On Tue, 3 Oct 1995 00:35:31 -0400 Glenn wrote:
>Stephen wrote:
SJ>I am amazed at this request of Glenn. I have been outlining my
>views ad nauseam, I would have thought! I am pressed for time at
>present, so I will briefly outline my views in one-liners:
SJ>1. Creation - I am a Progressive Creationist who believes that
>Bible and Nature are both "books" from God. 2. Man - I lean to a
>two-Adam model, ie. Gn 1 Man and Gn 2 Adam. Adam was a fairly
>recent appearance. Neanderthals might be fully human, or they might
>not. Depends on the evidence. I lean to the view that they were
>not, ie. they are included in Gn 1 man. 3. Flood - I believe the
>Flood was a large local flood in Mesopotamia.
GM>Sorry, what I was asking for was more detail than this. What are
>the time frames, for the events, when was fully human man made, what
>sediments mark the flood sediments.
I am not overly concerned about the "time frames". The Bible doesn't
give any, so I see no need to set any. My only concern is for a model
that fits both the Biblical and scientific evidence. The Biblical
evidence as I see it depicts Gn 2 Adam as a farmer (Gn 2:15; 3:19;
4:2), so I would correlate his date with the fairly recent appearance
of farming in the Fertile Crescent. My viewpoint would probably be
called old-Earth/young-Adam.
As to "sediments", I am not aware of any except the flood sediments
that Woolley found in the Mesopotamian Valley:
"In 1922, archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley began to excavate the
remains of one of the world's oldest cities, between the rivers Tigris
and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, or present-day Iraq. Woolley's hopes of
great discoveries at the site of the biblical city of Ur were more
than fulfilled. But what he found not only caught the archaeological
world by surprise, it also sent a ripple of consternation spreading
through the world's natural history and geological museums.
Six thousand years ago, civilisation arose in the plains of Sumeria,
where many famous cities flourished and died. It was here that the
legendary kings of Babylon lived and here that writing was invented.
The fame of Ur has outlasted many another Sumerian city because the
Bible gives it as the birth- place of the patriarch Abraham - 'Ur of
the Chaldees'...By cutting trenches straight down through the mound,
Woolley planned to reveal a slice of the history of Ur, its people and
their artefacts. Eventually, his excavation took him so deep he found
material from a period of immense antiquity which actually predated
the Sumerian people and which he named the 'al 'Ubaid period'.
Driving deeper still, Woolley hit what most of his workers took to be
the end of their dig, a thick bed of clay and silt. But continuing to
dig, he passed through the thick bed of water-laid sediments and
emerged again into the remains of civilised life, including 'al
'Ubaid' pottery.
He had clearly found the remains of a great flood. 'No other agency
could possibly account for it,' wrote Woolley. 'Inundations are of
normal occurrence in lower Mesopotamia, but no ordinary rising of the
rivers would leave behind it anything approaching the bulk of this
claybank: eight feet of sediment imply a very great depth of water,
and the flood which deposited it must have been of a magnitude
unparalleled in local history.' Woolley believed he had found
evidence of the great flood of Noah, described in the Bible, and the
evidence for this is compelling.
The flood sediments he discovered date from around 3000 BC, early in
the establishment of civilisation in the area... The extent of the
Sumerian flood was very substantial: a deposit 8 feet thick, covering
an area some 400 miles long by 100 miles wide - a total of many
billions of tons of material."
(Milton R., "The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism",
Fourth Estate, London, 1992, p60)
I don't say this was the Biblical Flood, but it could be. It would
however probably require a more imaginative attitude to Gn 7-9! :-)
It is important to realise that the Flood story is in a form that
recapitulates Creation. The Earth is covered by a watery chaos and
dry land, vegetation and animal life "appears". The purpose of the
Flood story is not straight history, but salvation-history.
GM>The biggest question I have is this. In the mesopotamian region
>the land slopes to the south towards the persion gulf. Any flood
>waters would drain to the south carrying the ark with it. So how did
>the ark land back in Turkey? Things like this are what I am
>interested in.
The above reflects Glenn's "interest" as a professional geophysicist.
It is not my major interest or expertise. I do try to relate the Bible
with the scientific facts, but I do not claim an exact fit. If we
knew exactly where and when the Flood was (the Bible does not say)
then we could zero in on the geological evidence. Ramm gives one
suggestion for a local flood:
" Although many Christians still believe in the universal flood, most
of the recent conservative scholarship of the church defends a local
flood. Those who defend a local flood believe that the time of the
flood was some time prior to 4000 B.C. The waters were supplied by
the rains from above and the ocean waters beneath. Some sort of
geological phenomenon is indicated by the expression "and the
fountains of the deep were broken up." This caused the ocean waters
to creep up the Mesopotamian valley. The waters carried the ark up to
the Ararat range. The Hebrew text does not mean that the ark was
deposited on the 17,000 foot summit of the peak, but that the ark
rested somewhere on the Ararat range. It would have taken a special
miracle to get Noah and his family down from such dizzy mountain
heights where the cold would have been extreme. By the reversal of
the geological phenomenon, the water is drained back from the valley
The reader must keep in mind, as stated in a leading conservative
commentary:
`There is in Western Asia a remarkably depressed area, extending from
the Sea of Aral to the Steppes of the Caucasus on the north, and
sweeping round the southern shores of the Caspian, comprehending
Ararat and the Great Salt Desert, which, as Ansted has remarked "forms
no inconsiderable portion of the great recognized centre of the human
family. The Caspian Sea (83« feet below the level of the sea and in
some parts of it 600 feet deep) and the Sea of Aral occupy the lowest
part of a vast space, whose whole extent is not less than 100,000
square miles, hollowed out, as it were, in the central region of the
great continent, and no doubt formerly the bed of the ocean" [and into
this natural saucer the ocean waters poured].'