Inherent Characteristics of Design

[Ouroboros]

I will probably be seen as blasphemous for thinking this, but while God says he changes not, it does not mean he does not "evolve" -in a broad sense. He is always perfect, always logical, etc, but certainly God changes outward form and creates new things which in turn affect him, etc.

Look into Omega Point. Jesuit Teilhart de Chardin postulated that God is the omega point, that all this that we see is evolving, eventually into God. God, not just as alpha, but also omega. Final cause instead of first cause.

 

[Etritonakin]

If there had been a flood, we wouldn't have found 500,000 fossils. We should be able to find millions and perhaps billions of them since all animals, plants, and life forms died within the same period. There's no explanation to where they went. Also, in a global flood, all life forms would have organized in the layers by weight and ability to escape, not biological complexity. Now, the strata isn't organized according to what we'd expect from a flood, but they're organized what we would expect from species evolving over time according to the measured age of these strata. Flood doesn't fit.


All or nothing, is it? That science has proved that the Bible is wrong when it comes to Genesis and the Deluge isn't the same as "the bible to be false" in totality. There's a difference between "this story is false" or "this story is wrong" and "all of it is wrong." No, geology doesn't say the whole friggin' Bible is wrong, but it does say that it's wrong in the first chapters.


When it comes to Genesis and Deluge it is.


The flood is an interpretation as well. People haven't realized it yet. It's an interpretation of a local flood, made into a global flood. The flood was never world-wide.


Really? There's so much science speaking against the Ark that it's not even funny. And miracles? Why? Why would God go through having a man work on a huge boat and have him collect animals into it, just so God can wave his finger and do some magic? Why not do magic from the beginning? Why didn't God give Noah a shrink-ray and animated suspension laboratory to put all animals in a tin-box sleeping, for a year? Why go through the crazy idea of using a wooden boat? God could have instructed Noah how to make aluminum even or carbon-fibre.


A global flood not leaving traces that it must have, that's not evidence against that it was?


I'm not sure how to explain this to you. I was a fundamentalist Christian, a Creationist and anti-evolutionist, for 30 (thirty) years. Then I realized I had to be honest to myself and stop lying in the attempt to keep my faith. Truth is more important than faith. So I started to learn things of what science actually do know for a fact. This take some dedication, but a whole bunch of humble-pills. I was wrong in so many things. Even today, I'm still learning, and most definitely, I'm wrong a lot and change my views a lot. That's a big part of why I discuss in forums like this. What I'm saying is that I don't think I'm infallible, besides, I consider myself having a spiritual side, and also, I don't think religion is bad. It can be bad, but it's not always. So can science. Science can cause a lot of harm, and science can be wrong (and is many times), but don't fool yourself to think that science must be wrong and your specific religion must be right. You need to keep your mind open as well.

Whoahhhhhhh there..... It seems we have a mix of scientific and religious guesswork going on....

I'm assuming you meant..... If there had been a flood.... And all life forms that ever existed on earth existed together before the flood... Which is based not on what the bible actually says or can possibly mean, but on someone's claim about such... That being that genesis describes the initial creation of the earth and all life on it... And that there was no life on earth prior to genesis.... Then we ought to see a nice even layer of fossils of every last life form laid out everywhere on earth.....

But.... That's not even what the bible says -though some have made such claims.

You are saying that a very specific set of circumstances could not be true -and I'm not saying you are wrong.
However, it should be understood what is being shown to be false.

It's a bit like people arguing about the true meaning of Christmas when Christmas has nothing to do with the true teachings of the bible.

Other parts of the bible indicate that Genesis was not describing the initial creation of the earth -and even genesis can read "and the earth became waste and ruin" at some unspecified point after its initial completion.

The word "man" in the bible is not a scientific term -but one relating to those with the potential to live forever. It does not say Adam was the first humanoid.
It does not say Adam was created without any reference to other creatures.

It does not say there were not millions of years of life on earth before Adam -or that the creatures of genesis were the first ever on earth.

God essentially tells Job he wasn't around and hasn't a clue what God has been up to when he laid the foundation of the earth/stretched the line upon (it in construction terms).

Etc., etc.,

It is excellent that certain myths have been busted -but that is not the same as proving the bible to be false. Genesis has not been proven to be false -your perception based on other false perceptions has been found to be false.

A global flood of a certain description based on assumptions made about scripture not leaving the traces you think it should have based only on available information and incomplete data is a given -but it is proof of nothing

 

[Etritonakin]

Look into Omega Point. Jesuit Teilhart de Chardin postulated that God is the omega point, that all this that we see is evolving, eventually into God. God, not just as alpha, but also omega. Final cause instead of first cause.

If both, then also - not instead.

I have wondered if it was both a choice and inevitable that God chose to reproduce himself -to make the children of God. It's just the right and logical thing to do -even if it meant an initial period of imperfection on our part. It increases love, wonder, joy, creativity....

 

[Etritonakin]

It is difficult to read the bible without referencing everything we've ever heard about it, but it's a good idea.

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

That's a very broad statement -not very specific. No time frame is given. In some unspecified manner, at some time and in some unspecified amount of time, God did so.

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

"Was" can just as correctly be translated "had become". So -either the earth simply was formless and empty at that point in its initial creation -or had become so after its initial creation due to whatever. Does the bible say anything elsewhere about what happened between the initial completion of earth and these events? Yep.

Where is Satan at this point? What has he been up to? He shows up in the garden -but where was he before? When did he initially rebel?

The deep is already there at this point -but no light is shining on it.
How did the earth become waste and ruin? What does that mean?
Is it out of position? Is its present state different to its previous state? Was the deep once ice that melted? Was their light previously and darkness is an aspect of its now less-than ideal state?

Don't know -doesn't specify.

What is this "spirit of God", anyway?

Was life present on earth prior to this point? It is indicated elsewhere that spiritual life was present -but what of physical life? Did becoming waste and ruin include extinction of species of life? Was it a complete extinction of all life if life existed previously?
Would fossils be left of those species?

Don't know -doesn't specify..

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

So After God said let there be light, what happened? How does he interface? Apparently we are talking about the sun, so we're talking either causing the sun to shine or causing it to shine again on the earth because something blocked it, etc., position of the earth relative to the sun, rate of rotation, etc....

How long were these days relative to our present days? Perhaps equal, perhaps not.

How long was the earth in darkness before this light -is this the first light which ever shone on it?
Don't know -doesn't specify.

What about tilt, wobble, atmosphere, etc.?

Were they all once in balance and then became otherwise? How?

When God made Adam, were there other humanoids on earth? How did Cain find a wife?
When God made Adam and the animals of Genesis, did he reference previously developed and available materials/resources/designs/DNA?

I'unno.

 

[Ouroboros]

Whoahhhhhhh there..... It seems we have a mix of scientific and religious guesswork going on....

Sorry. I think I misunderstood you because of what truthofscripture said and your response.

Then we ought to see a nice even layer of fossils of every last life form laid out everywhere on earth.....

We do see that. Not all animals become fossils though because of the very nature how the process works. Only a fraction really becomes fossils. Most of them are destroyed or simply becoming food to organisms and other life forms.

You are saying that a very specific set of circumstances could not be true -and I'm not saying you are wrong.
However, it should be understood what is being shown to be false.

Right.

An alternative, and more probable interpretation of the flood story is that it was local and not global, and it never covered all the mountains. It wasn't the whole world in the literal sense we'd understand it today, but the whole world the people knew about at that time.

It's a bit like people arguing about the true meaning of Christmas when Christmas has nothing to do with the true teachings of the bible.

Other parts of the bible indicate that Genesis was not describing the initial creation of the earth -and even genesis can read "and the earth became waste and ruin" at some unspecified point after its initial completion.

The word "man" in the bible is not a scientific term -but one relating to those with the potential to live forever. It does not say Adam was the first humanoid.
It does not say Adam was created without any reference to other creatures.

It does not say there were not millions of years of life on earth before Adam -or that the creatures of genesis were the first ever on earth.

God essentially tells Job he wasn't around and hasn't a clue what God has been up to when he laid the foundation of the earth/stretched the line upon (it in construction terms).

Etc., etc.,

Sure. No comments from me.

It is excellent that certain myths have been busted -but that is not the same as proving the bible to be false. Genesis has not been proven to be false -your perception based on other false perceptions has been found to be false.

Right. What's been proven to be false in those stories are the literal interpretations of what it says. We can of course interpret it figuratively, and it can even be insightful and have some cool things to say if we do that.

A global flood of a certain description based on assumptions made about scripture not leaving the traces you think it should have based only on available information and incomplete data is a given -but it is proof of nothing

I don't think so. A global flood would have to leave traces that we could not ignore. Just take the pyramids that were built before the supposed flood. Why don't they have any traces of being flooded? No water damage.

The thing is, we can't prove a negative in this case. You can't prove the negative with a positive. The only way to show that the flood didn't happen is that all the evidence that does exist contradicts it. It doesn't fit. There's been floods, yes, but not a huge world-wide deluge.

We do know there's been five huge world-wide extinction events in Earth's past history. Those we can prove. We find evidence for them. But they were all different and a very long time ago.

 

[Ouroboros]

If both, then also - not instead.

Sure. Which fits with my symbol in my avatar. The eternal snake eating its tail. Alpha and omega. Birth and death. Construction and destruction. Order out of chaos, chaos out of order.

I have wondered if it was both a choice and inevitable that God chose to reproduce himself -to make the children of God. It's just the right and logical thing to do -even if it meant an initial period of imperfection on our part. It increases love, wonder, joy, creativity....

I've had those thoughts as well. The mind begets minds, that eventually evolve and form a greater mind, and so on.

 

[Etritonakin]

Sorry. I think I misunderstood you because of what truthofscripture said and your response.


We do see that. Not all animals become fossils though because of the very nature how the process works. Only a fraction really becomes fossils. Most of them are destroyed or simply becoming food to organisms and other life forms.


Right.

An alternative, and more probable interpretation of the flood story is that it was local and not global, and it never covered all the mountains. It wasn't the whole world in the literal sense we'd understand it today, but the whole world the people knew about at that time.


Sure. No comments from me.


Right. What's been proven to be false in those stories are the literal interpretations of what it says. We can of course interpret it figuratively, and it can even be insightful and have some cool things to say if we do that.


I don't think so. A global flood would have to leave traces that we could not ignore. Just take the pyramids that were built before the supposed flood. Why don't they have any traces of being flooded? No water damage.

The thing is, we can't prove a negative in this case. You can't prove the negative with a positive. The only way to show that the flood didn't happen is that all the evidence that does exist contradicts it. It doesn't fit. There's been floods, yes, but not a huge world-wide deluge.

We do know there's been five huge world-wide extinction events in Earth's past history. Those we can prove. We find evidence for them. But they were all different and a very long time ago.

I haven't really looked into the exact description of the flood, but will try to respond to that later.

I'm not sure what one would expect to see in such a ridiculously massive and strong structure after 40 days of simply being wet/submerged.

We tend to think of a flood as moving from one place to another with strong forces, but from what I remember of the description that wouldn't be the case overall.

We have flash floods here when it hasn't even rained here, but if it rained everywhere at once, etc., things would be different.

Of course, "science" might not believe God could make it rain everywhere while gushing water up from the earth, but there ya go.

 

[Ouroboros]

I haven't really looked into the exact description of the flood, but will try to respond to that later.

I'm not sure what one would expect to see in such a ridiculously massive and strong structure after 40 days of simply being wet/submerged.

If I remember the story correctly, the Bible story says it was raining for 40 days, and then the world was covered in water for more than a year. Imagine Mount Everest, 19,000 feet tall, covered in water. All that 19,000 feet high water had to rain down, which means it had to be hanging in the sky. Clouds don't hold that much water.

We tend to think of a flood as moving from one place to another with strong forces, but from what I remember of the description that wouldn't be the case overall.

What I remember from the story, it says the whole world was covered.

We have flash floods here when it hasn't even rained here, but if it rained everywhere at once, etc., things would be different.

Of course, "science" might not believe God could make it rain everywhere while gushing water up from the earth, but there ya go.

If it was raining everywhere to cover the planet with mountains tall as 19,000 feet, then you have to equally distribute and cover the planet all over by 19,000 feet. You have to cover all mountains at once for a "all world" being covered at once. And how would water of that amount come up gushing from earth either? The land was suddenly heavier so it was pulled down to the core so the water was pressed out like an orange? Why the sudden change of mass and/or gravity? There's nothing about artificial gravity apparatus mentioned in the story. Aliens sounds like a better explanation if we have to stick to the story.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

It doesn't seem as though there is an empirical way to quantify creationism, but neither is there a way to measure evolution.

There are many ways to quantify evolution.

However, evolution seems like a shot in the dark by wishful thinkers. The things that exist, couldn't possibly have come about by accident as evolutionists would have us believe. However, logically, take the human mind. It's not possible for it to have come about accidentally, as it's capable of remembering millions of years of experiences.

Is God's mind capable of remembering millions of years of experience?

The Bible tells us that we were designed to live forever initially. Those two things fit together like a hand in a glove.

Baloney.

Take the wings of a bird. They're designed so efficiently that birds can fly non stop for days on end with no undue exertion by the bird. Man has tried to immitate wings of birds in aircraft with little success. when designing aircraft wings, the engineers always rely on the design of birds wings for improvements in lift, reduction in drag, etc.

It sounds like you know as little about engineering as you do about evolution.

Those things would take billions of billions of years to come about by natural selection. There's no fossil record indicating such. There are no transitional fossils from one form to another either. Each thing existing came about seemingly instantly in the fossil record with little change over millennia.

There are many transitional fossils, including many long sequences within single lines of anestry.

It seems much more likely that the Bible is correct, and science is fumbling for a scientific answer, that it cannot actually find.

IOW, "Science is hard for me to understand, therefore the sky really is a solid dome and plants arose before the Sun existed."

You do realize that even if the misrepresentations you're giving us were actually true, you'd just have a logical fallacy, right? "I can't understand evolution, so it must not have happened."

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I haven't really looked into the exact description of the flood, but will try to respond to that later.

I'm not sure what one would expect to see in such a ridiculously massive and strong structure after 40 days of simply being wet/submerged.

Not 40 days; a year. According to the story, it rained for 40 days but the waters didn't recede for a year.

Over that span of time, the water would affect the underlying soils. During the initial onrush of water, soils would be eroded and washed downstream, of course, but if the entire world was under so much water that the mountains were covered, even static water would cause soils all over the world to shift and reconsolidate.

Now... soils have their history locked up in them. We can do tests (google "consolidation curve" if you're curious) that will tell us if the soil has ever been under more stress than it is right now, and if so, how much more.

In many parts of the world (e.g. the Great Lakes of North America, where I live), the soils are overconsolidated. At some point since they were deposited, they were under much more stress than they are today.

Real scientists realize why this is: during the last ice age, the whole area was covered by a kilometer-tall glacier.

I've never heard a creationist come up with a good answer to this problem. The soils here (and in many other parts of the world) tell us that if a global flood occurred, the whole area muat have had a huge weight on it between the flood and now than it doesn't have today.

What was this weight and where did it go? The scientific answer - i.e. glaciers until ~11,000 years ago - is unavailable to anyone who is arguing for a global flood within the last few thousand years.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Oh - I should probably add that the weight of the flood water itself can't be that massive weight. Water pressure reduces, not increases, the effective stress in soils.

 

[Etritonakin]

If I remember the story correctly, the Bible story says it was raining for 40 days, and then the world was covered in water for more than a year. Imagine Mount Everest, 19,000 feet tall, covered in water. All that 19,000 feet high water had to rain down, which means it had to be hanging in the sky. Clouds don't hold that much water.


What I remember from the story, it says the whole world was covered.


If it was raining everywhere to cover the planet with mountains tall as 19,000 feet, then you have to equally distribute and cover the planet all over by 19,000 feet. You have to cover all mountains at once for a "all world" being covered at once. And how would water of that amount come up gushing from earth either? The land was suddenly heavier so it was pulled down to the core so the water was pressed out like an orange? Why the sudden change of mass and/or gravity? There's nothing about artificial gravity apparatus mentioned in the story. Aliens sounds like a better explanation if we have to stick to the story.

Well, we're talking about a being able to stay the sun in the sky for an hour -create the entire universe -perhaps beyond -with power over rainfall, etc., so you're not likely to find an acceptable "natural" or "normal" explanation -nor is anyone likely to offer one. That doesn't mean that God does not exist or is not capable of such -or that such is not natural, but "supernatural" from the perspective of our abilities or nature without divine influence, but science and faith are not likely to agree -ever -unless God or some other shows up to demonstrate various things.

As for science, we also see as through a glass, darkly (yes, that's from the bible) -similar to faith, but from a different perspective, if you will.

With science, we look for things we think should be so, based on what we know and believe -and are often found to be incorrect as we learn new things.

In a quick search about the age of the larger pyramids, I found something which said that it has been discovered that the stones of the pyramids were likely not carved or cut, but cast from a type of concrete.
That one bit of information would change many other things we thought must be so.

I have had the good and/or bad fortune to experience things which leave me no opportunity to doubt that most have no clue what is actually possible -but that's not to say I have proof of all things. Experiencing things which it seems should not be impossible can also be misleading without the correct perspective or enough of the facts to point one in the right direction.

Humans and humanity as a whole know approximately squat in reference to all things. We like to think we know -it makes us feel secure or something -but all we can do is the best we can with what we do know -acknowledge what we don't -and try not to let our ignorance or knowledge affect each other adversely.

 

[Ouroboros]

In a quick search about the age of the larger pyramids, I found something which said that it has been discovered that the stones of the pyramids were likely not carved or cut, but cast from a type of concrete.
That one bit of information would change many other things we thought must be so.

Concrete? Well, that's great! If they've been just rocks, we can't see the stains of water from a flood, but do you know what happens to composite rock materials when they're exposed to water, especially for a longer time? It's called erosion (physical damage because of chemical reactions). If they're concrete, then it really is a greater magical trick to keep them from staining and eroding. What you're saying there isn't helping the case of a flood, but rather makes the case stronger than there wasn't. If the pyramids had been under sea or brackish water for a year (as the story says), they would show great sign of stress from it. They don't. Simple as that.

So the answer to this is that God intentionally made all things look like there never was a flood. He only redesigned physics to create a rainbow (because supposedly it didn't exist before that, so photons and atmosphere and such were obviously under a different world of physics), but everything else he made sure was hidden away. To intentionally hide things... that's deception.

 

[Sapiens]

If I remember the story correctly, the Bible story says it was raining for 40 days, and then the world was covered in water for more than a year. Imagine Mount Everest, 19,000 feet tall, ...

Everest is 29,029 feet tall.

 

[Ouroboros]

Everest is 29,029 feet tall.

Sorry. 29,000. That's what happens when I just trust my memory and not fact check.

 

[Sapiens]

Sorry. 29,000. That's what happens when I just trust my memory and not fact check.

I believe the difference comes out to a little more that of a third of a billion cubic miles of water, a mere drop in the bucket.

 

[Ouroboros]

I believe the difference comes out to a little more that of a third of a billion cubic miles of water, a mere drop in the bucket.

Yeah. It's a fly's p** in an ocean(!)

Here's a question. How much more mass to the planet would all that water add? Would Noah feel heavier from the increased gravitational force?

 

[Sapiens]

About 4.6 billion tons per cubic mile.

 

[Ouroboros]

About 4.6 billion tons per cubic mile.

Bah. That's nothing.

 

[Sapiens]

Bah. That's nothing.

Yeah, your right. But multiplied by 300 million? That's 1.38 times ten to the 17th power.