Evolution? How?

Well, CI, more seriously doesn't the verse you quoted here say that the animals will come to Noah? I guess I don't see why you can't see that. If you are saying that you want the Bible's answer to your question.....well you quoted it yourself, didn't you?

rl. Exactly, the key word here is "KNOW". To me the best way to know, is by evidence from the field. Im pretty sure about my basis in fact and if you ever want to really debate evidence Im here for ya. Not in a snotty way, but I do have a working knowledge( even thoug I really dislike paleo) and I have quite an extensive reference set including "The Treatise on Paleontology' (That cost us many dinero).

Can you show us where in the bible it says the animals went to Noah?

If god controlled the animals in that manner, surely he could have let them drown then recreated everything over again. Then again, how did all those animals and creepers cross over the oceans? Maybe god flew them over. After all, he is god.

I agree the evidence must be key. My point is when there is no evidence (i.e. 'we don't see fossils of X in this strata etc' ) available, drawing a conclusion is highly speculative. I appreciate your extensive knowledge in your (apparently many) areas of expertise, and I have learned a lot from talking with you.

As I said, it's in the verse that you quoted.

"Two of every kind shall come to you to keep them alive...."



I suppose He could have done it lots of different ways, but apparently your suggestion is one He didn't take.



I don't know. The Bible doesn't address this question. Perhaps some of them went with humans as they migrated. Land bridges such as the one across the Bering Strait could have provided the means for others.

rl
Im not sure what conclusion I could draw regarding fossil "X" if it did not appear in a specific stratum
Some possibilities

1Fossil x didnt live in the environment that the stratum represented

2fossil X didnt live at the time when the stratum was deposited

3fossil X was eroded along with the encapsulating stratum so that wed only see a discontinuity

We cant make up any kind of conclusions as you infer. Any conclusions would be conclusions without evidence. Each of the above 3 possibilities are testable and falsifiable.
Grand conclusions ultimately grow out of small interconnected packets of evidence. We let the sweeping generalities usually go to the Creationists. Science is usually more self critical than you guys, only difference is that our critiques have to be firmly based on some scientific principle.

Even the concept of punctuated equilibrum was pretty well thought out and was presented with lots of data supporting it. Its still a hypothesis but , after about 30 years of detailed sampling in the very strata that Gould and Eldredge worked on, many paleos are finding strata that can be correlated to Goulds units but from 50 to 100 miles away and these show more abundant intermediate forms of brachs. Detailed sampling is suggesting that The hypothesis may just be based upon sampling bias. (They were making the same assumptions that you have, sort of. ie "even if a fossil doesnt occur in a chronol ogically significant stratum, maybe the animal still existed"). The only difference is that they(Gould ) didnt expect that there were any intermediates , they thought that they had good controls on their samples established.

farmerman,

it is interesting that you as well as certain scientists say that there never was a flood (even Christians debate over whether it was globalize or localized), but that there are several different ancient texts that all corroborate the account of the ancient flood. The Bible, Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh (Mayan sacred text), among others, speak of a devastating flood. Whether you believe in the spirituality of those sacred texts or not, they are historical books. I think the fact that those and other historical records speak of a devastating flood trump science.



The........

The,

I think we can all agree that there was a local flood pretty much every where at some point in time. Even a flood that covered the entire known world wouldn't need to be very big.

Are you talking about these Maya myths?

The Popol-Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya, contains within its creation story a tale of the destruction of the first beings by a flood. This flood differs from others in that it is not a punishment, but rather a remedy for a faulty creation. The Feathered Serpent first created man from mud. These creatures were a failure; they couldn't see, they dissolved when it rained, etc. So the god broke them up and tried again.

"This time he made men out of wood. They were better than the mud-men. They could walk and talk; they had many children, built many houses, but they had no minds nor souls nor hearts.

The Feathered Serpent - Quetzalcoatl - was disappointed with what he had created, so he sent a great flood to cleanse the earth of his mistake.


Myth 2


In the beginning was only Tepeu and Gucumatz another name for Quetzalcoatl.

These two sat together and thought, and whatever they thought came into being. They thought earth, and there it was. They thought mountains, and so there were. They thought trees, and sky, and animals etc, and each came into being. But none of these things could praise them, so they formed more advanced beings of clay. But these beings fell apart when they got wet, so they made beings out of wood, but they proved unsatisfactory and caused trouble on the earth. The gods sent a great flood to wipe out these beings, so that they could start over. With the help of Mountain Lion, Coyote, Parrot, and Crow they fashioned four new beings. These four beings performed well and are the ancestors of the Quich.

Hey Farmerman,


Quetion: Did the melting of all those glaciers at the end of the ice age cause a heat wave?



The.........

Eorl,

You're right. I never said it covered the entire world. I am one of those Christians who believes it was localized.


The........

The Epic of Gilgamesh


Arthur A. Brown

Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate. These things we can fix -- or establish definitely. But stories also remind us of things we cannot fix -- of what it means to be human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot understand, and reconcile us to mortality.


We read The Epic of Gilgamesh, four thousand years after it was written, in part because we are scholars, or pseudo-scholars, and wish to learn something about human history. We read it as well because we want to know the meaning of life. The meaning of life, however, is not something we can wrap up and walk away with. Discussing the philosophy of the Tao, Alan Watts explains what he believes Lao-tzu means by the line, "The five colours will blind a man's sight." "[T]he eye's sensitivity to color," Watts writes, "is impaired by the fixed idea that there are just five true colors. There is an infinite continuity of shading, and breaking it down into divisions with names distracts the attention from its subtlety" (27). Similarly, the mind's sensitivity to the meaning of life is impaired by fixed notions or perspectives on what it means to be human. There is an infinite continuity of meaning that can be comprehended only by seeing again, for ourselves. We read stories -- and reading is a kind of re-telling -- not to learn what is known but to know what cannot be known, for it is ongoing and we are in the middle of it.


To see for ourselves the meaning of a story, we need, first of all, to look carefully at what happens in the story; that is, we need to look at it as if the actions and people it describes actually took place or existed. We can articulate the questions raised by a character's actions and discuss the implications of their consequences. But we need to consider, too, how a story is put together -- how it uses the conventions of language, of events with beginnings and endings, of description, of character, and of storytelling itself to reawaken our sensitivity to the real world. The real world is the world without conventions, the unnameable, unrepresentable world -- in its continuity of action, its shadings and blurrings of character, its indecipherable patterns of being. The stories that mean most to us bring us back to our own unintelligible and yet immeasurably meaningful lives.


The Epic of Gilgamesh opens with the convention of a frame -- a prologue that sets off the story of Gilgamesh's life. An unnamed narrator states, "I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh" (61). Thus the narrator introduces himself before he introduces the hero, and by doing so, welcomes us, as the imaginary listeners and actual readers, into the endless present of the telling of the tale. The deeds of Gilgamesh took place in the past. Having returned from his journey and resting from his labor, Gilgamesh, the narrator recounts, engraved the whole story on a clay tablet. What we are reading, then, is the transcription of an oral telling that repeats a written telling. On the one hand the frame helps verisimilitude. By referring to Gilgamesh's own act of writing, the narrator attempts to convince us that Gilgamesh was an actual king and that the story that follows is a true story. On the other hand, by calling our attention to the act of telling, the narrator reminds us that the truth of a story might lie in the very fact of its being a story -- the undeniable fact of its narration. To deny its narration would be to deny our own existence. Either way, the frame blurs the distinction between Gilgamesh's world, or the world of the tale, and our own.

Localized by fantasy or tales?

Hi Cicerone Imposter,


My choice to be a Christian, as well as my choice to believe in their absolutely idiotic myths, which I find to be quite comforting, because it helps me to satisfy my own need to feel important because my mother purposely left me alone in the middle of the zoo at the age of five to stand in front of hungry lions, would also lead me to believe that exactly what you call myths in the Popol Vuh are the same things I call myths. Doesn't it make you happy to know that you can agree with a Christian about something.


The.........

Sorry, evidence for a series of localized floods all center around the Black Sae and the Caspian (Ryan et al 1994) these are contemporary with Neolithic cultures who may have begun legends about localized flooding. Of that there is no doubt. Also in the Tigris and Euphrates the Gilgamesh legends were probably born.
During the Last Ice Age at the end of the Pleistocene, water levels of the world were down by as much as 350 feet below present grade. so people libved out in the continental slopes . Evidence was that , even the Mediterranean was at a low sea stand and there was a land bridhe for Homo erectus and other migrations of erly humans to migrate into Europe.

HOWEVER, Thats a long way from evidencing a worldwide flood, which youre "pre flood: world comment would have you believe.
Even in the US , during the Cretaceous, there was a large shallow inland sea and there were other ocen basins that corresponded with early drifting continental masses.

There were always , here and there , evidences of little inundations and estuaries, shallow basins, inland seas. BUT, they never happened at the same time. Im sitting on a portion of the Appalachian piedmont which, from rock and soil data, has not been evidencing any flooding since at least the Ordovician when the martinsburg formation was deposited in a shallow inland embayment. Thats about 440 million years ago (+/- 4 weeks)

Farmerman,

I believe in a localized flood. I don't believe everything Jerry Falwell says. In fact, I don't even know what he says, so I don't care; but you might might it interesting to know that Christians are not the religious equivalents of The Borg. We are not a collective, and many of us do disagree on various points of contention.


Have a good night. I'm Tired.


The.........

Undone, Im aware of the many interpretations of scripture as evidence. Many , however, are presented as Conditions for the non-existance of evolution (worldwide flood, young earth etc)

Many Christin denominations have accepted evolution as a means of achieving lifes diversity on the planet and these religions happily coexist with evolution as a fact just like they exist with the weather.

yep its late

farmerman,

They are not interpretations; they are completely different records from completely different records from completely different civilizations at completely different times.




The..................

undone, do you accept the flood legends of the Bible to be metaphorical or literal?

farmerman,

literal. I know you probably have tons of evidence to prove that it is fabricated and that the different legends were simply passed through oral tradition from one civilization to another all over the world. If it is really that important for you to try to convert me to atheism, which requires no belief in a god and therefor will result in everyone becoming nothing after death, then write what you want. But if there is no God, then my ignorance is not worth you trying to prove that there is no god, because either way I will simply beomce dusst after I die.


The.......