Restoring My Beliefs

  • Thread starter McLaren
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Hey, then we are both failures. :cheers:

Personally, I love science. Chemistry, Biology, and all the other genres are fascinating. None of us know everything, so I guess we'll wait and see.
 
Guy ..not for anything but you TOTALY lost me when you claimed mankind was only 6,000 years old .
 
Here's the explanation I have: Biblical timelines date mankind, plants, animals and all other biological organisms on earth to around six thousand years old. Based on the first chapter of Genesis, it seems that the earth was already here before that and was covered entirely in water. While scientists say that they have carbon dated fossils to over one hundred thousand years old, they reject the notion of a world-wide flood survived by Noah and his Ark. Carbon-14 is water soluble. Therefore, ancient fossils have so little trace of Carbon-14, and scientists merely state that they must be that old. Many scientists will admit that carbon dating gets really inaccurate after several thousand years. They estimate and take the most logical answer. They have not proved these timelines. "The earliest records we have of human history go back only about 5,000 years."—"World Book Encyclopedia, 1966 edition, Vol. 6, p. 12.

However, there are at least three ancient flood narratives that I know of. I'll let someone else state why they are rejected by science.
 
Well, to answer your question, mankind is only 6,000 years old, mankind was created, and people lived to just under 1,000 years old before the flood.
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As an Anthroplogy studier this makes me laugh...we have stuff dated back futher then that and it a modern human, not to mention the Neanderthals that are found which are much older.

And this says you are wrong:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0216_050216_omo.html
 
herefore, ancient fossils have so little trace of Carbon-14, and scientists merely state that they must be that old. Many scientists will admit that carbon dating gets really inaccurate after several thousand years. They estimate and take the most logical answer.
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There are other forms of radio dating which are very accurate.

To say that man kind has been around for 6000 years is frankly naive. As is this world wide flood business. I won't even explain, as your obviously smart enough to see why. Actually...I will.

However, there are at least three ancient flood narratives that I know of. I'll let someone else state why they are rejected by science.
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They are rejected by science because it simply makes no sense, there simply isn't enough water on the earth to do it, and even if there was, where did it all go??? There is no evidence to support this world wide flood, so it is ignored. A world wide flood would cause MASSIVE ecological damage and would leave evidence today to support it. Also, there is no way in hell noah could have put a pair of the MILLIONS of species of animals on his boat, feed, and care for them all, then drop them off in the correct locations. For example, all the marsupials in australia etc etc. It's frankly ridiculous. Then after the flood, what would the animals eat? The carnivores would be buggered. Then there's the massive amounts of inbreeding that would have had to have take place... The there's the decimation to all the forests and plant life, oh I could go on, but you get the idea.

If you really look at it, it makes no sense. These storys are meant to give a message, not to be taken as litterall truth.

Sorry for the crap gammar in this post. It's late. And sorry for the turbo editing.
 
I was just providing the timeline given for mankind in the Bible, and the general response by Christians to it. Personally, I think the Earth was here long before Adam and Eve. There is a verse in the New Testement stating that when we are in heaven we will be like the angels. If that is true, maybe the souls we know as angels were once humans on earth, and different from us. This is just a wild curiosity of mine, and I have never ran across anyone else working on a theory similar. I haven't looked all that fervently either.

Realize that that idea is extra-Biblical, and what I read in the Bible takes precendece over my other questions and curiosities. Here is a link of a Christian scientist speaking favoribly of the more accurate dating systems. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/wiens2002.pdf#search='christian%20dating%20techniques.
 
You are still saying that mankind hasn't been here all but 6000 years, which fossile records say you are dead wrong, and so does the study of Anthropolgy. I suggest you take an anthro class, you will learn a lot.
 
Who wrote the Bible? What were their names? When were they born? What did they look like? What does God look like? In order to have influence he must be a physical object. He must be tangible in some sense. If we cannot see him surely we must be able to detect him through some intrument, correct? It takes something tangible to hold energy and disperse it. Sound does not travel in a vacuum because there is no medium for it to travel through. The source of the sound is obviously material, as it can vibrate and creat sound. Since we do have material in and around this planet for a higher being to transmit energy of any sort through, the source of the energy must be physically real. You may say that proves God is real, but I say he that is an invalid statement until proven true. I'd like you to actually bring God to me, so I can shake his hand.
I'd also like you to personally go out and gather two of every single living thing on this planet--yes, plants are alive--and put them all in one boat. Don't forget bacteriums and the millions, possibly billions or trillions of different types of them. And the funny thing is that some of them "change" so quickly that we can literally watch the process under a miscroscope. Hey, I just had an idea. Maybe this "ark" was the earth itself, and the flood was water flowing through space. It makes just as much sense to me as the current myth.

@ Blazin: Dahze has already established that he believes carbon dating to be falable and inaccurate, so we might as well stop with the whole dating game. Start arguing about how long it takes for dirt to pile up.
 
This is God...

god1.gif


:lol:
 
Right. Show me some cold hard physical evidence that it happened. It was only 6000 years ago or what ever, so there should be a TON of it.

Also that link is garbage. Who ever wrote that is frankly a fool who doesn't quite realise how many animals there really is, or how much food you would need to feed them all.

As far as the problem of obtaining the animals is concerned, the Lord solved this merely by sending them to Noah (note Genesis 6:20), so that he didn’t have to go searching for them at all. Animals can migrate long distances, especially when impelled to do so by imminent weather changes. These still-mysterious “instincts” were implanted somehow within those animals the Lord wanted preserved, and He thus caused them to “come unto” Noah and the place of safety from the gathering storm.
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FROM LINK

How does a kangaroo cross an ocean? If your as rational as you claim, you must be able to see why it doesn't work. I refuse to believe that a modern educated person can really, deep down, believe this. It makes no sense, none what so ever, and I'll be honest, it annoys the hell out of me that there are people so backwards.
 
He has God give him an almighty hand, of course.

And Blazin, okay you've shown me God, now gather Him at my front dor step so I can show him the pastel pictures I drew when I was 10. Does he like beef? Because that's what we're having for dinner.
 
Actually what I believe God to be is indeed your innerself telling you what you believe is right or wrong. God is nothing more then your mind.
 
Well I'm off to bed. When I get up, I'll log on and read the incredible physical evidence that you will post proving that the flood happened, shutting skeptics like myself up forever. After all, your a rational person, and you wouldn't just believe everything you read...right?

I already know that your gonna post sweet FA in terms of real evidence. Oh well.
 
@ Blazin: I think that's what all evolution-type people believe. He's a friend you can ask advice of when you're down. That is the way he should be viewed.
People live because, subconsciously, we need questions answered. We need to know everything. That's why we keep on living and paying taxes, so we can learn. If God is the answer to everything it leaves absolutely no questions to be answered, which, in turn, means that our lives are even more pointless than if we were just the product of random events. That of course would be debated by danoof (again, intentionally spelled wrong), the whole "random" thing. Why is the sky blue? God made it that way. Why does ligth behave as waves and as particles? God did it. God did everything, there, that's all you need to know, now you know you're life is pointless. Besides, we'll all be happier in Heaven, since all we have to do is say "sorry" after we kill our mothers in order to be forgiven.
That's something like what those extremist Muslims believe and that's why [sarcasm, though it's closer to true than not]they don't have a word for why, how, when, where, who, what, and don' have TVs.[/sarcasm, though it's closer to true than not]
 
According to my Sociology class that is pretty right. We studied the affect religion had on people from long ago, if you were a poor serf working under the king and never saw any thing other then your hovel, meger food, etc. you would have a pretty crappy life. However if you believed the evil king who was selfish and a bad person in your mind would go to hell and you would go to heaven...you wouldn't hate life, nor fear death.
 
Well, how many animals were there at the time and how much food would it take considering variables such as each respective animal's age when entering the ark, size when entering, and other such variables that could impact an Ark's failure to hold that capacity? Provide documented figures illustrating the ark's capacity as inadequate.

If one of you are willing to consider the creation text in Genesis, notibly how God divided the waters from the land (singular). The theory of the Pangea Supercontinent gave way to the theory of plate tectonics. Your contemporaries also acknowledge that land bridges allowed humans to migrate across the continents.

code_kev
I refuse to believe that a modern educated person can really, deep down, believe this.
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It might help if you educate yourself with the research of scientists who share your point of view, they answer your kangaroo dilemna within the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics. And those theories were only proposed after they started looking for a reason why biological life was geographically located where it should not be.

While at Marburg, in the autumn of 1911, Wegener was browsing in the university library when he came across a scientific paper that listed fossils of identical plants and animals found on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Intrigued by this information, Wegener began to look for, and find, more cases of similar organisms separated by great oceans. Orthodox science at the time explained such cases by postulating that land bridges, now sunken, had once connected far-flung continents. But Wegener noticed the close fit between the coastlines of Africa and South America. Might the similarities among organisms be due, not to land bridges, but to the continents having been joined together at one time? As he later wrote: "A conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind."
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html
 
Provide documented figures illustrating that the ark existed in the first place. Anyway...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_land_bridge

Pangea is the "theory" that is most accepted. Or has it been made fact now? The Bering Straight was once a shallow sea, much shallower than it is now. When the latest ice age came along, the ocean levels lowered because the water was freezing at the poles. The level was lowered so much that a small swatch of land opened up between Russian ans Alaska, which was travelled, over a few thousand years, by humans and animals. The most accepted theory for the cause of the ice age is a gradual drop in CO2 that resulted in lowering temperatures. The drop in CO2 was complimented at the sme time by a rise in O2. This is also the period, before the ice age, when most animals were fairly large. The plants sucked up all the CO2 that the planet started cooling and ho!, it got cold and frozen. After a while, the animals died, the plants died, the CO2 levels rose again, the planet started warming again, and now we're where we are.
I think all that stuff happened because it was governed by the laws of physics, not because God sprinkled some cold and said "BAM!" like Emeril.

Now, I'm no historian, so I'm guessing that some of my superiors will straighten me out, possibly you, but you get the idea. There is a legitimate answer to every question and science is out to find it. It's not as simple as "God said so".
 
Who wrote the bible anyway:odd: Believing there's a higher power is one thing, it's something all humans tend to think. It's the only thing that has linked civilizations all over the globe for thousands of years.
But writing a bible about it? If God exists, why would he give away how he created the earth and all the other stuff?

3.Consistent with or based on reason rather than emotion
4.Based on scientific knowledge or theory rather than practical observation
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Just observe this conversation. I can't believe how someone could write a bible, and expect everything to be correct immediatly??
Dahze_dichriste, there could still be a God even if the whole friggin bible was wrong. What if there is a God, but he "made" the world in a totally different way, would that hurt you emotionally?

My point? Remember that God itsself is the focus in religion, not the vague story surrounding him.
 
It might help if you educate yourself with the research of scientists who share your point of view, they answer your kangaroo dilemna within the theories of continental drift and plate tectonics. And those theories were only proposed after they started looking for a reason why biological life was geographically located where it should not be.
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It might help if you educated yourself. Continental drift and what not takes SLIGHTLY longer then a thousand years to move whole fricking continents. Plate tectonics simply don't work like that. Hell if you were right, we'd hace kanagoos etc in other countries also, but we don't. Why? Because Ausie land has been adrift so long that things have had time to evolve in to their current states.

You hide behind the face of rationalism, but you failed to provide even a single piece of real evidence that a world wide flood took place. Now lets remember, if this happened, to prove it should be a piece of piss, there should be mountains of real life evidence and data to back you up. Scientific text books EVERYWHERE would mention it. You couldn't even find that. You tried to use science to back up your myths, and you failed. Thus your not rational, the flood never happened, and your wrong, and chances are, you know it.

I also see that you ignored my bit about the various dating methods when you mentioned carbon dating not being good enough.

Provide documented figures illustrating the ark's capacity as inadequate.
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The size doesn't even matter, the logistics of it all make it impossible anyway.
 
kev, if you are thinking that it'd e impossible to fill the Ark because of constant evolution from bacteria you need to stop thinking that. Remember, we need to assume evolution doesn't exist and figure away to fill the Ark. After we establish a method, we can assume evolution exists, mainly since we can observe it in real-time, and then disprove the myth of the Ark. I'm not denying there was a Noah, and I'm not saying he didn't save his animals (maybe a farm?) from a flood created by exceptionally hard rains one rainy season, I'm just saying it's physically impossible to fill the Ark with two of everything and impossible to build something with that capacity. Unless that thing waas the planet itself, which is an absurd idea I came up with.
Anyway, size doesn't matter until we prove tha the Ark existed at all. If it was only a few thousand years ago we should be able to find the remains easily.
 
keef
kev, if you are thinking that it'd e impossible to fill the Ark because of constant evolution from bacteria you need to stop thinking that. Remember, we need to assume evolution doesn't exist and figure away to fill the Ark. After we establish a method, we can assume evolution exists, mainly since we can observe it in real-time, and then disprove the myth of the Ark. I'm not denying there was a Noah, and I'm not saying he didn't save his animals (maybe a farm?) from a flood created by exceptionally hard rains one rainy season, I'm just saying it's physically impossible to fill the Ark with two of everything and impossible to build something with that capacity. Unless that thing waas the planet itself, which is an absurd idea I came up with.
Anyway, size doesn't matter until we prove tha the Ark existed at all. If it was only a few thousand years ago we should be able to find the remains easily.
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Yep,
on top of that, you know how friggin difficult it is to make 2 animals breed under captivity? And, talking about animals, why do we, humans, need to be the ones that should believe in God? If God:
-created this world, and created every living organism on this planet, and
-wanted every living thing to believe in god, then
why wouldn't he have given the knowledge to every animal to believe in God?
What seperates us exactly?
 
*McLaren*,

I was suggested "Case for Faith, The: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity" to be a good read. My wife is reading it now and I will read it when she's done.

From what I understand Lee Strobel, the author of the book, was the Chief editor for the Chicago Tribune and a devout Atheist as was his wife. His wife ended up becoming a Christian so this led Strobel into his investigation which he financed himself traveling the world talking with experts in the field.

"Written by an investigative reporter and former atheist, THE CASE FOR FAITH challenges both skeptics and believers to examine the arguments for Christianity in greater depth through interviews with top religious scholars."

Let me know if you read this book and what you thought of it.

:cheers:
 
BlazinXtreme
Actually what I believe God to be is indeed your innerself telling you what you believe is right or wrong. God is nothing more then your mind.
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Then you have a very weak god BX.

All this stuff about the flood and the Ark has been done to death. You don't want to believe in the flood, fine. You want to believe that your a monkey's nephew, knock yourself out.

What I want to know is why to people constantly reject the thought of a higher power? Actually, I know why, I just want to know why others think it is.
 
dahze_dichriste
If you would like, I will also provide you with a link to a scientific source stating that if all of earth's land was flat, the water would cover the earth by about two miles.
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I can do that - the variation in the crust surface is about 18km (from Challenger Deep to Everest), leading to an average land height of 9km. In reality the average is lower than this, as 2/3rds of this is below sea level (50% of the land below water is more than 3km deep), and very little of it is the same height as Everest... So you can put the average height of the land at about 1-2km. The average depth of the World Ocean is 3.7km, so if the land were completely flat, the water would cover it by about 3km (allowing for the permeation of water through the land - the "water table").

But the land isn't flat. And if you assume that it was flat when Noah's Ark happened, you're looking at 30,000 feet of subduction and 21,000 feet of orogeny inside the last 6,000 years (Noah was human and you posit that humanity is only 6,000 years old) - which means that either Everest appeared overnight, or that it has been growing at the rate of at least 1.2 metres per year (with the Marianas sinking at nearly 2 metres per year) ever since.

And that ignores the fact that God gathered the waters together as seas and created dry land in Genesis 1:10, rather than leaving the whole planet covered in water. Be a bit of a waste of effort to just flatten everything again a bit later on.

And now... the Ark itself...

dahze_dichriste
lol...that's a common argument against the account of Noah, the capicity of the Ark. Check this link out...

http://www.csinfo.org/Number_of_Animals_on_the_Ark.htm
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Oh dear.

Firstly, let us deal with the Ark's structure. The largest documented wooden ship, the Wyoming, was 350 feet long, needed iron cross-bracing (as that amount of wood cannot bear its own weight, let alone the weight of the displaced water AND its contents, and leaked ALL the time. The Ark is supposedly 450 feet long - though you'll probably tell me it's based on some divine plan (never shared - oddly for a book full of "facts") and could blah blah blah better than anything modern humans could blah blah blah beyond mortal man's understanding blah.

It allegedly had a floor-space of 100,000 square feet. Now again, assuming that there's been no unprecedented expansion in biodiversity, leading to every species on Earth appearing inside the last (however long it is in the last 6,000 years since "the Flood"), you're going to need to fit every species on Earth in there.

Mammals: 5,500 species
Birds: ~9,500 species
Reptiles: ~8,000 species
Amphibians: ~6,000 species
(that's 29,000 vertebrate species alone - WAY more than the 17,600 accredited to Ernst Mayr, and we've not even got as far as the invertebrates or plants yet)
Invertebrates: There's no direct count here, but a popular number is that 97% of all animal species are invertebrates - not surprising given that 1 in 5 of all life on Earth (including plants) is a beetle. So that's nearly a MILLION invertebrate species.
Plants: Well, God said "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.", so Noah needs to have taken some plants with him, so that they can restablish themselves. 350,000 species of plants. But it's interesting to note that God actually failed - he said he'd destroy every living substance off the face of the Earth, but Noah finds, courtesy of a dove, an olive branch to mark the end of his voyage. So we'll ignore plants, just like Genesis did.

So anyway, we have pretty much a million species of animals - mostly paired up (though some in sevens), making for a rough average of 2 million animals.


But we have a further problem. Cats. All 37 species members of Felidae have a bit of a problem when it comes to food. Cats are tyrosine-deficient - they lack an amino acid which they MUST get from meat. Deprive them of meat for 72 hours and they enter coma and die. The rains persisted for 40 days and the flood lasted for a further 150 days, and these beasties need feeding meat at least every third day. That's 63 meals of animal. EACH. And there's 74 cats on board (assuming them to be "unclean" - if they're in by sevens you're really screwed), ranging from domestic cats to Bengal tigers. So you need find 4,662 meals of meat to stop these things dying off - or finding their OWN food in this floating smorgasbord - and it's unlikely an African Lion will settle for a single sheep every third day.

(there's a small lie above. There's 37 species, but there's around 50 subspecies of the big cats alone. Mmmmmm... meat-tastic)

And cats aren't the only animals on board with dietary requirements.


It's been justified to me before by the phrase "God made it so they didn't need it". That begs a couple of questions - if God saved them like this, why didn't he save them any other way, why did he need Noah at all (in fact, why DID he need Noah at all - even without the cats? Surely some guy who created an entire planet in 6 days would have no trouble at all killing every person on that planet in 190 days and leaving the animals and plants alone... A theological neutron bomb - kills people but leaves hummingbirds intact) and how come you can accept extremely short-term, divine changes to an animal's physiology with only a scribble of Hebrew as evidence, but not extremely long-term, natural changes to an animal's physiology with reams and reams, and terabytes and terabytes of corroborative evidence?


The Ark is a nice story. It doesn't hold water (no pun intended) in reality.
 
GREAT POST... You get the Red Check of Death 👍

But... What if they only had one version of an animal? Say an elephant from which all elephants would then come from? Same for horses, dogs, ect. And also, a lion wouldn't eat and entire horse by itself... So assuming that there may also be smaller cats onboard... They would eat the scraps... I'm pretty sure birds weren't on the arc, as it was a gull or dove that led them to land and it wasn't one of Noahs... Bugs could have lived on the animals... What's more important is what did Noah do with all the dung those animals produced... Yes, some of the animals would be necrafarious (spelling), but not all. And I'm faily sure Noah got hungry and ate the unicorns and dragons, hence why we don't see them around anymore... Or maybe he fed THEM to the lions? I'm sure a dargon could feed a pride for quite a while...
 
Carl.
That was a low blow.


Low, but damn funny. :lol:
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It wasn't meant to be a low blow. It was meant to get him thinking about what he considers God.
 
Swift
Then you have a very weak god BX.
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1. Well, do you believe in God because he seems very powerfull?

2. Does BX need a powerfull God?

As for Famine's comment, lol you really love to investigate these things down to the bottom dont you.
 

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