Intelligent Design

[Zundrah]

By the way, talking of the Ark and the flood; how can a handful of people in a boat possible know how God got rid of the water!? They just saw the water level descend is all. How can they know what God did to get rid of it in order for them to write it down in the bible?

 

[tjm190]

“the insertion of thousands of species, removal of trillions of gallons of water, undoing of erosion, and insertion of habitable land”

 

[tjm190]

By the way, talking of the Ark and the flood; how can a handful of people in a boat possible know how God got rid of the water!? They just saw the water level descend is all. How can they know what God did to get rid of it in order for them to write it down in the bible?

How did they manage to record creation?

 

[Zundrah]

How did they manage to record creation?

Moses was told all about creation. He wrote it down.

 

[tjm190]

Moses was told all about creation. He wrote it down.

but not how God ‘repaired’ the world after the flood?

 

[StAnastasia]

In that case you should remove “catholic” from your title and put agnostic ther instead. Pretty much every living human (before science was even dreamed of) believed exactly what the bible said.

I suspect you are a fundamentalist Protestant turned Catholic, who has brought youf Protestant biblical literalism with you. The Catholic Church has never held to a universally literal interpretation of scripture.

 

[StAnastasia]

Moses was told all about creation. He wrote it down.

Was it God who recounted the contradictory stories of creation to Moses? Did God Herself forget in which order things were created? Did Moses write the account of his own death? Neat trick, that!

 

[cassini]

I’m aware and you have not. However, we do have both some fish that can only survive in salt water and some that can only survive in fresh water, yes or no?

You are probably correct here.

 

[cassini]

Would you care to respond to my prior post in the slightest? Why would the Bible fail to inform us about all of the repair work God did after the flood?

TJM, mind if I give my tuppence worth on your post.

Were the Bible to describe every detail of the flood and its aftermath it would take a year to read it. As the word of God one - if one is a Christian - is supposed to TRUST in it and accept its revelation in good faith. If the Ark is a symbol of the Church, as the only way to survival (redemption), and is described as having only one door in its side (another symbol of Christ’s wound, from which flowed the last of His blood for mankind, the death knell that opened the doors of heaven so to speak) and it (the Ark) was pure fiction. then the OT lies and tradition is nonsense and Christianity is one big fairy tale.

An investigation into Chinese palaeography, God’s Promise To The Chinese. In a summary of this book, the reviewer states:

‘The three joint-authors have clearly demonstrated, to this reviewer’s satisfaction at least, that the inventor of the original Chinese characters, which were inscribed on tortoise shells and bones, knew and believed in an identical account of creation and earth’s beginnings to that found in Moses’ Book of Genesis…. The Chinese have always revered their writing system. Calligraphy ranks supreme in their artistic scale of values…Just 142 of the earliest hieroglyphic pictograms contain, in a highly condensed (and therefore mentally portable and ineradicable form) key components of the Book of Genesis. Since the truth or otherwise of the Flood has profound implications for the study of geology, in the Book of Documents (Sha Ching), written 3,000 years ago, we read: “The flood waters were everywhere, destroying everything as they rose above the hills and swelled up to Heaven.” ’ —Tim Williams, Christian Order, November 2001, pp.629-63, reviewing God’s Promise To The Chinese by E. Nelson, R. Broadberry and G. Chock, Read Books, HCR 65 Box 580, Dunlap, TN 37327, USA, 1997.

The authors show the earliest Chinese were monotheists who worshiped ShangDi or the one ‘God Above’. For more than 4,000 years they sacrificed to Him in the imperial city of Beijing in what was called the ‘Border Sacrifice’. Confucius (551-479BC) thought the Border Sacrifice so significant that he accredited the efficient ruling of the Chinese empire to it. The Border Sacrifice ended only when the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty was deposed in 1911.

(2) In the book, After The Flood - a 25-year study into Middle Eastern/European palaeography - Bill Cooper traces the early post-flood history of the Middle East and Europe. His task was to see if the ‘Table of Nations’ (Genesis Chapter 10 and 11) could be verified in the history of nations prior to Christianity. If he could find a lineage from the Japhetic line in these histories it would confirm the Bible also recorded true history. Cooper found ample evidence in eastern and western archives to confirm Middle East and European lines are both descended from the Japhetic tree. In Britain, Wales and Ireland he found the records of the early settlers went back 2,000 years, with the same genealogy to European differing only in language. What amazed Cooper was that the evidence of this history was so easy to find and so evident that he concluded its absence from textbooks, schools, universities etc., could only be a deliberate omission by those determined to undermine the Bible as recording true history. —Bill Cooper: After The Flood, New Wine Press, 22 Arun Business Park, Bognor Regis, West Sussex, PO22 9SX, England, 1995.

As for the idea that the flood had to go as high as Mt Everest, well that mountain was obviously not in existence then or if it was it was far smaller. Volcanos of 200 years have been dated as millions of years old. Scientific dating methods are well know to be open to mistakes. This science is far from fool proof thus not worth the paper it is written on.

Then there is the water. It came from the heavens and possibly from underground. As I recall the Scriptures tell us the winds came and dried up the waters. When it rains here these same winds dry up the footpaths and fields also. As to where the waters went, well some went into ice causing the ice age, some remained in the sky, some possibly returned underground.

But logic will solve the great mystery for evolutionists. If lands and mountains rise, and depressions sink, the flood water will find a level that we witness today. No great mystery, you could prove this in any physics classroom. But evolutionists need their ‘plate-tectonics’ over millions of years so they dismiss the flood deviding the oceans and lands on earth as they are now.

Now to the repair TJM. Ever see lands after flooding or landslides? Now go back after a few years and see the growth. Seeds do live in flooded soil for a year. Again no great mystery.

 

[tjm190]

TJM, mind if I give my tuppence worth on your post.

Were the Bible to describe every detail of the flood and its aftermath it would take a year to read it. As the word of God one - if one is a Christian - is supposed to TRUST in it and accept its revelation in good faith. If the Ark is a symbol of the Church, as the only way to survival (redemption), and is described as having only one door in its side (another symbol of Christ’s wound, from which flowed the last of His blood for mankind, the death knell that opened the doors of heaven so to speak) and it (the Ark) was pure fiction. then the OT lies and tradition is nonsense and Christianity is one big fairy tale.

I was countering the argument put forth that rejecting the flood leads to rejection of other biblical phenomena, hence I point out the difference. The restoration of all plant life alone seems mentionable.

As for the idea that the flood had to go as high as Mt Everest, well that mountain was obviously not in existence then or if it was it was far smaller. Volcanos of 200 years have been dated as millions of years old. Scientific dating methods are well know to be open to mistakes. This science is far from fool proof thus not worth the paper it is written on.

So the himalayas popped up in the past couple thousand years? What forces shaped them so quickly?

Then there is the water. It came from the heavens and possibly from underground. As I recall the Scriptures tell us the winds came and dried up the waters. When it rains here these same winds dry up the footpaths and fields also. As to where the waters went, well some went into ice causing the ice age, some remained in the sky, some possibly returned underground.

What ice age? The last ice age is estimated to have taken place 20 millennia ago, outside the YEC ‘range’

But logic will solve the great mystery for evolutionists. If lands and mountains rise, and depressions sink, the flood water will find a level that we witness today. No great mystery, you could prove this in any physics classroom. But evolutionists need their ‘plate-tectonics’ over millions of years so they dismiss the flood deviding the oceans and lands on earth as they are now.

You’re proposing that the lands shifted a rate thousands of times faster in the past than they do presently- anything to back that up?

Now to the repair TJM. Ever see lands after flooding or landslides? Now go back after a few years and see the growth. Seeds do live in flooded soil for a year. Again no great mystery.

The repair I was referring to was the -restoration of species, plant life, and creation of new land. It was stated that volcanoes could have made new land. Even if this could have happened in just 1 or 2 thousand years, God would have had to ‘zap’ it with top soil and such.

 

[donsnow]

Good morning, all -

First, let me apologize to tjm190, for misreading your initials. My fault and I’m sincere in my apology.

Second, let me explain why I go off-line. I have one telephone land line for both the modem of this computer and my telephone. I’m blocking telephone calls every time I go online. So, I don’t stay on-line continually.

Now, I shall try to address the posts directed to me in my absence.

God is love,
Don

 

[donsnow]

Don, here is a history of science I put together that may be of interest to you;

Having reconciled Aristotle’s philosophy with Christianity, next it was time to correct other ideas of the Greek scholar in the light of Christian revelation. This occurred on March seventh 1277AD, when Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris banned 219 propositions of Aristotle’s from the University at Sorbonne, the leading place of education at the time. For example, aware that ‘it is impossible to make something out of nothing’; now called The First Law of Thermodynamics, Aristotle reasoned the universe must always have existed. The Old Testament however reveals that the world has not always existed but had a beginning in time when God created it. Here then, in 1277, theology asserts itself over the rational ideas of man. Other myths, shared by all the major pagan cultures including the Hindus, the Chinese, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Babylonians as well as the Greeks, were also eliminated from the Sorbonne, myths such as Animism (that the world is an animal); Pantheism (that the world and God are the same thing); Astrology (that the movement of the stars influence happenings on earth, and Cyclic History (that all events in history repeat themselves exactly in time). — See Why Did Science Start: Christian Order April 2001, pp. 210-222.

With the myths now exposed by revelation true science began. By 1330 Professor Jean Buridan corrected Aristotle’s false physics of inertia. Aristotle used ‘intelligences’ to push celestial bodies whereas Burdian said

‘Since the Bible does not state that appropriate intelligences move celestial bodies it could be said that it does not appear necessary to posite intelligences of this kind because it would be answered that God, when He created the world moved each of the celestial orbs as he pleased, and in moving them He impressed in them impetuses that moved them without His having to move them any more except by the method of general influence whereby He concurs as a co-agent in all things that take place; “for thus on the seventh day He rested from all work that He had executed by committing to others the actions and the passions in turn.” And these impetuses which He impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased nor corrupted afterwards, because there was no inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements…’

Aristotle’s ‘intelligences’ however were not that far fetched. Saints have said that God puts His angels in charge of nature to oversee His concursus and especially to maintain the perfection of His cosmos (geocentric of course) in their movements that guarantee man a means to measure time itself.

It was Galileo who removed God from inertia and Newton completed the Devil’s promptings with his ‘Laws of gravitation’ in which matter moves itself without the need for God’s concursus or initial action with the created bodies. Thus the heliocentric heresy that removed God from science and his creation. Science does not need God’s (name removed by moderator)ut any more.

Now let us see where science without revelation has led man today:

An eternal universe has returned.
An infinite universe has returned.
Nature evolved by itself and the survival of the fittest
Man evolved with an animal soul in a life and death struggle before Adam
With De Chardin Pantheism has returned
Astrology is rampant today to make up for the discarded religion of millions.
Cyclic history has returned (the Steady State theory I think it is called, as opposed to the big Bang theory.

Yes, back to pagan myth.

Hi, Cassini -

That’s quite a respectable little history you put together, there. Thank you, for sharing your effort with me. I have no argument with it. However, I view it as laying the foundation for subsequent tallying and publishing the data tables which have allowed science, since the Reformation, to explode in growth.
Furthermore, I have here A.C. Crombie’s The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, which I view as showing the roots of science in the Western world to the laying of its foundations stated in your history, to the time of Galileo.
I like the way your history shows the devil slipping in and out of man’s search to understand God’s creation.

God is love,
Don

 

[StAnastasia]

As for the idea that the flood had to go as high as Mt Everest, well that mountain was obviously not in existence then or if it was it was far smaller. Volcanos of 200 years have been dated as millions of years old. Scientific dating methods are well know to be open to mistakes.

Everest is around five million years old; the rock of which it is formed around 60 million. If you have evidence that is it otherwise, please present that to the geological community; otherwise you won’t be taken seriously. You can ramble on idly on Internet fora as long as you want, and it won’t have one whit of influence, except on people as scientifically uneducated as yourself.

 

[buffalo]

Everest is around five million years old; the rock of which it is formed around 60 million. If you have evidence that is it otherwise, please present that to the geological community; otherwise you won’t be taken seriously. You can ramble on idly on Internet fora as long as you want, and it won’t have one whit of influence, except on people as scientifically uneducated as yourself.

You fall back to being only a theologian when convenient, but you assert science.

 

[donsnow]

So it is your assertion that fish could have redeveloped the ability to live in salt water and then filled up all of said salt water? And of course, whales/dolphins can’t live in fresh water for very long either, aside from the fact that they would have starved to death when the fish died.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but these are the logical conclusion of your statements.

No, it’s my opinion that some fish survived the deluge. There was no readaptation nor further evolution required; that both some fresh water and some salt water fish survived the flood and were around after it, to replenish the earth’s waters.
Now, I think my actual statements have different implication than you stated.

side note- evolution is actually thousands of times slower than currently thought so it couldn’t account for the diversity of life, but moves thousands of times faster than currently believed when the oceans need to get filled up?)

Well, tjm, frankly I’m not talking about evolution. What evolution does is no matter to me. If you’ve found a flaw in evolution, when compared to the flood is not my argument. I’m saying God drew water from the heavens, water from the skies and water from the foundations of the earth, to cover the Earth with water. Then, after the flood, the waters evaporated into the sky as well as flowing back into the foundations of the Earth, to let the waters recede from the face of the Earth. This is not about evolution; it’s about God chastising and cleansing the Earth of sinful corruption and promising not to use a global flood in the future to do so again. That is what this is about, not about evolution.

Well- we assume the water isn’t salt water. This would dilute the salt significantly. This would kill the fish. Also, the water would be of a certain temperature. This would massively offset the temperature of the water. This would kill all fish that are highly sensitive to the temperature of their environment. Such fish exist to this day.

I submit that diluting the salt water would not kill all the salt water fish; there are sharks capable of living in both salt and fresh water, the same specie of shark. There are also fresh water sharks in Lake Titicaca and other fresh water bodies. There are other fish that go back and forth between salt and fresh water. All I’m saying is that there were enough fish after the flood to replenish the waters of this planet.
Your point about temperature is well taken. Again, I point to other cultures’ traditions of also having an ark, in different climates, as the survival tool of fish in different temperature waters.

That wasn’t my intent- It just seemed like you have took my statement about the ark not being able to sustain say, buffalo and anaconda (maybe those two can scrape by, don’t hold me to that particular example), to be a question of size rather than temperature. Just clarifying.

OK. As you can see, I recognized and addressed different water temperatures in different climates, in this post.

 

[donsnow]

Haven’t been counting them in my criticism, since Noah could have brought them on the ark- although I suppose the constant cloud cover would have killed them along with most cold blooded creatures. Hadn’t thought of that before, thanks for the heads up.

I would think that crocodiles on the shore were killed by the raging flood waters; and that other crocodiles in the water…well a lot were killed by floods and temperature but some survived. Life itself is very hardy and I think that enough individuals of some (not all) temperate species survived the flood and cloud cover to replenish the waters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all species had individual survivors, just some temperate species. As a matter of fact, we’ll never know how many species became extinct during and after the deluge.

 

[buffalo]

I would think that crocodiles on the shore were killed by the raging flood waters; and that other crocodiles in the water…well a lot were killed by floods and temperature but some survived. Life itself is very hardy and I think that enough individuals of some (not all) temperate species survived the flood and cloud cover to replenish the waters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying all species had individual survivors, just some temperate species. As a matter of fact, we’ll never know how many species became extinct during and after the deluge.

An interesting fact - salt and fresh water fish internal fluids salinity is almost the same.

 

[donsnow]

Exactly especially when you think how creationists think macro evolution over millions of years isn;t possible. Yet somehow seem to have no problem with major changes like the one you mentioned happening over just a few thousand years. It;s mindboggling.

I can accept that macro evolution as a theory is possible and was the tool which God used to effect His creation, if it comes to that. And, I also can accept that major changes, such as the glaciation of Antartica, can occur in thousands of years. Which makes me more broad-minded than both other Creationists and any evolutionary.

 

[donsnow]

An interesting fact - salt and fresh water fish internal fluids salinity is almost the same.

Good morning, buffalo -

Thank you for that support.

Well, I’m going to mosey over to some other CAF groups and forums. I’ll try to return this evening.

God is love,
Don

 

[tjm190]

No, it’s my opinion that some fish survived the deluge. There was no readaptation nor further evolution required; that both some fresh water and some salt water fish survived the flood and were around after it, to replenish the earth’s waters.
Now, I think my actual statements have different implication than you stated.

Some fish would- those that did not depend upon typical ocean levels of salt would have done just fine. However, diluting the salt water to the extent the deluge would have would have killed off our salt dependent friends.

Well, tjm, frankly I’m not talking about evolution. What evolution does is no matter to me. If you’ve found a flaw in evolution, when compared to the flood is not my argument. I’m saying God drew water from the heavens, water from the skies and water from the foundations of the earth, to cover the Earth with water. Then, after the flood, the waters evaporated into the sky as well as flowing back into the foundations of the Earth, to let the waters recede from the face of the Earth. This is not about evolution; it’s about God chastising and cleansing the Earth of sinful corruption and promising not to use a global flood in the future to do so again. That is what this is about, not about evolution.

The evolution related issue is the implication that the species diversity we see in salt water environments could have arisen in just the past few thousand years.

I submit that diluting the salt water would not kill all the salt water fish; there are sharks capable of living in both salt and fresh water, the same specie of shark. There are also fresh water sharks in Lake Titicaca and other fresh water bodies. There are other fish that go back and forth between salt and fresh water. All I’m saying is that there were enough fish after the flood to replenish the waters of this planet.
Your point about temperature is well taken. Again, I point to other cultures’ traditions of also having an ark, in different climates, as the survival tool of fish in different temperature waters.

Yes, some species can survive in both salt and fresh water. However, there are huge numbers of species that are limited to salt- all of these would have perished during the flood. The few thousand years that have supposedly passed since then are not sufficient to restore the salt-only species. And the bible story claims that all the animals were on Noah’s ark, did it not? Was all that chosen people business nonsense?