You wrote:
>There is NO evidence that any sort of civilization such
> as that described in Genesis 4-9 existed more than
>10-20,000 years ago. This is the key problem. I would
>agree that if it were just a matter of time that the
>Genesis geneologies could hand it, but it's not a matter
> of time.
Terry, I am going lay out a lot of problems and then tell
you why your objection won't hold at the bottom of the
post. You should not expect to find what you are looking
for.
Let's look at Noah's situation. Only he and 7 other people
would survive. Those seven were the only ones who could
pass technology on to the next generation.
Put yourself in his shoes. If you and 7 others were the
only survivors, how much good would your knowledge do you?
You might take a metal ax, metal saw, a barrel of nails a
gun etc.ect. While you might be able to uses these things
in fashioning your immediate post-catastrophe home, the
time will come when the saw is too dull to use, your nails
are all used up or rusted out. You brought a metal plow but
it too will rust. All the metal knives you bring will rust
or get too dull. The bullets run out for your gun which is
then useless for acquiring food. You took a large suitcase
of clothes for you and your family. The time will
inevitably come when your clothes will wear out. You must
now make more of these things. And there are still you,
the seven others and maybe a couple of new children.
So, how do you make iron?
Without iron, you can not make new knives, axes or nails.
Do you know what iron ore looks like? I do, but it doesn't
occur everywhere. And if you are on a new, unfamiliar
terrain, what direction do you go to find iron ore? Even
if you find iron ore, which is very, very hard, can you
make dynamite to blast it out of the rock? Do you have
enough labor to be able to haul the iron ore to the place
where the coal is? Do you even know (on this new
unfamiliar territory) where the coal is?
Assume that you got the coal and the ore. You throw it all
into a pile and light the coal. The result is not iron.
Do you know what is lacking? There are two things lacking.
But I am not going to tell you what is lacking. But with
all this effort expended gathering coal and iron, all you
have produced is temporarily hot iron ore! And all the
while that you were searching the landscape and gathering
rocks you were NOT doing something that is very important
for your suvival... acquiring and producing food. An iron
based economy only runs on a suplus of agricultural
products. You don't have that with only 7-12 people!
After a generation or two only a vague 'myth' will remain
of the fact that strange substances flow out of rocks. No
one will know the nature of the substance and it will
appear as a wondrous myth. But no one will really believe
it because throwing rocks on fires will not make the stuff.
How do you make the bullets? Well you need gun powder. Do
you know how to make gun powder? You also need shell
casings. Can you make them?
You took a lot of agricultural seeds -- cotton, wheat,
corn etc. You figure that you can plant these things and
have a farm going in no time. I grew up in a rural
community but not on a farm. But I picked up a few things.
Do you know when to plant the wheat?, the cotton? the
corn? I know that you are aware that cotton, wheat and
corn can not live wild in nature and require huge
investments in time to keep the weeds and insects away. If
mankind did not continually replant corn, wheat and cotton,
it would go extinct within a few years. With less than 20
people, do you have that kind of time?
What do you do when the first crop failure occurs? Where
and to whom do you go buy surplus food from. The only way
farmers in a severe drought can survive today is that they
can purchase food from far away where there is no drought.
Suppose you successfully plant things. You now have to
wait 3-5 months before the crops come in. What are you
going to eat in the interim? I for one do not have the fat
reserves (although I have more than I want) to go that long
with out food, especially working as hard as I will have
to.
OK. I have to hunt now. After the bullets are gone before
my harvest comes in, I will have to make bows and arrows,
spears and traps in order to capture wild game. Do you
know how to do this? What kind of wood do you use? I
know. How do you straighten the arrow shafts? I know. Do
you know how to knapp stone tools? I don't know but have a
friend who want to teach me. Do you know how to haft them
onto the arrow? I don't. Do you know how to make the glue,
process the tendons and put feathers on straight? I don't.
OK. Your clothes have worn out. How do you spin the
threads, weave the cloth and then sew it together? Your
metal needles got lost very quickly after you got off the
ark. Can you make new ones? What material do you make
your new needles out of? I will tell you this. You have
to make them out of bone. Do you know how to drill the
hole? Once again, all the time and effort you put into
weaving, leaves you no time to hunt for food. You starve to
death!
OK. Forget cotton and weaving. Let's make animal skin
clothes. This assumes of course that you are able to
capture something big enough to use for clothing. Now that
you have it, do you know how to tan the hide so that it is
flexible and is not putrid? Wearing a smelly rotting sheep
skin around your loins is liable to attract all sorts of
unsavory predators who eye you hungrily. Here is what you
do. You must separate the skin from the muscle and then
scrape off all the fat. The fat will ruin the skin. Can
you make a stone scrapper? I can't. After you do that, you
dry it. Then you (sorry but this is indelicate) you
urinate on the underside to make it soft and pliable. You
have to rub the urine into the skin. (I may have the
order of these things wrong, I didn't go look them up).
Would you have thought of that? I certainly wouldn't have
if I hadn't done some study and I may have a detail or two
wrong since I am doing this from memory.
This is enough of this type of problem. The point I am
trying to make is that if you were in that situation, you
and your descendents would be quickly reduced to naked
savagery! You would have to scavenge off of the land.
Your lifespan would be very short and the environmental
hardships would make you look like death warmed over. Some
future anthropologist might think your descendents were sub
human!
Our view of man is that he is so incredibly inventive that
within 5-10 years he can re-create the knowledge base of
neolithic mankind. This is so incredibly arrogant of our
abilities. This does not even begin to discuss the
absolutlely terrible implications this view of humanity has
for those peoples who did not invent the technology which
gave rise to neolithic farming. The New Guinea tribesman
and Amazonian Indians are every bit as intelligent and
resourceful as western man is. Yet they did not invent or
engage in much farming. Why? Maybe such inventions are
more difficult to make than Christians blythy (from a safe
temporal-spatial distance) think.
Have you ever read the account of how mankind invented
numbers? Go read Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "Two Precursors
of Writing: Plain and Complex Tokens," in Wayne M. Senner,
_The Origins of Writing_ (Lincoln: The University of
Nebraska Press, 1989), p.27-41. It was not intuitively
obvious to those early Sumerians that a symbol could
represent a number. This took centuries for them to
realize! We, with our western technological superiority
take such concepts for granted as a priori knowledge. It
isn't.
We totally underestimate the difficulty of transmitting
technology through a population bottleneck.
I believe that God taught Adam and his family the knowledge
they had. When Noah's family lost it, I believe God let
them re-develop the technology and it took a long, long
time. Even the simple concept that a stone could be shaped
into a tool is not patently obvious from inborn knowledge.
and might have taken several million years.
You wrote:
> You stress the evidence a great deal, but you have
>conveniently buried all the evidence in the depths of the
>Mediterranean Sea and, on your view, in my
>opinion you could even claim that because of the
> destruction of the flood and the small size of the human
>population at the time that such evidence might never be
>found. Your view with respect to the anthropological
>issues is empirically verifiable only in some imaginary
>way.
You are darn tootin' I stress evidence. If I don't then I
am reduced to stressing my imagination as Ramm and Morris
do with their flood models. Of course, their imaginary
models are more popular and they can sell lots of books.
There are geologists on this listserv who could easily
hammer me for any factual misuse of geology. I haven't
seen them telling me my facts are wrong. I know they don't
like my view (which should pre-dispose them to want to
hammer me) but they have not claimed that the Mediterranean
was never dry. They have not told me how wrong my anthro
data is. They have not objected to my reasons for
rejecting Morris and Ramm's flood. (Do any of you
geologists want to defend what Ramm wrote about his model
of the flood?). I don't claim their support for my views
at all. But my facts are correct in most cases! You have
seen me on other lists make quick retractions over factual
data on which I was most definitely wrong.
My model of the flood is more verifiable than is the
existence of Reuben. Do you have any evidence of Reuben's
personal existence? You believe he existed don't you?
Convenient how that evidence has disappeared isn't it?
My view fits the logical positivist definition of "in
principle verifiable". What you call "imaginary" is of the
nature of a prediction. All theories worth their salt make
predictions which must be made prior to the time of
verification or refutation. Einstein's General Relativity
predicts that certain electromagnetic chirp signals be
found if black holes exist. None have been observed yet.
Does this make black holes imaginary or the evidence for
their existence imagninary? No. But if after a period of
time with sophisticated equipment, we still fail to find
that chirp signal, then maybe black holes don't exist.
For years the evidence for the formation of star systems
was "conveniently buried" behind poor telescopes and
atmospheric scintilation. Today we can finally see it. In
biology there are lots of things, (like a clear exposition
for the inorganic origin of life) which are "conveniently
buried" in an even more distant past 4.5 billion years ago;
in a totally different environment (a world without oxygen)
and in a barren landscape full of volcanoes! I believe
that you do hold to an inorganic origin scenario, so why is
what you are doing different than what I am doing? All
sciences do this. If Christians are ever to win one of
these science/Bible wars, we MUST make predictions. But we
fear being wrong too much to engage in that type of
behavior.
I make two basic predictions. If these don't ever come
true then my view is wrong. I will turn against my own view
if something comes up which disproves it. The first
prediction: Homo habilis, Homo erectus or Homo sapiens must
be found much closer to the 5.5 MYR time period. If this
is never found, then I am wrong. While I am not claiming
this as support for my view (since I don't consider it
proof positive), there was a very human-like humerus found
at Kanapoi from strata almost 5 million years old. Oxnard
states of this,
"Thus, just as a different form of behavior postulated for
australopithecines denies them a close link with the human
lineage so do ...(4) the existence of a humeral fragment
from Kanapoi that is almost five million years old yet is
indistinguishable in shape from any modern human humeri
(younger australopithecine humeri are vastly different from
modern man's)." Charles E. Oxnard, "Human Fossils: The New
Revolution," _Great Ideas Today, 1977, (Chicago:
Encyclopaedia Britannica), p. 148.
Second, there is the prediction that something should be
found at the base of the Miocene/Pliocene boundary on the
Mediterranean floor. I will admit that this is less likely
to be found even if it exists. But it is verifiable. GO
DIG!
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm