The Creationist Follies

[pbrower2a]

The name is real, and Ken Ham really is a ham.



Ken Ham, the creationist behind the giant Noah’s Ark replica nearing completion in Kentucky, received some pointed questions on Twitter from those who have a problem with the central message in the biblical story.

The Noah tale, which is in the Genesis, involves a massive global flood that wipes out the entire human race save for eight people — and that doesn’t sit right with some(.)

(Basically, God is a murderer if you believe the story of the Great Flood).

Many responded to Ham as he sent out his tweets — with some mocking the ark and the very unbiblical way in which it’s being built(.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b01a5ebde3fa04

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Originally Posted by Taramarie [url=http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showthread.php?p=556520#post556520]

Quote:That is just one of the many reasons i do not understand why people worship a god who sounds completely evil.

Or even incompetent to aid innocent people in inexcusable peril. Where was God when "Christian' clergy were separating newborns from their pagan parents in Mexico, baptizing them, and then killing them so that their souls would never be imperiled by their parents worshiping Quetzalcoatl? Where was God when Africans were being consigned to the Hell known as a slave ship? Where was God during the Inquisition and the Holocaust?

Is "God" at best a metaphor for physical law and human conscience? So learn mathematics and physics if you want to know how things really are and have a conscience -- then and only then can you commune with God.

...I find the Ark story absurd. Noah would have first had to circumnavigate the world to collect animals as geographically separate as the capybara pair and the Komodo dragons. Then he had to keep the Komodo dragon from killing the capybara He would have needed a huge freshwater aquarium for freshwater fish -- for which the technology did not exist. Did glass then exist? "Forty days and forty nights"? With the technology of early-modern times, that is the time that Columbus took to get from the Old World to the New World or the Mayflower to get from England to Massachusetts. The rain would have been a truly ferocious storm, one unsuitable for the survival of the well-designed clipper ships of the late 19th century. It would take at the least a submarine to get through that storm, ideally nuclear-powered. Then Noah had to deposit the animals where he found them -- pandas in China and jaguars in South America.

............

During the Last Glacial Maximum, what is now the Persian Gulf was above sea level. Melt-waters from snowy peaks of modern-day Turkey and Iran drained through the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into a river that created a long oasis. It was a paradise for hunter-gatherers, quite possibly the foundation of the legendary Garden of Eden. Bright sunlight and a copious flow of water allowed some great crop yields. Imagine the Nile Valley, only about as cool as the American Great Basin.

This world would exist until the ice sheets melted, at which time the hunter-gatherer paradise was hit with a deluge of incredible proportion That messed up their delicate world badly But the sea level rose and inundated lowlands today now shallow waters including the Persian Gulf. Survivors could not return.

As is true with old stories they get bigger as they are re-told. We get Homer's retelling of the Illiad and the Odyssey, and not an objective account. Maybe there was a nasty one-eyed Cyclops, a person who had lost an eye in battle. As a rule, unwritten stories get bigger and better with time, whether the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or the Kalevala. (I wonder what stories some American First Peoples have. Hurry -- before those people are fully assimilated into Western culute. Write those stiries down if you have access to them -- please!)

Lost world and great Flood. Those would be remembered.

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-12-2016, 02:14 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: During the Last Glacial Maximum, what is now the Persian Gulf was above sea level. Melt-waters from snowy peaks of modern-day Turkey and Iran drained through the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into a river that created a long oasis. It was a paradise for hunter-gatherers, quite possibly the foundation of the legendary Garden of Eden. Bright sunlight and a copious flow of water allowed some great crop yields. Imagine the Nile Valley, only about as cool as the American Great Basin.

This world would exist until the ice sheets melted, at which time the hunter-gatherer paradise was hit with a deluge of incredible proportion That messed up their delicate world badly But the sea level rose and inundated lowlands today now shallow waters including the Persian Gulf. Survivors could not return.

As is true with old stories they get bigger as they are re-told. We get Homer's retelling of the Illiad and the Odyssey, and not an objective account. Maybe there was a nasty one-eyed Cyclops, a person who had lost an eye in battle. As a rule, unwritten stories get bigger and better with time, whether the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or the Kalevala. (I wonder what stories some American First Peoples have. Hurry -- before those people are fully assimilated into Western culute. Write those stiries down if you have access to them -- please!)

Lost world and great Flood. Those would be remembered.

There were also floods well after the glaciers were gone.  For a while when modern archeologists were excavating the Tigris - Euphrates valleys, they found evidence of floods in just about every city.  Not at the same time, though.  The floods apparently got excessively high in one area while being more modest in others, with the various areas taking turns leaving massive evidence of floods.  (From a PBS special where they tried to build a replica of the Arc.)  They suspect that floods were a very common story in that part of the world.  Dealing with floods would have to be part of the culture.  When making up the myths, though, the many floods got combined to a single big flood.

I'd note also that the flood myths appear to have originated in the Tigris - Euphrates area, but started showing up in the Jewish biblical accounts at the time the Jews returned from exile in Babylon.  A secular interpreter would be inclined to believe the myth borrowed from another culture.

[radind]

I still say that spending time on Ham is a waste of time.
If anyone wants to explore further, I recommend John Lennox.

Quote:http://www.johnlennox.org/jresources...ide-the-world/

Seven Days That Divide The World
Eric Metaxas and Socrates in the City present an evening with John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, at the Union Club in New York City on January 31, 2013. Dr. Lennox explores a method for reading and interpreting the first chapters of Genesis without discounting either science or Scripture. Afterward Metaxas is heard asking, “Why didn’t I ever have any math teachers like this?” (Reproduced by permission of Socrates in the City).

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Another repost for information.

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Quote:[url=https://musingsonscience.wordpress.com/2016/04/28/the-flood/]https://musingsonscience.wordpress.c.../28/the-flood/

… "Noah is the second Adam. A new covenant and a new start. But the story doesn’t change much.
Justice for the wicked and mercy for the righteous, those who live in covenant with God. This is the recurring theme of the Old Testament, and for that matter, the New Testament.
Perhaps, as John Walton suggests, the story recounts a real historical but local event, covering the whole world as known to the writer. More likely the story usurps a well known story of the ancient Near East and uses it to convey a message about God and his people. If there was a flood (and the story of a flood likely permeated the culture as common knowledge), it must have been from the LORD, both in the destruction and salvation. The primeval history of Genesis 1-11 is setting the stage for what is to come.”…

[pbrower2a]

(05-12-2016, 03:07 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(05-12-2016, 02:14 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: During the Last Glacial Maximum, what is now the Persian Gulf was above sea level. Melt-waters from snowy peaks of modern-day Turkey and Iran drained through the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into a river that created a long oasis. It was a paradise for hunter-gatherers, quite possibly the foundation of the legendary Garden of Eden. Bright sunlight and a copious flow of water allowed some great crop yields. Imagine the Nile Valley, only about as cool as the American Great Basin.

This world would exist until the ice sheets melted, at which time the hunter-gatherer paradise was hit with a deluge of incredible proportion That messed up their delicate world badly But the sea level rose and inundated lowlands today now shallow waters including the Persian Gulf. Survivors could not return.

As is true with old stories they get bigger as they are re-told. We get Homer's retelling of the Illiad and the Odyssey, and not an objective account. Maybe there was a nasty one-eyed Cyclops, a person who had lost an eye in battle. As a rule, unwritten stories get bigger and better with time, whether the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or the Kalevala. (I wonder what stories some American First Peoples have. Hurry -- before those people are fully assimilated into Western culute. Write those stiries down if you have access to them -- please!)

Lost world and great Flood. Those would be remembered.

There were also floods well after the glaciers were gone.  For a while when modern archeologists were excavating the Tigris - Euphrates valleys, they found evidence of floods in just about every city.  Not at the same time, though.  The floods apparently got excessively high in one area while being more modest in others, with the various areas taking turns leaving massive evidence of floods.  (From a PBS special where they tried to build a replica of the Arc.)  They suspect that floods were a very common story in that part of the world.  Dealing with floods would have to be part of the culture.  When making up the myths, though, the many floods got combined to a single big flood.

I'd note also that the flood myths appear to have originated in the Tigris - Euphrates area, but started showing up in the Jewish biblical accounts at the time the Jews returned from exile in Babylon.  A secular interpreter would be inclined to believe the myth borrowed from another culture.

Those were very flood-prone areas.

The flooding of the Ice Age lowlands now under the Persian Gulf  would have not come from seasonal floods of the Tigris and Euphrates originating in what is now eastern Turkey (mostly winter rains), but instead from the Indian Ocean/Gulf of Arabia due to the rise of the sea level as melting glaciers discharged their waters into the oceans.

River floods do not cause an appreciable rise of the sea level. Flash floods in narrow channels can be catastrophically violent. Unless the rise of the sea level had tsunami-like characteristics. that rise could be more progressive and less violent. Still, the latter might be more lethal if people are trapped on disappearing islets with no way to escape.

The retreat of the glaciers changed the climatic patterns to allow much more rain in the Mediterranean Basin and especially mountainous areas of southwestern Asia. It is not clear that the change of weather patterns coincided with the melting of the great ice sheets... it just would not surprise me.

[radind]

I find  John Lennox  much more interesting than Ham.

Quote:http://augustinecollective.org/augus...vide-the-world
A Review of John Lennox’s “Seven Days that Divide the World”
… "Lennox dedicates a chapter to reading and interpreting the Bible that quite powerfully provides a method with which we can approach Genesis. He states: “One should in the first instance be guided by the natural understanding of a passage, sentence, word, or phrase in its context, historically, culturally, and linguistically” … He argues that one should first apply a literal understanding of a passage even though there may also be correct metaphorical interpretations.”…

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(05-12-2016, 06:15 PM)radind Wrote: I find  John Lennox  much more interesting than Ham.

Quote:http://augustinecollective.org/augus...vide-the-world
A Review of John Lennox’s “Seven Days that Divide the World”
… "Lennox dedicates a chapter to reading and interpreting the Bible that quite powerfully provides a method with which we can approach Genesis. He states: “One should in the first instance be guided by the natural understanding of a passage, sentence, word, or phrase in its context, historically, culturally, and linguistically” … He argues that one should first apply a literal understanding of a passage even though there may also be correct metaphorical interpretations.”…

I just noticed that the  John Lennox link did not work.

http://augustinecollective.org/augustine...matics-and

http://augustinecollective.org/augustine...-the-world

http://augustinecollective.org/augustine...ohn-lennox

[Odin]

IIRC the original Mesopotamian flood myth, going by the Sumerian king list, seems to correspond to no flood obvious in the archeological record. The king list starts with a series of mythical kings, followed by "then The Flood passed over", and then is followed by actual historical rulers, the start of the list of actual historical rulers starts around 3100 BC, which seems to correspond archeologically not to a natural disaster, but to a major shift in Sumerian society in which dominance by Uruk is replaced by feuding city-states and rule by the priests is replaced by military strongmen.

[pbrower2a]

(05-13-2016, 07:39 AM)Odin Wrote: IIRC the original Mesopotamian flood myth, going by the Sumerian king list, seems to correspond to no flood obvious in the archeological record. The king list starts with a series of mythical kings, followed by "then The Flood passed over", and then is followed by actual historical rulers, the start of the list of actual historical rulers starts around 3100 BC, which seems to correspond archeologically not to a natural disaster, but to a major shift in Sumerian society in which dominance by Uruk is replaced by feuding city-states and rule by the priests is replaced by military strongmen.

It makes sense -- a legend typically encompassing a collection of events instead of one when the several are bigger than the one.

[pbrower2a]

Back in September I went to Lake Superior (Pictured Rocks National Seashore -- spectacularly beautiful!) along Michigan State Highway 28... and I went to the beach. Perhaps because of global warming I was still able to walk into the water and feel the sand and still-tolerable warmth.

But one thing I noticed: there was a severe paucity of obvious life as one might expect at the same latitude in Maine. Yes, Maine has a salt-water shoreline, but that is not the same story. Coastal Maine is enough like northern Michigan that one could easily confuse them... until one gets to the shoreline. Maine has rich sea life, including the famous and delectable lobsters. Michigan's 'northern Shore' is by comparison a biological desert. Climate? No. Salt water as opposed to sea water? Fresh-water lakes in southern Michigan teem with small fish and fresh-water crustaceans and mollusks. Maine and southern Michigan were both glaciated, but water life found their ways back.

Lake Superior does not have the sort of easy connection (first rapids, then the Soo Locks) to waters connecting to the Atlantic Ocean or the Mississippi basin. Life could easily return along the sea to Maine, too, once Maine was deglaciated. But water life has had little chance to get back into Lake Superior...let alone to evolve. Six thousand years versus one billion.

[Odin]

(01-19-2017, 12:39 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(01-19-2017, 01:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Back in September I went to Lake Superior (Pictured Rocks National Seashore -- spectacularly beautiful!) along Michigan State Highway 28... and I went to the beach. Perhaps because of global warming I was still able to walk into the water and feel the sand and still-tolerable warmth.

But one thing I noticed: there was a severe paucity of obvious life as one might expect at the same latitude in Maine.  Yes, Maine has a salt-water shoreline, but that is not the same story. Coastal Maine is enough like northern Michigan that one could easily confuse them... until one gets to the shoreline. Maine has rich sea life, including the famous and delectable lobsters. Michigan's 'northern Shore' is by comparison a biological desert. Climate? No. Salt water as opposed to sea water? Fresh-water lakes in southern Michigan teem with small fish and fresh-water crustaceans and mollusks.  Maine and southern Michigan were both glaciated, but water life found their ways back.  

Lake Superior does not have the sort of easy connection (first rapids, then the Soo Locks) to waters connecting to the Atlantic Ocean or the Mississippi basin. Life could easily return along the sea to Maine, too, once Maine was deglaciated. But water life has had little chance to get back into Lake Superior...let alone to evolve. Six thousand years versus one billion.

Unlike the ocean fresh water lakes have seasonal turn over. That is writ large with the Great Lakes, given the fact they ice up. Plankton don't do very well in this type of setting. The other factor is relatively speaking the Great Lakes don't get the input of nutrients the oceans do. And they have an outlet to exacerbate this. They are too pure.

It's crazy how pure and clear the water of Lake Superior can be at spots, you can see really deep when there is little wind and the water is calm. Weird to think that a person could stick a water bottle in there and just start drinking it.

[JasonBlack]

Conservative non-creationist here. My biggest beef is that the political party most likely to deny evolution....is the same political party enthusiastically willing to use evolutionary psychology (of which I'm a big fan) to explain their views.

[pbrower2a]

No matter how elaborate is the explanation behind nonsense (good fiction obviously excluded), the complex explanation proves nothing. I am reasonably certain that create a colorful tome on fire-breathing dragons, even discussing their evolution, fossil record, biology, behavior, and ecology. Such would not make them real.