:: The point is that Rutherford made dogmatic pronouncements about things of which he knew nothing. Same as he did in the religious arena.
: There is no question about that. The Society still is burdened with some of his mis-interpretations of prophecy. Some of his ideas are totally indefensible.
That's right. In fact, most of his ideas are indefensible. Like renaming the Bible Students with the completely misrepresentative generic term "Jehovah's witnesses", which allowed subsequent Watchtowerites to make ridiculous arguments like, "Jesus was Jehovah's greatest witness, and because we're also Jehovah's witnesses, we must be worshipping truly, just like Jesus."
You shouldn’t really stray off in to the Scriptures here at the onset, because that just ain’t your field Alan. LOL
: Okay, having already read your entire post I see why I remembered you as having ascribed all the mammoth remains to clumsy beasts tumbling into pits of tar. In actuality, essentially, you do believe that the preserved beasts all randomly fell in pits and holes and crevices and some were over taking by “mud flows.” That is an absurdity. Obviously tar pits took their toll, but that cannot explain the hundreds of thousands of animals that have been entombed in various stages of preservation.
It's not the least bit absurd. During the last 3 million years…
Evolutionists are quick to plead their case by resorting to fantastic calculations of millions of years in which anything can, and usually does, magically happen. And all those poor souls that fell into mud pots millions of years ago are lying undisturbed down through all the geologic ages down to this day. I can see that you are a man of great “faith” in geologic miracles.
The stomach contents of various frozen animals, including that of mammoths, consisted entirely of such northern plant species, including sedges, northern grasses and twigs and cones from trees that make up the forests of Siberia today, such as fir and pine. Thus, the actual evidence including that taken from the frozen mammals themselves indicates that they lived not in a tropical climate, but a far-northern temperature to Arctic climate.
There have also been discovered fossilized remains of coral reefs in the Arctic waters as well as fossils of palms and giant plum trees in the Polar Regions. So the gastronomic contents of a few beasts doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. Given the fact that no large herds could be supported in Siberia now bespeaks of a massive cataclysmic change in the weather. According to you, wooly mammoths were designed for cold weather, and yet so many of them froze to death. Why is that? I don’t buy your explanations of individual beasts succumbing to mere mudflows and stumbling into holes and crevices.
While the process may not happen every day, over a period of nearly 100,000 years there is ample opportunity for it to happen to hundreds of thousands of animals.
Yeah, sure. Given a few million years anything can happen evidently.
Furthermore, the number of frozen animals actually found is actually quite small. Until gold mining in the far north became common in the 1940s, only about two frozen mammoths per century were found.
According to your reckoning it doesn’t matter how many or few animals there are entombed, given enough time they will eventually all fall into a pit of some kind or another.
That's why the Russian scientists took about a year from 1901 to 1902, trekking over about 16,000 miles of Siberia largely on foot, to recover the Berezovka mammoth -- it was incredibly rare and valuable to science.
Siberia is a vast largely unexplored polar wasteland that defies habitation and exploration. The fact that any beasts were found in such remote areas is like finding a needle in a haystack, and the laws of chance suggest that if any were found over such a large area, that there are many more that remain entombed in permafrost.
The speculations that you present are almost entirely the product of what you've read in Watchtower literature. Some of what you're saying was abandoned by the Society around 1980, but you just don't know it. These days, there are two lines of evidence that the Society uses to 'prove' the Flood: frozen animals in the Arctic, and legends. Both have been completely debunked as credible lines of evidence.
There are only two schools of thought, with of course many variations. Either there was a flood or there wasn’t. Obviously, for those that accept the flood, they are going to rely on similar interpretations of geologic formations and so forth. I think you are confusing the dismissing of evidence with disproving something. There is a difference. But, it seems to me that the WT barely goes into detail about the evidence for a flood because they simply rely in the authority of the Bible when it comes to whether there was or wasn’t a flood.
Massive floods also leave features called "giant ripple ridges". These are ridges formed from gravel, where the spines of the ridges are perpendicular to the flow of water, much like what you see in sand at the beach. In parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon where the water was flowing over fairly wide areas, you find ridges up to 30 feet high, 500 feet crest to crest and many miles long. Again their nature can best be seen from the air. And I've seen them from the air. So, Bobby, for your generalized criticisms to work, you would have to get down into specifics and show how the lack of such evidence worldwide is consistent with the most massive flood of all time.
So you recognize that certain parts of the earth bear the scars of gouging that are the unmistakable evidence of massive flooding. Yet you assume that ALL the earth should bear those same characteristics. I pointed out how unreasoning that is, for if the earth is scoured from one area it must be deposited in another. The area of disposition could be thousands of feet thick and thus not be at all what might appear as sedimentation from a flood. But obviously a global flood that raged for a year, and longer in many places, is not going to behave the same way that a local flood might. The turbulent flood water may hold trillions of tons of rock and soil in suspension, and as these gradually silted out as the waters calmed down, some areas would appear smooth and unruffled while other areas would continue subject to run-off and erosion. That easily explains the problem of why the entire earth doesn’t bear the scars of gouging. But, the fact that you recognize that there are areas of the earth that bear the unmistakable signs of scarring from massive floods, floods that cannot be duplicated today for obvious reasons, indicates that you simply wish to believe in a local flood theory because of personal bias. How true the Scripture that says of those who reject the flood account: “According to their wish this fact escapes their notice…”
If a committed Christian 'father of geology' like Adam Sedgwick could manage to abandon 170 years ago his initial, and self-admittedly biased, expectations about what he would find in "the record of the rocks" explicitly because of his subsequent examination of that record, then it is remarkable that today so many supposed Christians cannot see what this honest scientist did. Indeed, it is only the bias due to thoroughly ignorant religious leaders that prevents so many Christians from understanding the true "record of the rocks". We find a good example of this, Bobby, in your own views:
That sort of illogical reasoning does not persuade me. Many so-called Christians have been seduced to accept evolution, even imagining that there is proof for such a thing. Other so-called Christians teach ridiculous and absurd doctrines that they imagine are Scriptural. The ‘record of the rocks’ then is no different from the Bible, in that it requires an interpretation. Your interpretation of the way things occurred is not the only way that things may be explained. Nor do you have any sort of monopoly on geologic truth as you would have me believe.
The fact is that you, Bobby, have failed to keep up even with the Society in jettisoning the old YEC "flood geology" view. Today they accept that there were ice ages that produced the superficial geology of many northern areas. Until the early 1990s YECs didn't accept this, and neither did the Society until about 1980. Now they all seem to accept a fuzzy notion that some sort of ice ages existed, but they're not clear about the details.
I form my own opinions on these issues based upon my own research and thinking upon these matters. I don’t care if the majority believes this or that or whether the Society accepts or rejects some theories. We each are allotted three pounds of gray matter, so we all can look at the known facts and make up our own minds. The Society has written so very little about flood geology it is not worth even considering. But, of course there was an Ice Age. No one disputes that. What caused it and how long it lasted are matters of debate. From the standpoint of a water canopy it would have occurred immediately after the flood, and no doubt has advanced and declined back and forth since then, but with the trend in recent centuries been a steady retreat.
These days, many committed Christians hold that both Genesis and geology are correct, but in view of solidly established science they have to modify their interpretation of Genesis. This is no different from the Christian world's having had to modify its teaching that the sun orbited the earth when Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, and it became accepted due to unarguable scientific observations.
You are confusing scientific fact with conjecture and theory. As I have pointed out, you are merely accepting an interpretation that the rocks are supposed to be saying, and you would use the tyranny of authority in the name of science to impose a dogmatic theory upon gullible minds. It is no different then what you accuse the Watchtower of doing, or what Christendom does in imposing doctrines by authority rather than reason. Rejecting the standard interpretations of the fossil and geologic record advanced by the mainstream scientific community is not the same as believing that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the earth is flat. You should know by now that you can’t bamboozle me with that sort of fallacious argument.
So really, the Society's teachings and your beliefs, Bobby, have not nearly as much to do with the Bible as they do with your interpretations of the Bible.
How many ways are there to interpret the flood account that says that every mountain was covered and that every creature on dry land expired? Feel free to be as creative in your answer as you wish.
:The Grand Canyon is the most notable and famous “gouge.” It stands as a magnificent monument to the deluge. The fact that this canyon is some five miles wide, and more in places, and a mile deep, stands as a testament to the fact that there was a tremendous amount of water that moved rapidly through a sedimentary rock. After all, what river on earth is five miles wide? That’s how wide that tiny little Colorado River would have had to have been however long ago you assume that the river began cutting its way through the underlying rock. To have that volume of water, the interior of the continent would have had to have been an ocean, which of course it was during the deluge.
Your words bespeak only of massive ignorance of geology in general, and the Canyon in particular. The Grand Canyon is actually a premier example of what relatively slow erosion does to rock over long periods of time. Fast-flowing, extremely deep water produces characteristic traces in the landscape, such as are found in Washington's Channeled Scablands. Slow erosion produces quite a different set of traces.
What utter nonsense. For one thing, the top of the canyon is over a mile above sea-level. The interior of the continent is lower than the top of the Grand Canyon. Canyons and channels are cut from the top down, not the other way around. Unless you are advancing the proposition that during all those millions of years, when this erosion supposedly took place, that water ran uphill, there is no way for the canyon to have been carved in the manner that you suppose.
The traces in the Grand Canyon are entirely of the slow-erosion type. Of course, from time to time good-sized floods occur in the Grand Canyon, and it is these that actually produce 99% of the deepening. Much slower erosion due to weathering produces the widening of the canyon.
More nonsense. The canyon displays all the earmarks of having been cut by swiftly moving water of enormous volume. Of course, the forces of erosion are constantly at work, and the canyon would have been exposed to those forces after it was originally cut shortly after the flood drained through. But, for a five or 10 mile wide swath to be cut through hardened rock, in an area that receives little rainfall, would require such an enormous amount of water, so that anything short of a global deluge cutting the canyon is simply preposterous. The Colorado River, which carries the runoff of snowmelt from the east side of the Rocky Mountains, is presently only a few hundred feet across. If that same amount of water were spread out even a couple of miles it would not have the power to cut through rock. A river the size of the Amazon wouldn’t be sufficient. And of course, you are still faced with the problem of getting water to run uphill. Your explanation defies common sense.
Now, "flood geologists" like present-day YECs and like the Society's writers used to be claim that all of the sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon was laid down during Noah's Flood, and that afterwards, the draining of the Flood cut easily through the soft sediments and formed the Grand Canyon. But this explanation completely ignores basic rock physics. The Canyon contains thick layers of limestone, sandstone and other hard rocks. The surface of the Colorado Plateau through which the Canyon is cut consists of this hard rock overlain by a thin skin of dirt. There is no way that such a huge pile of soft sediment could turn to rock when it has been that close to the surface during the past few thousand years.
It is amazing to me how dogmatic you are. “There is no way,” you say? There certainly is a way to explain that in the light of the Bible. The Scriptures say that after the flood that God caused the mountains to ascend and the valleys to descend. Sandstone is made compressing sand. So the layers of sand could have been underwater many thousands of feet during the flood. That would have resulted in tremendous pressure. Afterwards the up thrusts lifted up the newly pressed sandstone. If the Grand Canyon were actually made by everyday forces of erosion there would be many such canyons. As it is, such a unique geologic formation bespeaks of a unique geologic phenomenon.
The sedimentary layers themselves prove that they were not laid down in a single flood, but underwent long periods of normal erosion, and then the land sank and was covered by seas, or climate changed and the surface was buried under wind-blown sand or other materials.
It is interesting that you evoke miraculous powers when it suits your argument, thus the land sank, and then it rose, and then there was a climatic change, and then there was a massive flood that could never happen again, but it was only local. It gets pretty silly. Of course all the forces are exactly what were brought into play by the voice of God during the flood. You are just so blinded with anti-God prejudice that you prefer that all these things just happened over those millions of years that you so easily toss about.
With miracles at your disposal, you can posit anything you like, but it's pointless to discuss it.
And that’s really the bottom line. We accept that there was a heavenly ocean because we accept the Bible as God’s word. We don’t know how exactly it was suspended, just as no one knows how a leaf or a grain of pollen or a strand of DNA came into existence. Scientist might be able to explain how such and such a thing behaves according to known laws, but there is certainly no one that can explain how such things came about.
Actually you're comparing apples and oranges here. We know that life exists, and we know a lot about what conditions life exists under. We also know the basic laws of physics, and whether or not anyone can say how an existing phenomenon came about, it is certainly possible to say whether many different postulated but non-existent phenomena are possible. Thus, it is impossible for a vapor canopy containing an ocean's worth of water to exist, unless it massively changed the atmosphere, or it was in the form of a Saturn-like ring.
But you know nothing about how life came about. Therefore, there are no known laws of nature or physics that can be called upon to explain chemicals mingling and forming living things or whatever Yet the Scriptures tie all these things together, including the canopy, as coming about as an act of God. From the standpoint of the Bible it’s not at all comparing apples and oranges. Since the creation came about by the same word of God that called the canopy into existence, we can rightly assume that the heavenly ocean, or canopy, also behaved under the current laws of physics, just as the rest of creation. If the water canopy were still in existence there would be a way to study it and no doubt understand what principles governed it. If there were no plant kingdom for instance, if that were possible, and someone were arguing that at one time these green things actually grew up from the earth and produced fruits and nuts, no one would be able to produce any laws of nature that would account for how such a thing came about, yet plants do exist.
I'll comment on the rest as I find the time. / You Know
