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The Flood Story

The Flood Story in the bible may have been inspired from a comet that passed close to earth causing the Ice Age that froze the earth in a icey grip and killed off the dinosaurs while most of the other animals and the cave people (if there were any humans at the time) to go deep under ground in caves not big enough for the woolly mamouths and dinosaurs, and therefore the "Ark" was actually the earth its self and the flood was the Ice-Age, but to the ancient story tellers not being of scientific minded as in later times turned the Ice-Age and the passing of the comet in to a story that would be more acceptable to the people of that time (when the bible was first written) and because of the fundamental belief system of the bible believers they accepted the flood story given by the story tellers as an actual event of it raining forty days and forty nights which may have been the time the comet passed over the earth plunging the earth in to the Ice Age while blocking out the sun. And it might not have happened through out the earth, but nearer its poles at the time is why scientists have discovered plant life in core samples beneath Antarctica, while Australia may have once been the South Pole.

Tags: bible, flood

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Permalink Reply by The Nerd on March 16, 2010 at 8:00am

Why should I believe a scientist over anyone else? Why should I believe their testing methods any more than some one else's? Everything is just a theory anyway.

Sir, I am amazed that you can say such things while writing those words on a computer. The very reason that we trust scientific methods more than other methods is the consistent and stunning results we get, which lead things like computers. Tell me any other method that is so useful and worthwhile?

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Permalink Reply by Becca on March 14, 2010 at 4:21pm

"they keep digging up older and older proof of humans living millions of years ago."

Humans at the time of the dinosaurs is impossible. I think you are mixing up Homo Sapiens with others in the Homo and Hominid categories. Human ancestors can be traced back to the time of the dinosaurs but so can ancestors of every other living creature on the planet today. All mammals can be traced back to animals called Therapsida. To read some introductory information see this wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapsids

"Just because no evidence has been found of human existence before the ice age is not proof that there weren't cavemen."

This sounds suspiciously like when a theist argues that just because there is no evidence for god doesn't mean there isn't a god. Not a good or convincing argument.

"scientist continue to change their mind about how old the earth is and how long humans have been on earth."

Pleas show me where scientists keep changing the age of the Earth and how long humans (aka Homo Sapiens) have been on earth? The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and practically every scientist out there agrees with this estimate. Homo Sapiens (humans) have been on the planet for about 200,000 years again practically every scientist agrees with this estimate.

"I believe anyone actually believing in these primitive bible stories has the same retarded intelligence as the cavemen."

First of all there really are no such thing as cavemen. Cavemen are charactures of early Homo Sapiens or Homo Neanderthalensis or Homo Heidelbergensis or Cro Magnons ect.. All of these peoples had extremely high intelligences that would compete with our intelligences today.

Also being theistic or atheistic does not make anyone more or less intelligent. It may be fair to say that atheists and other non believers are more rational but we certainly do not have a monopoly on intelligence.

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Permalink Reply by Eagle Ashcroft on March 15, 2010 at 1:24am

If you've implying I am a theist you've off your rocker because I don't believe anything I can not see, feel, hear or smell. If there is a god, let me see it, feel it and hear it. I need tangle evidence on everything before I will believe it. Scientist are like theist, they use all of these man made instruments and theories to "prove" their points which hold no water to me. I say to scientist and theist "put your money where your mouth is."

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Permalink Reply by Arnold on March 15, 2010 at 7:23am

I have no reason to think you are a theist, but you seem to have adopted an anti-intellectualism that treats all knowledge claims as equally suspect. Of course scientists (and theologians) use "man made instruments and theories." Who else is going to make them? Scientists bet on their words all the time: they make predictions and their reputations (and proposed theories) stand or fall on the accuracy of those predictions.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Spicer on March 15, 2010 at 4:55pm

Eagle, I don't think you're a theist, but you're also just not paying attention if you think established science claims are no more valid than guesswork. It's a little alarming that you think you don't have time to read because you're too busy writing. That's like saying you don't have time to listen because you're too busy talking. If you're not interested in learning why scientists make the claims that they do, it's awfully presumptuous to airily dismiss those claims or to propose your own alternate hypotheses.

Scientists do, in fact, have tangible evidence and understood mechanisms to back up their claims about the age of the Earth and when species appear and disappear in history. You have no evidence to back up your guesswork in the original post, and worse, your ideas contradict established facts, and when people point out your errors, you get upset with them for being argumentative.

You really do need to do some reading if you want to talk credibly about these ideas. For starters, dinosaurs died out millions of years before humans or even hominids showed up, killed by an asteroid impact in the Gulf of Mexico (not a comet near miss). Wikipedia is a great resource for embarking on research. And as others have mentioned, anything by Dawkins is worth reading.

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Permalink Reply by Becca on March 15, 2010 at 8:02pm

I am not implying that you are a theist you are just arguing like on one this topic. "just because no evidence has been found of human existence before the ice age is not proof that there weren't cavemen" is the same argument theists often use for god. It isn't a valid argument for god and it isn't a valid argument for 'cavemen' living at the same time as dinosaurs. When there is no evidence the most logical and ration thing to do is assume it doesn't exist. There is no evidence for humans and dinosaurs coexisting so the most logical conclusion is that they didn't coexist.

You are the first atheist I have met who doesn't accept science as a valuable tool for gaining knowledge about the world and the universe. From your above posts and arguments it seems the reason for this is that you don't understand scientific theory and how it works. It's ok of argue against scientists (I do it all the time) but you have to provide proof and evidence to actually make a valid point. So far all you haven't supplied one iota of proof backing up your claim.

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Permalink Reply by The Nerd on March 16, 2010 at 8:04am

I am not implying that you are a theist you are just arguing like on one this topic.

http://www.atheistnexus.org/forum/topics/thats-so-theist

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Permalink Reply by Becca on March 16, 2010 at 8:50pm

That's all well and good however I did not write it with the intention of it being an insult. I wrote it for the comparative value.

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Permalink Reply by Arnold on March 16, 2010 at 9:47pm

I love the cartoon!

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Permalink Reply by feralboy12 on March 15, 2010 at 8:23pm

I suspect when creating or embelleshing a myth one draws on real experiences or the experiences of others as a jumping off point...so the worst flood that anyone remembers might weave its way into the myth. Asimov once wrote that some of the details (opening up of "the deep" and the direction the ark sailed) might reflect the experience of a comet or asteroid hitting in the Mediterranean. But that might be reaching.
Of course, whatever the real experience was, it not only gets passed down and added to but has to expand to mythic proportions, hence the world wide aspect to the story. Of course, they hadn't seen the Himalayas and had no idea how much water their story required.
Flood myths seem to be common to many cultures, though. Some sort of archetypal narrative that the human brain has a need to invent. An emergent property of the neural network that provided a survival advantage would be my guess.