"In the beginning God created....." This is what I believe. If you have problems with the flood story, it is because we do not have all the details. God simply doesn't supply them, although I don't know what good it would do....no one would believe him anyway. Man has no real explanation for so many things....though he thinks he does. He is good at theorising...that is a fact.
The "luminaries" are placed there for a purpose.
The earth is just the right distance from the sun, the right size and the right shape. It has just the right mixture of gases to facilitate life, and it spins on its axis at just the right speed and angle......but this all just happened by accident according to science. Look at the pictures from space and see which planet is the only one living.
The moon is designed to reflect light from the sun....its surface being mainly glass. Yet its light is the stuff of poetry, love songs and lunacy. It is responsible for the movement of the tides in vast oceans and who knows what else. But no one put it there according to science. Just random chance.
I can't go into the random chance scenario without putting on the brakes....sorry. Things that exhibit exquisite design require an intelligent designer. I didn't find my wristwatch or my computer under a bush. I didn't find my house fully constructed out in a field either. If these things that are the puny inventions of man required an intelligent designer and manufacturer, why do the much larger and more complex structures in nature and the universe NOT require them?
If you cant answer the simple questions, why bother with the hard ones? Who cares how life changed, if you don't know how it began?
Complicated answers do not address the very simple first cause of everything. Life itself did not spring out of nowhere.
Science avoids that question because it can provide no answers, and to acknowledge a Creator would force them to surrender their own precious knowledge....even though it proves nothing that God didn't already tell us.
""In the beginning God created....." This is what I believe"
That is fine as a belief. But when it contradicts all the actual facts its a problem.
"If you have problems with the flood story"
For one, you keep saying this like if I have a problem, when in fact its evidence from a lot of different ways. One ice core samples going back a million years.
But
Antarctic Hills Haven't Seen Water in 14 Million Years
Water has not flowed across Antarctica's Friis Hills for 14 million years, researchers reported Tuesday (Oct. 29) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver.
The Friis Hills rise 2,000 feet (600 meters) above
Antarctica's Taylor Valley, one of the "Dry Valleys" west of McMurdo Sound. Fossils show tundra mosses and a lake once covered the flat-topped hills, when Earth's climate was warmer more than 14 million years ago. Now, thanks to blocking by nearby mountains, cold temperatures and strong winds that suck moisture from the air, the aptly named Dry Valleys receive little to no measurable rain or snow. (Sometimes, snow drifts in from nearby hills.)
Fossils found in ancient lake sediments on Antarctica's Friis Hills.
Credit: Adam Lewis, NDSU
graduate student
at the University of Pennsylvania, looked for traces of a radioactive isotope called
beryllium-10 in lake sediments on the Friis Hills. This rare beryllium isotope, which has more neutrons than the stable version, forms when cosmic rays collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms. Beryllium-10 decays on a predictable time scale, allowing geochemists to estimate the age of sediments containing the isotope. [
The 10 Driest Places on Earth]
Antarctic Hills Haven't Seen Water in 14 Million Years
There is another place in Chile in the driest desert on Earth where it hasn't rained more then 2 inches in over 23 million years.
How The Earth Was Made S01E06 Driest Place On Earth
There was no global flood for a fact, the biggest was about 13 thousand years ago in the NW called the
"
Glacial Lake Missoula and the Missoula Floods ...
Between 80,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago ice sheets called the "Wisconsin Glaciation" covered much of North America, including Northern Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Towards the end of this glaciation a large ice dam blocked the Clark Fork River in the Idaho Panhandle, creating "Glacial Lake Missoula". This lake was a massive lake 2,000 feet deep filling the valleys of western Montana. It stretched eastward more than 200 miles and, at its maximum height and extent, contained more than 500 cubic miles of water - more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. Periodically, the ice dam would fail, resulting in a large catastrophic flood of ice- and dirt-filled water which rushed across northern Idaho and eastern and central Washington, down the Columbia River, through the Columbia River Gorge, and finally poured into the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River. Flood waters filled the Willamette River Valley, reaching Eugene, Oregon, more than 100 miles away. When Lake Missoula burst through the ice dam and exploded downstream, it did so at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world.
The Columbia River - Missoula Floods
"Man has no real explanation for so many things"
Man has a better explanation for a lot of things people haven't learn yet either. Or ignore evidence because they hold belief over the facts. We have learned a ton of information. Evolution is a done deal and has been since the 1800's basically yet there are still people who don't have a clue about it or refuse to except it. If there is a God,the said God used evolution. Not just biological but the whole universe has evolved.
We know how our moon formed. We know how the dinosaurs died and how that opened the door for mammals such as ourselves. We also know no humans lived when they live and that there was another huge group of animals before the dinosaurs that also went extinct.
Before Dinosaurs - Pelycosaurs, Archosaurs, Therapsids
"
Like archeologists discovering the ruins of a previously unknown civilization buried deep beneath an ancient city, dinosaur enthusiasts are sometimes astonished to learn that entirely different kinds of reptiles once ruled the earth, tens of millions of years before famous dinosaurs like
Tyrannosaurus Rex,
Velociraptor and
Stegosaurus.
For approximately 120 million years--from the Carboniferous to
the middle Triassic periods--terrestrial life was dominated by the pelycosaurs, archosaurs, and therapsids (the so-called "mammal-like reptiles") that preceded the dinosaurs.
Before Dinosaurs - Pelycosaurs, Archosaurs, Therapsids
The "luminaries" are placed there for a purpose.
Its odd you use old bible terms like "kinds" and "luminaries." The bible isn't and never was a science book nor did they have the modern technology we have, they didn't have a Hubble telescope. We use to get a
terabyte a year of information from all our observations and technology of the universe and now we get that in one day.
1 TB = 1000000000000bytes = 1012bytes = 1000
gigabytes.
"The earth is just the right distance from the sun, the right size and the right shape. It has just the right mixture of gases to facilitate life, and it spins on its axis at just the right speed and angle"
Yes, but ti didn't just happen that way, again when it formed it had a natural gas atmosphere and so much radiation it would have burnt any life to a crisp. It took billions of years to develop an oxygen atmosphere from cynobateria who evolved photosynthesis. Venus and Mars once had water and atmosphere's as well.
"right shape"
You know what planet accretion means? Or stellar accretion? The Earth started out as a bunch of small rocks dust and gas. Life would be very different as well if we didn't have a moon and that again was formed with a massive collision with another planet the size of Mars. Which is also part of "and it spins on its axis at just the right speed and angle" Because of the Planet theia colliding with the earth. The days also weren't 24 hours. The moon is drifting away from the Earth as well and the sun will go red giant in about 5 billion years.
"It has just the right mixture of gases to facilitate life,"
That is because of EVOLUTION. We know this for a fact as well. God must be giving us more clues and facts then you seem to know personally.
The moon reflects light from both the Sun and the Earth, it is not a light source. There are lots of moons in our solar system. Ours is odd in how it formed, compared to other moons in the solar system.
Earth seen from behind Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft.
"But no one put it there according to science. Just random chance."
There is a ton of random chance in the universe and things colliding by the zillions, actually the number would be way way higher, everyday.
You should watch this on other plants suns and orbits.
How the Universe Works Extreme Orbits
"poetry, love songs" are human conceptions. They have nothing to do with how our moon formed.
"why do the much larger and more complex structures in nature and the universe NOT require them?"
That is a question not an answer, you don't answer the question with already thinking you know the answer. There is no evidence and in fact the evidence for a designer, would be abetter design, why do we have to eat and not just get energy from the sun? Why do we have more bacteria cells then human ones in our body? Why do we have to carry around with us trillions of bacteria to digest our food?
Scientists and a lot of humans have curiosity and spend their entire lives asking questions and finding answers and science has done well with that method. You should be glad for that since you have many things and are alive because of what science has done for you. Including your wristwatch computer and house and much more. Religion didn't build those science did.
"f you cant answer the simple questions, why bother with the hard ones? Who cares how life changed, if you don't know how it began?"
So in your view we should give up all medicine and biological breakthroughs that save millions of life's because we don't know how life began even though we know for a fact it evolved? That doesn't make sense.
"Complicated answers do not address the very simple first cause of everything. Life itself did not spring out of nowhere.
Science avoids that question because it can provide no answers, and to acknowledge a Creator would force them to surrender their own precious knowledge....even though it proves nothing that God didn't already tell us."
This is wrong, science tackles easy and hard questions everyday. It does not use supernatural explanations and just say god did it, or a lot of people would be dead from diseases, starvation and many other problems. There are also many religions and its arrogant to think one is right and all others are wrong or that any of them are right or wrong. No one knows, or at least no one can show anything supernatural.. We know man uses them for many reasons though throughout history, a lot of times to explain things they could before science. We don't stone people to death in the US anymore or do a lot of things they did in the Bible using God, because now we view it as wrong.