Please explain Noah's Ark to me ...

[Stealth3si]

It is amazing to me how scientists can say things are so many billions of years old...I heard that they carbon dated a rock that was formed in the eruption of Mt. Saint Hellens and dated it as billions of years old!

Dave D

Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ in 1962. One of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century, "he claims that" science does not tend towards the pursuit of truth, but rather it undergoes what he called, “paradigm shifts.” He says science can be just as dogmatic as religion, if not more-so. Scientists interpret evidence according to their pre-conceived notions of how things are (or rather should be). They aren’t necessarily interested in finding the truth, but in finding evidence that can be interpreted to justify their worldview. If a scientist does not want to believe in God, then that will skew how he interprets evidence; and he won’t necessarily come to the right conclusion so much as he will come to an acceptable conclusion.

[Stealth3si]

I wish I could post a link here, but do a search for The Institute for Creation Research if you are open minded about the debate...

I'd stay from sites like this. And the ID movement isn't really worth your time.

They bring up some good questions about the impossibility of evolution.

The theory of evolution, that is the biological process and natural mechanism for the diversity of life, is a well established idea among the science community, although it's not considered a fact in scientific terms because there are no such things as facts.

[Stealth3si]

SCIENTIFIC METHOD-- *holding microscope* "Here's the facts! What conclusions can we draw from them?"
RELIGIOUS METHOD-- *holding bible* "Here's the conclusion! What facts can we find to support it!?"

Homer said "Facts are meaningless. They can prove anything that is even remotely true."

[Stealth3si]

Religion is man's attempt at God.. Religion is when you follow rules or traditions set by man. Catholocism, protestants, baptist, muslim, hindu.. ect... these are all examples or religion.. but if you know GOD and follow him and ONLY him and his WORD that is not a religion.   Also.. Noah's Ark.. Was two of each KIND of animal  not two of each speices.. so there were not all different speices of dogs, cats ect.. just one male, one female..  There are websites out there but I don't think I am allowed to give the link.. so just search up Ken Ham and Genesis..

This brings up an interesting point.

Genesis 6:19 says:

You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.

Genesis 7:2-3 says:

Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.

So uh, which one was it?  

7 clean 2 Unclean animals, that's not contradictory.

Yet another reason to question the legitimacy of the tale.

When I was a child my grandfather "proved" to me that 2=1 by using what was for a small boy a seemingly sophisticated proof. Of course, I didn't start believing that 2=1; I just believed that he knew some trick that I didn't. In the course of time he showed me that he had divided by zero in the proof, and that that invalidated the proof. The problem wasn't with mathematics; the problem was that he wasn't doing math as math was meant to be done.

Never mind the fact that we're supposed to believe Noah himself lived to be 950 years old.  Just plain nonsense.

God created the universe just 6 chapters earlier. He's about to cause a flood that will destroy virtually all life on the planet. However, your big hang up is over Noah's age...it seems rather reasonable that the God destroying the planet could also make someone live longer.

It's a lovely story, with some good metaphorical meanings..

Which might or might not remove literalism, which would then remove only the requirement of a literal Noah, but it would not preclude the possibility.

Example: Robin Hood is a myth, but there was a saxon Lord by the name Robert of __________ (not lockesly) the exact same name and time as some of the Robin Hood myths. Hence non literalism would only preclude the facts being true in totality in the literal sense.

If you guys so desperately want to not believe in a God and prove through Science how he doesn't exist, how can you live? You must be depressed and what about when you have kids? No wonder people loose their minds when babies die.

This thread isn't discussing the validity of a god(s) anyway.  It's discussing the historical validity of Noah's Ark, which didn't happen.

marieelissa's long and pointless post

They feel that finding the Ark would validate their views on a whole range of matters, from Geology to evolution.

I'd think a massive thing like the ark, which could carry 2+ of every animal on earth (do your research and see how many animals Noah would have to tend to) would be ridiculously humongous

Let's see.  The idea that, a few thousand years ago, a 600 year old man (who lived to be 950 years old) had a one-on-one discussion with an invisible being in the sky, then built a boat large enough to hold an insanely large amount of animals, then rode out the largest flood mankind has ever known (of which there isn't a shrapnel of evidence supporting this outstanding flood), and then repopulated the entire planet...

All of these seem like a rather petty obstacle when compared to creating and organizing the cosmos from scratch.

the giant spaghetti monster,

The "Giant Spaghetti Monster" is not an argument. It has to be an argument for it to need refutation.

[Stealth3si]

we would have found it by now...if it did exist.

I doubt it. Of course, over the past 4000 years it's probably been destroyed.

I love how it does not talk about anything beyond the 19th century.

People used to believe fly larvae were born from rotten meat- as if the rotten meat was the thing which conceived the maggots. People thought it made perfect sense. But then a scientist came around and contested that belief-- he did an experiment and watched the flies land on the meat, feast, and sometimes lay their larvae. He showed his proof and intelligent individuals believed him because he had physical evidence and it made perfect sense.

The world is full of morons until they finally bring in the light? Come on now, this is chronological snobbery. If you can't embrace all of history then you ought to suspect that you're being a bit too narrow in your judgment of history.

The same could be said about Eratosthenese and how he proved the world was round through basic geometry. But you know what? People continued to believe the world was flat for 1000's of years despite the overwhelming evidence presented to them.

If you're measuring the Earth's circumference, it seems to me that you must be pre-supposing that the Earth is round. Any arguments based off a measurement of the Earth's circumference would be absurd to someone who didn't believe the Earth was round in the first place.

You know why? It was easier for them. It required no thought to sit in their little boxes and be ignorant because the truth would rock their little worlds and their whole thought process would be rearranged. This is the same reason why people still believe in the ark-- it's so much easier to sit in their box and blind themselves. You get people throwing dinosaurs onto the ark BECAUSE IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE!!!

But according to the OP, this reason serves as the best Faith, which might make your point self-refuting.

God wants you to go to him and that is your choice but if you are searching for knowledge without understanding that you will never be able to figure out all this without God wanting you to than you are wasting your time.

...what?

Your never going to know and that is how God wants it.

This quote is why intelligent people mock religion.

I always get a kick out of when something great happens to some extremist, they're all "PRAISE THE LORD! PROOF HE BLESSES HIS BELIEVERS! I AM RIGHT!!!" but when something awful happens, they're all "it's all in gods plan! This was supposed to happen! It's all clear to me!" It's really sad.

I really wish people would step out of their little ugly cramped box and face the facts. Reality's rough, but you're making it worse by telling lies to get dumb peoples hopes up. Do some simple research and face it. The ark isn't real. It never happened.

Delusion - a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact

Well you know what? It's all bullshit. There is no physical evidence it ever happened except an old MYTH in which there's dozens of different ways to tell it. There's even one saying a giant frog cried and his tears caused a massive flood. And no, a piece of wood or seashell found on a mountain does not constitute ANY undeniable evidence. I'm sorry, but if you believe the ark is real, you're a delusional moron.

Why do you care?

[Stealth3si]

Then they perhaps proposed the idea that all complex organisms evolved from simple organisms over billions of years by natural forces into what we now see today.

Perhaps based on fallible and dubious assumptions.

Then they used their skills in observation and experimentation over decades to fill libraries of evidence backing this stance up.

We can observe the earth from space and see that it isn't flat. All of our navigation for airplanes is based on the idea that the earth is round and not flat. For that matter, we can travel to the edge of the earth and realize there is no edge because the earth isn't flat. No tests or speculation are necessary. We can observe that the earth isn't flat.

Can you explain to me how we can observe 4.5 billion years of evolution? Is it really fair to compare something which is easily observable to something which is impossible to observe and put them on the same level?

[ipayitforward]

Another thing that I have heard somewhere...can't remember where...and definately not to be taken as fact...just interesting thinking...If you had to put 2 elephants on the ark to repopulate the earth, would you take two full grown elephants, or two young ones?  Of course you would take the younger ones.  They would be smaller to save space.  On that too...the ark was big...it had enough room to hold everything.

    Another thought...God could have put the animals into a hibernation state too so that they wouldn't have had to eat and poop. 

[liljp617]

It is amazing to me how scientists can say things are so many billions of years old...I heard that they carbon dated a rock that was formed in the eruption of Mt. Saint Hellens and dated it as billions of years old!

Dave D

Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ in 1962. One of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century, "he claims that" science does not tend towards the pursuit of truth, but rather it undergoes what he called, “paradigm shifts.” He says science can be just as dogmatic as religion, if not more-so. Scientists interpret evidence according to their pre-conceived notions of how things are (or rather should be). They aren’t necessarily interested in finding the truth, but in finding evidence that can be interpreted to justify their worldview. If a scientist does not want to believe in God, then that will skew how he interprets evidence; and he won’t necessarily come to the right conclusion so much as he will come to an acceptable conclusion.

Yet I'm consistently told by theists that a theistic scientists, even a YEC or someone who takes the Bible literally, can be great scientist and keep neutrality in the lab (which I completely agree with).  Francis Collins for example -- the director of the Human Genome Project -- is someone who literally believes there was a talking snake.  No problem; didn't effect his studies or job as director.

The idea that someone who doesn't believe in a god(s) is going to inherently show bias toward the results and inherently become dogmatic towards science is nonsense.  They may observe something from a different perspective, but that's completely different from skewing results or observations.  That's the heart of science.  Never mind the fact that any legitimate study is peer reviewed over and over before it gains any validity.  A scientist can't propose some random nonsense based on their on individual perception and have it fly through the pipes with no criticism.

What Kuhn brings up is something that should be brought up, but that doesn't mean it holds up under scrutiny or holds any validity.  Could you give some examples of scientific studies being skewed because someone lacked the belief in a god(s)?  Why would someone skew results because of a lack of belief?  What are they achieving by doing this?

[liljp617]

Then they perhaps proposed the idea that all complex organisms evolved from simple organisms over billions of years by natural forces into what we now see today.

Perhaps based on fallible and dubious assumptions.

Examples please.  (You don't think scientists have entertained this thought?)

Then they used their skills in observation and experimentation over decades to fill libraries of evidence backing this stance up.

We can observe the earth from space and see that it isn't flat. All of our navigation for airplanes is based on the idea that the earth is round and not flat. For that matter, we can travel to the edge of the earth and realize there is no edge because the earth isn't flat. No tests or speculation are necessary. We can observe that the earth isn't flat.

Can you explain to me how we can observe 4.5 billion years of evolution? Is it really fair to compare something which is easily observable to something which is impossible to observe and put them on the same level?[/quote]

I didn't make the comparison or place them on the same level, you did.

We have observed evolution.  On a small time scale, certainly (for obvious reasons).  The mechanisms of evolution do not change as the time span elongates.  They remain the same.  Evolution makes predictions about what we would expect to see in the fossil record, comparative anatomy, genetic sequences, geographical distribution of species, etc., and these predictions have been verified many times over.

[Falconer02]

Wow Stealth3si I had a TON of time on his hands! GEEEEZ!

Why do you care?

I already stated this-- I just want people to look at the big picture rather than sit in their little box of irrational hatred to anyone who thinks otherwise. Religious extremists do this very well. Basically I just find this a major problem with humanity in my eyes-- "Don't believe what I believe? Well you're going to hell then!". It's much worse when they have power. 

Oh and about the dinosaur/ark thing if you're still curious about why I said it...I see it preached massively within the confines of creationist science websites and books. Hell, my neighbor even spurted it at me a while back. It's just ludicrous. So I just thought with all the people in this post saying that they believe the ark happened and quoting CS websites, that some probably believe that as well. An assumption? Sure. Don't overthink it.

Homer said "Facts are meaningless. They can prove anything that is even remotely true."

All of these seem like a rather petty obstacle when compared to creating and organizing the cosmos from scratch.

The whole main point of my frustration with ark-believers is their unwillingness to be rational when trying to prove it happened. It just perplexes me how they will defend something they've probably been thinking since childhood and never questioned it. You'd think once you hit a certain age, you'd do so. It's like you telling me your grandpa is completely right about 2=1 after you've matured and there's no way he could be wrong. End of story. Gate's closed. Don't say anything else. I won't take any other answer but that one.

The world is full of morons until they finally bring in the light? Come on now, this is chronological snobbery. If you can't embrace all of history then you ought to suspect that you're being a bit too narrow in your judgment of history.

I'm not sure if you got my point so I'll make this example quick-- The discovery of bacteria meant we should alter our way of thinking about..a doctor handling newborn children after...handling a diseased cadaver by cleaning himself so the disease cannot spread. We were 'brought into the light' as you put it and it improved our way of doing things. But what if doctors kept doing things the old way despite the new evidence and just shut their ears yelling "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU I AM NOT LISTENING!"? Not good! My point was simply to show that the old way of thinking isn't necessarily the most logical way of thinking (a lesser example? the ark story). This just ties into my paragraph above I guess.

Can you explain to me how we can observe 4.5 billion years of evolution?

Delorean + Flux Capacitor = Answer

[klkwid]

This isn't one of those black and white things-I think there's a middle ground here.  I think that something happened where this man did have to build and ark and he did actually bring 2 of each animal that he knew of at the time.  It probably did save some species.  Did the entire Earth flood?  I don't know.  Did everything that we know today come from what was brought on that ark?  Maybe.  I think that animals DO evolve in a way-they remain the same for the most part, but they change to adapt to their situations.  I just heard today on the radio that polar bears are smaller than they were years ago-it's a form of adaption.  I think that God allows for that kind of change over time-maybe He even changes things as time goes on.  Why?  I don't know-maybe he gets bored looking at all the same stuff all the time   There's SO many possible explainations!  Noah's Ark's story is just one of the several things that probably happened and may (or may not) have had an impact on what all these creatures are today.

[Stealth3si]

It is amazing to me how scientists can say things are so many billions of years old...I heard that they carbon dated a rock that was formed in the eruption of Mt. Saint Hellens and dated it as billions of years old!

Dave D

Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ in 1962. One of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century, "he claims that" science does not tend towards the pursuit of truth, but rather it undergoes what he called, “paradigm shifts.” He says science can be just as dogmatic as religion, if not more-so. Scientists interpret evidence according to their pre-conceived notions of how things are (or rather should be). They aren’t necessarily interested in finding the truth, but in finding evidence that can be interpreted to justify their worldview. If a scientist does not want to believe in God, then that will skew how he interprets evidence; and he won’t necessarily come to the right conclusion so much as he will come to an acceptable conclusion.

Yet I'm consistently told by theists that a theistic scientists, even a YEC or someone who takes the Bible literally, can be great scientist and keep neutrality in the lab (which I completely agree with).  Francis Collins for example -- the director of the Human Genome Project -- is someone who literally believes there was a talking snake.  No problem; didn't effect his studies or job as director.

This looks like a positivist view of Popper, whose system is rather naïve and quite frankly nothing more than question-begging when it comes to conflicts between the naturalist and the supernaturalist. In a post-Kuhn and post-Polanyi world, it’s just inexcusable for a scientist or philosopher to be so naïve to think that we can do science neutrally without having to get into conflicts in preliminary assumptions and the frameworks by which we interpret evidence in the first place.

Francis Collins for example -- the director of the Human Genome Project -- is someone who literally believes there was a talking snake.  No problem; didn't effect his studies or job as director.

This reminds us of the theme of social engineering in extreme fundamentalism, which we already met in Hitler's eugenics. The Human Genome Project is a further attempt at social engineering, allowing us to make people into whatever we need them to be in order to create our "utopia." I'm not saying I'm against curing the sick, etc; simply, the Genome Project is part of a program of genetic social engineering to normalize society. Its purpose is not merely to stop disease and so forth. Its purpose is ultimately to stop abnormality of any sort.

The idea that someone who doesn't believe in a god(s) is going to inherently show bias toward the results and inherently become dogmatic towards science is nonsense.  They may observe something from a different perspective, but that's completely different from skewing results or observations.  That's the heart of science.  Never mind the fact that any legitimate study is peer reviewed over and over before it gains any validity.  A scientist can't propose some random nonsense based on their on individual perception and have it fly through the pipes with no criticism.

I completely agree that this idea is absurd to scientists and the world of science frowns upon this but what is going on is that "normal science," as Kuhn calls it, is concerned with justifying one's paradigm by fitting all the available evidence into it, like puzzle pieces.

However—and this is the whole point of Kuhn's book— because every so often normal science completely fails to fit a piece of evidence in the puzzle, scientists are often forced, by the nature of science (i.e., "self-correction"), to refrain from doing this. Consequently, scientists then abandon the paradigm and desperately scramble for a new one: a scientific revolution. Out of the chaos, a new paradigm is chosen to replace the old because it is a better fit of the evidence.

Hypothetically, we can even envision a wide number of reasons why a scientific theory is so accepted in the scientific community by possibly taking a cue from Kuhn and realizing that this is what the scientific community does when a new paradigm is identified which is very popular and upon which much other science is based—they exclude dissenters. Also, empirical evidence is clearly available for this hypothesis with respect to evolution.

What Kuhn brings up is something that should be brought up, but that doesn't mean it holds up under scrutiny or holds any validity.

Kuhn ("On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions") is a philosopher of science who argued that science (and, correlatively, other knowledge) develops not by objective reasoning but by the fleshing out of new paradigms for looking at the world and along with Feyerabend ("Against Method"), a philosopher of science who showed that every scientific rule designed to ensure objective reasoning has been broken by a major scientist, so scientific successes cannot be fundamentally attributed to objective reasoning (at least alone). Exactly what Kuhn said or proved is a very complicated thing, and so anti-science reactionaries tend to make wild claims by invoking his name and pro-science reactionaries tend to make wild claims about how "postmodern" and "irrational" he is. Some of the basics are undeniable, but interpretation of Kuhn is really complex. That's why I generally don't get into the nitty-gritty of what he said, because if scholars of the philosophy of science are arguing about it then I'm certainly not qualified to make a comment. But, unquestionably, he (along with Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge, Tacit Dimension," to a lesser extent) represents the beginning of a long trend (continued in Feyerabend and others) in both epistemology and the study of science that undermines scientific positivism and reductionism.

Could you give some examples of scientific studies being skewed because someone lacked the belief in a god(s)?  Why would someone skew results because of a lack of belief?  What are they achieving by doing this?

I don't think these are the right questions that would be asked from reading Kuhn because the issue here is when people interpret theories based on naturalistic presuppositions. But there are much deeper questions to be asked by both sides. For instance, what kind of naturalistic assumptions go into science, and how can we work to do a non-naturalistic science? How do the structures of scientific thought shape our understanding of the world, and how should we reshape them?

But that's not the job of the scientist because, you see, science answers questions about how things work and what things are through the assumption-centered hypothesis which teaches that an unobservable principle is responsible for speciation and order through random alterations, but it cannot answer the questions of greater meaning that scientific discoveries may point to. That is the realm of the scientific philosophers, whom many scientific philosophers are also scientists, but not all scientists are scientific philosophers and some scientific philosophers are not scientists.

As it so happens, most of the fellows at the Discovery Institute (the leading ID think tank) DO happen to be PhD's in science as well. But I don't believe that even those at the heart of the ID movement would claim that ID is science. ID is actually a system of asking questions of science, and speculating on the larger implications of scientific theories. I think ID would be more accurately defined in terms of scientific philosophy, which is the discipline that thinks about science, but is not actually science itself.

[Stealth3si]

Then they perhaps proposed the idea that all complex organisms evolved from simple organisms over billions of years by natural forces into what we now see today.

Perhaps based on fallible and dubious assumptions.

Examples please.  (You don't think scientists have entertained this thought?)

In science you can't pick the evidence. You have to account for all of it but in science you can pick the presuppositions which interpret how the evidence will fit to justify the scientist's worldview of which its naturalistic presuppositions are fallible. Testing it only validates the fallibility of the presupposition and confirms the fault in the logic behind it, irregardless of the results. It's bad logic because it assumes how things work now is the way it has always been working. For example, I certainly think that the evolutionary theories are the best present scientific models, but I believe they're fallacious at best. In addition, the Pangaea theory more or less holds the same natural mechanics in the historical universe as evolutionism.

I didn't make the comparison or place them on the same level, you did.

We have observed evolution.  On a small time scale, certainly (for obvious reasons).  The mechanisms of evolution do not change as the time span elongates.  They remain the same.  Evolution makes predictions about what we would expect to see in the fossil record, comparative anatomy, genetic sequences, geographical distribution of species, etc., and these predictions have been verified many times over.

What you're implying is that, within the fossil record serving as evidence of a 4.5 billion year observation of evolution (which isn't comparable to easily observable phenomena), a multitude of "missing link" transitional fossils appear in the strata layers exactly where evolutionary theory predicts we'd find them, but this is absurd. I could point you to fossils where layers are upside down, things go in reverse order, etc. Actually, that is not the creationist argument, but you have here something that is ridiculous (about rock layers.) Geology, minerology and fossils are areas I am knowledgeable about, and before you make a claim this silly, please pick up your local college's textbook on geology from the library. For example, a large section of Australia has a 200 mile or so area where the layers are in reverse order. Then again, there was the beer can I dug out of "16 million" year old strata in Kettleman city.

Not that anomalies support a worldwide flood or are detrimental to evolution but there are literally hundreds of them. In fact, the beer can I found in strata didn't really fit Noah's flood that well. What did it fit? I do not know, but the fact remains that your claim here has no basis in fact, and you need to not make such claims. How do ferns fossilize slowly? How do I have a non-fossilized megdalon tooth. How come I have chunks of fossilized muscles? How did meat slowly form into stone? There is a fossilized heart in existence. The man who owned it gave it to ICR, to a man named Fred Wilson.

[Stealth3si]

Wow Stealth3si I had a TON of time on his hands! GEEEEZ!

Ha. This is the only time I have on the forum.

Why do you care?

I already stated this-- I just want people to look at the big picture rather than sit in their little box of irrational hatred to anyone who thinks otherwise. Religious extremists do this very well. Basically I just find this a major problem with humanity in my eyes-- "Don't believe what I believe? Well you're going to hell then!". It's much worse when they have power.

I did not see any one here in this forum hating others.

All I saw was you calling people irrational for being irrational.

But you also seem to me looking down on others who aren't being logical as you would be, or especially, believing in something you don't like.

Why do you care?

Oh and about the dinosaur/ark thing if you're still curious about why I said it...I see it preached massively within the confines of creationist science websites and books. Hell, my neighbor even spurted it at me a while back. It's just ludicrous. So I just thought with all the people in this post saying that they believe the ark happened and quoting CS websites, that some probably believe that as well. An assumption? Sure. Don't overthink it.

Seems like extreme fundamentalism.

I would think the global flood of Noah, followed by an ice age due to climactic shifts, could have well driven them to extinction.

Really, I view them as just another extinct species, like the dodo.

Hence, from a biblical worldview it seems like a large reptile would not fair too well in a world chilled. However, why is the saber toothed cat gone? I have no idea, but extinctions have always occured and fairly rapidly, which would explain why we see greater bio-diversity within the fossil record. Without intervention from governments, our generation would have spelled the end to the elephant and tiger, and many of the mightiest of beasts. Earlier generations have generally been crappy conservationists; hence, an extinct mighty beast seems very plausible from human or natural causes, but after a global flood, we would expect a climactic shift in much the same way the huricanes in FL kept Chicago unseasonably warm until one morning.

Homer said "Facts are meaningless. They can prove anything that is even remotely true."

All of these seem like a rather petty obstacle when compared to creating and organizing the cosmos from scratch.

The whole main point of my frustration with ark-believers is their unwillingness to be rational when trying to prove it happened.

You must take into account that this particular story involves the Christian belief in a biblical God. A God who stretches beyond science, knowledge and understanding. A God who is believed to have made the sun sit still in the sky, a God who created the universe, created heaven, made man out of dust and woman out of a rib, a God who parted a sea...the list of unbelievable stories goes on. The supporters of this story believe in that. To try and use the argument that "the story isn't logical or probable" holds no ground in a discussion involving a very strong belief in an extraordinary God. To use that argument one would have to first disprove the existence of a God, and rid all belief of him in the believers.

Whether or not it happened wouldn't be an issue if god is presupposed.

It just perplexes me how they will defend something they've probably been thinking since childhood and never questioned it. You'd think once you hit a certain age, you'd do so.

I think you're perplexed because unbelievers can try to smuggle empirical thoughts into a theistic worldview and materialize raw proven facts like "no geological proof" but when directly faced with a Christian narrative that arches a biblical thread of continuity of the "flood epic" of Noah's Ark they will run into the same impasse because they are approaching the question with drastically different presuppositions. Every single piece of evidence, every single argument presented will necessarily be interpreted differently by each side. For one who assumes naturalism and does not allow for the possibility of a supernatural explanation, of course a supernatural event will be thought to be impossible. His argument is necessarily circular, going back to his ultimate commitment to naturalism. Likewise, the Christian's argument will necessarily be circular, as he will continually go back to his ultimate reference point, his belief in God. If it were not so, it would not truly be his ultimate commitment. "Raw proven facts" simply will not do, as the facts mean very different things to the theist and the atheist.

It's like you telling me your grandpa is completely right about 2=1 after you've matured and there's no way he could be wrong. End of story. Gate's closed. Don't say anything else. I won't take any other answer but that one.

My point was there was no problem with the story, but how people read into the story.

The world is full of morons until they finally bring in the light? Come on now, this is chronological snobbery. If you can't embrace all of history then you ought to suspect that you're being a bit too narrow in your judgment of history.

I'm not sure if you got my point so I'll make this example quick-- The discovery of bacteria meant we should alter our way of thinking about..a doctor handling newborn children after...handling a diseased cadaver by cleaning himself so the disease cannot spread. We were 'brought into the light' as you put it and it improved our way of doing things. But what if doctors kept doing things the old way despite the new evidence and just shut their ears yelling "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU I AM NOT LISTENING!"? Not good! My point was simply to show that the old way of thinking isn't necessarily the most logical way of thinking (a lesser example? the ark story). This just ties into my paragraph above I guess

I got your point, which is you're actually showing an elitist mindset of Enlightenment dogma. It is this 21st century post-modern understanding of paradigm shifting in scientific discoveries that parades itself as your standard of human progress but really dehumanizes people and waters science down.

And my point is, look, even at least be a little less harsh on a person like Aristotle. He was the greatest scientist of all time (arguably?). He worked in astronomy, meteorology, physics, geology, biology, and psychology. (Not to mention philosophy, logic, poetry, literary theory, rhetoric, politics, political theory, and training Alexander the Great...) Instead of treating the senses disparagingly (as have most people who have said that they wanted to "shun traditional dogmatisms," your characterization of the Enlightenment of science, like the early Greek philosophers, Descartes, etc.), he used them, filling his Lyceum with specimens, engaging in experiments, etc.

Granted, at some point he trusted his "reason" a bit too much -- for instance, he assumed that a large stone would fall more quickly than a small stone -- but when you're not only writing the Encyclopedia Brittanica but inventing the disciplines and doing all the scholarship that the Encyclopedia studies, there's only so much you can do. A thousand years from now we'll have plenty of comparable reasons to "mock" Galileo, and perhaps the 20th century will be painted at the idyllic era in which some thinkers finally broke the oppressive chains of modernist tyranny and finally started to "think for themselves" instead of trusting Enlightenment dogma. Hopefully my counterpart in that era will be unimpressed with that kind of talk?

Can you explain to me how we can observe 4.5 billion years of evolution?

Delorean + Flux Capacitor = Answer

Precisely my point.

[mommadixon]

It is not just a story it is true events. God can do anything he made you. He made everything that you look at everyday so He can also bring every animal from every where and put them in one place and as many as He desireth. Keep thinking that it' s just a story you'll find out in the end what God is capable of.