An email debate

[Vympel]

Hey guys, I'll be posting an email debate between myself and a close Christian friend. Thoughts/comments will be appreciated and noted.

Stay tuned. The topic is the Bible's reliability. More specifics forthcoming.

EDIT: Topic is that the Bible is the Infallible Word of God.

[Vympel]

Introduction:

The Bible is the only infallible and authoritative Word of God.

1. What do mean by infallible?

By "infallible" we mean that the bible is without error throughout. I.e. that it's assertions are factually true in all the original autographs.

2. What do we mean by authorative Word of God?

That it was divinely inspired by God Almighty.

That was my friend's post. Here is mine.

By arguing that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, a Christian places himself in an absolutely untenable position. If one error can be shown- on any matter- an intertextual contradiction, or a contradiction with science, history etc, the argument fails.

The Bible is fallible- an example is it's account of a "Great Flood". The story is well known. It poses a host of problems:

How did the Great Flood occur?

- It requires a source of sufficient water to cover all the Earth's land masses, up to the highest point. It must explain where all this water came from, and where all this water went. Let's assume a 2km deluge (still not enough to cover the worlds' mountains), this is a million, trillion tons of water. No valid explanation has ever been posited.

There is no evidence of a Great Flood occurring: The effects of such a catastrophe are not even remotely compatible with observation- the obvious conclusion is that it did not occur.

- All of the fresh water fish would have become extinct, as the lakes mingled with the salt water of the oceans. This has obviously not happened, since the world's lake are full of specialized organisms which cannot survive in the salt water of the oceans.

- Most of the sedimentary rock on the Earth should be in the oceans, since the loose material would have been largely pushed off-shore as the flood waters receded. However, most of the sedimentary rock on Earth is on high ground!. In fact, even the mountains are largely composed of sedimentary rock!
- Animal species which are dependent upon non-European localized ecosystems would have become extinct, since they would never survive the migration back home after debarking from the Ark. For example, the South American trapdoor tarantulas would have had to somehow journey all the way from Europe to the Amazon jungle, over an ocean and through environments which are much too cold to support it. The polar bear would have had to journey back to its arctic home, through thousands of kilometres of temperate zone. The giant panda would have had to journey from Europe to the bamboo forests of China, despite its poor mobility and extremely specific dietary requirements. What did it eat until it reached the distant bamboo forests? Species like this should have become extinct, but they didn't.

- The distribution of recent fossils should follow a radial pattern from the point where Noah unloaded his Ark, irrespective of species. Consider the fact that all of the Earth's creatures had to migrate outward from a single point. This would leave obvious fossil patterns, which we have failed to observe. Instead, the fossil patterns seem to be consistent with a pattern of long-term migrations and evolutionary adaptations.

- All the plants in the world would have died, because plants require UV radiation and cannot survive deep submersion for prolonged periods (that's why all underwater plants are close to the surface). However, the ancient Bristlecone Pine trees of California show an unbroken line passing right through the Flood and dating back more than 10,000 years. In fact, one particular specimen (nicknamed "Methuselah") is still living, even though it dates back nearly 4800 years, or 500 years before the Flood.

- Fossils of flightless animals should be depth-sorted based on their size and hydrodynamic characteristics rather than their position in the evolutionary progression. However, this is not the case. Species of virtually identical hydrodynamic characteristics are separated by eons, while even the largest dinosaurs are found at the same level as the smallest dinosaurs (which are all, in turn, found far below much smaller and more recent primates). No pattern of depth-sorting based on size and hydrodynamic characteristics is identifiable in the fossil record.

- Fossils of species with superior mobility should always be found at the shallowest levels in the sedimentary rock rather than being grouped with their evolutionary contemporaries, since they would presumably have reached high ground and taken the longest time to die. Flying animals in particular would be at the very top. However, this is not the case. For example, flying dinosaur species are buried at the same depth as other dinosaur species, well below much more recent species with inferior mobility. No pattern of depth-sorting based on mobility is identifiable in the fossil record.

- Metallic man-made Bronze Age artifacts would be found at the very bottom of the fossil record, since such objects fall quicker than any organism, and will obviously not run to high ground or struggle to tread water. However, this is not the case; the vast majority of the fossil record lies beneath the earliest human metallic artifacts.

Miscellaneous problems:

How did Noah build the Ark? A simple examination of shipbuilding techniques and manpower requirements reveals that a wooden boat of that size will not be seaworthy because of excessive leakage, and that one man couldn't possibly build it. The act of procuring the necessary wood alone would have easily overwhelmed him. The largest wooden boats built by man have been 300 feet long, not 450 feet, and have been strapped with iron- however they still had excessive leakage and were considered unseaworthy.

Why do the sedimentary rocks in the mountains contain fossils of ocean-dwelling creatures?

How did the ice caps form? They would have been broken up and melted during the flood, and there hasn't been enough time for them to form since then. Moreover, Greenland ice cores show a progression of yearly patterns since well before the Flood, even though the entire mass should have been broken up.

Why aren't the fossils of modern land-locked animals routinely found deep in the sea bed, even though a catastrophic flood should have easily pushed huge amounts of coastal life into the ocean?

Why aren't environmentally specialized fossils found away from their native environments? A flood would easily disperse fossils over very wide areas irrespective of their original environmental suitability, yet we see no evidence of this dispersion.

Why are different components of the same organism (ie. the pollen and trunk of a plant) invariably sorted at the same layer? Did the flood somehow sort the pollen and trunk and leaves of plants so that they would always end up in consistent layers?

Why are exposed-surface features such as footprints found in deep rock, often layered on top of one another? How does a footprint form, remain intact, and fossilize in the midst of the chaotic sedimentation process described by flood geology?

Why are fossils layered with complete forest ecosystems to match, so that soil layers and plants and animals from one epoch are always grouped together? Did the flood somehow sort this too? That's one clever flood!

How did all of this sedimentary rock formed without releasing the requisite amount of heat, which would have boiled the oceans? Sedimentary rock forms because the resulting rock has a lower energy state than the loose matter from which it was formed, and the energy decrease in the rock must be balanced by an equal energy release into its environment. You can't accelerate the process of rock sedimentation without also accelerating the consequent rate of energy release.

How did Noah or any of the other animals survive in the barren, devastated global ecosystem that would have been left after the flood? Since all of the plants would have died from prolonged deep submersion, the effect would be similar to any other global holocaust scenario; there would be no food except for the other animals coming off the Ark. Even if we assume that fertile topsoil magically appeared amidst the devastation and new plants began growing immediately, they wouldn't grow quickly enough to keep all of Noah's animals from starving to death.

How did the forests and jungles regrow so quickly? Why are some of the most ancient trees and densest jungles in the world found in the Americas, so far from Noah's Ark?

How did all of the human-specific diseases survive? Did the residents of the Ark simultaneously carry every disease in existence? That must have been one sick ship, particularly when you consider the fact that every other species on the bo at must have also been carrying all of the diseases that are specialized for it.

How did species with short lifespans (eg. mayflies) survive the long trip?

How did Noah feed all of those species, particularly those who must eat other species to survive?

How did Noah provide environments suitable for all those species, since some of them can't survive in heat and some of them can't survive in cold? Did he have heated bays and refridgerated bays in his boat?

How did unique species find themselves on isolated islands?

Why isn't there any inbreeding-related damage in the Earth's species? Such damage should be severe if every species was repopulated from just two specimens.

Why didn't the ancient Egyptians make any record of a catastrophic flood even though they were known to have an advanced civilization at the time (between 2000BC and 2500BC)?

How did Noah and his family repopulate the Earth so quickly? Some of the Egyptian pyramids were built in the centuries immediately following the imaginary global Flood; were they built by a few dozen people?

How did life on Earth survive if all of the meteor impact craters were formed within the last 6000 years? This also begs the question of why none of the world's cultures recorded the devastation of all these meteor impacts. There are numerous huge impact craters which betray evidence of impacts powerful enough to devastate the planet (such as the infamous "dino-killer" asteroid), and in primeval periods, some that were so powerful that they would have vapourized the oceans. The huge craters are right there for all to see, and yet we're still alive, aren't we?

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So we have within the Bible, which is contended to be the infallible word of God, a story that is a total falsification. The Bible is obviously not infallible.

(thanks to Mike Wong's creationism page and talkorigins.org for Great Flood discussion- edited to remove YEC-specific arguments- I doubt he'd go down that track ... I hope he doesnt he's much smarter than that)

[Mr Bean]

You forgot the fact we have Ruins from North American Tribal Groups during the time of the flood, before and after(Must be damn good swimmers eh?)

[Tosho]

Very good I must say. Keep up the good work.

[Vympel]

You forgot the fact we have Ruins from North American Tribal Groups during the time of the flood, before and after(Must be damn good swimmers eh?)

*trying to suppress laughter*

It's just so ridiculous ....

This is all really Wong's points and talkorigins points (they don't differ, not suprisingly) but of course if you think about the story for more than two seconds the absurdity sets in quite quickly.