Here is something I found online from an archive of the old "Holy Smoke" Fidonet BBS skeptics of religion forum. The year was 1997. While I spent very little time in the "Holy Smoke" forum, I did spend a great deal of time on the "Religion" Fidonet forum which was started by Dan Bennet per my request in the mid 80s. I wish there was an archive of that forum I could access.
But here is what I found:
EID:d4e5 226104c0
MSGID: 1:116/17.0 3318d497
-=> Quoting Don Martin to Bryson Hughes <=-
BH> Ok we can talk about the existance of God if you like.
MG> Do you have any evidence that a god exists? Any at all?
BH> However, in a case of the honest skeptic, I doubt that
BH> I could produce the evidence of what I know. There
BH> would be a couple of reasons. One would be my own
BH> limited ability to convey abstract ideas in a
BH> compressed space of time; the other due to the
BH> uninitiated or unprepared state that my skeptic friend
BH> would be in, to absorb the full impact of what I show
BH> to him.
DM> Personally, I have said many times that I would welcome ANY
DM> evidence of the existence of any god, and I have even specified
DM> indirect evidence that would be quite convincing, not only to
DM> me, but (I suspect) to all the wicked atheists here: the residue
DM> of the Noachan Flood.
DM> We have an account of a global flood directly produced by
DM> Yahweh in the Bible.
DM> : in short, a universal unique
DM> event would produce a universal unique outcome--a stratum like
DM> no other in the geologic column.
DM> Such a stratum would furnish perfectly good indirect
DM> evidence for the existence of this Yahweh person,
DM> So show us this stratum. That would be evidence.
I'm not a geologist.
Nor am I a fundamentalist in my view of biblical text. However, if you are
feeling serendipitous enough to look at other sources on the account of
the
biblical flood, I can recommend a few other text that I find interesting.
The Sibylene oracles give many detailed expansion upon the flood story
including the name of a specific peak that is one of the sub-mountains of
Ararat, as the last resting place of the ark.
Also the three versions of the book of Enoch, read side by side, give a
pretty
fantastic account of pre-flood world history including extremely high levels
of technology said to be brought by the "Sons of God" from the heavens,
who
intermarried with humanity because earth women were extremely attractive.
The technology was used in great warring and for violence continually, thus
the judgement upon the earth.
Another is the Ron Wyatt book about the discovery of a deteriorated boat
structure located in Turkey, on a peak that is a sub-mountain near Ararat.
The book includes pictures and is very interesting. Several anchor stones
also survived in much better condition than the boat structure. They are
huge and weigh several thousand pounds each. There is also text inscribed
on the anchors which indicate eight people. The name of the local area
is also named eight in another language.
I have found through reading the various accounts of the flood, that it
closely resembles the Atlantis legends of the destruction of a technological
race due to a deluge.
I also find the existance of quick frozen woolly mammoths quite a wonder.
I see each of these things as pieces of the puzzle, but I don't know what
the big picture is that gave rise to these clues. Several themes emerge.
We can reasonbly state that SOMETHING happened, that gave rise to these
accounts interpretted, by those who passed them down to us, as a world
wide deluge. I find the mystery to be fascinating and a great opportunity
for sluething out the mysterious past. I don't have the answers, but I've
got some of the clues.
Even if we had the big picture of what the cataclysm consisted of, I doubt
that it would prove God to the skeptic. As I stated before, the perception
of God, in lue of theist experiences and epiphanies such as I have, is
due to the ability to see meaning in events which speak of the superior
being that transcends human scales. Prophecy tracking and synchronicity
are
just two examples which some people find persuasive. What is persuasive
to each individual though, is an individual matter.
... PROPHET BRYSON and The ANGELS -***- WORLD * TOUR -***- 1997
--- Blue Wave/Max v2.12 [NR]
* Origin: Skeeter Haven "Nashville, TN" (615) 872-8609 (1:116/17)
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Just a few observations:
ReplyDeleteA wooden ark the size of the one described in the Bible and various other texts, would break up very quickly. Wave action would see to that.
No geologic strata exists denoting a world wide flood or a preexisting, highly advanced civilization ( a civilization far in advance of let's say Egypt ).
Nothing could survive on the surface of a global ocean. The atmospheric pressure would crush it.
Geologic strata containing marine life have been found on mountain tops, but in these organisms and ecosystems vary considerably and can be dated to different periods.
When the last glacial age ended and the earth entered it's present interglacial some 16,000 years ago, large quantities of ice melted quickly ( within several decades ), and ocean levels rose sharply, radically altering coastlines. The Black Sea broke through a natural dam and flooded many square miles of land. It became a good deal wetter than today. It is also possible that the Euphrates River flooded as it only did every 1,000 years. These events could give the impression that a global flood had once occurred. Wet conditions would have contributed to flooding in Asia and the Amazon ( much of which is under 30 feet of water during the rainy season today ).
The original Noah legend predates the Bible and refers back to a Babylonian king whose family, together with animals and goods for trade were caught in a major flood on the Euphrates River.
There is nothing strange in mammoths being caught in sudden storms reducing temperatures sharply. A woman in Alaska on a very cold day believed she could reach her newspaper where it had been thrown on her front lawn. She dashed out of her house in a night dress and froze to death before she could reach her paper.
One must ask where the olive branch came from as olive trees are very sensitive to salt water and wouldn't fair well under water.
It would be very difficult to explain the degree of ecological diversity, much less the distribution of life, to be found on earth so soon following the flood had there been one. I strongly doubt this could be achieved in a million years, let alone 10,000 or less.
BH: Hi SF. Yes the implausibility of the story of the flood to the rational mind is not in question. Most of the claims of the Bible and of spiritual events sound implausible. It just goes with the turf.
ReplyDeleteBack in 1997, the flood was being presented in the tired fashion of rationalist, as somehow an invalidation of the existence of God. There are a host of assumptions being made by the rationalist to think this is a persuasive argument in justification of their skepticism. The point I brought out was the topic was indeed an unanswered set of mysteries, but nevertheless a warrant for asking all kinds of question about the flood and consideration of more source materials, legends and so forth. No big deal.
My point to Don Martin was that even if we had evidence of a great geological upheaval that corroborates the worldwide legends of a deluge, it still would do little to prove God to the skeptic, just as lack of evidence does little to discount the existence of God for the believer. There are a great many peripheral psychologies at work in the minds of either party that are in fact governing them.
I didn't attempt to argue in favor of a flood since intimately, even if I could prove it undeniably true to a skeptic, it would still be irrelevant to imparting belief in God to him. It would intimately be irrelevant. So I choose to address instead a few topics of consideration that is not related to the natural sciences, but nevertheless forms of evidences that I think are much better considerations to entertain concerning the question of the existence of God.
One of the things I find amusing in small doses, and intensely frustrating in excess, is the rationalist mindset that gets rutted in a single argument to the end that the rationalist doesn't even realize he is not being argued with on his points, and he continues to repeat it over and over when it is taken as irrelevant for the actual question of priority. The rationalist in his doggedness, fails to see he is being directed to other considerations that bear directly upon the main question of God's existence.
Just as it was in 1997, so it is today when faced with the mindset of the determined rationalist to run a programmed scripted set of ideas, oblivious to the other direction being offered,it goes right past them because those synaptic firings are preoccupied with his own "argument".
Rationalist thinking in a discussion is modeled after a conflict and is presented like the offensive thrust to vanquish. The idealist mind like my own present ideas like flowing water following and flowing along the paths that it finds. Note that dynamic is at work even between Don Martin the rationalist, and myself the idealist.
Go right on flowing, but ( pardon the pun ), your waters aint gonna float a boat.
ReplyDeleteBH: Hi SF. Yes the implausibility of the story of the flood to the rational mind is not in question. Most of the claims of the Bible and of spiritual events sound implausible. It just goes with the turf.
ReplyDeleteLois: You are confusing "implausible" with "impossible." I think the latter word is appropriate for the majority of tales we read in the Bible. The sun and moon cannot go backwards, for example; and even if you magically drained all the water from the Red Sea, you still could not cross it on flat, dry ground.
There was a great deal of water upheaval as the Ice Age ground to a halt. A lot of arable coastlands were inundated as the ice melted, and in some cases there were catastrophic releases of glacial lakes as large sections of ice collapsed. This certainly does not prove anything about God, it merely proves that life was difficult and a lot of people died.
From your original post: Another is the Ron Wyatt book about the discovery of a deteriorated boat
structure located in Turkey, on a peak that is a sub-mountain near Ararat.
The book includes pictures and is very interesting. Several anchor stones
also survived in much better condition than the boat structure. They are
huge and weigh several thousand pounds each. There is also text inscribed
on the anchors which indicate eight people. The name of the local area
is also named eight in another language.
Lois: So, which boat is this? There must be half a dozen of them up there now. Did Noah build an entire fleet? Why would he have needed anchor stones? How does Wyatt know they are anchor stones? Just because a bunch of people declared it to be THE Noah's Ark, does not mean that it is. There are several tombs of Jesus, large numbers of pieces from the cross he was nailed to, thousands and thousands of dessicated old body parts claimed to come from various saints, disciples, apostles, and popes, the Shroud of Turin, the burial places of Mary, Paul, Peter, etc. etc. Do you believe all these wild tales, Vatic? How many tombs was Jesus buried in? There is even one in Japan!!
The ark of Noah? Sorry, but no. As SF said, a wooden boat that large simply would NOT stay together. This is a fact of physics. It would collapse under its own weight, never mind the weight of thousands of tons of cargo. How much food do you think a million animals would need? There was no ventilation on the ship, no light, no way to dispose of the feces and urine, no place for the odors to go except to waft around inside the ark for a year, poisoning the air. There are so many problems with this story that it is small wonder that most scientists do not consider it worth debating the issue anymore. Christians are like children who claim to have evidence of the beanstalk that Jack climbed, and it turns out to a fossilized bean leaf, and then they wonder why everyone laughs at them.