yet we see similar if not identical topography. I am sure the same holds true for Aus.

 

The only significant difference is that the GC in the US is closer to the West Coast and the BRC in SA is closer to the East coast and based on the rotation of the earth and water cycle patterns, ours is in the high rainfall region whereas the GC is semi arid. You need only look at a global topographical map and see the difference.

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Six million Jews at Mount Sinai? (click link for thumbnails)

 

This figure has been bandied about a few times by Jews and Christians alike suggesting the size of the myth of exodus. I call it a myth as the Egyptian records oddly make no mention of this and also no loss of a Pharaoh in the Red (or Reed) sea.

 

But let us look at the claims from a mathematical and scientific probability without invoking magic (just yet)

 

A "crowd" of 6M to put it in a 2D perspective is 2450 x 2450 people. Lets assume standing, each one takes up 1 square meter. That is 2.45 square kilometres which is 1.522 square miles. That is one huge STANDING crowd.

 

We should all know that the human body requires 2 litres of water per day to survive. We shall ignore the idea that in desert conditions this figure will escalate.

 

That is 2 x 6M = 12Mega litres of water per day for the said crowd. A litre of water weighs 1 kilogram (don't you just love the metric system biggrin.gif) so we have 12 million kilograms of water per day. A kilo litre (1000 l) is 1 tonne thus we have 12,000 tonnes of water per day for the crowd.

 

One of these

Water-Truck-20000L-Capacity-Cummins-Engine-SW1250WJ-.jpg

Carries 20 kilo litres (or 20 tonnes) of water. 12,000 tonnes divided by 20 we get a requirement of 600 of these "beasts". Now these are about 22m long so a convoy (Nose to tail) of them in today's terms is 13.2km (8.2 miles) long.

 

Of course back then we did not have these "beasts", we had camels and donkeys and they too need water to "run" - whoops.

 

That takes care of the water. (sort of )

 

Now food we know we can go without for longer periods than water but we of course have these folk wondering around in the desert for 40 years, procreating and the rebellious folk would not enter the promised land, but their offspring would. Not to mention their military exploits, the need for armaments, you know stuff like bronze/steel for swords and arrows, whoops we need wood for arrows too.

 

So I will not even attempt to calculate the tonnage for food and the beasts of burden required to transport it. Oh I forgot we had manna from heaven and quail (Invokes Magic) but do camels and donkeys eat birds? Hmmmmm

 

Now we have this crowd of a minimum of 2.45 square kilometres wondering around the desert and would set up camp ever so often no? Oh dear, we have tents, blankets and all those other necessities for the chilly desert evenings. The size of the camel/donkey express must really have been a phenomenal site to see.

 

Well let us assume the good elders assigned a camp site of 10 square metres per household and let us assume an average of 5 per household.

 

6M / 5 gives us 1,200,000 camps and that is 1.2M x 10 = 12M square metres OR if you will 12 square kilometres that is an area 3.46km x 3.46km. I am being very conservative with space IOW very cramped and yet we have city sized community.

 

The last time I did this I used the inaugural event of Obama's inauguration and that was only 1.2M and within a city with ablutions laid on for the event and the area covered was huge. This is 6 times that size.

 

There's an old saying not to defecate on your own doorstep so ablutions were really a long walk away over yonder sand dune for the poor suckers in the middle of the encampment.

 

Which brings us to the question of Jew's trigonometric prowess, that pesky math stuff like using sextants, using celestial orbs to find one's way in the desert and journey, which by the way takes 9-13 days by foot (with a travelling vehicular support crew)

 

The Egyptians were using slaves for what exactly. 6M folk had to have been for the pyramids no? One must assume that somewhere a slave would find favour and learn a trick or two with the crude mathematical instruments and gleaned off some know how of basic trig. Thus an exodus should have been a breeze. But they were there for FORTY years. Kind odd that Moses did not think of hiring a guide to show them the way no?

 

As you can imagine, over a period of 40 years, such an exodus should have left some pretty cute lost and found "beach artefacts" lying around, numerous corpses and yet the archaeologists have found - wait for it.

 

NOTHING!

 

So please tell this sceptic just how this mass exodus really happened or is this like the ramblings of king Saul killing thousands and king David tens of thousands merely embellished folklore?

 

If the folk could simply produce evidence of the stone tablets and/or the magic ark of the covenant, it would put to bed ALL doubts and cynics like me and countless others.

 

When factoids like this (using science) are presented, no wonder folk invoke magic and/or faith.

 

Map of alleged route

Map-Route-Exodus-Israelites-Egypt.gif

 

The counter argument is that it was 2M not 6M folk but the OT and NT texts always suggest numbering of crowds to be men only

 

See the thread here where I debate folk and there is a good scholar with ample knowledge of these legends origins come from. It is very informative.

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LivingLife, I'd like to add one more argument against the Flood and the Ark story having happened.

 

If we look at both DNA and mDNA, we can trace the genetic lineages of organisms backwards for many, many years. We can also tell, due to how closely individuals are related to each other within a species, how long that species has been reproducing. Furthermore, we can tell, using genetics, if any given population was reduced to a very low number at some point in the past, then rebounded; when this occurs, this is known as a population bottleneck.

 

Using this knowledge, if the Flood had happened, and we tested the genetic information from various organisms around the world, we would find that they would all have experienced a common bottleneck a few thousand years ago. The population or very living thing on earth, be it a ferret, an elephant, a cactus, an oak tree, or a human, would show exactly the same bottleneck, and would show exactly the same degree of "relatedness" to the other members of its species.

 

Yet we find nothing of the sort. Some species have gone through population bottlenecks very recently. Others have never had significant bottlenecks.

 

Therefore, the Flood, and the Ark story, never happened.

 

However, Christians will counter with something along the lines of "God messed with the DNA of every living thing on earth to hide the fact that the flood happened," but we all know that's just stupid, and makes no sense, no matter how "mysterious" their nonsensical deity may be.

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I have no objections, add away (anyone) and ask questions. I never did anything like this here before but Puddin's comments and others made me realise folk need to understand evolution and old earth in simplistic terms. When it comes to bio-genetics, I can hum the tune but don't know the words that well :D. The geology side I am pretty good at.

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I have no objections, add away (anyone) and ask questions. I never did anything like this here before but Puddin's comments and others made me realise folk need to understand evolution and old earth in simplistic terms. When it comes to bio-genetics, I can hum the tune but don't know the words that well biggrin.png. The geology side I am pretty good at.

 

I tend to know more about the astronomy side of science, myself; my knowledge in other areas is mostly just random snippets of information (like knowing what population bottlenecks are).

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LivingLife, I also got to thinking about the canyon erosion point you brought up...

 

It is possible for canyon erosion to occur (in geological terms) quickly, so the creationists may even be correct when they say that it doesn't take millions of years for something like the Grand Canyon to form. However, they would also have to account for the time it would take for all of the layers of sediment to accumulate before the big erosion begins.

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LivingLife, I also got to thinking about the canyon erosion point you brought up...

 

It is possible for canyon erosion to occur (in geological terms) quickly, so the creationists may even be correct when they say that it doesn't take millions of years for something like the Grand Canyon to form. However, they would also have to account for the time it would take for all of the layers of sediment to accumulate before the big erosion begins.

The issues to consider again is topography and climate. As you said the multiple layers, they cannot ignore but they do. As for erosion, this is the glacial retreating ice theory mundaneness they use. That is fine for maybe the GC, but then you have to ask why we see similar canyons all over the world and all look pretty much similar and all of them have differing climate conditions. If you research the South Americas canyons, you find again, similarities and similar depths. These rivers are not raging torrents and are usually very seasonal in their flow and capacity. The YEC folk have fludd on the brain and as such try to see this all happening in a short time span. What about wind erosion?

 

At the end of the day, canyons are scars in the landscape that allow us to see these layers.

 

We have a number of these outcrops here in The Free State province

 

free_state.jpg

Golden Gate - Free State

 

This is wind erosion and is no canyon but a relatively flattish valley.

 

2337879941_01ab472cdd_z.jpg?zz=1

Titanic Rock - Clarens Free State

 

This one I have actually climbed 3 times

 

These are compressed sandstone. The area is known for dino fossils and one time must have been a huge dam

 

314007_10150345866034756_751394755_7872011_1529968610_n.jpg

 

The valley - this is in the Maluti Mountains which is part of the Drakensberg. The only waters here are streams. This is right next door to Lesotho (back right) and my mom grew up here. these are not remnants of volcanic mountains.

 

The last time I climbed the titanic in 1978, I carved my initials and year in with a simple pen knife. The rock is soft.

 

Somewhere this got pushed up from a dam and became mountains. Probably at one time it was a canyon. Who knows?

 

The point is, the same evidence of layers is seen here in a different setting to the BR canyon which is 600 miles away.

 

Dunno if that answers your question?

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The talkorigins site pretty much destroys piece of blind dogma that creationists can come up with. And those IDiots too.

 

 

Creationism clashes with reality:

 

 

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/gstory.htm

 

.

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Back in my days of trying to set evolution in the christian mindset there were ways to attempt to get around it.

 

First even with a literal reading of genesis 1, you could argue that this was a creation poem not one meant to be taken as strictly the way it happened. There are other cases in the psalms among other places where these types poetic structures are used. I remember reading a John Walton book which attempted to show this. So assuming this is correct and we can have an old earth.

 

Next there is the assumption with an old earth, god can use a form of evolution, theistic evolution. Perhaps he even took an existing hominid and places a spirit into him. (I can't remember the biblical reasons for this one at all).

 

The flood could be interpreted as a local one which killed out only the known world (look at an ancient map and see how localized it is).

 

Then there are things like this:

 

 

Okay, I'm boring myself, I just remember spending way too much time trying to read books on these things and fitting an old earth with lifeforms formed by evolution to fit into the biblical account. Its much easier to accept natural means and leave god out.

 

I can't fathom why people try so hard to do a literal reading of genesis. I've yet to hear a good explanation of why the hell the sons of god were screwing the daughter of men and creating giants. Anyways who are these sons of god, did jesus have multiple brothers?

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  • 2 weeks later...

At some point all my learning about Biblical history backfired. I thought, I don't think the Jews at any point have taken those myths as literal history any more than the Greeks did. So why should I?

 

Gorgeously written, LL, and thanks to you and to those who have added to the discussion. I love to learn.

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On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that?

 

http://www.theonion.com/articles/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-creates-worl,2879/

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On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that?

 

http://www.theonion....ates-worl,2879/

 

LOL that was hilarious, VF! Thanks for the giggle! :)

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Thank you for this straight-forward explanation, LL!

 

On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that? Let alone the science of it, which I am still very much learning about. it really just hit me with more force than ever before, just how ludicrous the whole idea was.

We have tree rings up to 10,000 years back.

 

Another thing, the monk who came up with 4004 BC date for the creation, Ussher, he also calculated that Jesus was to come back in 1997. Which of course didn't happen.

 

And if the whole earth flooded... How exactly was that physically possible? Where did all the water come from? It just doesn't seem possible, let alone likely.

And where did it go? And the speed the water had to fall down (a foot/hour all over the planet, simultaneous) would have created extreme friction and turbulence. I don't think an arc could have dealt with miles wide whirlpools. Put it this way, imagine a large mountain having a rainfall that fast and intensive for 90 days. There would be enormous floods from those mountaintops while the bottom of the mountain was getting its own rain. Or think of it this way, a mountain side of a couple of miles receiving a foot high water in one hour, where would it go? Downhill. We know from experience of rainfalls that are just a fraction of that speed causing tremendous damage to both land and boats on the ocean as well. No one is safe from those torrents.

 

What is your take on that boat that the YEC's are always talking about, that they found up on some mountain somewhere? What do you make of that?

I suspect it's a ruin of an ancient building rather than a boat.

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Livinglife: Those are some interesting calculations for how much water they would've needed. Now I'm wondering how many latrines would have to been dug.

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Thank you for this straight-forward explanation, LL!

 

On the subject of YEC, it really only occured to me last night just how ridiculous the idea was, when I was watching Dawkin's The Root Of All Evil? It was something he questioned a Rabbi on, and I paused for a moment and thought about it. I thought, 6000 years equates back to 4000BCE... Wait a minute, don't we have even history records older than that? Man-made artefacts older than that? Let alone the science of it, which I am still very much learning about. it really just hit me with more force than ever before, just how ludicrous the whole idea was.

We have tree rings up to 10,000 years back.

 

Another thing, the monk who came up with 4004 BC date for the creation, Ussher, he also calculated that Jesus was to come back in 1997. Which of course didn't happen.

 

And if the whole earth flooded... How exactly was that physically possible? Where did all the water come from? It just doesn't seem possible, let alone likely.

And where did it go? And the speed the water had to fall down (a foot/hour all over the planet, simultaneous) would have created extreme friction and turbulence. I don't think an arc could have dealt with miles wide whirlpools. Put it this way, imagine a large mountain having a rainfall that fast and intensive for 90 days. There would be enormous floods from those mountaintops while the bottom of the mountain was getting its own rain. Or think of it this way, a mountain side of a couple of miles receiving a foot high water in one hour, where would it go? Downhill. We know from experience of rainfalls that are just a fraction of that speed causing tremendous damage to both land and boats on the ocean as well. No one is safe from those torrents.

 

What is your take on that boat that the YEC's are always talking about, that they found up on some mountain somewhere? What do you make of that?

I suspect it's a ruin of an ancient building rather than a boat.

 

Ah, christianity. The rise of Science was rather unfortunate for the church. Too bad none of the prophets saw THAT coming!

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Ah, christianity. The rise of Science was rather unfortunate for the church. Too bad none of the prophets saw THAT coming!

:lmao: Yeah. Didn't think of that.

 

It's a mystery that science wasn't mentioned in Revelations.

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Ah, christianity. The rise of Science was rather unfortunate for the church. Too bad none of the prophets saw THAT coming!

lmao_99.gif Yeah. Didn't think of that.

 

It's a mystery that science wasn't mentioned in Revelations.

 

Maybe Science scared Jesus away? That could be why he never came back. Wendyshrug.gif

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Now that you mention it, he does seem to have a phobia about cameras and recording devices.

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Now that you mention it, he does seem to have a phobia about cameras and recording devices.

Some artists choose film, some pick oils. Jesus works in toast.
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