Ok, youre applying this to the Flood, right?
I wasn't, but it applies. I was responding to your comment that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is when evidence is expected:
YOU: "Absence of evidence, is
not evidence of absence."
ME: "The absence of expected evidence is evidence of absence. Modus tollens in logic refers to the idea that if P implies Q (if P happened, Q would be evidence of that) so that if Q if is not the case, nether is P. The absence of Q, the expective evidence, argues against P."
Suppose Bob played hooky from work Tuesday and tried to claim that he had been at work, but his timecard wasn't punched and his coworkers report that they didn't see him at his station when he said he was. Do you expect them to believe and pay him for the day? Absent evidence that would be expected had he worked, no.
On the other hand, Becky was supposed to be babysitting Tuesday night from 7 to midnight, but might have stepped out and left the kids alone and sleeping for an hour according to somebody who thought they saw her at a fast-food place without them. Will she get paid for 5 hours or 4? Probably for 5. There's no evidence that she left if the kids didn't wake up or there are no security cameras apart from an uncertain report that she might have been seen somewhere she shouldn't have been. Thus, no evidence is expected, so absence of evidence means nothing there.
If applied to the flood, we would expect to be able to find enough water on earth to submerge all dry land, but we don't.
We have good evidence that that family could not have built the ark as described. Ken Ham built an ark to those specifications, and it required manpower not available to Noah, lumber not available to Noah, trucks and other heavy equipment not available to Noah, an ability to collect and then return animals from remote continents not available to Noah (Ham didn't actually do that part, but he could have, whereas Noah could not), and Ham used metal nails and braces not available to Noah. If Noah could do those things, we would expect evidence that it was possible for him.
Did God want the vegetation destroyed? That would have worked against Noah & his offspring… that was food, they would have died off.
Terrestrial foliage would not be expected to survive pounding rain or prolonged submersion.
But there is much resultant evidence, i believe. You know I’m not a YEC, the Grand Canyon’s strata were laid down over millions of years. But the Flood cut through those layers & removed the over 1,000 cu.mi. volume that’s missing. The creation of the vast Buttes and Mesas in the western US. (What happened to the surrounding land?)
So a flood event that could carve out deep canyons and shape buttes and mesa would leave vegetation unharmed? That's not reasonable.
Also, why would a flood carve anything? A river like the Colorado over eons, yes, but that's moving water. We wouldn't expect a global flood to carve out canyons anymore than we expect the ocean to carve canyons on the seafloor.
I see no need to comment on your “how religion began” post.
That's unfortunate. I thought I gave you a compelling argument for why the Sabbath exists as well as a Commandment to observe it by taking a day of rest to visit the central synagogue once nomads settled into city life.
But is justified: I gave you reasons, in explaining all the events happening in Day 6. That’s really not fair to overlook those reasons.
YOU: "For a reason:
it’s not literal"
ME: "I understand that it is acceptable among believers to simply make proclamation like that one, but it's unjustified. It's a preferred understanding. One can just as well proclaim it literal and be on at least as good a footing"
YOU: "But is justified: I gave you reasons, in explaining
all the events happening in Day 6. That’s really not fair to
overlook those reasons"
You believe those things happened, but I don't. To justify a belief to a critical thinker skilled in evaluating evidence, you'd need to provide evidence that makes the belief likely to be correct by the academic standards (rules of inference) found in science and law.
I gave you my reasons for believing that the Bible writers meant a week of literal 24-hour days. You didn't comment on it much less try to rebut it. Not surprisingly, my argument and position remain unchanged. And even if you had, you have no factual basis to assert that the myth was not meant literally. What you have is hindsight that allows you to know that the scripture cannot be literally correct thanks to subsequent discoveries, but without that knowledge, and in conjunction with the belief in a tri-omni deity that revealed truth to them, you'd not only have no reason to say that the account was not meant literally, you'd have reason to NOT do that, such as fear of retribution from the deity or the priesthood.
What you and other believers do is called motivated reasoning. You're trying to reconcile scripture written by ancients in the light of knowledge not available to them and the belief that a god exists that knows all, can do all, who loves them, and has left a revelation on earth. The ancients had to deal with the moral dilemmas such beliefs created, such as why do we not live in paradise or have immortality, or why are there so many mutually unintelligible languages in the world, or why would God drown most of the earth. The solution was always to blame man and say he deserved these things.
Today, the believer also needs to reconcile scientific discoveries with scripture, which opens up another avenue for motivated reasoning to go to work such as your arguments for a global flood.
I say there was. Otherwise, Jesus’ sacrifice of a (perfect) life for a (perfect) life - the Mosaic Law’s standard for justice - has no value or meaning if Adam didn’t exist.
That was a response to, "But that's folktale, tribal origins lore. There was no historical Garden of Eden and no historical creation"
Here's more motivated reasoning and circularity. You believe there was a literal Garden of Eden by faith, and you bootstrap that unevidenced belief with other unevidenced beliefs. I say that a literal first man (never existed) and that there is no reason to believe that the crucifixion of Jesus has the meaning that believers ascribe to it.
If the Bible only represented the ancient worldview, then we wouldn’t have the accurate description of the Earth @ Job 26:7…where it’s situated “on nothing”… or Job 38:16… where God asks Job, “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?” Who knew of those things back then? Nobody! Only in modern times, were such things discovered. And they verified the Bible.
And here is more. You cherry pick vague references and assign them modern meanings.
Situated on nothing, which contradicts all of the scriptures that have situated on pillars, hardly qualifies as an accurate description of the earth. What did you teach your children about the earth? That it is situated on nothing? How about that is spheroid in shape, it rotates daily on its axis, and orbits the sun once a year.
Why do you consider
springs of the sea and
recesses of the deep evidence of divine prescience channeled through the Bible writers? Once again, that is a woefully inadequate description of the oceans and the seafloor with its continental shelfs, mountains and volcanoes, darkness, extreme pressure, fumaroles, deep trenches, subduction, and seafloor spreading.
since Adam died at 930 yrs. of age, this is more proof that “Yom” (day) in this text did not mean a literal 24 hrs.
More bootstrapping of one unevidenced belief using another. There was no first man, no man has lived 930 years to our knowledge, and even if there had been a first man and he lived nearly a millennium, neither of those make the days of creation anything other than a 24-period.
Now these people, according to the Bible, had been slaves! They hadn’t had the freedom to develop a ‘particular style of pottery.’
America had slaves who had a culture of their own - music, dance, jargon, dress - some of which came from Africa and some later. Here's some American slave pottery:
American Face Vessels | Smithsonian Institution
Here are slave songs ("negro spirituals"):
Slave Songs of the United States - Wikipedia
Do you know what a cakewalk was before it became slang for something easy? Here's more slave culture:
History of the Cake Walk
