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Interesting clips, thought this would be the best thread to post them in.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KeZB2EsPqGE
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XmzailhVl-U
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m6UdQxt7b24Hi David
Stu: I think you might have forgotten that actual evidence has been given that disproves the biblical account on each of these points
Quote Sorry, must of missed that somehow. Could you name one of them?
Well if you missed it, why not go back and read?Quote What you have done is explain that we can't explain some things in the Bible, just as science can't explain many things today, just as science couldn't explain many things in the past. This is vastly different than saying that actual scientific evidence has disproven some Biblical account.
Very bored with your nonsense. Is this the normal behaviour of JWs? Do you not care for bearing false witness? It is all there for anyone reading this, 5 biblical conjectures are disproved by evidence cited in this thread. Got anything new?Stu: The ark was a physical impossibility. There is corroborating evidence that the biblical flood never happened as described.
Quote You haven't demonstrated that the ark was a physical impossibility. And, you're right, all we have for corroborating evidence are the majority of cultures, tribes, etc on earth having a story that matches most aspects of the flood. Been through this already. It’s already shown to be a fundie fantasy. See evidence previously cited, and the previous refutation of this non-argument (the various flood myths are pretty much incompatible; you can’t build a wooden boat that big; it would sink when 2/3 full; no evidence for a flood; bristlecone pines and sea-level rock drawings show there was never such an event).
Stuart
Hi t8
Quote Evolution and no God is the biggest too hard basket ever.
Sure. For those who already know all the answers, it must be difficult when reality gets in the way of know-all fantasy.Nothing created things that not even NASA with the aid of supercomputers can match.
Yup.Quote One dragon fly can out fly anything man has ever made.
Yes it can… Oh, apart from most commercial aircraft.Stuart
Attempt 2… (see you should have given me editing rights!)
Hi t8
Quote Evolution and no God is the biggest too hard basket ever.
Sure. For those who already know all the answers, it must be difficult when reality gets in the way of know-all fantasy.Quote Nothing created things that not even NASA with the aid of supercomputers can match.
Yup.Quote One dragon fly can out fly anything man has ever made.
Yes it can… Oh, apart from most commercial aircraft.Stuart
This is what happens when you allow an ex-fisherman to write bible passages:
2Pe 3:5 For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water
How do you get the rest of the known elements out of hydrogen and oxygen?
Quote (Cato @ June 04 2008,10:10) Nuclear Fusion
But why start with water? It is my understanding that there was little to no oxygen on earth in its early history (or so it is theorized), and no water until 4.5 billion years ago. There certainly wasn't an abundance of water.Yes, nuclear fusion of elemental hydrogen, but not the dissociation of water to obtain it.
I've been having a look on and off for a while at the myth of the tower of babel. Anything relating to ancient history of a spoken language is notoriously difficult to pin down. The only relevant research I can find posits a widespread relationship between ethnicity and language. It would have to be supposed that the Australian Aboriginal people have spoken a myriad of languages for maybe 10 times longer than the time since the alleged biblical event. I'm not positing this as something a biblical literalist could not explain because I guess there is no direct archeological evidence against it, but there must be some very convoluted and bizarre mechanism by which the Aborigines (having magically descended from Noah's family but resuming their long occupation of the Australian continent and evolving at super-fast speed back to the same biological and ecological existence as before the Noachian flood) then found themselves speaking a wide range of languages having previously talked in a way common to people living in the Middle East and other places, in a manner totally contradicting the ethnic-language change link.
Anyone care to justify such magical things?
Stuart
Quote (Stu @ June 07 2008,22:25) I've been having a look on and off for a while at the myth of the tower of babel. Anything relating to ancient history of a spoken language is notoriously difficult to pin down. The only relevant research I can find posits a widespread relationship between ethnicity and language. It would have to be supposed that the Australian Aboriginal people have spoken a myriad of languages for maybe 10 times longer than the time since the alleged biblical event. I'm not positing this as something a biblical literalist could not explain because I guess there is no direct archeological evidence against it, but there must be some very convoluted and bizarre mechanism by which the Aborigines (having magically descended from Noah's family but resuming their long occupation of the Australian continent and evolving at super-fast speed back to the same biological and ecological existence as before the Noachian flood) then found themselves speaking a wide range of languages having previously talked in a way common to people living in the Middle East and other places, in a manner totally contradicting the ethnic-language change link. Anyone care to justify such magical things?
Stuart
Because it is written.Just joking.
Tim
Quote you can’t build a wooden boat that big; it would sink when 2/3 full; 2/3 full of what? Water? Maybe I missed your research or your experiment showing this.
http://groups.google.com/group….rnum=17
“3. Even a conservative calculation of the total mass of the animals and their food would have the ark exceed its buoyancy by 1/3. This ark would sink not long after it was half-filled.”
Could you provide some details? Anything?
Quote (Stu @ May 30 2008,21:53) Quote One dragon fly can out fly anything man has ever made.
Yes it can… Oh, apart from most commercial aircraft.Stuart
Not in terms of maneuverability it can't, no commercial aircraft would touch it….I think that was the point David was making.“If mastering flight is your goal, you can't do better than to emulate a dragonfly” (ScienceDaily, Feb. 21, 2006)
Quote Hi David I have provided the link to the material I used. Was it a month and a half ago now?
Stuart
Wasn't your link just some guy saying what he believes. I found no evidence for the idea that the ark could not float, for example. I could just as easily give you a link to someone on this very thread who disagrees with you. I think some sort of evidence would be good.
Hi David
If you want evidence that there was an ark at all, you will have to provide that. The link I gave leads to this speculation, which you should be very happy with given that creationism can explain anything you want:
depending on what you use for a cubit, Ye Arke is about 450 feet long, 75
wide, and 45 tall, right? I work best in metres, so lets do a bit of
conversion: that's 137.16 by 22.86 by 13.716 metres, right? For ease of
calculation, let's call it 140 x 23 x 14. This give you 45.080e+3 cubic
metres. One cubic metre of pure water is one metric tonne. Salt water is a
bit more dense. Be nice, add another thousand tonnes or so… Ye Arke
displaces 46,000 tonnes. Maybe 46,400 at max. And I'm being generous. (The
reader who knows something about ship-building will also spot a certain minor
problem with the above figures. No creationist has ever seen it… in part
'cause if it's corrected, things get worse for Ye Arke.)
Problem 1: The sheer size. HMS _Victory_, still preserved at Portsmouth, was
186 feet long on the gundeck. HMS _Victoria_, the last full-rigged 1st rate
ship of the line to serve as flag of the Channel Fleet, built in 1859, was
250 feet long on the gundeck. And she had a steel frame because the RN had
found that building wooden ships much bigger than 225 feet long was not a
good idea because they tended to straddle or to hog on being launched; that
is, they tended to bend, their bows and sterns to stick up out of the water
at an angle, (that¹s straddling) or to bend the other way, the bows and
sterns supported by waves but the midships sections out of the water (or at
least not as well supported) (that¹s hogging) and either way their keels
tended to crack under the strain. Even with steel frames, wooden ships bigger
than 250 feet long tended to hog or straddle. Don't take my word for it, look
it up for yourself. One possible source: _The Wooden Fighting Ship In the
Royal Navy, 897-1860_, EHH Archibald, Blandford Press, London. Sorry, my copy
was published back before ISBNs. Edward Archibald was at the time of writing
the curator of the National Maritime Museum, Portsmouth, England. Or build a
wooden boat 250 feet long and see what happens. Ye Arke was the size of _two_
1st rate line of battleships, laid end-to-end. Noah was a shepherd. He knew
better than the shipwrights at Chatham who built the ships with which the RN
dominated the world for 150 years? If I'm wrong, and it is possible to build
a 450 foot wooden vessel, by all means demonstrate it. I'll even put up some
of the money… so long as I get to record the launch of said vessel. And so
long as those who say that such a craft would be safe are willing to stay on
it while it's being launched. Me, I figure that I'd get some _great_ pix.
Problem 2: Even though it's too big to work, Ye Arke is _too small_ to do its
job. Noah was at sea for a year. The Bible explicitly states that he carried
food for himself, his family, and the animals… where did he put it? John
Woodmorappe (who is, BTW, a creationist) in his book _Noah¹s Ark: A
Feasibility Study_, published by the Institute for Creation Research, El
Cajon, California, (the ICR is not merely creationist; it _requires_ that all
who work there take an oath that they feel that the Bible is inerrant, as
demonstrated on their web site) calculates that Noah's ark carried 5.5
million kilos by weight of animals. (I disagree with this figure, as it¹s
much too low, but for purposes of argument I¹ll use it.) He also estimates
that each animal, on average, ate one thirtieth of its body weight per day.
Let's see… 5.5 million kilos is 5,500 tonnes. Divide by 30, multiply by
365… 66.917e+3. (Ye Arke was at sea for over a year, according to Gen 7 and
8. I¹ll just use one year to keep things simple and to give Woody as much
slack as possible. Wouldn¹t want anyone to say that I was railroading him.)
Hmm. 67 thousand tonnes of food, by Woody's own figures. But… if you
remember, we calculated that Ye Arke could displace a max of 46,000 tonnes,
or 46,400 if we were being generous. And that included the mass of the boat
itself, and the animals. (Archimedes¹ Principle, you know) Looks like y'all
need at least two Arkes just to carry the food. So where¹s the mention of the
Great Barge Fleet in the Bible? I once tried to work out just how big an Arke
would have had to have been to carry the assorted animals and their food and
have space for proper cages and exercise areas so that the animals' muscles
don't atrophy… after I got to 900,000 tonnes displacement and still hadn't
accounted for all the good stuff, I stopped. That's _three times the size of
a supertanker_. Or _nine times the size of a nuke aircraft carrier_. There's
simply no way that a wooden vessel could ever be that big. No way at all.
Problem 3: In order to get the mass of the animals down, Woody pared things
down. He tried to define 'kind' so as to have, say, one pair of cat-like
whatevers, and have all present day cats, from house cats to lions,
descendants of that pair. Nice… except that doing it that way _requires_
evolution on a scale so massive and rapid that _no_ evolutionary biologist
would dare suggest it. And Woody does that with _all_ animals… It's the
only way he could get 'em to fit.
Problem 4: Even after he pares down the list (he posits 15,754 'kinds') he
has a problem. In order for there to be physically enough space inside Ye
Arke, Woody uses the _median_ to work out the size of cages. He says that if
you have hippos, elephants, rats, and dogs, you can use the _median_ size
animal and build cages for 'em, and they'll all fit. The median size,
according to Woody, that of a sheep. Using that, he can shoehorn enough cages
into Ye Arke to hold his 15,754 kinds… but only just. And the cages would
be sized so that an animal in it would be able to stand up, but not move
about… which means it gets no exercise, and its muscles will atrophy. And
it won't live to see the end of the voyage. Unfortunately, Woody can't think
of any other way to fit 'em all in.Got a problem with any of that? It uses the dimentions quoted in Genesis, and leaves a lot of error in favour of the creationist myth.
Stuart
Quote Got a problem with any of that? Well let's see.
The large ships tended to either straddle or hog, so people stopped making them, because I imagine it's pretty hard to control a ship that is doing either of these things.
The problem, is that the ark wasn't designed to go anywhere. It was only made to float. It didn't really matter in the least if it straddled, did it?
Quote Noah was a shepherd. He knew better than the shipwrights at Chatham who built the ships with which the RN dominated the world for 150 years? Noah's boat only had to float.
My next problem with the logic above, is the way problem #3 and #2 are related. If what he argues against in #3 is true, then there is no problem #2.
I wish a list of the animals that were used was actually given so we could have some idea of some sort of evidence for any of this.The other problem I have is that this is all based on what woody says, and this guys arguements against what he says. And because woody is a definite believer in the Noah story, we just have to believe that what he says is correct.
david
Hi David
Quote The large ships tended to either straddle or hog, so people stopped making them, because I imagine it's pretty hard to control a ship that is doing either of these things. The problem, is that the ark wasn't designed to go anywhere. It was only made to float. It didn't really matter in the least if it straddled, did it? Noah's boat only had to float.
Don’t forget that the supposed ark is getting on for TWICE the length of the largest wooden ships ever made, those that are showing serious structural weaknesses at the half-way size. If the entire globe were flooded there is no land in the way of ocean waves, which would circle the earth at enormous heights, especially when encountering areas of much shallower water, say over previously exposed continental shelf. Any shipbuilder knows that there is little difference between the seaworthiness of a powered vessel and a floating one.Quote My next problem with the logic above, is the way problem #3 and #2 are related. If what he argues against in #3 is true, then there is no problem #2. I wish a list of the animals that were used was actually given so we could have some idea of some sort of evidence for any of this.
I don’t think you have read it carefully enough. #2 is not OK, and even if it was, the evolution required is absurd. Breathtaking rates of genetic change do not make any difference to the sinking of the overweight ark. Did you really mean to use the word evidence? The whole thing, from Genesis to Woodmorappe to our skeptic is all wild conjecture. The only evidence presented is Archimedes and the evidence from wooden boat building as applied to the proportions given in Genesis.Quote The other problem I have is that this is all based on what woody says, and this guys arguements against what he says. And because woody is a definite believer in the Noah story, we just have to believe that what he says is correct.
Well yeah. Whether you’re a christian apologist or an honest person, it is pretty hard to pin down the details of mythology, I’d agree.Stuart
As an afterthought I would add the fact that there is no evidence for any significant change in the height of Everest in the past few thousand years (as you should expect) and we know that the flood water allegedly covered at least that summit, nearly 9km up in the Himalayas.
At that altitude (the altitude of the floating ark) most people need bottled oxygen and very warm clothing. Ye Holy Wikipedia sayeth:
Even at base camp the low level of available oxygen had direct effect on blood oxygen saturation levels. At sea level these are usually 98% to 99%, but at base camp this fell to between 85% and 87%. Blood samples taken at the summit indicated very low levels of oxygen present. A side effect of this is a vastly increased breathing rate, from 20-30 breaths per minute to 80-90 breaths, leading to exhaustion just trying to breathe.
Lack of oxygen, exhaustion, extreme cold, and the dangers of the climb all contribute to the death toll.
The only aspect of this that would not apply to the cargo of the fictional ark would be the 'danger of the climb'.
Stuart
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