[_ Old Earth _] fossil foolishness

[Asimov]

Its a theory I happen to subscribe to

Please....don't use that word, theory. It's a belief.

 

[Featherbop]

Its a theory I happen to subscribe to

Please....don't use that word, theory. It's a belief.

He is probably using the word by it's 'normal' definition: "unproven idea".
Why are you upset at that?

 

[Asimov]

I'm not upset Marcky Marck, he's equating scientific theory with his idea of theory...that's false.

You want to talk science FACTS, well here's one. When I was in elementary school, the Earth was 3.5 billion years old. After high school, I found out the Earth was now 4.5 billion years old. It sure aged a lot while I grew up. So please, watch out about living by what are thought to be FACTS. Here is a line from a funny movie that might put things in perspective. I hope I get this right.

Yes...it's amazing how when we find out new things, our knowledge changes... :roll:

 

[Barabbas]

Well thank you Asimov. We agree at last. You've said so eloquently, what I said in a round about way. Our knowledge does change when we discover new facts.
I've discovered many new facts. I'm sure that happens with you also.
Yol Bolsun.

 

[unred typo]

My "theory"

I am a Bible literalist. A YEC, btw. I also believe that the book of Jasher ( http://www.nazarene.net/jasher/Book%20of%20Jasher.htm ) is a valuable record, although not inspired or inerrant, that gives an accurate picture of the events described in the Bible. In the book of Jasher, there are more details that help to uncover the mystery of the fossil record, without contradicting the Bible. Jasher records 2 major earth events, a famine and a flood before the worldwide flood of Noah. Jasher 2: 6 And the Lord caused the waters of the river Gihon to overwhelm them, and he destroyed and consumed them, and he destroyed the third part of the earth, and notwithstanding this, the sons of men did not turn from their evil ways, and their hands were yet extended to do evil in the sight of the Lord.
7 And in those days there was neither sowing nor reaping in the earth; and there was no food for the sons of men and the famine was very great in those days.

Some light is also shed on the various species that went extinct may have been destroyed by God during the flood:
4:18 And their judges and rulers went to the daughters of men and took their wives by force from their husbands according to their choice, and the sons of men in those days took from the cattle of the earth, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and taught the mixture of animals of one species with the other, in order therewith to provoke the Lord; and God saw the whole earth and it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon earth, all men and all animals.

As for the layers of species that are very primitive and very deep, my personal theory on them is that they were below the earth as part of a natural filtration system created by God in the beginning, to convert and dispose of waste. The labyrinth of underground fountains probably contained more simple organisms that were a vital part of the ecological system. Most of these would not have survived the cataclysmic events that occurred before, during and after the floods, although many do live even today.

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

Bad typo, no necromancy.

 

[unred typo]

SyntaxVorlon wrote:

Bad typo, no necromancy.

Oh, I do believe in the spiritual aspect and the inspiration of scripture but I also realize that the originals have been corrupted and a translation of copy of a copy of a translation of a copy of a handed down spoken record may have some errors to account for. I guess that’s why God gave us brains. Amazing thing is that it has survived so intact. Someone thought it was very important and somehow managed to impress generations to follow of it’s accuracy down to jots and tittles.

 

[reznwerks]

contrary

SyntaxVorlon wrote:

Bad typo, no necromancy.

Oh, I do believe in the spiritual aspect and the inspiration of scripture but I also realize that the originals have been corrupted and a translation of copy of a copy of a translation of a copy of a handed down spoken record may have some errors to account for. I guess that’s why God gave us brains. Amazing thing is that it has survived so intact. Someone thought it was very important and somehow managed to impress generations to follow of it’s accuracy down to jots and tittles.

How do we know how accurate it is since an original copy does not exist. The copies don't exist. The originals should be in Aramaic or Hebrew. The earliest texts we have are in Greek and we don't know who copied or how many times they were copied or how accurate or honest the copiers were. You already admit of the errors , so if you have one you probabley have more. If God was involved in the writing and creation of scripture he certainly could have caused it to be written so all would understand it and that if it were copied their would not be any question as to its meaning or accuracy. To accept anything less is an insult to any all knowing , all powerful God.

 

[unred typo]

Rezenwerks wrote:

How do we know how accurate it is since an original copy does not exist. The copies don't exist. The originals should be in Aramaic or Hebrew. The earliest texts we have are in Greek and we don't know who copied or how many times they were copied or how accurate or honest the copiers were. You already admit of the errors , so if you have one you probabley have more. If God was involved in the writing and creation of scripture he certainly could have caused it to be written so all would understand it and that if it were copied their would not be any question as to its meaning or accuracy. To accept anything less is an insult to any all knowing , all powerful God.

Well, it’s kinda like a fossil skeleton. You take what you have and plaster in the spaces with your best guess. God inspired men to write it all down. How accurate and detailed it was varied from writer to writer. If God wanted it perfect, I think it would have been written in stone with His own finger or across the sky in indelible cloud letters. I think we are in charge of what gets passed on to our offspring. If we hand them a bunch of beliefs, like evolution, for instance, we are responsible for our own children growing up and having that for a belief system. Awesome responsibility, isn’t it? Whole nations have lost the message entrusted to them by God. I think it is insulting to God to imply that it is somehow His fault. :roll:

 

[reznwerks]

kinda

Rezenwerks wrote:

How do we know how accurate it is since an original copy does not exist. The copies don't exist. The originals should be in Aramaic or Hebrew. The earliest texts we have are in Greek and we don't know who copied or how many times they were copied or how accurate or honest the copiers were. You already admit of the errors , so if you have one you probabley have more. If God was involved in the writing and creation of scripture he certainly could have caused it to be written so all would understand it and that if it were copied their would not be any question as to its meaning or accuracy. To accept anything less is an insult to any all knowing , all powerful God.

Well, it’s kinda like a fossil skeleton. You take what you have and plaster in the spaces with your best guess.God inspired men to write it all down. How accurate and detailed it was varied from writer to writer.
Well then you admit scripture is only as good as the person interpreting. I've said before when the message is garbled the receiver is seldom to blame. As a YEC I find your position contradictory considering your admission of the probability of error.

If God wanted it perfect, I think it would have been written in stone with His own finger or across the sky in indelible cloud letters.
I think if God wanted it written perfect he should have introduced BILL GATES a long time ago. Do you think God is using Microsoft yet? I wonder how big his hard drive is.
Really why would God do something and not do it perfect if he could. Do you go to work everyday and not try to do things as well as you can? For a perfect and all knowing God to reach anything less than perfection is an insult and an impossiblity.

I think we are in charge of what gets passed on to our offspring. If we hand them a bunch of beliefs, like evolution, for instance, we are responsible for our own children growing up and having that for a belief system.
Evolution is not a belief. Evolution is based on hard and reliable evidence. Passing off stories in the bible without any evidence as being literal is what should concern you. If the bible were true in this regard the evidence would be there . It is not. I can't see why God would hide the evidence or create evidence that would contradict what is in the bible.

Awesome responsibility, isn’t it? Whole nations have lost the message entrusted to them by God. I think it is insulting to God to imply that it is somehow His fault. :roll:
Whole nations have not lost the message. Whole nations have realized the message is incorrect and have the proof of it. What is insulting is to imply that a creator that you impart so much power to does not have the intelligence to impart a message that cannot be understood by one and all alike.

 

[unred typo]

Rezenwerks wrote:

Well then you admit scripture is only as good as the person interpreting. I've said before when the message is garbled the receiver is seldom to blame. As a YEC I find your position contradictory considering your admission of the probability of error.

Oh, am I out of my box? Call me a YUC or a YEK if you prefer. I don’t like labels anyways but I thought it would best describe my view in this forum. I believe in an approx. 6,000 year old earth created by God in 6 days.

Rezenwerks wrote:

I think if God wanted it written perfect he should have introduced BILL GATES a long time ago. Do you think God is using Microsoft yet? I wonder how big his hard drive is.
Really why would God do something and not do it perfect if he could. Do you go to work everyday and not try to do things as well as you can? For a perfect and all knowing God to reach anything less than perfection is an insult and an impossiblity.

Whole nations have not lost the message. Whole nations have realized the message is incorrect and have the proof of it. What is insulting is to imply that a creator that you impart so much power to does not have the intelligence to impart a message that cannot be understood by one and all alike.

The written message is man’s version of God’s communications to us. They were not written by God or they would be without error. Your problem is that you have decided what you think God should tell us and you think you can demand that He deliver it perfectly according to your specifications and speculations. Guess what? You can’t. God is quite independent like that. Bill Gates can’t even hire Him and Donald Trump can’t fire Him. Man has taken these collections of wonderful, quite accurate writings and published them in the handy Reader’s Digest format in several thousands of languages and translations and forms. I don’t even think God is collecting royalties though. :roll:

The message that God personally sent to earth was in the form of His only begotten Son, who was perfect for the job, btw. His message can be understood by one and all alike because it is a simple message of unselfish, undying love and respect for one another…and for God. That’s basically all you need to know. The Spirit of God is within you to help you understand it if you will allow Him to. God gave us the choice. Treat others as you would have them treat you or suffer the judgment you would judge others by. Poetic justice and perfect genius, if you ask me. :wink:

 

[unred typo]

I think I’m guilty of taking this thread off course.
In the opening argument, Rezenwerks wrote:

Fossil layers with complete fossils are almost invariably catastrophic in some way. If you've got a wide sampling of intact species and trace fossils, then you've got some kind of wide event preserving them. This can be something like a flood (for intact animals, not trace fossils so much) a mudslide or landslide, a layer of volcanic ash, etc.

Why is it that fossils found around the world can be called evidence of a local flood or volcanic event but not a world wide catastrophic event? Don't you think a global flood would also cause mudslides, volcanic activity, and a variety of strange deaths and burials, both before and after the flood as well as during? In areas where there is evidence of a considerable length of time between layers, (longer than can be explained by 40 days and 40 nights) we have 1/3 of the earth inundated by the waters of the River Gihon in previous years recorded in the book of Jasher, a non biblical historical source that agrees with the account in Genesis, btw.

 

[ThinkerMan]

unredtypo...

You often refer to the book of Jasher....

I suggest you read this, and well as other information about the book...

It's a fabrication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefer_haYa ... midrash%29

 

[unred typo]

Thank you, Thinkerman, for the site. While I agree that there may be obvious signs of translation errors, like the Bible, it has to be read with the understanding that it is a translation of a translation. I believe I read somewhere that the book of Jasher was still being used as scripture in the Ethiopian church since the time of Christ. I don’t know if I can find that site again but I will try later. As for the site you gave, it raises some valid points but many have made the same allegations about the Bible. I would comment on this excerpt:

But the book in its entirety cannot be so old as shown by chapter 10 covering the descendants of Noah which even contains medieval names for territories and countries, perhaps mostly obviously Franza for France and Lumbardi in Italia for Lombardy.
Most of its extra-Biblical accounts are found in nearly the same form in either other medieval compilations, or in the Talmud, or in other midrash or in Arabic sources. For example it contains the common tale that Lamech and his son Jabal accidentally killed Cain, thus requiting his wickedness for slaying Abel.
The Arabic connections suggests it was written by a Jew who lived in Spain or southern Italy. The work was used extensively but not especially more than many other sources in Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews.
In the 19th century, Moses Samuel of Liverpool, England, was given a copy of the Hebrew work and became convinced that the core of this work truly was the self-same Book of the Upright referenced in Hebrew scriptures. He translated it into English and 1839 sold it to Mordecai M. Noah, a Jewish New York publisher who published it the following year.

If I were translating an ancient manuscript that could barely be read, I would probably enter names that were current to the time I was translating the book according to my understanding of the locations mentioned. The whole purpose of a translation is to make it understandable by the reader, after all. Translating the ancient names of countries and places seems to be quite reasonable to me. The fact that most of the extra-biblical accounts are found in other sources does nothing to remove the authenticity of the book itself, but should rather support the idea that the records are actually based in truth, however tainted by legend they may or may not be.

 

[unred typo]

http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/lds ... asher.html

Here is a site that sheds some light on the subject. I think the man who hosts it is a Mormon but I haven't read that for sure. What he says about Jasher is interesting.

http://www.jasher.com/Forum.htm also has some positive things to say about Jasher.

 

[scitso]

Why is it that fossils found around the world can be called evidence of a local flood or volcanic event but not a world wide catastrophic event?

It all depends on when the floods happened. If the localized floods happened at different times, it means that it was not a world wide catastrophic even. And as far as I am aware. there is no evidence that the whole world flooded.
Besides, if the flood occured, evolution is incorrect, and the earth is only 6000 years old, then we would not have the all the animals we have. There is no way that all of the animals fit on Noah's ark, none. Even if it was one of each animal, they wouldn't have fit, but it was much more than one of each (7 clean, 6 unclean I believe). Also, the Bible does not explain how he got the animals from Australia and the Americas.
If the "great flood" occured, and that is a huge if but I will humor you, it is likely that what they considered the entire earth is not the entire earth. It is likely that they believed the earth to be only the parts that they we aware of (that's just common sense); so if a localized flood occured involving the area they are aware of, they would believe that the entire world was flooded.

 

[unred typo]

Scitso wrote:

It all depends on when the floods happened. If the localized floods happened at different times, it means that it was not a world wide catastrophic even. And as far as I am aware. there is no evidence that the whole world flooded.
Besides, if the flood occured, evolution is incorrect, and the earth is only 6000 years old, then we would not have the all the animals we have. There is no way that all of the animals fit on Noah's ark, none. Even if it was one of each animal, they wouldn't have fit, but it was much more than one of each (7 clean, 6 unclean I believe). Also, the Bible does not explain how he got the animals from Australia and the Americas.
If the "great flood" occured, and that is a huge if but I will humor you, it is likely that what they considered the entire earth is not the entire earth. It is likely that they believed the earth to be only the parts that they we aware of (that's just common sense); so if a localized flood occured involving the area they are aware of, they would believe that the entire world was flooded.

There is the Jasher record of a flood prior to the Noachian flood where 1/3 of the earth was flooded. This would give some areas layered sediments over the original mantle which also must have been layered for specific habitats of primitive organisms above and below and throughout the ‘fountains of the deep’ described in Genesis. These areas may or may not match other sedimentary layers from different parts of the world.

There is no reason to assume all the animals we have now did not evolve from animals taken on the Ark. Evolution as a chance occurrence needs millions and billions of years but as a design feature for survival, it can happen rather quickly, in mere 2-3 hundreds of years perhaps. We have sixty of these hundred year spans to accomplish great changes. If the families of animals can be broken down into branches for evolutionary models, similar divisions can be made for the Genesis account and still remain faithful to the phrase, ‘after their kind.’ You have no problem with believing a tadpole becomes a frog in a matter of days, why not a horse-like animal becoming a zebra or pony or mule in a few centuries of isolation on a continent by itself where inbreeding causes specialized features to become dominant? How many new dog breeds have been developed in the last hundred years by men‘s designs? Why don’t you believe that God who created all these creatures in the first place cannot tweak their DNA to produce more varieties of the same kinds?

How many animals can you fit in a three story barge that measured at least 450 feet long by 75 feet wide? Answer that and you might be able to figure how many original ‘kinds’ there were. ;-)

The Bible doesn’t explain how the animals got to different areas of the world but it does say that God sent them from the Ark to replenish the earth. After the flood, much of the water was probably frozen at the poles to allow the earth a chance to dry up. More land was exposed to allow animals to migrate to other areas. Shifting of the unstable earth’s crust by mudslides, volcanic action, tsunami, and other catastrophic events made some of the ice melt and inland trapped waters to flow into lower parts causing divisions in the continents by newly formed ocean areas.

If the flood of Noah was not world wide, why did God say He was going to use a rainbow in the cloud as a memorial to the promise He would not destroy all the earth by flood again? We have had many local floods since then.

 

[reznwerks]

facts

Scitso wrote:

It all depends on when the floods happened. If the localized floods happened at different times, it means that it was not a world wide catastrophic even. And as far as I am aware. there is no evidence that the whole world flooded.
Besides, if the flood occured, evolution is incorrect, and the earth is only 6000 years old, then we would not have the all the animals we have. There is no way that all of the animals fit on Noah's ark, none. Even if it was one of each animal, they wouldn't have fit, but it was much more than one of each (7 clean, 6 unclean I believe). Also, the Bible does not explain how he got the animals from Australia and the Americas.
If the "great flood" occured, and that is a huge if but I will humor you, it is likely that what they considered the entire earth is not the entire earth. It is likely that they believed the earth to be only the parts that they we aware of (that's just common sense); so if a localized flood occured involving the area they are aware of, they would believe that the entire world was flooded.

There is the Jasher record of a flood prior to the Noachian flood where 1/3 of the earth was flooded.
First of all the world was considered flat at the time and even if it weren't communication did not exist that would confirm such a tale.

This would give some areas layered sediments over the original mantle which also must have been layered for specific habitats of primitive organisms above and below and throughout the ‘fountains of the deep’ described in Genesis. These areas may or may not match other sedimentary layers from different parts of the world.
Geologists already know the geological strata and what it consists of . It doesn't support a global flood plain and simple.

There is no reason to assume all the animals we have now did not evolve from animals taken on the Ark.
Yes there are , the Ark has never been proven to ever have existed and using logistics alone would be impossible to do, plain and simple.


Evolution as a chance occurrence needs millions and billions of years but as a design feature for survival, it can happen rather quickly, in mere 2-3 hundreds of years perhaps.
Evolution is not a "chance" occurrance. It is a known regularly occurring process that can take a long time or a short time to occur.

We have sixty of these hundred year spans to accomplish great changes. If the families of animals can be broken down into branches for evolutionary models, similar divisions can be made for the Genesis account and still remain faithful to the phrase, ‘after their kind.’ You have no problem with believing a tadpole becomes a frog in a matter of days, why not a horse-like animal becoming a zebra or pony or mule in a few centuries of isolation on a continent by itself where inbreeding causes specialized features to become dominant?
We know tadpoles become frogs by observing them first hand. No belief is required. We also know we have horses , zebras ponys and mules all existing at the same time. They don't change back and forth.

How many new dog breeds have been developed in the last hundred years by men‘s designs? Why don’t you believe that God who created all these creatures in the first place cannot tweak their DNA to produce more varieties of the same kinds?
Is God looking for a blue ribbon as well? For what purpose would a God "tweak" DNA to make new creatures? This would imply God uses vanity for personal enrichment. I would think the creator of the universe would be above such petty human ambitions.

How many animals can you fit in a three story barge that measured at least 450 feet long by 75 feet wide? Answer that and you might be able to figure how many original ‘kinds’ there were. ;-)
How many animals do you think you could put on 3 football fields with all the food they need? Answer : not anywhere near the amount of animals on the face of the earth. Look at how much room one circus takes up. You couldn't stack two of each animal that existed on the face of the earth in this space let alone expect them to survive. Lets talk about waste as well from these animals. What were these animals going to eat once they got off the ark since every living thing was dead?

The Bible doesn’t explain how the animals got to different areas of the world but it does say that God sent them from the Ark to replenish the earth. After the flood, much of the water was probably frozen at the poles to allow the earth a chance to dry up.
Just like that? "Water you go to each pole and then freeze so the earth can dry up." said God. Forget how the animals got dispersed after the flood. How were they summoned in the first place and how were they chosen? How did the Koala bear get to Noahs ark and where did Noah get the Eucalyptis leaves for them to eat since this is all they eat? Where did Noah put the crocodiles and polar bears?

More land was exposed to allow animals to migrate to other areas. Shifting of the unstable earth’s crust by mudslides, volcanic action, tsunami, and other catastrophic events made some of the ice melt and inland trapped waters to flow into lower parts causing divisions in the continents by newly formed ocean areas.
The animals all understood what to do when they saw these natural disasters. Yea right. The animals were all tuned in to CNN and saw what was going on and they knew they should pack their belongings and move.

If the flood of Noah was not world wide, why did God say He was going to use a rainbow in the cloud as a memorial to the promise He would not destroy all the earth by flood again? We have had many local floods since then.
A better question might be why did God say he was going to destroy the world except for Noah and his family to end the evil in the world when clearly it didn't work and then why did he say he was sorry for doing it? God clearly admits to making a mistake and this is impossible for an all powerful all knowing God.

 

[unred typo]

reznwerks wrote:

Geologists already know the geological strata and what it consists of . It doesn't support a global flood plain and simple…. the Ark has never been proven to ever have existed and using logistics alone would be impossible to do, plain and simple. (etc, etc...his comments in blue type)

There was no one to communicate the tale to since everyone but Noah and his family drowned, and they would have learned of the River Gihon flood from God‘s personal message to them. They simply passed the account down to their children who passed it down to theirs. Even if some people thought the world was flat doesn’t change the fact that God Himself spoke to Noah and told him to build an ark because He was going to flood the entire surface unlike the previous warning flood, whether the earth was believed to be flat, cylinder, cube or globe.

The geology of the earth is not nearly as “plain and simple†as you would like to believe. Evolutionists have fabricated several nice explanations of what the earth’s layers represent. As you say, though, believing doesn’t make it so. Carbon dating can not be confirmed to be an accurate method since there is no way to absolutely prove that carbon always has decayed at a fixed rate. There may be many factors to consider that scientists in the last century have never experienced, such as global flood, meteorite showers, radiation or concentrated chemicals or gasses unknown to present day observers. A mere 200 years doesn’t seem like very much study when thirty times that amount has gone by. Besides that, it isn’t as if the scientific theories are written in stone. They change quite rapidly as new and more conflicting evidence is discovered or frauds are exposed.

Evolution as a “known regularly occurring process†is only the display of the genetic variety and genius of it’s designer, affectionately known as our heavenly Father God. I don't believe that I implied that these new breeds of creatures “change back and forth†although some may do that if they haven’t become so specialized that they are now a unique animal that is unable to mate with it’s former cousin. The desire to create varieties and appreciate diversity are attributes that we have inherited from our maker. We are created in His image, you recall. The love of variety isn’t a petty human trait but evidence of creativity and artistic ability, not to mention the fact that it enables animals a chance to survive in their changing environment.

The logistics of saving a remnant of all animals in the midst of a catastrophic flood is no easy task. I think God is capable of such a feat, even using a wooden boat. 1,500,000 cubic feet of space is the minimum area that is figured using an 18†cubit. I guess a lot would be determined by the size of the animals and how much they would need to be fed. Hibernation, using young animals and good packing techniques probably were employed. Animals were lead to the Ark, I suppose the same way butterflies, birds, and other creatures are lead to migrate across whole continents today. Pre flood Earth only had three major rivers around the globe that could conceivably separate areas where animals lived. All the animals were created in the Eden area and roamed from there to other parts of the planet. Young crocodiles fit in a goldfish bowl. Baby bears aren’t much bigger than sheep. Polar bears may be later descendants of generic bear kinds. The Koala bear certainly might be a post flood evolutionary species. If not, he probably lived where his diet was accommodated by the local vegetation, which Noah brought along. Diet after the flood for carnivores was no doubt dead fish and animals buried in soft sediment. The waters were completely abated from the earth in a year but most of the earth was probably starting to re grow long before that. Nothing like rich flood silt for growing seeds and rooting cuttings. Probably didn’t even need Miracle Grow.

reznwerks wrote:

A better question might be why did God say he was going to destroy the world except for Noah and his family to end the evil in the world when clearly it didn't work and then why did he say he was sorry for doing it? God clearly admits to making a mistake and this is impossible for an all powerful all knowing God.

First, He didn’t say it would end all evil in the world. He said He did it to remove those people whose every imagination was evil. It was punishment for their sin. I have had to punish my children for doing wrong. I regret having to do it but I’m not the one who did wrong. God was sorry He had to do it, not that He was wrong to remove them from the earth. They were so engrossed in evil they became genetically defective and hopelessly depraved. God knows everything that can possibly be known. Freewill future actions can not be known. Freewill means they are not determined by God. Future means they haven’t happened until they do. That’s pretty plain and simple, wouldn’t you say?

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

reznwerks wrote:

Geologists already know the geological strata and what it consists of . It doesn't support a global flood plain and simple…. the Ark has never been proven to ever have existed and using logistics alone would be impossible to do, plain and simple. (etc, etc...his comments in blue type)

There was no one to communicate the tale to since everyone but Noah and his family drowned, and they would have learned of the River Gihon flood from God‘s personal message to them. They simply passed the account down to their children who passed it down to theirs. Even if some people thought the world was flat doesn’t change the fact that God Himself spoke to Noah and told him to build an ark because He was going to flood the entire surface unlike the previous warning flood, whether the earth was believed to be flat, cylinder, cube or globe.

Do you realize how much water that would take, and how much energy would be released were it to rain? It would quite literally boil the seas away.
If this had happened it would have been highly evident in the geologic record. Furthermore, there isn't a great big overall sedimentary level that completely covered the planet anywhere in the past 10000 years.

The geology of the earth is not nearly as “plain and simple†as you would like to believe. Evolutionists have fabricated several nice explanations of what the earth’s layers represent. As you say, though, believing doesn’t make it so. Carbon dating can not be confirmed to be an accurate method since there is no way to absolutely prove that carbon always has decayed at a fixed rate.

Sure there is, if such such constants were so easily mutable by conditions that would be survivable on earth then we wouldn't have the bloody great ball of nuclear fusing plasmic hydrogen we call the sun.
And if radiation levels and decay rates changed so easily, life on earth could not survive, or DNA would be ripped apart before we could reproduce.

There may be many factors to consider that scientists in the last century have never experienced, such as global flood, meteorite showers, radiation or concentrated chemicals or gasses unknown to present day observers. A mere 200 years doesn’t seem like very much study when thirty times that amount has gone by. Besides that, it isn’t as if the scientific theories are written in stone. They change quite rapidly as new and more conflicting evidence is discovered or frauds are exposed.

Newton's laws still work, and won't ever not work, we haven't changed them in the past three centuries. Physics has changed, grown larger, become more complex, but Newton's laws still work, three centuries from now Einstein's will still work. There is no reason to believe that the way the universe acts has changed significantly over the past 13 billion years.

Evolution as a “known regularly occurring process†is only the display of the genetic variety and genius of it’s designer, affectionately known as our heavenly Father God. I don't believe that I implied that these new breeds of creatures “change back and forth†although some may do that if they haven’t become so specialized that they are now a unique animal that is unable to mate with it’s former cousin. The desire to create varieties and appreciate diversity are attributes that we have inherited from our maker. We are created in His image, you recall. The love of variety isn’t a petty human trait but evidence of creativity and artistic ability, not to mention the fact that it enables animals a chance to survive in their changing environment.

Blah blah blah, sophistry, yada yada.

The logistics of saving a remnant of all animals in the midst of a catastrophic flood is no easy task. I think God is capable of such a feat, even using a wooden boat. 1,500,000 cubic feet of space is the minimum area that is figured using an 18†cubit. I guess a lot would be determined by the size of the animals and how much they would need to be fed. Hibernation, using young animals and good packing techniques probably were employed. Animals were lead to the Ark, I suppose the same way butterflies, birds, and other creatures are lead to migrate across whole continents today. Pre flood Earth only had three major rivers around the globe that could conceivably separate areas where animals lived. All the animals were created in the Eden area and roamed from there to other parts of the planet. Young crocodiles fit in a goldfish bowl. Baby bears aren’t much bigger than sheep. Polar bears may be later descendants of generic bear kinds. The Koala bear certainly might be a post flood evolutionary species. If not, he probably lived where his diet was accommodated by the local vegetation, which Noah brought along. Diet after the flood for carnivores was no doubt dead fish and animals buried in soft sediment. The waters were completely abated from the earth in a year but most of the earth was probably starting to re grow long before that. Nothing like rich flood silt for growing seeds and rooting cuttings. Probably didn’t even need Miracle Grow.

....Wow, what a bunch of false and unsupported assumptions. What about the salt levels in the oceans, were all freshwater fish magically able to survive in them? If so why didn't God just make Noah and all the animals magically able to survive the flood? Silly god.

reznwerks wrote:[quote:2d579]A better question might be why did God say he was going to destroy the world except for Noah and his family to end the evil in the world when clearly it didn't work and then why did he say he was sorry for doing it? God clearly admits to making a mistake and this is impossible for an all powerful all knowing God.

First, He didn’t say it would end all evil in the world. He said He did it to remove those people whose every imagination was evil. It was punishment for their sin. I have had to punish my children for doing wrong. I regret having to do it but I’m not the one who did wrong.[/quote:2d579]
Did you drown them?