Noah'S Flood

[mfbukowski]

In our own head perhaps....but if we can experience oneness in the next life, feel the Spirit in this one....can we really assume we are all alone and not surrounded by masses aware of us though we are not aware of them? Many NDEs suggest we are not really alone. People are just waiting for us to become more fully aware.

I was talking about facing death when we know it is coming. Been there, done that, and fortunately I was wrong

[mfbukowski]

This article helped me conclude that the concept of a Universal Flood was a bunch of baloney...

https://dialoguejour...e_V40N03_95.pdf

It also helped me come to the conclusion that LDS leaders could not be relied on for teaching truth...they had for decades taught complete flasehoods as truth. It exposed the church as a very man-made organization...who's leaders could not be relied on as a source for truth than any other average person on earth. All one really had to do was be willing to ask difficult question and then not be afraid of the answers to those questions...and never to begin a quest for truth with the answer before the question has even been asked.

Hopelessly naive view of truth.

Edited July 25, 2012 by mfbukowski

[CV75]

This article helped me conclude that the concept of a Universal Flood was a bunch of baloney...

https://dialoguejour...e_V40N03_95.pdf

It also helped me come to the conclusion that LDS leaders could not be relied on for teaching truth...they had for decades taught complete flasehoods as truth. It exposed the church as a very man-made organization...who's leaders could not be relied on as a source for truth than any other average person on earth. All one really had to do was be willing to ask difficult question and then not be afraid of the answers to those questions...and never to begin a quest for truth with the answer before the question has even been asked.

Unfortunately for many, believing in fables, science, or those who espouse either can affect authentic faith and keeping of the Lord’s covenants, which is the only way to find the most important truth and set mere belief(s) aside. Even John Taylor said (as part of the full quote only partially cited in the article), “...it is the duty of all intelligent beings who are responsible and amenable to God for their acts, to search after truth, and to permit it to influence them and their acts and general course in life, independent of all bias or preconceived notions, however specious and plausible they may be.”

[Calm]

I was talking about facing death when we know it is coming. Been there, done that, and fortunately I was wrong

I would say that many feel alone at the time of death. I wonder what my FIL felt, he was surrounded by all his children at that time and his death was not a struggle. Christ felt alone in the Garden and on the Cross, yet I do not think he really was alone, but that it was necessary for him to descend below all things to do so without experiencing the support of the Father and other loved ones so he stepped out of the oneness for the time needed, the support was there, he just denied himself of access to it...and then experienced the sense of abandonment that most humans feel so much of the time if they stop and think about it. Wonder how often it is us denying ourselves and not a necessary experience either.

And if we feel alone, we are...but this may be by choice and not by 'reality'. I have often experienced a great sense of loneliness when in a crowd or even when being held by my mother who was trying so hard to understand and yet it seemed to me she was clueless (never want to go through the teen years again). It seems so strange that you can be so alone in the midst of people all concerned for you and willing to put their lives on hold for you and yet it feels almost more painfully alone than when one is actually sitting alone in a quiet space.

Loneliness is part of the human condition not because we are actually alone but because we experience the world in a subjective manner, our spirits may be able to connect with others in oneness, but unless our minds have been trained to recognize this so often we miss out on the benefit that can bring us.

Edited July 25, 2012 by calmoriah

[Cobalt-70]

Cobalt-70:

Ice is just another form of water. But even then there still has been a few times when liquid water cover the earth. At least accord to my geology books.

I've never heard of that. How could that even be possible, given it took some time for water to pool on the earth as a result of asteroid bombardment, and by that time, there were already probably microcontinents? And even if there was some huge amount of water on the planet prior to the formation of microcontinent structures, surely there were always tall active volcanoes, and then when microcontinents formed, at least part of them would have been above the water line. And even if it were possible that the entire earth was covered with water, how could any geologist prove that no variation in the elevation of earth's crust was higher than the water line?

[danielwoods]

A simple question, just to nail down a detail. When did Noah's flood occur? I'm not looking for an exact date. I'll accept anything close, even a decade or a century, just to figure out a timeline. PLease don't come with multiple options if they are more than a century apart, unless you are talking about multiple events.

If counted from the time of Creation adding the geneologies one get's the number 1656 years after creation or 2348 BC if creation occurred at 4004 BC (however, the number may be 10 or so years off due to the inexact nature of "begat this year..." No indication of months, so additional 10 months for each patriarch could add up.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2012/03/09/feedback-timeline-for-the-flood

Now, if the Exodus was 1445 BC, and we count backwards then that puts the flood at 2302 BC (essentially 857 years before the Exodus, and again a 10 year variance due to the inexactness).

http://www.chelper.net/btl/BibleTimeLine.htm

Hope that helps.

[Ron Beron]

If counted from the time of Creation adding the geneologies one get's the number 1656 years after creation or 2348 BC if creation occurred at 4004 BC (however, the number may be 10 or so years off due to the inexact nature of "begat this year..." No indication of months, so additional 10 months for each patriarch could add up.

http://www.answersin...e-for-the-flood

Now, if the Exodus was 1445 BC, and we count backwards then that puts the flood at 2302 BC (essentially 857 years before the Exodus, and again a 10 year variance due to the inexactness).

http://www.chelper.n...bleTimeLine.htm

Hope that helps.

A creation date of 4004 BCE would come as a great surprise to paleo and neolithic man not to mention all those who preceded them.

[mfbukowski]

If you don't have a calendar, do you worry about what "date" it is?

Days follow days, years follow years, summer fall, winter spring summer fall winter spring

How do you know when to pay your mortgage?

[mnn727]

John Widtsoe suggested that it being global does not necessitate that it was deep. When it rains outside the whole earth is covered in water; we just assume that it was two miles deep.

To cover the highest mountain it would need to be more than 2 miles deep.

The answer to when it happened -- never, there was never a flood that covered the entire globe while humans existed.

Sorry folks, but much of the Old Testament is just (a non-scientific, superstitious based) people trying to explain why things are as they are (were).

Do I believe something happened? yes, perhaps something caused a large Tsunami, but no way was the entire Earth covered as high as mountains.

The fact that modern Christian Churches (including ours) use the O.T. as historical is just not logical.

The metal gymnastics you have to go through to try to force many of the Old Testament events into rational timeline's boggles the mind sometimes

OK, flame away.

Edited July 26, 2012 by mnn727

[Craig Paxton]

A creation date of 4004 BCE would come as a great surprise to paleo and neolithic man not to mention all those who preceded them.

It would also come as a great surprise to all those pre-lamanites who arrived in the Americas some 10,000 years earlier

Edited July 26, 2012 by Craig Paxton

[thesometimesaint]

The modern Christian concept of a 6000 year old earth comes from Archbishop Ussher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher

[blackstrap]

Just out of curiousity, what evidence would one expect to see in the geologic record had there been a worldwide flood that lasted ,let's say 5 years? Nature,I'm told, abhores a vacuum,so it tends to recover any disturbed areas quite quickly. Look at the results from the Mt. St. Helen's eruption just a couple of decades ago.

[Craig Paxton]

Just out of curiousity, what evidence would one expect to see in the geologic record had there been a worldwide flood that lasted ,let's say 5 years? Nature,I'm told, abhores a vacuum,so it tends to recover any disturbed areas quite quickly. Look at the results from the Mt. St. Helen's eruption just a couple of decades ago.

You're correct...Mt St Helens left a geological record behind that is quite evident

...the so called universal flood did not...but then myths never do...

[danielwoods]

Just out of curiousity, what evidence would one expect to see in the geologic record had there been a worldwide flood that lasted ,let's say 5 years? Nature,I'm told, abhores a vacuum,so it tends to recover any disturbed areas quite quickly. Look at the results from the Mt. St. Helen's eruption just a couple of decades ago.

"Erosional remnants of the receding waters include great monoliths (monadnocks) surrounded by peneplains, low flat featureless plains found throughout the world. Other erosional remnants include landforms such as plateaus, mesas, buttes, spires, pinnacles, balanced rocks, arches, dry falls and canyons, ancient drainage lakes, deeply incised meanders, and underfit rivers and overfit valleys.

There is a preponderance of evidence that such features were the result of rapid erosion while underwater, not erosion over millions of years while the land was exposed to dry conditions." Link to source for quote

Evidence for the world wide flood is world wide:

Grand Canyon

Goosenecks State Park, Utah

Waimea Canyon, located on the western side of Kauai

The Fish River Canyon, Namibia (Africa)

Kings Canyon, Australia

[Ron Beron]

"Erosional remnants of the receding waters include great monoliths (monadnocks) surrounded by peneplains, low flat featureless plains found throughout the world. Other erosional remnants include landforms such as plateaus, mesas, buttes, spires, pinnacles, balanced rocks, arches, dry falls and canyons, ancient drainage lakes, deeply incised meanders, and underfit rivers and overfit valleys.

There is a preponderance of evidence that such features were the result of rapid erosion while underwater, not erosion over millions of years while the land was exposed to dry conditions." Link to source for quote

Evidence for the world wide flood is world wide:

Creation Science Today...really??

I remember Immanuel Velikovsky ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky )and his theories that celestial contacts with Earth created the natural wonders that now spot the planet. There isn't any geological evidence to show that the Grand Canyon et al were created by anything other than natural erosion.

[danielwoods]

Creation Science Today...really??

I remember Immanuel Velikovsky ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky )and his theories that celestial contacts with Earth created the natural wonders that now spot the planet. There isn't any geological evidence to show that the Grand Canyon et al were created by anything other than natural erosion.

I'm only showing what we would expect to find as evidence, if there was a global flood.

[Ron Beron]

I'm only showing what we would expect to find as evidence, if there was a global flood.

If there were a global flood you would more than likely find geologic levels of silt mixed with other elements as well as evidences of flood pluming on land which has been found in relation to meteorite hits.

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan, N.Y., with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction – toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world's population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061114/news_1n14meteors.html Edited July 27, 2012 by Ron Beron

[CASteinman]

"Erosional remnants of the receding waters include great monoliths (monadnocks) surrounded by peneplains, low flat featureless plains found throughout the world. Other erosional remnants include landforms such as plateaus, mesas, buttes, spires, pinnacles, balanced rocks, arches, dry falls and canyons, ancient drainage lakes, deeply incised meanders, and underfit rivers and overfit valleys.

Kings Canyon, Australia

A few years back, I was at the Grand Canyon. There was a bunch of "hippie" like people -- practically a small commune there visiting. We were near the edge and they were doing that oooh and awww and look a that kind of stuff that happens when you walk up. And I spoke up to them and said "Awww.. what a waste". They said "What do you mean?" I said "All this devastation could have been prevented if they had just replanted some trees to hold the soil.

[blackstrap]

And how long did it take the scientists to accept the Scablands FLOOD? 50+ years. After that it was just 'obvious' to anyone who looked that there was a massive flood.Before acceptance ,however,it was just as 'obvious' that the scablands flood theory was false. Is there a reason why the words obvious and oblivious have some similarity?

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

I used to live on Kauai, which is basically one enormous extinct shield volcano dotted with smaller ones. Waimea Canyon:

The formation of Waimea Canyon has nothing to do with that of the Grand Canyon, etc. For instance, the sedimentary rock units of the Grand Canyon range between 570 to 250 million years old, with metamorphic rocks in the deep gorge estimated to be almost two billion years old; by contrast, the lava rocks at Waimea are barely over five million years old. The rock layers of the Grand Canyon extend entirely across the canyon; Waimea has multiple deposits of lava flows, meaning that the rocks on either side of the canyon differ in age by over a million years. The Grand Canyon was downcut as the Colorado Plateau was uplifted; Waimea Canyon is a result of the unstable mountain structure of the shield volcano slumping in the east, and then a second volcano popping up around four million years ago, which also sank. Oxidation and erosion by running water widened the canyon, and meanwhile the entire island sank at least 3500 feet. You don't need a catastrophic flood to get that; if you visit, you can see the erosion happening right in front of you.

(I used to work at a lighthouse, where we sold books about this stuff to tourists. I recommend Chuck Blay and Robert Siemer's Kauai's Geologic History: A Simplified Guide.)

If God is powerful enough to cause a literal worldwide flood, then He's powerful enough to get the point across without killing people. The genealogies in Genesis are vague enough that Ussher's precise dating isn't justified. The Flood wasn't a literal flood; it was a heuristic teaching device, a story illustrating the workings of the calendar descended from a worldwide tradition dealing with astronomical matters -- the shift from one age to another, and the potential chaos that could bring. For instance:

[J Green]

The Flood wasn't a literal flood; it was a heuristic teaching device, a story illustrating the workings of the calendar descended from a worldwide tradition dealing with astronomical matters -- the shift from one age to another, and the potential chaos that could bring.

If you like Hamlet's Mill, you should read William Sullivan's The Secret of the Incas (NY: Crown Publishers, 1996).

William Sullivan (PhD in American Indian Studies) is living in the Andes doing ethnoastronomical field work by collecting star myths when he keeps running into a flood story involving a shepherd fleeing the flood with his family and a llama and a fox to the very top of a specific mountain. So he decides to test Santillana's theories about animals being stars and topographic references corellating to the sun in relation to these constellations from a particular location. And since there were constellations known in Qechua as the llama and the celestial fox, Sullivan enlists the help of a planetarium to take him back to when the Llama and Fox constellations share the sky during the heliacal rising of the Pleiades in relation to the mountain. It takes him to the December solstice of 650 AD and the Incan night of the dead. To Sullivan, the flood represented a massive event that changed the culture, and it is intriguing that the Qechuan word for llama is the same as it is for a Shaman/Priest.

Interesting stuff. Santillana and Dechend's theories haven't won widespread acceptance, but Sullivan's fieldwork is an interesting test case for their thesis. In any case, the whole animal star motif kind of reminds me of the animal and star codes in the Enoch literature.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Thanks for the rec, J Green, sounds cool ('specially since my dad is from Ecuador and I've got Inca in me somewhere). I'm a fan of Anthony Aveni's stuff, and I actually just started a book by E. C. Krupp. We'll see how it turns out.

[Ron Beron]

If you like Hamlet's Mill, you should read William Sullivan's The Secret of the Incas (NY: Crown Publishers, 1996).

William Sullivan (PhD in American Indian Studies) is living in the Andes doing ethnoastronomical field work by collecting star myths when he keeps running into a flood story involving a shepherd fleeing the flood with his family and a llama and a fox to the very top of a specific mountain. So he decides to test Santillana's theories about animals being stars and topographic references corellating to the sun in relation to these constellations from a particular location. And since there were constellations known in Qechua as the llama and the celestial fox, Sullivan enlists the help of a planetarium to take him back to when the Llama and Fox constellations share the sky during the heliacal rising of the Pleiades in relation to the mountain. It takes him to the December solstice of 650 AD and the Incan night of the dead. To Sullivan, the flood represented a massive event that changed the culture, and it is intriguing that the Qechuan word for llama is the same as it is for a Shaman/Priest.

Interesting stuff. Santillana and Dechend's theories haven't won widespread acceptance, but Sullivan's fieldwork is an interesting test case for their thesis. In any case, the whole animal star motif kind of reminds me of the animal and star codes in the Enoch literature.

Interesting theory and it seems that time after time there are these kind of similarities, almost archetypes, that speak of a common "event horizon" that has been translated into a mythic milieu. A book you might interesting is When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth by Barber and Barber.

[J Green]

I find Dr. Parry's article on science and revelation to be intriguing. His thesis seems to be that when clear and obvious revelation through prophets appears to contradict current scientific theory, we should believe what we know through revelation. He says that there are two types of people who have issues with the flood story -- those who don't believe it happened and those who only believe it is local -- and that both of these do so because of scientific evidence.

Well, I must be off on my own in a third group. I haven't spent any time researching the scientific response to the universal flood story, although I do understand that the consensus is against it. My objection to the details of the flood story as it stands in Genesis have to do not with science but with factors like textual corruption and irregularity, discrenpancies in redaction, additional redaction to synchronize the flood with the cosmic creation, what to do with myth and metaphor in general in the pre-history portions of Genesis (Gen 1-11), questions about how we approach perspective in the context of revelation anciently, etc. In other words, I don't see the specific details as constituting a clear case of revelation. On the other hand, if doctrines like repentence, atonement, resurrection, and others appear miraculous or supernatural to some, they are nevertheless very clearly revealed in mulitple dispensations in all volumes of scripture through many prophets and I have tested them for myself with fulfilling results.

So to me it's simply a case that I don't agree with the example Dr. Parry chose to illustrate the principle of faith over science. Keeping BRM's guidance in mind about how we can collectively misinterpret one verse while considering that interpretation to be clearly revealed, I'll wait until these specific flood details in Genesis are verly clearly stated to be revelation by current prophets instead of merely used as an illustrative story for a correct principle without the speaker even knowing the textual issues that may be involved, let alone getting the brethren together to seek for collective revelation on the issue. To me, correlated assumption doesn't always equal clear revelation.

What is really intriguing to me is Dr. Parry's discussion about the tower, and I haven't seen that come up here yet. He explores the textual issues behind why he has a non-literal interpretation of it's purpose, arguing that it is a temple text and not a story about a sky scraper. But he then he doesn't interact with the change of language issue in the same way by looking at it in light of its own textual issues. With the flood and the literal overnight change in language, he reads them literally without engaging metaphor or textual issues very much. However, on the purpose of the tower he does engage these aspects of the pericope. Why the change? To me that is more interesting than the thirtieth thread about the flood to hit the discussion board, because I like to see how others deal with texts in the light of revelation versus assumptions we make about our interpretation of revelation.

Edited July 27, 2012 by J Green

[J Green]

Thanks for the rec, J Green, sounds cool ('specially since my dad is from Ecuador and I've got Inca in me somewhere). I'm a fan of Anthony Aveni's stuff, and I actually just started a book by E. C. Krupp. We'll see how it turns out.

Please play nice with the other kids and share what you learn.

Cheers