Hello again Siaf,
Originally posted by Siaf__csf
Seagoon, please don't. It's clear to me that you've dedicated your life to the cause you firmly believe in and I can only respect that. So it would be merely a waste of your time for you to start explaining the verses one by one (I believe there were hundreds of examples.) It would be an act of futility as it would not change my opinnion.
I'm just teasing Jackal at this point to see if he finally realises that the flood story in the Bible is simply impossible to have happened the way he believes it was. Even if that won't happen, I'll still get a few chuckles out of it.
Ok, my sincere thanks for being so honest about it. I have to admit that my heart really wasn't in it. To tell the truth, this thread has expanded into too many different sub-arguments for me to follow and respond to without my head hurting. I'm one of those guys who has difficulty walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time so when a thread begins to look this way I generally bow out.
A few random responses though:
1) A far wiser man than I warned me a long time ago the folly of trying to be an expert in too many fields, and I've already witnessed too many pastors making fools of themselves by attempting to be amateur scientists and politicians. As R.B. Kuiper put it so well:
"Just because the preaching of the Word is so great a task the church must devote itself to it alone. For the church to undertake other activities, not indissolubly bound up with this one, is a colossal blunder, because it inevitably results in neglect of its proper task. Let not the church degenerate into a social club. Let not the church go into the entertainment business. Let not the church take sides on such aspects of economics, politics, or natural science as are not dealt with in the Word of God. And let the church be content to teach special, not general revelation. Let the church be the church."[/b]
So whenever I blunder into discussing aspects of non-historical general revelation, and science in particular I have to do so acknowledging that I am a complete bumpkin and that this doesn't fall under the commission I am given in Matthew 28:19-20.
But a few points regarding the Ark from Gen. 6. The Ship itself was fairly immense, about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high with multiple decks. I don't personally rely on General Revelation to "prove" special revelation - thus I don't heave a sigh of relief when I find Jesus mentioned by the contemporary Jewish/Roman historian Josephus, but it is worth noting that both historians and other archaeologists have found evidence of other ancient vessels of immense proportion, so the idea that "no wooden ship could be so large" is groundless. It's also worth noting that the pyramids are also technically impossible given what moderns believe the ancients were capable of doing, yet they exist.
As to the worldwide flood, both Sumerian and Babylonian accounts chronicle their own version of the flood, but ultimately I'll admit that I believe it because I trust the biblical account and not because I am credulous, but because I trust the author. the universal Flood is mentioned as a fact by Christ in Luke 17:26-27, by the author of Hebrews in Heb. 11:7 and by Peter in 1 Peter 1:3:20 & 2 Peter 2:5, so this isn't just a quaint little narrative from the OT Christians can take or leave.
2) On to Science (village idiot hat on). Regarding Darwinian evolution, even the late Stephen J. Gould (a noted atheist and famous prof. of Geology, Biology and the history of science)himself noted in his essay "Darwinian Fundamentalism" the distressing tendency to make this paradigm the new unshakable faith of the period. He and his peers, for instance, criticized the willingness of education establishments to continue teaching portions of Darwinian evolution that had long since been scrapped and their unwillingness to embrace modern theories such as the "wonderful monster" concept of change via simultaneous rapid mutations. In fact, although he held creationists in utter contempt, he too was embarassed by the tendency of text-book publishers to print pictures of hypothetical "transitional life forms" that no fossil evidence has ever uncovered and which are biologically untenable.
For instance, Gould and his colleagues were only too well aware that a structure in-between an arm and a wing that was actually neither, made for a life-form that even under the concept of "survival of the fitest" would be "deleted." As most modern paleontologists point out, we have fossil arms and we have fossil wings, we have fossil arms and fossil flippers, but no transitional forms in between. They've generally given up on searching for biologically untenable "links" so the modern explanation for this is usually rapid mutation. I.E. Mamma lizard gives birth to a bird, said bird finds another similar mutant and the bird species begins. Christians of course say simply Special Creation, i.e. God made Lizards and God made birds. Which is of course laughed at, but then again it is also being laughed at by people who prefer the idea of UFO tinkering with human development to the idea of a creator.
In Creation, it really is a case of "Ex Nihilo, Nihil Fit" -
From nothing, nothing comes If at one time there really was nothing, there would still be nothing today. Even the big bang theory doesn't explain the generation of the matter that exploded. Matter is not self-generated.
Either you have a creator who has revealed himself to his creation via general and special revelation, or you are still left with the unanswered childs question: "Where did everything come from." and the depressing answer "I don't know" (or worse, the existentialists "I can't know" or the nihilists "Stupid flabby child! Nothing exists!")
PS: Vorticon, I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who bursts out laughing at the "my doctor has forbidden me to push" point in Thomas the Tank Engine - my kids look at me like I'm crazy.
I mean when I do that... you know, laugh at Thomas the Tank Engine.
Ok, they think I'm crazy most of the time.
- SEAGOON
