17 i am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it.
19 you are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.
20 two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.
I see what you mean, Moxy. I very deliberately chose not to use the tetragrammaton YHWH for "Lord," or Elohim for "God" to keep the arguments simple enough for sixth-graders to understand; most adult Christians aren't familiar with those names, so I kept them "hidden" from them, as you noted.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
hi rwc,.
i'm sure you're a very nice person and i don't want to get into an argument but rather a civil debate.
i just wanted to point out that as ex-jws many of us are a little obsessed with truth (not to be confused with "the truth" tm) and that after being burned by the watchtower society and hating ourselves for being so stupid to have fallen for its bs we have now become highly skeptical of the bible as well.
RWC wrote,
I contend that God has made his presence known through out the ages and the message of salvation is known. You clearly know it, but have chosen not to beleive it.How do you explain why an awareness of your god, and his message of salvation, has not been made known to billions of humans from other faiths? God could have made them all aware, couldn't he, since he is all-powerful and all-knowing, according to your faith?
The god you believe in, RWC, embedded into the DNA of all humans the means by which the human can become aware of its own existence, and instinctively seek nourishment and sex. Why, then, if your God exists, and really does want man to be aware of God's existence, and instinctively to know his message of salvation, didn't he just embed that instinctive awareness and message into our DNA? He has the power to do that, doesn't he?
I've asked this question a few dozen times, and never has a God-believer ever responded to it.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
hi rwc,.
i'm sure you're a very nice person and i don't want to get into an argument but rather a civil debate.
i just wanted to point out that as ex-jws many of us are a little obsessed with truth (not to be confused with "the truth" tm) and that after being burned by the watchtower society and hating ourselves for being so stupid to have fallen for its bs we have now become highly skeptical of the bible as well.
RWC believes,
From a scientific perspective to stay within the realm of our understanding, the materials to create the Big Bang must have come from somewhere, because science tells us that something cannot come from nothing.That's not what scientists believe at all, RWC.
There's no need to imagine the universe "came" from something. Why could it not always have been? Betrand Russell explained it well:
"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause." --Bertrand RussellAn article in Scientific American describes the theory of recycling universes, and makes clear that the universe could always have existed.
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2002/021102cyclic/
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
17 i am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it.
19 you are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.
20 two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.
Thanks for the comments, Moxy.
I didn't refer to the "documentary hypothesis," or to the "Book of Yahweh," or other information, because I wanted to keep the information I presented as simple as possible. One needs to know nothing about the many hypotheses which have been put forth to understand from my article that there are (at least) two different flood stories being told.
I'm not sure I know what you mean about my referring to the "earlier account" as the one that uses LORD. You're referring to an article on my site, I guess. Which one was that?
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
achristian believes those who think the bible teaches that the flood was global look foolish.
he wrote, .
i encourage all christians to investigate the possibility that the bible does not really teach that the whole earth was flooded at the time of noah.
hooberus wrote,
There would have been no reason for an ark to built in the first place if God was only going to cause a local flood. God simply would have had Noah and the animals migrate out of the areaIt is abundantly clear that the writers of Genesis believed that the flood they were describing was global, but this doesn't mean the global flood actually occurred. The story of Noah and the flood seems to have been nothing more than an allegory (a fictionalized tale meant to teach a moral).
Few things in the Bible are clearer than the fact that the writers viewed the flood as a rebirth of the earth and its people, a kind of second creation. In the first creation story, God created an earth covered with water, then had the waters recede from the earth to expose the land, on which his people would multiply. Later, God was dissatisfied with what the earth and its people had become, so he essentially created anew the earth. He once again returned the earth to state in which it had existed before--a world completely covered with water.
He removed the waters, saving only Noah and his family. Noah and his family were to be the ones from whom civilization would spring, just as God had intended for Adam and Eve. But, this is just a teaching story, a story about righteousness, cleansing, and rebirth. It was never intended to be taken literally by its creators; there is zero evidence that there ever was a global flood, or an ark the size of the one described in the Bible.
God had Noah build the ark because the flood was indeed global requiring an ark to save mankind and the animals so that the earth could be repopulated. That is why male and female pares of each animal were taken.This is good evidence that the Genesis writers wanted the readers to know that the flood in their (fictional) story was global.
The Creation Research Society has over 1,000 members ALL with advanced degrees in science. They are an excellent source for information on the scientific evidence of a recent global flood.A requirement for membership in the CRS is that members must pledge that they agree that the Bible stories are literally true, and that they will work to find evidence which supports the literal truth of the creation and flood stories. Rather than use the scientific approach of collecting evidence, and only then reaching a conclusion, these folks first reach a conclusion (the Bible stories are literally true), and then go looking for "facts" which they think support this view. These are hardly objective "scientists"; they are hard-core, die-rather-than-admit-Bible-error fundamentalists.
The academies of science of every industrialized country in the world know that there was never a global flood.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
achristian believes those who think the bible teaches that the flood was global look foolish.
he wrote, .
i encourage all christians to investigate the possibility that the bible does not really teach that the whole earth was flooded at the time of noah.
KJV notes,
I have made a mistake. It was 7 million acres that was the given figureAssuming this is the size of the flood upon which the flood story was based, then we're talking about a circular area with a radius of about 59 miles.
If this is the flood the local-flood theorists are offering, then the argument I made in a previous post is made even stronger, for a dove could have reached the unflooded area easily, even if dove had been released from the center of the imagined circular flood area.
Thus, once again, I affirm that the Genesis author could not have known that Noah "knew the waters had receded" when the dove returned with the olive tree leaf, because the author would have known that Noah would have no way of knowing whether the dove had plucked the leaf from a tree outside the 59-mile radius area where the flood had not reached, or from a tree on land from which the flood waters had recently receded. The only way the Genesis author would think that Noah "knew" the waters had receded is if the flood in question was global.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
achristian believes those who think the bible teaches that the flood was global look foolish.
he wrote, .
i encourage all christians to investigate the possibility that the bible does not really teach that the whole earth was flooded at the time of noah.
aChristian says that Christians who believe that the Bible teaches that the flood was global look foolish, and that we should believe that God flooded only the “land of Noah.”
Let me list just two of the many problems I have with the notion that the Bible teaches that the flood was local.
1. Why Didn’t the Genesis Writer Tell Us?
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. (Genesis 6:11-13)
If “the earth” that’s corrupt in the passage above is really just “the land of Noah,” then why didn’t the Genesis writer say so? Wouldn’t most readers take the writer’s words at face value, and assume he was referring to “all the people on earth,” and not just all the people on the land of Noah, wherever that is?
God, who is infinitely intelligent, would have known how we would have interpreted his writer’s words, so if God really wanted us to know the Word of God, then God would have directed his Bible writer to tell us that only the “land of Noah” was corrupt, not the rest of the world, and only that land was to be flooded, wouldn’t he--if that's really what he wanted us to know?
2. Just the Heavens Above the Land of Noah?
I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens (Genesis 6:17)
All life under the heavens? This is not how one describes a limited region of land, is it? Would not the all-wise God know that we would have assumed that he was talking about the whole earth under the whole heavens? Would this all-knowing God really have expected us to imagine that he was talking about just that patch of the heavens above the land of Noah, especially since he never gave his readers the slightest hint anywhere that he had any kind of limited land area involved?
Furthermore, wouldn’t God want us to know the location of the only land and its people flooded by God out of existence, if the flood was indeed local? Why didn’t he say the region he destroyed was, say, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, if the flood was really local, instead of saying it was somewhere "under the heavens"?
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
achristian believes those who think the bible teaches that the flood was global look foolish.
he wrote, .
i encourage all christians to investigate the possibility that the bible does not really teach that the whole earth was flooded at the time of noah.
I agree completely with RWC who says that it's logical to assume that Noah believed the flood was local. But, it is likewise logical to assume that the Genesis writer believed it was global, too. As proof of this, note below that the writer tells us that Noah knew that the flood had receded from the earth.
11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.If the local flood advocates are correct, the Bible writer knew that the flood was local. This writer would know that a dove returning with an olive tree leaf would not be proof that the waters had receded, since the Bible writer knows that Noah would have no way of knowing whether the dove had plucked the leaf from the unflooded area outside the land of Noah, or whether it came from land from which the waters had receded.
Only if the Bible writer knew the flood was global could he know that Noah "knew" that the flood leaf came from land from which the flood waters had receded.
I'll be back about 3:00 pm California time to accept rebuttals to this argument.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
since the bible makes it clear that jesus believed in the scriptural account of the flood and since the evidence that a worldwide flood as described in that same scriptural account would have been virtually impossible, why should anyone trust jesus to be man's redeemer and the only begotten son of god?.
farkel
Maybe I'm a little slow tonight but I didn't understand why you say Noah had to know the flood was local?
It would be more appropriate for you to ask this question in the thread in which I made that statement. I won't be around to respond, however, until late Sunday afternoon.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
achristian believes those who think the bible teaches that the flood was global look foolish.
he wrote, .
i encourage all christians to investigate the possibility that the bible does not really teach that the whole earth was flooded at the time of noah.
My apologies, KJV. I had found my mistake just one minute before your post correcting me. You make a good point, too. Why didn't God just tell Noah that the waters had receded? This element, and dozens of others, should make it clear to objective observers who don't have to believe the Bible is literally true or else die, that the Genesis stories are mythical.
I'll be signing off soon, and won't be back until late Sunday afternoon.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
