The Global Flood and Antarctica - Can we have both?

by mavie 44 Replies latest jw friends

  • SixofNine
    SixofNine


    I read your other post, you punkass li'l beotch. You have potential, and that makes your idealogical sex-trade with certain vile elements of society all the more disgusting. You're smart enough to know better.

    No need to thank me for the quoted material. It was available to you just as it was to me before you made your ridiculous post.

  • Qcmbr
    Qcmbr

    We are taking a modern day interpretation of a record of an ancient event that happened during the lifetime of writing mankind (and was recorded and passed down through many societies legends.) There are many discrepancies between accounts of the boat, when it happened, who was saved etc... We have a wealth of evidence reagrding the history of this earth (and we don't all agree on the interpretation of the facts) and some very powerful theories regarding timespans etc.. viewed from the climatic and geological conditions of the last 200 years. The bible and christianity never ever stood or failed on OUR interpretation of Israel's interpretation of history.

    Christianity is based on Christ. I share a hope with all christians that one day the whole story will be explained exactly and then errors will be removed (from the written records and the interpretations of science) and science will be found to accord exactly with religion. Christians are as guilty as aethiests of warring over straw men (i.e. if the flood is 'proven' as an event that occured at the end of the last ice age on a localised scale then all the christians and anti-flood advocates will look pretty silly for arguing over a global, younger flood story that never happened.) When your faith is solely based on the historicity of ancient records then maybe its based on shifing sands. I'd be gutted if in some far distant time people believed in Christ because I wrote down my experiences and someone handed them down - if I could go into the future I'd say 'Oi, write your own story and get off mine.'

  • daniel-p
    daniel-p

    "I read your other post, you punkass li'l beotch. You have potential, and that makes your idealogical sex-trade with certain vile elements of society all the more disgusting."


    Whoa there, sailor. I don't see any reason to get this nasty. THIS IS JUST THE INTERNET.

  • Big Tex
    Big Tex

    When I was a Witness, back before color was invented, the teaching was that there was a canopy over the earth and that each creation day was 7,000 years long. Is that still being taught?

    I've never really believed in a global flood, although when I was a Witness, I certainly believed the story of Noah. A global flood always seemed to me to be rather silly. There was no need for God to flood the whole earth, killing billions of animals, wiping out entire species, simply because of a few hundred thousand recalcitrant people. That's extraordinarily wasteful.

    Localized flood? Sure, why not?

  • Forscher
    Forscher

    "Daniel-P", says Forscher who is studiously ignoring the whining baby seal in the room, "where did you start that thread about the letter which was read at the convention. You might want to direct Big Tex to it so that he can get a through answer to his question."
    ;-)

  • daniel-p
    daniel-p

    Here we go for the "Odd Announcement" thread:

    http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/115175/1.ashx

  • Forscher
    Forscher

    Thanks Daniel.
    Forscher

  • mavie
    mavie
    Insight Book - "Deluge" pg 610

    So, after the floodwaters fell, but before the raising of mountains and the lowering of seabeds and before the buildup of polar ice caps, there was more than enough water to cover "all the tall mountains," as the inspired record says.

    Is this the portion from the Insight volumes which are seen as advocating no ice caps pre-flood? If so, it looks like the WT gave themselves a way out by using the phrase "before the buildup", meaning they could have existed in a much smaller form.

    Good discussion guys.

  • Forscher
    Forscher
    Greenland ice up to 12,500. How could such a thickness of ice build up in less than 4400 years?


    Okay. I used the above from what AlanF wrote along with the observed data of a 268 ft. accumulation of of ice in Greenland to run a very simple and crude test of Alan's question. I still came up with a required period of around 20,000 for that much ice to accumulate (If your looking in Alan I am aware of just how crude and simple that test really is and some of the factors I didn't/couldn't allow for). That is still a period more than five times longer than biblical chronology allows. That is kind of hard to argue with.
    Alan does make the point in those writings I skimmed through about the statistical relevance of multiple independent dating methods arriving at the roughly the same dates. Once again I acknowledge that to be a powerful point in favor for the ages proposed.
    On a lighter note, I looked over Alan's Bio while I was at it. When I came to the part about his time at MIT, I almost spit my tea all over the monitor! Talk about a babe in the woods, I minored in Anthropology and by the time I did my first paper in one of those course I knew better than to try and do an apologetic paper for anything the WTBTS taught. Ah, the joys of growing up!
    Forscher

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    mavie, your reservations about Noah's Flood are entirely on target. Inconvenient facts like you pointed out prove conclusively that there was no earthwide Flood a few thousand years ago.

    Leolaia pointed out that the "water canopy" theory is the product of biblical exegesis, and to a large extent, that it is. However, the ideas of the Watchtower Society on this have an interesting history and show that the idea is only loosely based on the Bible, and solidly based on the ideas of a few crackpots. In 1874, one Isaac Newton Vail posited a theory he called "The Annular Theory" which claimed that the earth was created with a bunch of rings like Saturn has, and that these rings fell to the earth one by one over thousands of years, causing unrecorded catastrophes until the last ring fell and caused Noah's Flood. Around 1900, an energetic Seventh-Day Adventist named George McCready Price began publishing books and tracts supporting the young-earth creationist beliefs of the SDA's, and he apparently used a modified form of Vail's ideas to come up with what is today called "the water canopy theory". He published much about this up through the 1940s. Meanwhile, the Watchtower Society under C. T. Russell adopted Vail's ideas, and taught these until about the mid-1960s. Meanwhile again, in 1961 the evangelical Christians John Whitcomb and Henry Morris published the influential book The Genesis Flood, which was largely an unaccredited update of Price's Flood theory, including the notion of a "water canopy". By about 1965, it appears that the Watchtower Society had adopted Morris' and Whitcomb's ideas (giving neither them nor Price credit, of course) and dropped Vail's ideas completely. What the Society failed to note -- perhaps they were too stupid to understand, or more likely, figured they could get away with their subtle plagiarism -- was that these notions of a "water canopy" and "flood geology" went hand in hand with young-earth creationism, which for some years they had explicitly rejected as "unscientific". By about 1980, the Society had quit mentioning any notions based on "flood geology", except for the "water canopy" theory, and soon explicitly rejected young-earth creationism as not only unscientific but unbiblical. So the Society's teachings have been a mish-mosh of ideas grabbed from various authors, all of whom were crackpots.

    As rockhound suggested, you ought to take a look at my essay on The Flood (the updated URL is: http://corior.blogspot.com/2006/02/part-1-general-description-of-flood.html ). It goes into some detail on your points.

    AlanF

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