And then the water went… where? The idea of a global flood is so ridiculous that it fails on more levels than I would be able to list within the character limit of a post here. So I’ll just stick with one example: The three-toed sloth.
The three-toed sloth lives in South and Central America. Noah purportedly lived in the Middle-East. Imagine that Noah’s ark just touched down on Mount Ararat after the flood waters magically disappeared. Now, sloths only live in South and Central America, so these two sloths need to get there from the Middle-East. On the ground, they have a maximum speed of 7 feet per minute. So, close your eyes and imagine for a moment - a pair of sloths swimming across the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of 1750 miles.
Now, do the same for every other species of living thing, from army ants to koala bears to tomatoes. Each traveled thousands of miles from Mount Ararat to a specific location on the globe. Why? How? - Magic.
And that’s only one of hundreds of problems with the story that must be answered by “magic”.
How did Noah feed millions of species of animals? Magic.
Where did the water come from? Magic.
Where did the water go? Magic.
Why is there no geological layer showing evidence of a global flood? Magic.
Why do the pyramids at Giza show no signs of flood damage? Magic.
Why did the Flood not seem to affect the reign of Sargon of Akkad or any of the other cultures across the globe that survived the flood without even noticing it? Magic.
How did freshwater or saltwater fish and other sea-life survive when the ocean covering the earth would have been a mixture of salt and fresh water? Magic.
How did the polar ice caps survive without any evidence of being flooded? Magic.
Why do tree ring records show no evidence of a global flood? Magic.
Why does the fossil record (presumably formed by the flood) match so well to evolutionary theory? Coincidence.
How did the human population rebound so fast? According to Genesis, we go from 8 people to enough to build the Tower of Babel within 150 years.
So, given this, we have two choices:
A) Dismiss pretty much all of science, believe that reality is conspiring against us to make us believe something untrue and that the world is directed by waves of magical spells rather than by predictable natural forces.
B) Don’t take Genesis literally.
Distinct strata are not formed from a single event.
I’d say that’s still much older than 6000 years.
great ngill. i think you’ve found our starting point.
first i’ll just say that sloths are actually very good swimmers but i am more interested in tomatoes.
if we start out with the idea that there was a great flood, or something, [and associated events] which killed all the animals and plants which died in the last extinction event.
so, half the plants survived and birds, mammals, water-loving land creatures also survived provided the animals weighed less than 50kg.
so lets not worry about dates for now nor about exact details in the biblical story.
the gist of both history and the biblical account is that almost every living creature died at a certain specific point in history and that a few survived to repopulate the earth.
now we don’t know what this flood/catastrophe looked like nor how it happened nor how the associated natural events unfolded. but we know they happened.
the meteor strike on the yucatan which was supposed to have killed the dinos actually hit earth 300,000 years after the dinos had died out in an extinction event.
so, we are back to looking for a selective extinction event which could kill peter but not paul, providing that paul was less that 50 kg in weight, that he could also fly, or, that he could sometimes swim.
so the converse of this argument is that the fossils found in the extinction event were of heavy animals; they could not fly away from whatever it was; and they could not swim to safety.
so we can guess that the extinction event was not atmospheric, or the birds would be extinct. it was not explosive, or there would be no discrimination in the creatures which became extinct.
what did cause their extinction caught them by surprise, they could not evolve or adapt their way out of it. it did not occur slowly over a long period, because their fossil remains are all gathered in a narrow horizon.
however, whatever it was may have travelled more quickly than some selected land animals but was also slower or had no effect on air animals nor on light land animals which were good swimmers.
so we can see already the beginnings of a type of natural sorting of animals caused just by this catastrophe.
but tomatoes are also interesting; insofar as they represent the plant kingdom, and as such they represent life which could not run away from this thing, whatever it was.
so we learn a good bit about the catastrophe’s nature from the type of animal that survived and the types that did not survive. but i think there is even more to learn about what this catastrophe actually was by looking at what plants became extinct and where exactly they were growing and what areas they covered when alive.
if all significant large plants of specifically and exclusively low-lying areas became extinct at that time and plants from higher altitudes took over and colonized after the extinction event.
well, you see where i’m headed. and these are things and ideas that can be tested, - as people say.
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