Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!yale!husc6!seismo!caip!princeton!allegra!ulysses!burl!clyde!cbatt!ihnp4!ihlpf!zonker From: zonker@ihlpf.UUCP (Tom Harris) Newsgroups: talk.origins,talk.religion.misc Subject: Re: Creation, Evolution, and Flood Message-ID: <723@ihlpf.UUCP> Date: Fri, 12-Sep-86 13:18:20 EDT Article-I.D.: ihlpf.723 Posted: Fri Sep 12 13:18:20 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 15-Sep-86 05:28:02 EDT References: <203@BMS-AT.UUCP> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 70 Xref: linus talk.origins:34 talk.religion.misc:60 > Stuart D. Gathman <..!seismo!{vrdxhq|dgis}!BMS-AT!stuart> writes: > Here are some facts from the Bible Biblical fact is an oxymoron. < Insert all sorts of Biblical fiction here. One current sceintific thought is that the "flood" was in fact the tidal after affect of the explosion of Thera (this probably caused the destruction of the Minoan civilization). At the maximum it was an event local to the Mediterrainian. There is no sedimentary evidence for global flood. At any rate the Biblical account of the flood is a rather thinly veil copy of the same story from the Tales of Gilgamesh (the first best seller). A book Moses, as someone in the Eqyptian court, would have had access to and since the copywrite wasn't invented (well it makes a good story so why not). > Thoughts: > > Did the flood split the super continent in a year? (As opposed > to millions of years.) No. The supercontenent split millions of years before. > > When did the flood take place? Thera exploded about 1500 B.C. > > Changes in lifespan and weather indicate to me that radiation > based dating would be totally off base for events > prior to the flood. (I.e. carbon 14). > The Carbon 14 dating method is valid as it stands (or least a better source of fact than the Bible). The external justification that Carbon 14 is accurate scheme overwhealming (souces are biology, anthropology, geology, zoology, physics and history). The carbon 14 method of dating was created by taking the output of the carbon samples and verifing them with other evidence. No published carbon 14 date is ever used unless there is external justifcation it is correct. It is too easy to ruin the date by contaminating the sample. As an Archeologist we used the C14 only to justify dates we already had figured out from cultural context, if there was a difference we figured out why. In fact one of my professors was caught with his pants down when he announced that he had found the oldest pot in the new world (based on alluvial river deposits), but the carbon date came back 2000 years later than his date. Seems the river deposited four times the muck in the past it does today. < Insert more Biblical fiction here. > Was the flood the demise of dinosaurs? (They were too big > to fit in the Ark?) They were gone several million years before there were people. Size of the ark would have had little to do with it, if Noah could build a ship big enought to house two of every breathing species and food to feed them for a year what's a couple of dinosuars more or less. Also the flood doesn't explain the demise of the sea going dinosaurs. > > What kind of sediment layers (mixed with creatures) would the > flood produce? If there had been a flood of proportions to cover mountains over the whole earth for a year, the effect would have been unmistakeable and easily identified geologically. Think about all the topsoil that would have been washed free, mixed into the ocean and the settled to the bottom, it would stand out from a mile away. This layer doesn't exist, hence there was no flood. Non Cuniculus Est, Tom H.