Ooparts & Ancient High Tech--Evidence of Noah's Flood?

[s8int]

Do ancient unexplained artifacts and high technology potentially provide evidence of pre-flood civilizations?

Do 800 Billion fossils of all types in the Karoo Bone yards provide additional evidence of a worldwide flood? Does the Bible mention dinosaurs? Is there an easy explanation for fitting dinosaurs on the ark? Is there a reason that scientists cannot do on purpose in the lab what they claim happened by accident? Is evolution the worst theory ever to fit known facts?--


Hello! Is there an unmistakable Message (from God) in the cells of every living thing?

YES!

[ADMIN EDIT by I, Brian - link removed]

[Vajradhara]

Originally Posted by s8int

Do ancient unexplained artifacts and high technology potentially provide evidence of pre-flood civilizations?

Do 800 Billion fossils of all types in the Karoo Bone yards provide additional evidence of a worldwide flood? Does the Bible mention dinosaurs? Is there an easy explanation for fitting dinosaurs on the ark? Is there a reason that scientists cannot do on purpose in the lab what they claim happened by accident? Is evolution the worst theory ever to fit known facts?--


Hello! Is there an unmistakable Message (from God) in the cells of every living thing?

YES!

(spamlink removed by moderator)

Namaste s8int,

welcome to the forum.

by "flood" i'm going to presume that you mean the Abramahic Genisis World Flood myth and i'll proceed with that assumption. if that is not a valid assumption, please let me know.

yes.. there were civilizations prior to the flood event myth, to what extent they covered the planet, is open to debate. in any event, there were several established civilizations by this period, the Arayan's are the most well known and documented in the west.

800 billion fossils? do you have any source that you can cite for this number?

funnily enough.. the Bible doesn't mention dinosaurs.. why do you suppose that is? do you think that the "dragon" myths and legends were predicted on unsophisticated people discovering dinosauers fossils?

there is no way that the dinosaurs could have fit on the ark... just not possible. not that it should matter... there is equally no way that two of every modern living species would fit on the ark either, in my opinion.

i'm not sure what you are referring to vis a vie scientists in the lab, can you elaborate?

no, evolution is one of the most outstanding theories ever. of course... nothing, thus far, comes close to matching Quantum Theory as the most successful theory ever... but that's off the topic.

evolution is both fact and theory. it's a fact that it happened and we have a theory as to how. perhaps, Stephen J. Gould can explain this a bit more eloquently than i:

[justify]“Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.”[/justify]— "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, p. 254.

[I, Brian]

It's spam - but I'll leave the thread up as Vaj has already made it a discussion topic.

[Vajradhara]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

It's spam - but I'll leave the thread up as Vaj has already made it a discussion topic.

Namaste brian,

you could remove the link in my response, if you'd like... the one from s8int....

though... i do wonder if he or she will be back to the forum to participate in a discussion.

actually... i think that the whole dragon/dinosaur thing is kind of neat... and i would really be interested in exploring this further...

[WHKeith]

Sigh. . . .

To my continued shame and mortification, I, once--in my hyper-Christian-fundamentalist youth--avidly pursued the idea of "scientific creationism," so-called. That phase lasted for, I believe, about six weeks. At the end of that time, I realized that I was giving myself the equivalent of an autolobotomy, since I'd always been extremely science-oriented as a kid, and was having to compartmentalize what I believed.

So, yeah, I've seen--and used--all the arguments. The footprints in the Paluxy River rock beds "prove" that humans coexisted with dinosaurs . . . the mention of "Leviathan" in Job refers to dinosaurs (obviously!) . . . jumbled fossil beds indicate a global flood . . .

I think my favorite--you'll hear this one a lot in creationist circles--is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that you CANNOT get more order from less in a closed system. Since evolution posits more and higher order--life coming from non-life through essentially random means--it therefore violates the law of entropy. What the good folk who use this argument forget is that Earth is NOT a closed system. We are bathed in a wealth of energy from the Sun, more than enough to drive the evolutionary engine.

I really do regret turning my brain off all those years ago. That was one of several threads that eventually led me into hard-core atheism. My brand of Christianity insisted that the Bible was literally true; if it were not, such doctrines as original sin collapsed and, in true falling-domino fashion, so too collapsed the idea of salvation through grace. When I reached the point where I simply couldn't swallow the Bible's science [Did you know that bats were actually birds (Leviticus 11:13, 19)? That birds have four legs, as do locusts, beetles, grasshoppers, and other flying things (Leviticus 11:20-23)? That Pi = 3 1 Kings 7:23)?] . . . I ended up chucking the whole thing. [In fairness, it wasn't just the science. The way the New Testament supports slavery and the subjugation of women, while the Old Testament actually supports rape and the treatment of women as property, was another big factor.]

I have come to the point nowadays of--not questioning evolution, per se, but of believing the theory is not complete, possibly by a large margin. Classical Darwinism posits gradualisim over catastrophism, and yet there is abundant evidence that the rise and fall of species is linked to catastrophic events, and that evolutionary repopulation after said events is too quick to be explained by mutation and natural selection alone. Doesn't mean evolution isn't so; I just think we don't have the whole story yet.

Currently, I'm interested in Shelldrake's theory of morphogenic fields. This attempts to explain changes in animal behavior (and, ultimately, speciation) that appear linked to nonlocal (i.e. quantum) effects based on an apparent critical mass of individuals. Shelldrakes' theories have the added advantage of potentially explaining many of the otherwise inexplicable facts that supported Lysenkoism.

I also have a long-time fascination for the "OOPARTs" mentioned in the thread-starter, and in such interesting facts as the apparent universality of flood myths. Of course, floods DO occur along river valleys, but there are also hints at something bigger. Recent finds on the shores of the Black Sea, for instance, suggest that the flooding of a large fresh-water lake by incoming sea wtaer from the Med happened in just barely prehistoric times. So, too, was the creation of an enigmatic series of craters scattered across the coastal regions of North Carolina and inland as far as Tennessee; these appear linked to meteor or cometary debris from around 7,000 BCE. A major asteroid impact at sea could have flooded coastal regions worldwide, and might, arguably, be linked to the Atlantis myth--which also appears worldwide (though by different names--"Aztlan" to the Aztecs, for example.)

But as for Noah's ark, well . . . there was Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives. Where did they store all the food, and how much time did it take them to muck out all those stables?

And how the Jiminy did they keep track of 600,000 species of beetles?

[I, Brian]

The easiest explanation of any global flood mythology is simple: humans have always settled by sources of water, and sources of water have a nasty habit of flooding. There is a given range of what may constitute "normal" flooding, and the ancient Egyptians took great pains to measure the range of this "normality".

However, very rarely but predictably, any course of water may experience a catastrophic flooding. Such flooding always remains local, but may be so severe as to be marked clearly on the societal consciousness, and be duly directed into any number and series of flood tales.

Hence the propensity of many cultures to share a similar theme in their local cultural history - that of catastrophic flooding.

We've seen over the past few years what major flooding can do - the Yellow River in China a couple of years back, coupled with that over Mozambique.

As for Evolution - yes, there is a great deal missing. I personally believe that not only are we missing a proper understanding of the process of mutation, but also with regards to the actual evolutionary vectors associated with catastrophic events. I also believe that for the moment modern science completely fails to appreicate the monumental complexity of genetics - there is a nasty habit of treating individual genes as individual on-off switches for individual attributes/traits. Of course, I try to tackle all this head on in my writing - and that includes presenting possible solutions.

(Darn the patience required!)

[Vajradhara]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

As for Evolution - yes, there is a great deal missing. I personally believe that not only are we missing a proper understanding of the process of mutation, but also with regards to the actual evolutionary vectors associated with catastrophic events. I also believe that for the moment modern science completely fails to appreicate the monumental complexity of genetics - there is a nasty habit of treating individual genes as individual on-off switches for individual attributes/traits. Of course, I try to tackle all this head on in my writing - and that includes presenting possible solutions.

(Darn the patience required!)

Namaste Brian..

hmmm... well... seems that perhaps, this is not a majority opinion in any event... have you heard of the theory called "puncutated equillibrium"?

it posits a different pace than the catastrophic evolutionary models.... at least from what i can ascertain.

you've read, i'm sure, my posts from Guold on this... what is your take on what he's relating?

[The Fool]

I haven't actually read Gould, but I have seen his ideas and writings referenced in the scientific press.

My understanding is that Gould argued that the evolutionary process itself must have occured on relatively short time scales - ie, in the order of thousands of years, at any individual time (ie, after a mass extinction/catastrophic climate change event) - whereas Stephen Dawkins was apparently arguing for a more gradual and linear timescale. If I remember right, Dawkins became a bit acrimonious in the debate.

I'd side with Gould - but I still think there are important elements he overlooked. Probably the more forward thinking of the "names" in evolutionary biology, though.

[bananabrain]

evolution is not at all incompatible with the bible - unless, of course, one is simplistic enough to take the literal meaning alone (and often a translation of a translation of the literal meaning alone) and remove it from its context, treating each word as if it relates to our context. leviathan is by no means necessarily to be identified with dinosaurs (in fact, the "great sea monsters" of genesis 1:21 are closer) and this whole argument just doesn't even register for us, because we never understood the text in such a prescriptive and stilted fashion. people who say that the two are mutually exclusive are, i'm afraid, ignorant either of the text or of the science. i've said it before and i'll say it again - Torah is not a biology textbook any more than it is a history textbook. to try and play the two off against each other in some kind of competition is both counterproductive and futile.

now, as to this rather more unpleasant accusation -

the Old Testament actually supports rape and the treatment of women as property

er, i don't *think* so. brian, would you like me to take this discussion elsewhere? whkeith, would you mind clarifying which verses you mean so i can have a go at explaining them properly?

b'shalom

bananabrain

[The Fool]

Lordy - I'm not able to safely acess my admin account at the moment - but I will send an e-mail to WHKeith tonight and ask that he clarifies that statement.

[Vajradhara]

Originally Posted by The Fool

I haven't actually read Gould, but I have seen his ideas and writings referenced in the scientific press.

My understanding is that Gould argued that the evolutionary process itself must have occured on relatively short time scales - ie, in the order of thousands of years, at any individual time (ie, after a mass extinction/catastrophic climate change event) - whereas Stephen Dawkins was apparently arguing for a more gradual and linear timescale. If I remember right, Dawkins became a bit acrimonious in the debate.

I'd side with Gould - but I still think there are important elements he overlooked. Probably the more forward thinking of the "names" in evolutionary biology, though.

Namaste Brian,


Gould supported Dawkins overall theory, however, due to the evidence in the fossil record, he proposed his punctualited equilibrium theory. from what i can determine he postualtes that isolated populations of creatures would evolve more quickly since the overall population was limited. i.e. the mutations would spread throughout the general population more quickly since there are fewer generations in the isolated population.

you're right... their debates were pretty acrimonious at times.. and Gould even comments on that in some of his writings.

as bb says, none of the monotheistic faiths really have a problem with evolution unless they take a literal reading of their text. God could have created and used evolution as the process... no worries there.

[WHKeith]

My deep and sincere apologies, if I have offended anyone. I've been under some rather severe emotinal stress recently, and I exhibited poor judgement in my choice of words. I've been extremely bitter of late, and it seeps unexpectedly into other areas of my life.

Bananabrain, the clearest of the verses I had in mind was Genesis 19:6 - 8. Lot, remember, was the one RIGHTEOUS man in God's eyes in Sodom. The law for dealing with captured women is set forth in Deuteronomy 21:10 - 14. True, it says "have her as thy wife," but it's remarkably easy to dispose of her afterward if he "takes no delight in her."

The overall poor treatment of women is evident throughout. One of the clearest statements is in Deuteronomy 25:11 - 12, where a woman will have her hand cut off if she tried to help her husband in a fight by grabbing the genitals of his enemy. "Thine eye shall not pity her."

I should not have suggested that God directly supported such attitudes and practices. For me, today, these verses demonstrate only that these passages were written by men who were part of a particular cultural mindset, one that deemed women to be a step above slaves . . . maybe. Indeed, some of the laws evidently protect women from more severe treatment; presumeably, the woman who had her hand cut off would have been put to death in earlier days, before that law was given. The one about a captured woman orders the man to let her go rather than selling her again.

What I was trying to say, and which I obviously failed to make clear, was that back when I was a fundamentalist Christian, many years ago, now, the Bible's presentation of both science and the treatment of women were two major sticking points for me. I had to come to grips with them within the context of my faith, which demanded that I accept every word of both the Old Testament and the New as absolutely the revealed Word of God, as valid for today as it was then. The attitude toward women in both OT and NT ("I will not suffer a woman to speak in church. . . ") disgusted me, especially since many modern-day fundamentalist churches take these statements to heart and make them doctrine ("The man is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church. . ."). My belief structure was too rigid, and the whole thing collapsed beneath me. I became atheist instead. And it was long after THAT that I changed again, embracing, I hope, a more inclusive and gentle belief system that tends to view the Bible in a more historical context.

Again, today I believe these statements to be evidence that the words were written out of a cultural worldview that took it for granted that women were inferior creatures, not worthy of the same respect as men in the eyes of God as revealed by His law. I can see that what I said could easily be interpreted as blaming God for heinous crimes. Such was not my intent, and I ask your forgiveness, all who may have taken offense.

Brian . . . no need for the e. Here's my response. I'll withdraw from the boards if that's what's best.

--Bill

[brucegdc]

Thanks for the clarification, Bill. It's greatly appreciated.

[I, Brian]

And if I may add, before cultural miscommunication reigns - "Lordy!" is an exclamation of surprise, akin to "Golly!" or "Gosh!". Perhaps I should make that very clear indeed in case any construes that I was making sarcastic comment at Bananabrain - or anyone else, for that matter.

As for treating women as property - my personal impression that it was a common cultural perception, that is deeply rooted in history from at least 1500 BC right through to the modern day (though, perhaps arguably, lessened over the latter couple of centuries particularly). This is not least evidenced by the practice of wearing headscarves and the covering of the face was still a fairly common practice in Christendom up until the Middle Ages, when somehow it begins to lose fashion - in Europe at least. Of course, the practice in Islam was not at all unique, but merely the continued acceptance of an already present cross-cultural paradigm. Many Islamic women voice pride in their headscarves, not least because it is in part of their symbol of rebellion against Western "moral corruption" - - - which reminds myself, I should open a thread on the "Society and Politics" board about Jacque Chirac's recent backing for a bill preventing the use of Muslim headscarves - and other religious paraphanelia - from public buildings in France.

[Susma Rio Sep]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

( . . . )

As for treating women as property - my personal impression that it was a common cultural perception, that is deeply rooted in history from at least 1500 BC right through to the modern day ( . . . )

This is one thing that makes me very angry. How can men who have mothers -- and are there such as without mothers, treat their women like property and productive property at that.

Right to the present day we have in Hindu society the system of dowry where a girl can't get a groom unless and until her family promises at least if not deliver so much of material goods like a car, a house, furniture, whatever the groom's family demands.

And if the promises are not delivered in time, the poor girl is likely to suffer physical tortures and of course all kinds of ill usage in the home of the groom. They even main or burn the poor girl to get even for not having gotten the material wares they were promised, or to coerce thereby the girl's family to by hook or crook to put up.

Women here in this website, you can have me for an advocate of women's rights and equality. I can sign any kind of statements you girls present to advance your causes. I can also march with you in the Internet -- not really a big bother at all (hehehehe).

Why do I love and honor women? Because one of them is my mother, and my wife, and my sister, and my grandmother, and my aunt. So, why shouldn't I want everything for them that is good for me and for men since the dawn of human civilization? Women are the mothers of humankind and the source of society and civilization and the upward climb of the human species to hgher terrains of nobility.

Susma Rio Sep