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It has always struck me as odd that the creationists struggle so hard to create the veneer of real science over their nonsense when all they have to acknowledge is that the Genesis story is allegorical, metaphorical or mythic, or simply admit that there is no science involved and that an omnipotent God performed miracles. It's like they realize the profound impact and explanatory power science has had on the world yet are reluctant to actually utilize scientific principles and instead create the illusion of scientific inquiry to disguise the abject absurdities within.painted wolf said:
I noted this paradox in a post some time back: creationists are driven by belief in the literal truth of scripture to accept the flood story; then in trying to make the flood story stand up they have to distort the very scripture that made them accept it.
Floating forests or tussocks occur in shallow water conditions like lakes or marshlands and aren't normally present in deep oceans. Even if floating islands were plausible in replenishing plant life how would the various plant species be relocated to their appropriate biomes? How would, say, the rare psammophytes, like the Pholsima sonorae (sand food) which has a complex parasitic relationship with other perrenials like the Eriogonium deserticola and Tiqulia plicata, arrive in, and only in, the Algodones Dunes of California? How did they get here? When were there enough insects and birds to pollinate the various plant species? What about plants that spread their seed in the feces of animals or as burrs on their fur? The planet would have been so underpopulated by animals the statistical likelihood of plants requiring reproduction on the coattails of animals would doom the vegetation to extinction. A global flood requires the relocation of such a vast selection of fauna over the entire planet under an impossibly short timeline it's simply another impossibility to add to the creationist list. And if I accept the creationist claim that there were only a small variety of plants which diversified later on, well, the speed and degree of macroevolution involved would make Goldschmitt slack jawed.
Of course you don't have a problem with it when you're woefully ignorant of the complete lack of evidence for a worldwide flood and painfully oblivious to the problems such a flood would raise for the proliferation fo life.
What happened to the plesiosaurs? Ichthyosaurs? Ambulocetus? Pakicetus? Air breathing, I grant you, but wholly aquatic; if modern whales survived the flood (which by your reasoning they must have done), why not the plesiosaurs?
You may not, but mathematics does. By the most basic of population growth models, to get from 8 people in 2400 BC to the estimated world population at AD1 humans would have to have had a reproductive capacity roughly akin to that of aphids. If you're going to tell us that Noah's daughters-in-law did in fact fit that bill, then I have to tell you they were not human - not as we would recognise the condition today, anyway.
Pay attention please, I said "fertile topsoil". The topsoil would be saturated with salts- even low estimates of salinity- lets pretend God did a miracle and dilluted the waters or the extra water source was not salty- would result in tens of thousands of plant species dying or failing to seed. Again, if your argument that "We don't know the salinity of the water during the flood" means God intervened and decreased the salinity of the oceans then I agree that falling back on miracles is an explanation- an unscientific unfalsifiable one but an explanation nonetheless. Seawater contains 35 g. of salt per litre and the vast majority of plant life can't survive in 1/10ths of this concentration of salts.
Very few would actually. And certainly not enough to reflect over 14,000 species of Bryophyta, well over 250,000 species of flowering plants, not to mention 12,000+ species of ferns... I could go on and on. Seeds could not have "just landed where they may" in the devastated landscape and quickly "macro-evolve" into the varieties of plants we see today.
I already explained this in my previous post. The blink-of-an-eye between the time the flood ended to now would require such a huge diffusion of plants and such a massive and fast rate of evolution most plant species would be hopefully monstrous. Get it? Ha! That's witty- please feel free to use it.
Once you take as a given an omnipotent God running around, talking to people, giving commands, creating water from nothing, making it all disappear again later and whatnot, it's kinda hard to then turn around and say that "God did it" doesn't excuse how the animals survived afterward as well.
Wait a minute... so a creature like a lion, whose jaw and teeth are excellent for biting and tearing meat but near-useless for chewing plants, didn't eat meat until after the Fall?
... while creating the problem of what could have caused those geologic changes.
I've often asked creationists to describe to me the actions of a lion eating grass; I usually get fobbed off with "ah well, their teeth would have been different before the Fall". When I ask, in that case, how exactly were they lions before the Fall, I never seem to get a coherent answer.
Any thoughts on beetle kind yet? Four hundred thousand species and counting. So, how many beetle kinds did Noah have on the ark? Just the one pair? They'd have their work cut out, engendering 400,000 descendant species in a few hundred years. One pair of Polyphaga, one of Adephaga, perhaps? Or was there a staphylinid kind, a weevil kind, a coccinelid kind? The 'creation scientists' we keep hearing about must surely have worked this out by now: where can we look up their findings?
