by Moxy 43 Replies latest jw friends
hey moxy !
was it the whole earth or the whole 'populated' earth ? or maybe it was just egypt - um that signifies the world rather than the earth right ? ... or maybe it was just the typical fulfilment and the anti-typical will actually engulf the whole world ... or was it earth ...
thx rem & vm44.
i think your points are all covered in there already, perhaps under some of my obfuscated language.
ISP: im trying to avoid areas that i feel are too subjective in interpretation. do you think the population distribution issue is a clear one, seperate enough from the one i put there about ancient human sites? can you elaborate?
alliwannadoislive: those are actually all very good questions that christian scholars have been addressing for centuries. however the WT interpretation does not leave these questions open to discussion, and my focus is the WT.
mox
More questions, regarding the Ark,
How long would it take a man and his three sons to cut the wood with primative hand tools to build the Ark. How much food would they have to grow, harvest, transport and store for all the animals to live for their 11 month voyage. How many species along with all the food could fit on that boat.
I did read some calculations on some site todo with the population numbers which meant that to reach some of the 'known' populations on early china etc... that women would have had to give birth to a child each year between the ages of 16 to 50 with no infant mortality (may not be the exact figures but you get the idea).
No way.
Also, the claim that Jesus' mention of Noah is any kind of proof is the weakest proof I've ever heard ...
1. He could have been recounting a fable that everyone was familiar with such as the Tortoise & The Hare (anyone who believes they really had a race can leave the room now)
and
2. He is a mythical figure himself! Surely anything that he 'said' should be taken with a huge pinch of salt?
Re: the 'lots of civilisations have flood stores so it must be true. yes, floods are common. Local floods that seem 'big' to the poeple in the locality. Look into the stories though and they are vastly different.
The site http://www.talkorigins.org/ has more information I think.
Moxy,
Your language already covers this but a cople of things on populations and genetics. If there was a global flood very recently in geological terms we'd expect to see mass extinctions of at least amphibians, reptilian, avian and mamalian life. There would be an explosion of variation since then with a common origin dating back only a few centuries. That variation could be tracked in mitochondrial DNA and all species would have a common female progenitor about 4000 years ago. Sorry, but there's no evidence for that either.
THirdson
'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing'
When exactly dose the jw or bible say the flood happened.Was it around 200 bc.
sorry 2000 bc
One other assertion about pre-flood times is that the climate was temperant earth wide. That is one explanation for animals found seemingly quick frozen in extreme northern areas. For instance a wooly mammoth found frozen and preserved in the tundra. My question would be that if the climate were such, why is the wooly mammoth wooly?
simon: i like the point about using parables to make a point. since a large proportion of christians today seem to believe that christ is the son of god but NOT that there was a global deluge, i can only assume that they have also found a similar explanation satisfactory.
gambler: 2370 BCE, october or novenber. we cant say exactly.
oldhippie: thats a very good question and one that was seriously considered about, oh, 200 years ago. other good questions would be: why so many dead mammoths and not other animals too? why do the mammoth corpses show signs of a struggle and broken bones? why do the radiocarbon dates obtained from the mammoths show a range of dates over several millenia? the belief that mammoths prove the Deluge is so outdated that even the WT is very careful when discussing them, not to state that the mammoths died in the flood, but only that some have suggested that they did.
mox
When I read the genesis account I don't see it saying the entire spere of the Earth being flooded.
It was written as an eyewitness account, and the eyewitness may not have known the Earth was a spere.
In his (Eye veiw) the whole earth (before his eyes) was flooded.
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
