Hello Coyoteman. You didn’t think I’d forgotten you did you?
1) If you doubt that there was a global flood, please Google “fossil graveyard”. Animals don’t get buried alive in mud unless a flood is happening.
2) I’ve never seen a lizard sprout wings, I’ve never seen a cow grow a fin, etc. Those are some of the observable events that would make evolution an observable scientific fact measurable by the “scientific method” thus making evolution “science”. But it has not happened in recorded history, so I relegate evolution to the category of fable.
3) I’m not an expert in history. So I stand by the Bible as reliable history when I say your sources are wrong when they predate the Egyptians before the flood. Why? How could I dare make such a stand? Is it the blind faith of a religious zealot? Am I deluded completely because I am completely crazy with faith?
Not at all.
I believe the Bible because:
1) Like millions of Christians throughout history, I have experienced the love of God, personally. He has made it clear he knows my thougts and fears and prayers.
2) Like many Christians, I have seen angels with my own eyes while wide awake.
3) Unlike other alleged holy books, the Bible says what happens thousands of years before it happens.
Please see http://www.direct.ca/trinity/y3nf.html for the details. This telling what happens thousands of years before it happens, is the signature of God, that you may know that the Bible is not just any book.
It’s not circular. If you dig into the links, you will notice for instance that the reason he says 606BC was the year that the Babylonians conquered Israel is:
1) The Babylonians kept a history of events
2) They also recorded lunar and solar eclipses
3) By taking the present position/velocity of the moon, we can calculate the date of these eclipses precisely
4) We interpolate from the dates of these eclipses to other dates, like say the conquest of Israel, which we thus know with certainty happened in 606BC
See you downthread, FRiend.
ROTB
Or a volcano. As I recall the Mount St. Helens eruption created a major mud flow which buried a whole valley. And I believe volcanic ash (pyroclastic flow) has created not a few fossils as well.
But let's say that all the fossils you mention were created by floods. It would only support your contention if the floods all dated to the exact same time period. The global flood only happened once, so you have to choose when it happened. Most biblical scholars center on about 4350 years ago. But some folks link the flood to the "Cambrian explosion" some 500+ million years ago. You folks really have to get your stories straight! You can't have every convenient flood or fossil find be the one and only global flood!
In a similar vein I am amused by those who point out the flood stories of many world cultures as support for a global flood. Most cultures live in close proximity to bodies of water and floods are not a rare event. Just in recent days we have had flooding in Oklahoma. Remember New Orleans? Johnstown? And if these stories originated with the global flood, who was left to tell the stories?
2) I’ve never seen a lizard sprout wings, I’ve never seen a cow grow a fin, etc. Those are some of the observable events that would make evolution an observable scientific fact measurable by the “scientific method” thus making evolution “science”. But it has not happened in recorded history, so I relegate evolution to the category of fable.
The types of changes you are looking for are strawmen -- lies made up to be easily refuted in hope of fooling the gullible and ignorant. If such a change could be documented, it would run counter to the theory of evolution, which states that evolution is change in the genome of a population over time. Each generation is very slightly different from the previous. You are different from your parents, but you have not sprouted wings or fins.
If you were to place each of your male ancestors going back a million, or five million, years all in a row, you would see no significant differences between any adjacent ancestors, and probably no significant differences if you just looked at every tenth ancestor. But over that vast span of time, there would be significant differences between beginning and end. This is a truer picture of evolution than the wings/fins scenario.
There are living examples of this phenomenon. Google ring species:
Ring species provide unusual and valuable situations in which we can observe two species and the intermediate forms connecting them. In a ring species:
- A ring of populations encircles an area of unsuitable habitat.
- At one location in the ring of populations, two distinct forms coexist without interbreeding, and hence are different species.
- Around the rest of the ring, the traits of one of these species change gradually, through intermediate populations, into the traits of the second species.
A ring species, therefore, is a ring of populations in which there is only one place where two distinct species meet. Ernst Mayr called ring species "the perfect demonstration of speciation" because they show a range of intermediate forms between two species. They allow us to use variation in space to infer how changes occurred over time. This approach is especially powerful when we can reconstruct the biogeographical history of a ring species, as has been done in two cases. Source
3) I’m not an expert in history. So I stand by the Bible as reliable history when I say your sources are wrong when they predate the Egyptians before the flood. Why? How could I dare make such a stand? Is it the blind faith of a religious zealot? Am I deluded completely because I am completely crazy with faith?
If you choose to believe the bible rather than other sources, no matter what the evidence, there is nothing left to discuss. I could point out the best archaeological data and it would make no difference because your mind has already been made up. As Heinlein noted:
Belief gets in the way of learning.Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973
With that, good night!