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What Happens When You Die?
message 201:
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Lauren
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Apr 28, 2009 05:28PM
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Doesn't lava come from under the earth? Or inside the earth?Lava doesn't flood the Earth. The amount of magma that comes to the surface and becomes lava is offset by the amount of the Earth's crust that gets sucked back down into the Earth. The overall amount of material has to remain the same, unless you start adding new material from space.
Water can not come from the ocean to flood the entire Earth. It's simply nonsense. It's like taking a gallon jug with three cups of water in it and having that water suddenly flood the entire jug. If water from the bottom of the ocean is on top of Mount Everest, what's left on the bottom of the ocean? And how did all this water suddenly move against gravity?
Well, I don't see why we can't believe that if we believe the other miracles Jesus performed in the Bible.
Well that's hardly proof of anything. The miracles in the bible are true because the other miracles are true. And those miracles are true because the other miracles are true. Anyway, that's not my question. My question is, why is it so important that every last word be true? If the flood didn't happen, does your entire faith go away?
"he overall amount of material has to remain the same, unless you start adding new material from space."Subduction? I used to know that stuff.
Well, what if all the miracles are wrong?
Mod
Well, no, the faith doesn't go away. But that would make the Bible have a flaw, therefore not being fully trustworthy.
Mod
Then most of the Bible probably wouldn't be true.
Mod
And those miracles are true because someone saw them and wrote them down in the Bible.
Ninja wrote: "That's an inch every 10 seconds isn't it? Is that a problem for it to rain a lot?"You would drown standing up. No boat ever made would fail to sink. The highest rainfall ever recorded in 24 hours is 72 inches -- twelve minutes worth of the supposed Flood rain.
BTW, the Christian site you keep posting is a joke. The earth surrounded by waters overhead? The earth full of waters underground below? I have only two things to say to either one. First, the people who wrote this haven't the faintest understanding of physics or they would understand a thousand reasons that these postulates aren't just nonsense, they're laughable nonsense. I especially loved the bit that suggested that it never rained before the flood, because if it rained there might have been a rainbow. Only somebody that has absolutely no clue what a rainbow could have written that, just as only Bronze age shamans could have written anything so silly as to suggest that light wasn't actually electromagnetic waves before the flood.
Second. please understand that one would never be forced to make absurd assertions and carefully disguise them as "science" and put them on a website that is basically an enormous intellectual fraud if one simply looked at the evidence. If one looked at the evidence without the Bible in hand, and let the data speak, do you know what it would say? It would say that 13.5 or so billion years have elapsed from the big bang, which was not in any sense the "creation" described in the Bible (for one thing, nothing was actually created). Some billions of years in, a large sun was formed and burned quickly. It then collapsed and exploded, forging the heavy elements. Its remnants slowly recoalesced, forming the sun and the planets, including the earth, around five or six billion years ago. Four billion years ago the surface chemistry of the earth was very, very complex, because it was hot and wet the atmosphere was very different. The chemistry got complex enough to self-replicate, and once molecules existed that replicated, natural selection ensured that molecules that replicated the most successfully dominated the chemical seas, and somewhere in there it became "life".
Life evolved for four billion years (a really long time) growing ever more complex. It left an extraordinarily clear and remarkably complete (considering the ages and ages of time involved) record in the rocks. At the same time and completely consistently radioactive compounds were deposited in those rocks. In some cases the radioactive elements in those minerals decay into elements that are never found in the same mineral configuration as the original radioactive compounds. By examining the rocks and simply measuring how much of the original radioactive compound is left in an otherwise unstable mineral that never would have survived the process of rock formation intact, one has a clock. One has many clocks, actually, many independent clocks.
By reading those clocks, by counting the layers of the earth downward, by organizing the fossils found in those layers, a consistent picture has emerged verifying the process of biological evolution of species and the timeline of billions of years. One clock checks another, and all the clocks agree. If the Bible didn't exist, it would never occur to you to doubt any part of this, because it makes sense.
At the same time, looking out overhead, one can use ordinary parallax and a system of sorting out stars by their spectra and brightness and looking for Cepheid variables to measure distances out literally as far as our most powerful telescopes can see, using the entire spectrum of that non-frangible light and not just the tiny visible portion of it. What is revealed is a vast, vast Universe. You should go out some night and view it with a local astronomy group. One glimpse of the Andromeda Galaxy and you'll see for yourself that the Bible is just plain wrong and that the Universe is far larger, and far older, than it allows for. Billions of years older, billions of light years larger. Andromeda is enormous in the night sky and yet is so far away that without a telescope it is nearly invisible to the naked eye, its stars are too faint.
Now find yourself a good picture of all of the galaxies visible in just one tiny field of view of the Hubble. Many of them are far larger than Andromeda (which appears "large" only because it is so "close"). Many a person who formerly believed the Universe to be "young" changed their mind looking for themselves out at the stars. There is no way they are only 6000 years old, only 6000 light years away. Again, we can consistently estimate distances using many methods and we end up with a consensus view that makes the most sense and explains the data well.
The only reason you want to doubt that evidence is that you want to believe that the Bible is inerrant truth. Unfortunately, the evidence has its own story to tell.
Now you know that the Bible was written by men, and that men are often mistaken. If you travelled to visit desert tribes in rural Afghanistan, you would not be inclined, I think, to trust them as a credible source of information on how to build a television, or an airplane, or pretty much anything else scientific. They're superstitious and ignorant, just like you, but you know better, because you know, whether or not you want to acknowledge it, that your television, your computer, your car, airplanes, rockets to the moon, orbiting telescopes, microscopes that have revealed the real cause of disease (where the Bible somehow left that out), and all the other trappings of modern society would not work if we didn't understand how things work in the world.
You want it all, of course. You want to believe that God made the world, made a flood fall in some peculiar way and then drained the water off to, well, he just unmade it I guess because it's all gone. If he was just going to unmake all of that water, one wonders why He didn't just unmake all of the specific people who were irritating him and leave the poor animals alone, why all the smoke and mirrors. Or one would wonder, if one was permitted to wonder why God in the Bible has the character of a spoiled child and a despotic and violent king all rolled into one thoroughly unlovable being.
rgb
Mod
BTW, the Christian site you keep posting is a joke. The earth surrounded by waters overhead? The earth full of waters underground below? I have only two things to say to either one. First, the people who wrote this haven't the faintest understanding of physics or they would understand a thousand reasons that these postulates aren't just nonsense, they're laughable nonsense. I especially loved the bit that suggested that it never rained before the flood, because if it rained there might have been a rainbow."
SUGGESTED, as you said. They never claimed it didn't they just said MAYBE it didn't. They never said they knew for sure there was never any rain. And if they believe the Bible, then they believe that God can do it.
The chemistry got complex enough to self-replicate, and once molecules existed that replicated, natural selection ensured that molecules that replicated the most successfully dominated the chemical seas, and somewhere in there it became "life".
I like your wording. The chemistry GOT complex enough...
Tell me, how did it get more complex?
And SOMEWHERE in there it became "life".
Somewhere? But you don't know where or when?
At the same time, looking out overhead, one can use ordinary parallax and a system of sorting out stars by their spectra and brightness and looking for Cepheid variables to measure distances out literally as far as our most powerful telescopes can see, using the entire spectrum of that non-frangible light and not just the tiny visible portion of it. What is revealed is a vast, vast Universe. You should go out some night and view it with a local astronomy group. One glimpse of the Andromeda Galaxy and you'll see for yourself that the Bible is just plain wrong and that the Universe is far larger, and far older, than it allows for. Billions of years older, billions of light years larger. Andromeda is enormous in the night sky and yet is so far away that without a telescope it is nearly invisible to the naked eye, its stars are too faint.
Exactly, BIG universe. I find it hard to believe that chance, evolution, and a "big bang" created universe upon universe upon universe.
Unfortunately, the evidence has its own story to tell.
But we believe the evidence points in two different directions.
You want to believe that God made the world, made a flood fall in some peculiar way and then drained the water off to, well, he just unmade it I guess because it's all gone.
Ah, but you're wrong there.
Where Did All the Water Go?
And the waters receded continually from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters decreased (Genesis 8:3).
Simply put, the water from the Flood is in the oceans and seas we see today. Three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered with water.
As even secular geologists observe, it does appear that the continents were at one time “together” and not separated by the vast oceans of today. The forces involved in the Flood were certainly sufficient to change all of this.
Scripture indicates that God formed the ocean basins, raising the land out of the water, so that the floodwaters returned to a safe place. (Some theologians believe Psalm 104 may refer to this event.) Some creation scientists believe this breakup of the continent was part of the mechanism that ultimately caused the Flood.11
Some have speculated, because of Genesis 10:25, that the continental break occurred during the time of Peleg. However, this division is mentioned in the context of the Tower of Babel’s language division of the whole earth (Genesis 10–11). So the context points to a dividing of the languages and people groups, not the land breaking apart.
If there were a massive movement of continents during the time of Peleg, there would have been another worldwide flood. The Bible indicates that the mountains of Ararat existed for the Ark to land in them (Genesis 8:4); so the Indian-Australian Plate and Eurasian Plate had to have already collided, indicating that the continents had already shifted prior to Peleg. http://www.answersingenesis.org/artic...
Here, these also have some other info about the flood:
Where did all the water come from?:
http://biblicalgeology.net/Answer/Whe...
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig...
Some other info:
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-ede...
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig...
Oh, and your SECOND two sources of "evidence" for the flood contain not a single shred of "evidence". Just because somebody says "scientists believe" doesn't mean that it is true.In fact, no scientists believe in the flood myth. Not even Christian ones. The only people who do may pretend to be scientists, they may claim to be scientists, but they do not use science or the scientific method, they have no data to support their outrageous claims, and they ignore the mountains of data that is out there refuting it. As are you.
I do understand your reasoning process. Any hypothesis that permits you to continue to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, no matter how outrageous, will get your support. Where did the water come from? "Somewhere". Outer space. Underground. No, we can't see any trace of it in either place. It is ludicrous to imagine it in outer space. It certainly isn't underground and has never been underground (you have this problem, I think with the volumes we're talking about -- a layer of water six miles deep). If that's too deep to make sense (and it is) then what the heck, let's pretend that the mountains themselves must have moved up or down. That explains it! Now we're safe!
Where did the water go? Well, there wasn't that much water. (Really? Just how much water was there? Do the math.) It went back underground. It evaporated. God took it back into outer space -- gravity means nothing to Him. God made the water disappear. Poof! No more water. Water problem solved! By scientists, yet, if you say so!
What about freshwater fish? Ooo, better make something up to explain freshwater fish that die in salt water, since all species were either on the Ark or in the water. Guess Noah took freshwater aquariums. What about birds? Nearly all bird species can't swim. Hmmm, I'm sure there was plenty of room for birds. How big is a cubit, anyway? We could easily fit a breeding population of the world into a giant supertanker, couldn't we? How big are they? How many species are we talking about?
Next, let's make up some really amazing explanation for the marsupials ending up in Australia and the tapir in South America. Don't forget those pesky Galapagos! Don't think too much about the probabilities of such perfect separation of species according to geography! That way is a sure path to hell! Must find more scientists, preferably ones that cannot do arithmetic so that they won't see how absurd the base hypothesis is. Under no circumstances do the following experiment, even with your mind!
Do not take just the coins (a few hundred of each will be plenty) from all of the countries on all seven continents. Do not mix them up in a big vat. Do not pull random handfuls out and slap them down on seven tables. Do not, I repeat not, think about how likely it is that each table receives just the coins and all of the coins from any single country let alone sorting out right back where they came from.
And you KNOW that those african honeybees and fire ants and kudzu and snakehead fish and so on just love it here. It isn't like they wouldn't have survived here but would survive there. And don't think at all about survival -- of -- the -- fittest, for along that road lies damnation!
It's easy to be a Christian who believes in the perfect truth of the entire bible. You just have to put your eyes out, stop your ears, and refuse to use most of your cortex, especially the part associated with reason. Evidence against simply doesn't exist. It can't, because the Bible is true. If our eyes and ears and common sense say otherwise, they are just wrong!
rgb
Ninja wrote: "rgb wrote: "Ninja wrote: "BTW, the Christian site you keep posting is a joke. The earth surrounded by waters overhead? The earth full of waters underground below? I have only two things to say to ..."
Ninja, if the Universe is a big Universe, Genesis is wrong. If Genesis is wrong there, why are you defending it?
As for the waters exerting enough forces to rearrange the land masses -- please! Neither you, nor those you are quoting, has any clue as to what force is. You're better off just asserting "God made the water go away". That's really what you believe, anyway. You'd like to pretend that these things you are stating are "evidence" so you could convince me, but I teach physics. I understand and teach how and why light is bent by water droplets. I assure you, if the physics that makes it work was different before the flood, there isn't any point in talking about people as their chemistry wouldn't have worked. Chemistry is, after all, mediated by the exact same set of forces that we observe as light.
You are trying to defend the indefensible. The flood you (and the Bible) describe is completely nonphysical. Explain it, if you like, by God Made it by his Mighty Power, but don't pretend that there is evidence for it or that there was any physics in it.
Here's one I bet you can't find on your websites. Water gives off a rather large amount of heat when it condenses. That's why steam burns you worse than water. It gives off this heat on condensation -- it has nothing to do with the temperature of the water vapor at the time. Look up "latent heat of vaporization".
A rather lot of energy is released in a single, big rainstorm, say a hurricane. Of course in the case of a hurricane, the source of the energy is the warm ocean water that makes the clouds and that energy came from the sun over an entire summer to make fall hurricanes. Your silly websites have no rain falling before the flood, the earth misted every morning because it is so humid outside. Enormous amounts of energy tied up in those clouds overhead.
Where did it all go?
To get an idea of how much there was, think about boiling away the oceans -- that's how much, pretty close.
The right answer is "God made it miraculously go away because God can do anything" not "It melted the mountaintops and cooked every living thing including Noah in his ark, parboiled". And please, don't say "scientists have discovered evidence" that such a thing is possible because no, it's not.
rgb
Mod
That much water pressure, after sitting there for days (because they were in the ark a year, no just while it rained), well, part of it may have sunk into the earth. And the rest is the oceans that we have today. The earth is mostly covered with water. That doesn't mean it was always that way.
Guess Noah took freshwater aquariums.
And why is there a problem if he did? The ark was huge!
Here's a few links about the ark possibly being found today.
http://www.time.com/time/health/artic...
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=21...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ne...
Its overall dimensions were at least 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high with three interior decks. That's how big the ark was.
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr...
Mod
That sounds to be like evolution. Chance after chance, and then suddenly they all become right and create the universe.
Mod
I look around me, and I wonder how in the world all of this came out of some "primordial stew" and a "Big Bang" that we can't explain how it happened. Here's a non Christian site telling about it.
http://www.big-bang-theory.com/
According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. What is a "singularity" and where does it come from? Well, to be honest, we don't know for sure.
Say wha?
Mod
No, there's more than one universe. Even science says that, right? Or was that galaxies, oops. Or both? Sorry, not an astronomer. I just mean the one that we live in is pretty big. And then that there are more than just the one we live in. It's a big place to have just 'happened'.
Mod
"The biblical flood -
Is there any evidence for a biblical flood?
Was the biblical flood only a local event? (Did the flood look like the picture above?)
Could a forty day and forty night rain with "fountains of the great deep" breaking open cause a global flood?
Where did all the water go after the flood?
Why was there a flood to begin with?
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I'll be honest with the readers of this blog; I take the Bible by faith.
That doesn't mean that I won't engage in debates, listen to evidence from opposing viewpoints, and have a little fun with biblical apologetics but, in the end, it comes down to my faith in God and His Word.
We all have the same facts about what happened here on Earth in the distant past. What is in question is the interpretation of those facts.
So, any takers on the questions above?"
This is what s/he says, and then there is a discussion about it, kind of like this one
Mod
And someone says:
"There is proof. In three ways.
1) Every culture on earth has stories about a "flood" of some kind, with one man and his family being saved by a boat or raft (even Eskimos). Many are several thousand years old or more, some dating back to the time of the fertile cresent.
2) In every corner of the planet you can find, scattered here and there, a layer of strata that can only be fine mud or silt (even found under the Antarctica ice sheet). It contains the same types of elements all over the world and it represents the dividing line between the age of the dinosaurs and the age of mammals. Scientists all over the world recognize this layer, but disagree on what caused it. Forty days and nights of standing muddy water?
3) The earth is crissed crossed with ancient river beds, some over ten miles wide. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Near Vernal Utah you can stand and look at one such ancient river bed. It stands near vertical due to upheavel in the earths crust and contains virtually every species of animal, including dinosaurs and fossilized palm trees and wood, fish, turtles, birds, etc. How did they all die and get deposited together in one huge sand bar? Receeding flood waters?"
And also:
"As for layers, take a bottle and put dirt, sand, water, and rocks in it, shake it up now watch it settle and make many layers in just a minute. That might not prove anything, but something to keep in mind. Layers can form quickly, uniformly."
Meaning that it doesn't take billions of years for it to happen.
Mod
-The oldest known living trees, Bristlecone Pines in California, are about 5000 years old. This would coincide with the recovery of the earth after the flood.
-An analysis of 30,000 radiocarbon dating results published in the "Radiocarbon" journal shows an unmistakable spike in the death of living things about 5,000 years ago.
-The Origin of Civilization appeared near the resting place of the Ark at about the same time that the flood occurred.
-Fossils of once living organisms have been found in places not suitable for their habitat:
--In Lincoln County, Wyoming fossils have been found of an alligator, deep sea bass, sunfish, crustaceans, and palm leaves. Obviously these would not grow well in Wyoming's climate. It also suggest that at one time Wyoming was covered water. The fossils of the life found in this vicinity are very well preserved indicating a fast burial and preservation.
--The Florissant, Colorado fossil beds contain fossilized insects that are preserved remarkably well. In addition, the remains of giant sequoia trees have been found here. The sequoia trees and many of the types of insects do not exist in this region today.
-(4)Radiometric dating performed on volcanic rocks from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1986 indicated that the rocks were between .34 million years to 2.8 million years old. This suggests that the radiometric dating methods to determine the earth are at the best inaccurate.
--(4) Austin, Steven A. "Excess Argon within Mineral Concentrates from the New Dacite Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens Volcano", Institute for Creation Research . Link: http://www.icr.org/research/index/res...
-The shape of the continents hints that they may have been connected at one time. The fossil records of mountain ranges seem to indicate that the mountains were created by the collision of two continents. It is also noted that earthquakes are caused by movement of continents along fault lines. This supports the theory of plate tectonics. A catastrophe such as a the Biblical flood would create enough force to rearrange continents. In fact a flood of these proportions easily becomes a "best fit" for the geological data that exist today.
In my closing on this matter, a last statement from the site:
Although scientific evidence does exist to support many aspects of the Bible, conclusive evidence may never exist to prove or disprove these events. There are so many variables and aspects of science it is easy to interpret the data in a manner pleasing to your desire. I'm sure that Noah had no way to prove his belief in God's word to him (only his family believed him). But he found enough faith to work for 100 years to build a boat that people said he could not use. Scientific discussions may provide a spark of faith to believe the Bible. But, in reality, the choice of what to believe is based on faith. Some people have faith in science or mankind. Others put their faith in God.
Mod
I doubt this is a Christian website, therefore it is unbiased, or if it is biased, it's biased towards your arguments.
Through the understandings of modern science we have been able to provide firm theories for some of the answers we once called hypotheses.
From dictionary.com: a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.
It will be important to keep in mind that all of this information is constantly being questioned and reevaluated in order to understand the universe more clearly.
About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at one point. What exisisted prior to this event is completely UNKNOWN and is a matter of PURE SPECULATION.
Mod
Now that an attempt has been made to grapple with the theory of the Big Bang...
What, is it too complex to understand?
In the minuscule fractions of the first second after creation....
Wait, Big Bang Theory ADMITS that there WAS a creation? They just don't really know how it STARTED, right?
In the very beginning there was nothing except for a plasma soup.
Which came from where?
What is known of these brief moments in time, at the start of our study of cosmology, is largely conjectural.
Dictionary.com says: Conjectural-based primarily on surmise rather than adequate evidence; "theories about the extinction of dinosaurs are still highly conjectural"; "the supposed reason for his absence"; "suppositious reconstructions of dead languages"; "hypothetical situation"
However, science has devised some sketch of what probably happened, based on what is known about the universe today.
Dictionary.com says: Devised-to contrive, plan, or elaborate; invent from existing principles or ideas: to devise a method.
Also: To form, plan, or arrange in the mind; design or contrive:
Immediately after the Big Bang, as one might imagine, the universe was tremendously hot as a result of particles of both matter and antimatter rushing apart in all directions. As it began to cool, at around 10^-43 seconds after creation, there existed an almost equal yet asymmetrical amount of matter and antimatter. As these two materials are created together, they collide and destroy one another creating pure energy. Fortunately for us, there was an asymmetry in favor of matter.
So, you mean, like chance? Just saying, it sounds like it. It's like saying "Good thing I decided to ride my bike to work instead of drive. Luck must have been on my side, could have been me in that car accident."
Mod
Mod
As a direct result of an excess....
Do you think this is the right word? I just don't feel it is, but go ahead to if you want. No biggie, just saying.
....of about one part per billion, the universe was able to mature in a way favorable for matter to persist.
Able how?
The particles which began to dominate were those of matter. They were created and they decayed without the accompaniment of an equal creation or decay of an antiparticle.
Where did the particles come from? Mmm, wait, actually I think it's talking about pieces of the explosion, so it makes sense in terms of the theory.
But, created how? And where did they decay too? And why did they need to decay?
As the universe expanded further, and thus cooled, common particles began to form. These particles are called baryons and include photons, neutrinos, electrons and quarks would become the building blocks of matter and life as we know it
Let's head on over to dictionary.com again!
Quarks: Physics. any of the hypothetical particles with spin 1/2, baryon number 1/3, and electric charge 1/3 or −2/3 that, together with their antiparticles, are believed to constitute all the elementary particles classed as baryons and mesons
Notice how it says BELIEVED and not proven. Hmmm....
During the baryon genesis period there were no recognizable heavy particles such as protons or neutrons because of the still intense heat. At this moment, there was only a quark soup.
So we've got something that was created, don't know how, but then it exploded into a hypothetical soup.
Hypothetical: 1. assumed by hypothesis; supposed:
4.Logic.
a. (of a proposition) highly conjectural; not well supported by available evidence.
b. (of a proposition or syllogism) conditional.
Mod
Mod
After about one to three minutes had passed since the creation of the universe.....
Which, remind me again, was created how?
While it is true that much of this information is speculative,........
So, you don't know for sure then?
.....as the universe ages we are able to become increasingly confident in our knowledge of its history. By studying the way in which the universe exists today it is possible to learn a great deal about its past. Much effort has gone into understanding the formation and number of baryons present today. Through finding answers to these modern questions, it is possible to trace their role in the universe back to the Big Bang.
Subsequently, by studying the formation of simple atoms in the laboratory we can make some educated guesses.....
You could be known as the smartest person alive and still not have all the answers. I don't care how educated you are, it doesn't mean you are right.
.....as to how they formed originally. Only through further research and discovery will it be possible to completely understand the creation of the universe and its first atomic structures, however, maybe we will never know for sure.
"Maybe we will never know for sure? Are you serious? You follow something that you might “never know for sure”? Meaning that you aren't sure now.
"You could be known as the smartest person alive and still not have all the answers. I don't care how educated you are, it doesn't mean you are right."If science is 'wrong' then what makes you think religion is any more right? By default?
And actually, Yahweh and Allah are the same. SO, they already are. :)
lol conversations
The ark was huge? 1.5 football fields long is huge? Are you nuts? Have you ever actually been to a zoo?You cannot pack animals into a volume like you pack crates. Noah didn't freeze dry lions so he could stack them on top of all the antelopes. And I'm devoutly hoping that Noah wasn't supposedly technological, so that the ark was equipped with refrigeration and he only took fertilized eggs.
The problem with this sort of nonsense statement (which I predicted, if you'll look above -- I've seen these sites already) is that they indicate the usual profound lack of the ability to do simple arithmetic. Fine, so you want to take those silly sites at face value. You want me to become convinced and utter "Wow, you're right, the Ark was huge! Plenty of room for all the animals and their food! And Noah and his family were more than enough for taking care of them all!"
Why don't you set up "The Noah Experiment"? Prove to me that this is plausible. I'll make it easy on you. The experiment is to collect a breeding pair of every species in just North America. You may not use cars or field guides or scientific references or catalogs of books -- there were no such things available to Noah, you can't use them now. You are welcome to pray for divine help to lead you to exemplars of each species.
You may use beasts of burden to transport the animals you catch. You must use Bronze Age technology to build the cages you move them in, the carts with which they are moved. You may use roads, where they exist. You must store all of the animals you've already caught back where the "ark" is supposedly being built, and you must keep the ones you've caught alive while you catch the rest.
Good luck with those nectar eating bats, by the way! The one's I've tried to keep in my basement were lovely animals, but they don't do too well in captivity. In fact, most of the animals you catch won't do well in captivity. Something about yanking them out of an ecosystem and plopping them into a cage doesn't agree with them. But no veterinary medicine, no antibiotics! No cheating!
I'm dead serious, by the way. Heck, I won't even make you actually catch them. We'll make it a preliminary research project, one designed to simulate how Noah might have collected all of the species. You can go to libraries and find the most complete lists of NA species extant, and for each animal estimate the time of travel (Bronze Age methods) too and from, the habitat required by the animal, the food required by the animal, any special care required by the animal, and assign it an imaginary slot in your imaginary ark. It will be fun!
You'll quit long, long before you get through even the mammals. Of just one continental land mass. Bronze age methods is Lewis and Clark transport across North America, and most of the species you "collect" have highly specialized habitat and aren't easy to keep alive in modern zoos. Polar bears do not thrive in heat, for example. Nor do penguins (yes, you have to take Penguins -- or do you think that the water that fell/rose/whatever automatically adjusted its thermostat to match animals that happened to be in the water when it all started? In the oceans that were replenished by all that "mist" because it never rained (we call "not raining" a "drought" around here, because dew actually isn't enough to keep most plants alive, but I'm sure things were different in Noah's day and trees just needed a good misting to stay alive. Sure, that's plausible. Isn't it?
And please, I know that you're going to try to point me at some benighted website that claims to have done this, but they haven't. Seriously. We don't know TODAY how many species there are in North America. New species, most of them with highly specialized niches, are discovered all the time. Noah had to make a perfect sweep -- he couldn't afford to miss a single animal, a single salt-sensitive plant, a single insect, a single freshwater arthropod. Also, forget the "he only took babies" hypothesis. Statistics again -- you load a half-million to million species (as babies) onto a big boat. You can find many warehouses that match the ark's dimensions -- feel free to actually try this. Start loading whenever you like, but the trick is to keep all of those precious breeding pairs alive to reproduction of healthy offspring and the perpetuation of those species from single pairs.
No, you cannot do this, either. The science of genetics that you sneer at has this thing called inbreeding -- species require a certain amount of genetic variability in a population to survive. You'd lose species after species to mere accident -- what's the probability of losing one of your breeding pairs to disease (in a humid, stifling, shit-filled space with all the animals in too-close proximity -- one would think high, wouldn't one) or by stepping on them, or by forgetting which species of kangaroo rats were the breeding pairs and which ones were along to feed the owls and other raptors?
But none of this matters. Your hypotheses don't have to make sense. They don't have to have actual numbers -- that's too much work, and you're both too lazy and too scared of what you'll learn from attempting it. You know it is impossible, but you turn off your common sense and desperately cite anyone or anything that throws in old idea out that "might" explain each point, taking care never to look at any of those ideas too closely or working out the numbers lest you be forced to confront the fact that they obviously don't work out.
C'mon, it would be nightmarish to try to collect all the North American species on the back of donkey carts. The people who wrote the Old Testament lived in a dry, near desert climate. The ecology was fairly simple, and most of it was invisible to them anyway. It was perfectly plausible for Noah to load up an ark that held the principle land mammals found in their area -- it's just like the ark toy kits, two giraffes, two elephants, two deer, two lions...
But don't forget those blind fish! Or some of the other really interesting species in the salt flats and waterways of the southwest. Some of the ecosystem is so fragile, and the animals so well adapted to it (and unlikely to survive when removed from it) as to really drive you/Noah crazy.
Oh, did I mention no glass aquariums? Only pottery, please. And the best of luck with that...
Finally, your offhand remark comparing my little thought experiment to evolution is direct evidence that you are almost completely ignorant of the theory of probability and statistics, nothing more. If you like, I'd be happy to reformulate the problem to simulate evolution in action so you can see how it works. Because it does work -- see "genetic algorithms" in computer science, which are known on theoretical grounds to be more powerful than human intelligence in solving a wide range of problems. That is, I can give you many, many problems that a GA will solve and do well on where if I leave it to you -- especially you, since you cannot do math at all, pretty obviously -- your "intelligence" will prove to be far less than the amazing random algorithm postulated by Darwin.
It works, in other words. It works in the laboratory. You can even understand how it works, and watch it working, if you try.
But you won't, just like you won't actually try the gedanken experiment above, you'll simply post a linear mile of quotes from other websites that don't share five actual scientific references between them.
rgb (speaking for the Society of Antichrist Scholars, that global conspiracy invented by Satan to make people doubt Jesus, starting with the Flood.)
(Or that's what you think, anyway...;-)
Nathan wrote: "You know, these conversations with fundamentalist Christians always go the same way.Fundamentalist Christian: "I thik this is true because it is in an archaic text written by people who knew no..."
OMG!! I've actually had a conversation with someone like that before@!!!!!! Pretty much the same words too!!
ARGUMENT FROM NONBELIEF(1) The majority of the world's population are nonbelievers in Christianity.
(2) This is just what Satan intended.
(3) Therefore, God exists.
I'm not sure if you said it, but how did the Koala manage to get off of the island? And back on, and all marsupials just HAPPENED to all move to an impossible location?
rgb wrote: "The ark was huge? 1.5 football fields long is huge? Are you nuts? Have you ever actually been to a zoo?You cannot pack animals into a volume like you pack crates. Noah didn't freeze dry lions..."
oh and FYI he didn't have the habitats or the food or the time to get and keep all the animals into a tiny ship and get two of EVERY animal EVERY including EVERY bug and EVERY animal even the NEW species that we only learned about last year!
Yeah, like that. Exactly. It is completely implausible, once you think about the numbers. Creationists never think about numbers. They can't. If they did, they wouldn't be creationists because Creationism does not add up.rgb
They had no animals that only a God could give them. They never had bison, they had no pandas, they had no blue-footed boobies. Just sheep and other livestock.
What about fire ants? Collecting them must have been fun. And did Noah really only take two fire ants? What about aphids? Noah had to take more than two aphids so he could feed the ants that live on aphids. Both of them. And the way honeybees reproduce, taking just a queen and a drone pretty much guarantees that there won't be any viable bee offspring, unless Noah's kids used their teensy weensy tweezers (made of reeds, no steel allowed) to help baby bees come out of the combs and clean off their little antennae and feed and groom the queen and the drone.And what about those cute little ground-dwelling owls described in hoot? Even finding their habitat is a bit tricksy. And I can just imagine Noah traipsing through the Everglades, combing every square foot of it for species that might live noplace else on Earth. Be sure to break open every rotting log to look for snakes, beetles, particular kinds of fungus, even regional bacteria that cannot survive immersion in salt water. Its an entire ecosystem you have to reconstruct on the far side. In fact, it is thousands of ecosystems, maybe even tens of thousands.
Hey, don't worry about the effects of deforestation or global warming. Clearly we could wipe out the entire Amazon tomorrow and reestablish all of its species in a functioning ecosystem out of zoos and gardens. That's surely obvious. I mean, how many species can there be? How intertwined could they be? Surely a frog that breeds only in freshwater pools trapped in bromeliads a hundred feet off of the ground would be perfectly happy being dumped into a terra-cotta jug, carried off to greater Mesopotamia, and left to its own devices for a century or so while Noah collects all the rest of the millions of species, right? It can sit right next to the overheating polar bears, your little koala happily munching its Eucalyptus trees that Noah brought back and planted but that mysteriously died out post flood everywhere but Australia.
The difference between "a theory" and so much hot air is the attention paid to details and arithmetic. A theory has to be consistent, top to bottom. It cannot be chock full of ad hoc assumptions. Where it doesn't know something, it should acknowledge that it doesn't know something. Where the numbers don't add up that's very, very bad -- a fundamental inconsistency.
In 1000 BCE Genesis was what passed for plausible cosmology. Obviously, it wasn't science. It was observation based, sure, but the observations were all local observations, because they thought the world was flat and ended right over the horizon, so to speak. Even within that small world, distances were distorted by the needs of the story, facts didn't add up.
Egypt is at most a few weeks walk from Israel, for example, with almost nothing separating them, but it took Noah "forty years" to get there. Is this plausible? Of course not. You walk out of Egypt there isn't really anyplace to go but Israel unless you just wander about randomly and take a turn through India or something. Although you could walk to India and back several times in forty years.
Ninja, you seem fond of asking how so many "universes" could have been created without a Creator as if that isn't direct evidence against the truth of Genesis as they are big and far, far away and their light has been en route here for billions of years, not thousands.
You obviously aren't actually reading my posts -- did you catch the bit about "Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy"? Do I need to post a link or something, or block copy ten pages from physics sites that talk about this, or give you the thousands on thousands of scientific references that validate it (and which discuss the consequences of its failure)?
We've never observed the creation of one single thing. You're all over me about how the initial assembly of a "living" system of molecules out of pre-existing stuff might have come about, in blissful ignorance I'm sure of any actual chemistry organic or otherwise -- if I wasn't there, how do I know that a Flying Spaghetti Monster didn't reach down and push just the right molecules together in just the right order with Its Noodly Appendage?
In place of this you assert that the same FSM simply waves its magic noodle and poof, there it is. A Universe, made out of nothing, for no reason. It is easier for you to believe in something from nothing, in pure magic, than it is for you believe that the Universe itself might be eternal. Which it must be even according to you -- remember, God lives IN the Universe, because the Universe is everything that exists. If God exists, God is part of the Universe (or maybe the whole thing).
Either way, an eternal Universe is required for an eternal God simply because of what the words mean. There is no logical way for a Universe to be created by a creator. It isn't just an assertion unsupported by evidence. It is impossible, a direct contradiction of the meanings of the words.
Now that we've established that God needs a Universe (if he exists) prove to me that the Universe needs to have a God. Logically it is not necessary. I can imagine a Universe that contains a God. I can imagine the same Universe, identical in every detail, without a God. I cannot, no matter how hard I try, imagine a God without a Universe.
Where is this God? Nowhere, as anyplace that exists is part of the Universe. When is this God? Nowhen, as any time that exists is part of the Universe. Of what is God made? Of nothing, as everything is part of the Universe. By the mere definition of the word "Universe". God without a Universe is nowhere, at no time, made out of no thing. This God is the Void, the absence of all things. The yawning pit of evil, satan disincarnate, unreason, the great contradiction, the opposite of being.
You cannot construct the set of all things that exist, and then assert that God exists but is not part of the set of all things that exist. That's just silly.
With that hopefully clear, we see that:
a) The Universe does not need a creator. It was not created. It cannot be destroyed. "Creation" and "Destruction" only take on meaning as concepts within its already existing bounds. The notion of God as the necessary creator is and has always been an absolute abuse of ontological logic, as it is untrue that everything requires a cause. Nothing requires a "cause" in the sense of creation; the meaning of "causality" in physics is connected to "causal interaction", rules for understanding how stuff moves around consistently according to a set of natural laws, one of which is that creation never occurs.
b) The book of Genesis is incorrect. Really we only need to show that the Bible is incorrect in one tiny detail. That's enough to free one's mind enough that one can permit oneself to doubt the next obvious myth, and the next one, and the next one. It's a slippery slope indeed, but one that leads away from the Pit of unreason, the horror of unearned belief, the cancer of unfounded knowledge, the madness of a persistent belief in the supernatural and magic that blocks any possibility of your coming to actually understand the world as it is.
Open your eyes. Open your mind! Try not accepting everything you were taught! Say to yourself, Gee, what if the entire scientific community of the planet is actually right and the book of Genesis is actually wrong? Maybe I'd better actually FIGURE ALL THIS STUFF OUT instead of accepting the dubious authority of others, and learn some calculus and probability theory! Maybe I'd better learn about Genetic Algorithms and how (and if) they work to solve amazingly complex problems, problems that neither people nor computers can solve any other way. Maybe I'd better learn to understand radiometric dating and realize what my rejection of that method means in terms of observable consequences.
rgb
Pure ownage. :) The majority of people just accept what they were told as kids. But Santa Clause was something parents said. Easter Bunny. Tooth Fairy. We ignore those lies when it comes to religion.
Any argument to put God into the Universe is like dividing by zero (for me) because by doing so I can make 1=0 and then anything goes. If God requires us to unravel all logic, then he doesn't exist.
Lauren, anytime you're in the market for adoptive parents, let me know.How many 15 year olds even know how to prove 1 = 2 (provided you can slip the old divide by zero trick in algebraically, hand quicker than eye)?
Have you seen this site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_proof
It's such fun!
a = b
a^2 = ab (multiply by a)
a^2 - b^2 = ab - b^2 (subtract b^2)
(a - b)(a + b) = b(a - b) (factor)
a + b = b (divide out the a - b from both sides)
and finally, let a = b = 1:
2 = 1
Oops...;-)
But God doesn't require you to unravel all logic, if and only if God = Universe.
As you've noted, there are bad sides to leaving theists a loophole -- it's "simpler" to just leave God out of it and feel awe directly for the Universe itself without the anthropomorphic projection of a personality onto it, and theists want to turn right around and name the Universe "Jesus", or "Allah" and then you're right back where you started, as they personify and anthropomorphize and project their own neuroses onto an imagined creator of that which does not require creating. Then they allege that this anthropomorphic deity behaves the way they'd behave if they were God, demanding worship, generally behaving like a spoiled child, randomly punishing or rewarding the various Ken and Barbie dolls in his back yard with tea parties and sex or being cast into the barbie-cue grill for doing precisely what was ordained in the beginning of time. The bible even says that he does it just to exalt his own name.
This is a bad side effect, agreed, but I think it's clear that no argument, however logical, can stop them. If they could do logic and math, how could they end up not only theists but scriptural literalists? So ignore them.
There is, however, a substantial class of people who for one reason or another take comfort in the notion of God. They generally don't anthropomorphize God too much -- they just like the feeling of presence and connectedness the notion that the Universe is in some sense "alive" gives them, that however impersonal it is in its operation, there might be some measure of compassion in the grand scheme of things.
These people continue to go to e.g. Christian churches not because they are really Christians any more, but because they enjoy the company, the opportunity to do a bit of good from time to time, they like the marryings and buryings and take comfort from them, too. They are deists, possibly even pandeists, but they don't know it because their whole lives have revolved around the dualistic choice, Christian or godless heathen and outcast.
These folks are often swayed by reason. Demonstrate that pandeism is the only viable worldview that can contain God and not be self-contradictory in some way, and you open the door for many people to leave the Church and replace it with the simple joy of being alive in a Universe that may or may not be alive right back (and is certainly the support of all life either way).
rgb
lol If I continue being a pest at home they might consider it. "Then they allege that this anthropomorphic deity behaves the way they'd behave if they were God, demanding worship, generally behaving like a spoiled child, randomly punishing or rewarding the various Ken and Barbie dolls in his back yard with tea parties and sex or being cast into the barbie-cue grill for doing precisely what was ordained in the beginning of time. The bible even says that he does it just to exalt his own name."
Which is exactly why whatever in the Bible was made up.
And a lot of people don't even realize they're become deists/pantheists/whatever. But they like the company of the church community. If secular societies started more community-like groups, it would be more appealing to people.
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I already have. Actually you've all had some very good questions and arguments during this discussion. I'm glad of that, because it does make me question what I believe.
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I've already doubted my religion once in my life. I did look at what I was taught, by my parents, my school, the Bible.
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You can't prove the Big Bang happened, and I can't prove creation happened.
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But Nazareth does exist, correct? And you said believed, not proven.
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At least it knows where the world came from, whereas Big Bang can only speculate.
Ninja wrote: "The Big Bang Theory has flaws, science states that, and you believe the Bible is flawed, or entirely not true. Well it's Historically accurate, as far as places in it go, so you know it's at least ..."But we have more evidence about the Big Bang than you do about creation
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I'd give you proof, but I doubt you'd read it, care, or count it as reliable, just as with much of what I have said.
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The best evidence for creation and design is within all of us. It is our reality. It is what we see, feel, touch, smell and our overall consciousness. It is knowing what it is like to be me. Generally, it is very easy for us to distinguish between natural and created items. Even the staunchest evolutionists admit that living things appear designed. That is why evolutionist Richard Dawkins wrote the book titled “The Blind Watchmaker.”
Well, without the last part about the book.
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Ninja wrote: "GreenDaisy BlackStem wrote: "But we have more evidence about the Big Bang than you do about creation "I'd give you proof, but I doubt you'd read it, care, or count it as reliable, just as with mu..."
I would read it if you typed it yourself and I do care because otheriwse I would not be here
Mod
The Male - Female Problem
The simplest and most compelling argument for Creation is the male/female pairing issue.
Abstract: If an animal mates with another animal not of its exact species, the result will be a sterile creature (e.g. a horse mating with a donkey produces a sterile mule). If animals of a given species mate and produce an abnormal offspring (i.e. a mutant), it also is sterile. Therefore, how could the macro evolutionary process advance? How could a "mutant" (i.e. advances in form) reproduce? It would first have to be fertile itself. It would have to find a sexually compatible mate who was also fertile during its relatively miniscule life span on the overall evolutionary time scale. Thirdly, their offspring would also have to be fertile and be able to continue the advance. So if single celled animals formed in the primordial soup and they were asexual (not have either male or female characteristics, but reproducing by themselves, how would they advance to a hermaphroditic state (having both male and female sexual organs) and then to the higher orders of animals which almost always have distinct male and female reproductive organs? All in-between states are sterile.
The Details: Evolution can only explain asexual or self-fertilizing hermaphroditic reproduction. Yet we have tens of thousands of the higher orders of species with perfectly matched sexually sets of males and females. And any deviations from a normal union and offspring is sterile (not capable of reproduction). Why? How could evolutionary processes possibly explain what we see all around us today?
In short, the theory of evolution states that lower life evolved over eons into higher life forms. Many lower life forms (generally single cells or plants) are asexual, which is what one would expect if the theory of evolution had any validity. If the evolutionary process was to continue however, we would expect the continuation of asexual characteristics or possibly hermaphroditic characteristics (i.e. having both sets of sexual reproductive organs). Moreover, an evolving hermaphroditic creature should be able to self-fertilize itself. Without asexual characteristics or self-fertilizing hermaphroditic characteristics, how possibly could a mutant entity reproduce? The chance of such a mutant finding an exact complementary mate within its lifespan would be extremely remote given the infrequency of mutations, and especially fertile mutations.
Yet scientific observation reveals that of all the hermaphroditic creatures, only the flatworm is self-fertilizing. Moreover, there are no (or a statistically insignificant number of) creatures that we might suppose or rationalize as evolving. Given the eons of time for evolution to take place,we should expect to see many creatures at all stages of the evolutionary process. But we don't see any missing links to speak of, or creatures in transition. (Once in a while some "scientist" will speculate and publish some "finding" which is generally discarded later)
When we find a mutant in the higher level creatures, it is nearly always sterile. Furthermore, the offspring of cross specie types are always sterile (such as the mule, an offspring of a horse and donkey or the offspring of one type of dolphin mating with another type of dolphin.).
Again, how can possibly sterile creatures reproduce and continue the evolutionary process? They can't!!!
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I don't know enough to type it all myself. I learn as I go, and then pass the info on.
Ninja wrote: "And still, none of you can answer me where the stuff came from to start the Big Bang."It always existed, it exists, it always will exists. Where do think the stuff came from that made the stuff that started the big bang? Just what do you think "stuff" is? Did God "wish it into existence"? What did he wish it out of? Where was he when he did it? When was this? If he existed, was anywhere, anywhen, then the question is recursive. Where did that stuff come from? Where did that spacetime originate? Or was it, like everything else that exists, eternal. As best we can tell, based on evidence, not on scripture.
I, at least, can tell you in gross terms what it is, even though it didn't "come" from anywhere it WAS everywhere, always. It's mass-energy. If you want to learn about it, take a course in it. Read Wikipedia pages. Watch the discovery channel. There's some bullshit mixed in there because it is difficult to accurately transform a mathematically formulated theory into English, so it's easy to discover "paradoxes" in it in an English expression that aren't there in the mathematics or the physical theory, and there are questions that don't have answers, but what you realize is that the question "Is there a God" is a question that really doesn't have an answer, at least one accessible to humans.
You should read Hume's Dialogues Concerning a Natural Religion and commentary thereupon. There is no amount of finite empirical evidence that would suffice to prove Deity. In fact, empirical evidence doesn't "prove" anything at all in the sense of Aristotelian logic. We live and learn in a non-Aristotelian Universe, and the dualism presented as "the only choice" by the Church is an utterly false dichotomy, as was it "religious" support of Aristotle. Newton's first law wasn't formulated because it is necessary -- it is a trivial consequence of the second. It was formulated as a direct refutation of Aristotle.
So "I don't know, and we (as humans) can never know" is, as it turns out, not only an acceptable answer but the only correct answer for many things. A good answer to keep in mind...
Finally, the Bible is not historically accurate. It is chock full of inaccuracies. Actual archeologists working in the Middle East are finding that most, possibly all, of the OLD Testament is fiction, citing nonexistent places, mixed in with inherited Sumerian Myths (including the Flood myth, which predates the OT by a goodly amount). When you live in a riverine culture, floods happen. Big floods get first remembered, then mythologized. Perfectly understandable.
There is a huge difference between the BB theory and the OT, by the way. Science makes no claim that the theory is definitely correct and never has. It claims, correctly, that it is the best provisional explanation we have so far for the data we accumulate by observation and fit into a body of consistent knowledge that is all derived from experience, is all experimentally reproducible and testable, and that appears to work amazingly, astoundingly, incredibly well.
The Bible, on the other hand, asserts that it is perfect truth, is taught as being true by authority and unchallengable unless you want to go to hell. It is a document of pure intellectual extortion -- believe in the truth of this in the face of all reason or you will be tortured for an eternity by a loving and compassionate God.
By this magazine, or we'll shoot this dog...
rgb
(P.S. -- the last bit is a reference to one of my favorite National Lampoon covers, in case anybody cares. Google it up. NL also has a great series in it called "Son o' God Comix" that are a direct mockery of the comics that are distributed by certain sects of Christianity, showing Jimmy and Suzy being tempted by Satan, giving in, having an horrible accident, and ending up in Hell weeping as their flesh burns off of their bones only to be restored and burned again.
Extortion, not civilized discourse, critical thought, self doubt, or reason.)
P.P.S.And I can so prove the Big Bang. That is, there is actual evidence to support it. There is no evidence to support a young creation -- all evidence (and I do mean all) contradicts it.
rgb
"2103611 And still, none of you can answer me where the stuff came from to start the Big Bang. "I've said it. IT WAS ALWAYS THERE
What are the 'flaws' in Big Bang Theory?
Questioning Society
Books mentioned in this topic
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (other topics)Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (other topics)
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (other topics)
The Upanishads (other topics)
