Pity the poor inverts

Apparently some creatures are just too wiley for the old bastard. Clever little devils. Of course, this just gives credence to my irrational belief that all invertebrates are made of pure evil so that even God himself can't predict their motives or destroy them completely.

I think the key to Noah's ark is how the hell he fed all of the animals. Let's just pretend his ark was large enough to store them all (impossible, even as babies), many animals require other animals as food, and that would be quite a lot of extra baggage for forty days. Let's presume all of those animals decided they're okay with eating plantmatter for that more than one month's time. That's still enough wheat or barley or grass to sink the damn boat.

Let's say they only ate a couple times and went mostly hungry during that time, well when the water finally receded (into space, apparently) they wouldn't have enough time to repopulate to normal survivable levels before the predators utterly destroyed the prey populations. Let's even forget about how all of the animals landing on a boat in the middle east had a far walk to repopulate their old habitats around the whole world that they were designed to survive in.

I get tickled by the "theory" that 'kind' means 'genus' or 'family' because, as is stated, they would have to speciate at an extremely high rate -- about a couple times a day -- to get to today's diversity. Of course, creationists are fine with knocking scientists for not witnessing evolution ever happening and never seeing a new species pop up (which we actually have) while they'll put forward that at one time animals were speciating at a rate of once a day. Why would it stop? Shouldn't we have discovered like a hundred new species of big cat in at least the last hundred years?

One of my favorite questions to ask Young Earth Creationists about Noah's Ark is from an essay by Mark Twain. It goes something like "How many syphilis spirochetes, tuberculosis bacteria, Ebola virii, gonorrhea bacteria, leprosy bacilli, cholera bacteria, smallpox virii, West Nile virii, typhoid, polio, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, plague, etc., etc., were on board Noah’s Ark? Recall that some of these are specifically human pathogens, some of which multiply rapidly, some of which are quickly fatal… Where were these pathogens carried on Noah’s Ark (which you will recall carried all terrestrial life on the planet) – and how did Noah’s family survive?

Here's the quote and citation from Mark Twain:

"The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark's cargo... There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations, golden bearers of God's love to man..." - Twain's "Letters From The Earth," http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainlfe.htm

What is interesting about the “kinds” argument is that it represents a major retreat from fixity of species. Now we have “baraminology” which makes evolutionary trees of relationship of species within “kinds”. I'm all in favor of this. Let them reconstruct the trees -- which will keep getting larger and larger. They're on a slippery slope, and have already implicitly acknowledged that evolution can make different species, and can make different adaptations in the different species within a “kind” that represent novel information. Maybe evolutionary biologists should think of themselves as macro-baraminologists ...

The creationists have coined a word for the study of biblical kinds: "baraminology" If you'd do your homework and read the Answers Journal, you'd see a couple of paper on it. All inconclusive, of course.

But I'd like to know about the fish. Sure, they could ride out the flood in the world-wide water. But salt water would have killed the fresh-water fish, and probably vice versa.

Creationists also make a big deal of classifying hominid fossils as human or non-human, to prove that there are no transitional fossils. You might ask your creationist friends about their "human" Neandertal, homo habilis, etc. The problem is that they had no domesticated crops and no metal-working. Whereas Genesis clearly states that Adam was a farmer, and his sons made metal tools.

of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every [sort] shall come unto thee, to keep [them] alive.

Ah, simple logic, far sharper than the Sword of the Spirit.

What were the all the xylophages and gribbles doing during that voyage?

The Bible says that insects have four legs (Leviticus 11:20-23) so maybe insects were 33% smaller in those days.

Smaller? But didn't arthropods used to be bigger? (Back when the air had more oxygen than it does today.)

John_S said: ... I think Ken Ham is just inventing stuff.

Well, Ham is an accomplished tap-dancer, isn't he? He doesn't really have much choice. His nose must be 20 feet long by now.

Oh what a tangled web we weave

when first we practice to deceive.

I heard that Noah couldn't tell the female cats -- er, cat-kinds-- from the male ones, so he made them all get jobs. The ones who brought home the tiny paychecks were the females.

Mee-YOW! (fnxtr runs and hides again)

Here's a testable hypothesis for our creationist friends: If all the kangaroos, rats, and other land-dwelling species on earth are descended from the two on the ark, but all the whales, fish and other sea dwellers are descended from the original animals, there should less genetic diversity among the land-dwelling species. Evolution predicts diversity depends on population genetics, time since a speciation event, etc. Let the games begin!

Also, I think Ken Ham might be one of those creeping things.

Ken Ham is also famous for the cometary theory of inundation, where the Earth was hit by a comet containing enough water to cause the flood, and the impact, see, caused vast movements in the crust, which over the following months deepened the ocean basins enough for the water to have somewhere to go.

The overlapping physical impossibilities of this (the energy produced by an impact of that size would have boiled the oceans, and earth movement on that scale would have boiled them again from friction) are readily explained by the fact that God can do anything, so there.

"Ken Ham is also famous for the cometary theory of inundation, where the Earth was hit by a comet containing enough water to cause the flood ..."

But isn't that where the oceans originally came from? From the early cometary bombardment 4 to 4.5 billion years ago.

So after the "kinds" left the ark they underwent super-evolution to produce the variety we find today?

alloytoo said: So after the "kinds" left the ark they underwent super-evolution to produce the variety we find today?

Wayne Robinson said: "Ken Ham is also famous for the cometary theory of inundation, where the Earth was hit by a comet containing enough water to cause the flood ..." But isn't that where the oceans originally came from? From the early cometary bombardment 4 to 4.5 billion years ago.

alloytoo said: So after the "kinds" left the ark they underwent super-evolution to produce the variety we find today?

alloytoo said: So after the "kinds" left the ark they underwent super-evolution to produce the variety we find today?

DS said: ... Then, you can move on to ask them why there is a nested hierarchy of genetic similarity between all living organisms if they are not really related. Common design is not the answer. Remember, whales nest within artiodactlys not fish, even when nonfunctional characters are used to reconstruct the phylogeny.

Steve Taylor said:

Wayne Robinson said: "Ken Ham is also famous for the cometary theory of inundation, where the Earth was hit by a comet containing enough water to cause the flood ..." But isn't that where the oceans originally came from? From the early cometary bombardment 4 to 4.5 billion years ago.

Yes, some of it but not all at once, and over several hundreds of millions of years. Much is presumed to have been tied up in deep rocks as the earth formed too. Space borne Accretion is still happening, I saw figures for the additional water we aquire each year from space impacts, but I can't find a source now, its not a trivial couple of gallons, but its not cubic miles either. Steve

Joe wrote:

"The other approach that some creationists use is to admit that there is a common signal, but to say “you haven’t ruled out common design!” And indeed, we haven’t ruled it out. They carefully don’t note that common design predicts every possible pattern we might see and is thus not a scientific explanation."

Well that is the beauty of the SINE data. More than any other data set, the pattern cannot be attributed to common design. If a creationist makes this claim, then they are admitting that god copied the mistakes. Of course, common design really doesn't make much sense for any of the other data sets either, but as you say, god can do anything she wants. She can even do foolish, stupid, inefficient things that make a mockery of "intelligent" design.

Ooh, ooh, i got it! The insects were preserved by Satan to plague us after the flood. Thankfully Satan wasn't too discriminating in that he preserved some pollinators too.

Well if ol' Hambone gets to make shit up, why can't the rest of us?

I'm going to go with the poofination theory here. God snapped his fingers and POOF! All of the animals automagically fit on the Ark. He snapped them again and POOF! No hunger or manure. He then snapped them one last time and POOF! The animals were all where they were supposed to be after the waters receded.

Argue with that logic! I dare you!

alloytoo said: So after the "kinds" left the ark they underwent super-evolution to produce the variety we find today?

KJV GEN 6:17 also says "... and every thing that is in the earth shall die." Well that pretty much means a sterile Earth if all the microrganisms "in" the Earth go too. All that beneficial bacteria ... gone. How is that to get replenished post flood. God specifically excludes microrganisms from the Ark, which BTW precludes any stowaways too, unless you want to dispute God's word.

Doesn't Genesis 7 also say the "creeping things" were "destroyed from the earth"? So whether they had nostrils or not should be irrelevant, right?

We are all missing the obvious: all non-vertebrates that survived the flood are, in fact, undead, hence Noah didn't have to bring them on the Ark. Its all so simple when you think about it scientifically.

Jesse said: I'm going to go with the poofination theory here. God snapped his fingers and POOF! All of the animals automagically fit on the Ark. He snapped them again and POOF! No hunger or manure. He then snapped them one last time and POOF! The animals were all where they were supposed to be after the waters receded.

John_S said: I guess that's more likely than the idea of two giant earthworms tunneling under the Kavir desert, across India, island-hopping down the Malay Peninsula and burrowing under the ocean bed to emerge in Australia.

But insects don’t breathe through their nostrils...

Based on the inanity of their arguments, it doesn't sound like he or his followers do either.

/snark/

Here in the UK Ken Ham wouldn't get a stage, no press or media attention apart from significant ridicule. Well ok perhaps just the once but from then on everyone would see that he is a seriously disturbed individual who has sacrificed all his reasoning faculties, in fact his very humanity for a poisonous and corrupt ideology. He lives in a permanent state of virtual reality, an embarrassment to the major established Christian Churches, and an insult to every civilized thinking adult regardless of what they believe. Imagine David Icke sporting Amish facial hair and there you have him in all his glory, but with even more invincible ignorance. Ken Ham epitomises Christianity at its worst, i've started to think of his brand of Fundamental Christianity as the "American Disease", but I know Americans are far far better than that.
I feel sorry that we even have to consider his feckless mumblings…

Jesse said: I'm going to go with the poofination theory here. God snapped his fingers and POOF! All of the animals automagically fit on the Ark. He snapped them again and POOF! No hunger or manure. He then snapped them one last time and POOF! The animals were all where they were supposed to be after the waters receded. Argue with that logic! I dare you!

Kevin B said:

Jesse said: I'm going to go with the poofination theory here. God snapped his fingers and POOF! All of the animals automagically fit on the Ark. He snapped them again and POOF! No hunger or manure. He then snapped them one last time and POOF! The animals were all where they were supposed to be after the waters receded. Argue with that logic! I dare you!

But why did he have to get Noah to build the Ark? Does the finger-snapping not work for carpentry? Or was the whole flood merely one of these " executive team-building day out" sort of thingss?

Keruso said: Here in the UK Ken Ham wouldn't get a stage, no press or media attention apart from significant ridicule. Well ok perhaps just the once but from then on everyone would see that he is a seriously disturbed individual who has sacrificed all his reasoning faculties, in fact his very humanity for a poisonous and corrupt ideology. He lives in a permanent state of virtual reality, an embarrassment to the major established Christian Churches, and an insult to every civilized thinking adult regardless of what they believe. Imagine David Icke sporting Amish facial hair and there you have him in all his glory, but with even more invincible ignorance. Ken Ham epitomises Christianity at its worst, i've started to think of his brand of Fundamental Christianity as the "American Disease", but I know Americans are far far better than that. I feel sorry that we even have to consider his feckless mumblings…

Kevin B said: But why did he have to get Noah to build the Ark? Does the finger-snapping not work for carpentry? Or was the whole flood merely one of these " executive team-building day out" sort of thingss?

Ken Ham is narrowing the possibilities for managing all those vertebrates by excluding the invertebrates. How did Noah shovel all that dung out of a tiny window? Easy, he didn't. He took dung beetles on board.

Of course that creates a new problem. Dung beetles roll up and bury dung as a food supply for their larvae. Given the ideal conditions of a long voyage and a huge supply of dung he would soon be up to his armpits in beetles. Be a bit difficult to navigate then.

Of course this is a lot of Hams@*t.

Jesse said:

John_S said: I guess that's more likely than the idea of two giant earthworms tunneling under the Kavir desert, across India, island-hopping down the Malay Peninsula and burrowing under the ocean bed to emerge in Australia.

And it has the inherent advantage that you can't prove that God does not just poofinate things.

The insects were brought on board to feed the reptile kind. And as He foresaw, they were thus spared. And the diseases were born by the monkey kind, including the biologists and college professors and liberals!

"A more serious argument against the Noah myth is how the heck could Noah manage to build the Ark in the first place? He’d have to be stinking rich to pay all the people he would need for the construction, and I don’t see how he could keep them from throwing off bot the Noah’s and the dinosaurs, boarding the Ark themselves instead when the waters began to rise. Who would have stood idle by, waving bon voyage to Noah?"

Actually in the older version, the Babylonian version in the Gilgamesh Epic, Noah--or Utnaphisti, as he is called there-- is described as rich--the god Ea tells him to forget about his money and spend it as he needs to because it will be useless after the disaster. Everyone else was too distracted to interfere with the construction of the ark (which only took a few days apparently) because Ea made it rain bread day and night.

Helena Constantine said: Actually in the older version, the Babylonian version in the Gilgamesh Epic, Noah--or Utnaphisti, as he is called there-- is described as rich--the god Ea tells him to forget about his money and spend it as he needs to because it will be useless after the disaster. Everyone else was too distracted to interfere with the construction of the ark (which only took a few days apparently) because Ea made it rain bread day and night.

alloytoo said: So after the "kinds" left the ark they underwent super-evolution to produce the variety we find today?

Never say never.

Creationist Robert Chittick explained the problem thus, that when Noah was boarding the animals, dinosaurs included, they all copulated, laid eggs, and the eggs were taken aboard. In that manner space was no problem. Subsequently it is assumed then (he didn't venture into this area) that when Noah found land, he and his family sat on the eggs until they all hatched. Noah himself is reputed to have had a pet T-Rex.

I for one would support a PTM (Panda's Thumb Moritorium)on Arkology posts given it is such a demonstrable crock of BS; or at least create a new category: mythological humor so we can skip over any further stupidity. Keep up the good work Panda! Regards, Jim Cliborn

wamba said: The Bible says that insects have four legs (Leviticus 11:20-23) so maybe insects were 33% smaller in those days.

Keruso | March 15, 2010 12:10 PM | Reply | Edit Here in the UK Ken Ham wouldn’t get a stage, no press or media attention apart from significant ridicule.

waynef43 said:

Jesse said:

John_S said: I guess that's more likely than the idea of two giant earthworms tunneling under the Kavir desert, across India, island-hopping down the Malay Peninsula and burrowing under the ocean bed to emerge in Australia.

And it has the inherent advantage that you can't prove that God does not just poofinate things.

Unless you want to argue that there haven't been any documented or verifiable poofinations over the course of the past 2000 years. I can think of numerous poofinable (sp?) worthy events in our recent history. Why'd he quit 2000 years ago? I wish he'd drop by and get some face time. Maybe do an interview with Wolf Blitzer...

stevaroni Maybe God didn’t like the 4-legged design, and decided to wipe them all out and start over with six legs. Call it “rev A”, if you will. After all, He’s made almost a million variations of the current hexapod design, He could just be very, very concerned with getting it just right. He is, it has been noted, “Inordinately fond of beetles”.

Jesse said: Yeah, but the 4-legged design insects made it into Leviticus, so if God did kill them, he had to do it after the flood and after Moses. Even the elusive 4-legged beetle, which the KJ Bible mentions.

Even the elusive 4-legged beetle

Karen S. said:

Even the elusive 4-legged beetle

I think a beetle has 4 wheels, not 4 legs. Or maybe both are from the beetle kind?

1.) Clearly the arc was extra dimensional and bigger on the inside than it was on the outside...

2.) We know that there was at least a Raven kind and a Dove kind aboard the arc, so if we can extrapolate that at least bird kinds are equivalent to genus level classification, how many critters that give us in just bird kinds? About 1600 I think, multiply that by 7 if they are clean....thats alot of birds...

3.) I have always been curious as to what the critters onthe arc were supposed to eat onve the flood water went away...everything was underwater for how long? Long enough to kill every green plant I would guess. So what did all those herbivores eat, and why didn't the carnivores immediately eat everytghing that moved one they got off the arc?

The question is, if they fail here, where are they going to turn next?

Karen S. said:

Even the elusive 4-legged beetle

I think a beetle has 4 wheels, not 4 legs. Or maybe both are from the beetle kind?

Long enough to kill every green plant I would guess.

Keruso | March 15, 2010 12:10 PM | Reply | Edit Here in the UK Ken Ham wouldn’t get a stage, no press or media attention apart from significant ridicule. Well ok perhaps just the once but from then on everyone would see that he is a seriously disturbed individual who has sacrificed all his reasoning faculties,

Last I heard, the youngen’s are leaving the fundamentalist churches in droves.

signsofthelastdays.com: The other day we came across an article in Advertising Age that blew us away. The article was discussing marketing and religion, but what impacted us so profoundly were some figures from the American Religious Identification Survey by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College. According to that survey, 15% of Americans now say they have "no religion" which is up from 8% in 1990. That would be bad enough news for evangelical Christianity. But there is some more news from that survey that is much worse. In that same survey, 46% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 indicated that they had no religion. Forty. Six. Percent.

out of Ham: You know, some insects may indeed have been on the Ark, but they would have been stowaways. The real question is whether insects were among the living creatures that God said had to be on the Ark.

Insects then, and other arachnids and assorted exoskeltal kinds of guys were only present as eggs and nits which infested not only the fauna but the flora the were fed. Including smilidon.

The really tiny bugs, like that black fly and them noseeums were always swarming about but never noticed. They were just lucky that they could stay in the rain shadow of the ark.

Where I start to lose it is with things like nematodes and fungi associated with creating and maintaining soil. In what medium were these organisms kept during the downpour and how were they spread upon the layer of muck and debris left by the flood? This would have had to happen very fast in order to prepare fertile soil for plants so all the lovely animals could repopulate this soggy orb.

Without good dirt we'd all be pretty damned hungry, you know?

Crudely Wrott said: Without good dirt we'd all be pretty damned hungry, you know?

Of course, there isn't a single objection raised here to the flood story/ies that can't be answered with "God works in mysterious ways, it's not our place to understand, you're using man's logic not God's logic, and besides, take THAT!" [whapping you on the head with a Bible].

David Utidjian said: I don't know why the creationists futz around with trying to make up coherent and believable stories. Why not just say "it was a miracle" and be done with it? Otherwise the real evidence just isn't there to support their stories.

DU: "I don’t know why the creationists futz around with trying to make up coherent and believable stories. Why not just say “it was a miracle” and be done with it? Otherwise the real evidence just isn’t there to support their stories."

Real evidence does not matter, David. After all, when you live in a place populated by Discorporate Invisible Supernatural Spooks engaged in eternal conflict all around you, the comfort you take is the comfort offered. It is not necessary that the comfort be either rational or effective. What matters is the sense of belonging to a group that is broader and deeper both in space and in time. Belief in DISSs and the expectation of many wonderful things after our minds and bodies become equally discorporate is only the substrate. The glue that holds the believers thin veneer of hubris to that substrate (poor quality particle board in my estimation) is their gathered enthusiasm fueled by acceptance and willing relegated to shoring up the strained dogma of that nice little church with all the nice people. This is how clubs work. This is why I haven't joined on for years.

MPW said: Well, always keep in mind that you and I aren't their audience. The point is to give a superficial impression of being "scientific" to a certain segment of the flock that you want to keep in the pen, who might be glancing outside the fence and occasionally muttering "You know, that secular logic looks awfully appealing sometimes." If you can give them the impression that they can have the comforts of fundamentalist religion and the intellectual respectability of science at the same time, it's easier to keep them in the pen. The "explanations" don't have to make much sense at all; most of the flock really wants to believe this and you just have to give them a couple thin straws to hang onto and that will be enough; they won't go digging at the roots. I hasten to add this doesn't necessarily assume conscious cynicism in all cases; the audience or "the flock" can include yourself, if you're a fundamentalist who's highly motivated to fool yourself for similar psychological or social reasons.

YEC here.
A lot of posts about different things.
I never heard before the denial that all insects went on the Ark. I thought they did. Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker but still would have to persuade me any living thing with breath survived on land. i think the nostrils thing doesn't need be seen as actual nostrils. Just brearthing air is good enough. Ham could be right.
I also think there is a problem with kinds. For example i see dogs and bears and perhaps seals as the same kind. I see marsupials as just placentals. in facxt i think most creatures can be reduced into a smaller number of kinds. Creationists have problems because of seeing present classification systems as accurate. So genus is invoked as kind but this doesn't work.
Creationists must see kinds as very flexible. the great hint is the snake. First it still remained in kind despite losing its legs. Then there are spitters and squeezers and egg layers and live birthers. Yet surely there ws only a snake kind on the ark. So diversity is must be allowed more by biblical creationism.

Yes diversity would of exploded after the flood. The example is the cichlid fishes of africa or modern Amazon. Diversity is the true nature of life. It is quick and fills all niches. I imagine that just two centuries after the flood there was hundreds of species of horses for example. just like the cichlids.

Food on the ark simply can be seen as creatures not needing much. after the flood vegatarianism was the rule. This would explain why teeth types of related creatures or unrelated creatures is so varied. Teeth simply were not in need for creatures on the ark or after.

All questions can be answered. I say biogeography only makes sense in a framework of a origin of creatures from a single area. The flood story fits this fine.

Your constantly making up crap as you go leaves the distinct impression that you are completely off your rocker.

You seem to like that.

Once again I'll invoke the "one response and out" for Byers. Mike wins this round.

Not to mention that the Big Boat salvage operation was a near total failure. Despite heavy supernatural support, 99% of all species ended up extinct. We still miss our dinosaurs.

Robert Byers said: YEC here. A lot of posts about different things. I never heard before the denial that all insects went on the Ark. I thought they did. Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker ...

waynef43 said: Unless you want to argue that there haven't been any documented or verifiable poofinations over the course of the past 2000 years.

DavidK said, citing some creationist: the eggs were taken aboard. In that manner space was no problem.

If the current topic is on the use and meaning of the word “kind” in ancient writings, then maybe the issue is the often and probably incorrect literal “modern” interpretation of the use of the word rather than an “ancient” literary one.

Assuming the Bible was written somewhere between the 11th and 10th century (bce) based on thousands of years of oral tradition, the meaning of “kind” was most likely not indicating “species” since that term is relatively new (1700’s?), not to mention the ancient Greeks started “formally” categorizing life not by morphology or physiology per say but more in the lines of what “flew”, what “swam”, etc.

The gist of Genesis was addressed to an ancient audience with ancient nomenclature and world view. It may need to be analyzed in that context. This is definitely not saying the ancients were morons; they just had a different outlook and understanding and lived accordingly (the same could be viewed of our culture 100 years from now.) The general theme basically addressed the differentiation of the Hebrew God’s ontology as distinct from extant Mesopotamian cosmogony and theogony. This is not confirming or denying the existence of deity in a modern evaluation, but it did make a distinction in ancient religion since many other beliefs of that era had multiple gods transforming into other life forms (“kinds”). Clearly the God of the Hebrews indicates His existence is unique among the other cultures and clarifies it in the tradition and eventual writing.

The use of “kind” is therefore more likely to be used in that context to clarify that plants and animals to not transform into deities or vice versa.

David Utidjian said: I don't know why the creationists futz around with trying to make up coherent and believable stories. Why not just say "it was a miracle" and be done with it? Otherwise the real evidence just isn't there to support their stories.

when God could have simply made Everything OK with a Level 2 Miracle?

I wonder what the termites ate while on the Ark...

Robert Byers said: Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker...

Ham could be right.

For example i see dogs and bears and perhaps seals as the same kind.

I see marsupials as just placentals.

I imagine that just two centuries after the flood there was hundreds of species of horses for example.

raven said: Why didn't he just get it right at the start with the Garden of Eden?

If every population of vertebrates was founded by just 2 individuals a few thousand years ago that would mean that pretty much all of the genetic variation we see in them has occured SINCE that time. This would imply that mutation and evolution occurs at a breakneck speed!....a bit of a conundrum for the creationists I would think.

Mike Elzinga said:

Karen S. said:

Even the elusive 4-legged beetle

I think a beetle has 4 wheels, not 4 legs. Or maybe both are from the beetle kind?

Three guitars and a set of drums.

MikeMa said:

Robert Byers said: YEC here. A lot of posts about different things. I never heard before the denial that all insects went on the Ark. I thought they did. Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker ...

Lost the argument right there. Ken Ham is a fool and a charlatan.

RDK said: After consulting the Robert Byers Guide to Creationism and Baraminology, the Beatles, dung beetles, and the Volkswagen Beetle are indeed all from the same kind.

"The Darwin god has kept the universe going for 13.7 billion years and it is just getting started. He invented evolution. It at least doesn’t come across as inept and malevolent."

Actually, the ineptitude and malevolence of evolution, or what may be construed as such -- you know, death and suffering multiplied through trillions of creatures over billions of years -- are fired broadside against evolution-accepting religious believers both by evangelical atheists and creationists. Think of Stephen Jay Gould exclaiming over the alleged "hecatomb" of sacrifice to produce each species. (Silly, of course -- all creatures die: to spin most of those deaths as "sacrifices" on behalf of a few temporarily live descendants is pure sentimental tale-spinning.) Per some zealous atheists, I am a worse fool than Ken Ham, even though I don't dispute a syllable of the science, indeed admire and promulgate it; per the most troglodytic Creationists, I am worse fool than Dawkins, more dangerous, perhaps, because not so obviously evil.

But the Bible says that the animals were taken “male and his mate”. Eggs don’t have mates, only mature individuals have mates.

If God was so pissed with evil humans why did he have to drown all the other animals (kinds, species and the lot)? What was their sin?
Couldn't he just have given every human being exept for Noah, Sem, Cham, Jafeth and 4 unnamed women a heart attaque or some other lethal disease?

RDK said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Karen S. said:

Even the elusive 4-legged beetle

I think a beetle has 4 wheels, not 4 legs. Or maybe both are from the beetle kind?

Three guitars and a set of drums.

After consulting the Robert Byers Guide to Creationism and Baraminology, the Beatles, dung beetles, and the Volkswagen Beetle are indeed all from the same kind.

Eddie Janssen said: If God was so pissed with evil humans why did he have to drown all the other animals (kinds, species and the lot)? What was their sin? Couldn't he just have given every human being exept for Noah, Sem, Cham, Jafeth and 4 unnamed women a heart attaque or some other lethal disease?

How would a Global Flood effect life on the polar caps. I mean polar bears, seals and penguins could probably have been just fine for at least 40 days, as ICE FLOATS.

So no penguins or Polar bears on the ark then fundies?

Ice floats? There's a minor detail that may affect the conclusion - ice also melts.

(That's in addition to the minor detail that wiping out a layer of the food chain would starve anything above that layer that depends on the now extinct species, even indirectly.)

b allen said: If the current topic is on the use and meaning of the word "kind" in ancient writings, then maybe the issue is the often and probably incorrect literal “modern” interpretation of the use of the word rather than an “ancient” literary one.

What if "kind" is taken to be synonymous with clade?

I'm confused by the comment of Robert Byers.

He says that he and Ham differ on a fairly important issue, but concedes that "Ham could be right".

WHAT!!!!???? The whole point of rejecting reality for "Biblical literalism" is that one interpretation has to be right.

If you're going to allow that insects might not have been on the ark, why don't you just admit that the whole thing could be metaphorical?

Look at it - two people who insist it's "literal" saying it means different things. That's essentially proof that it can't be interpreted literally.

Rod Wilson said: If every population of vertebrates was founded by just 2 individuals a few thousand years ago that would mean that pretty much all of the genetic variation we see in them has occured SINCE that time. This would imply that mutation and evolution occurs at a breakneck speed!....a bit of a conundrum for the creationists I would think.

Leszek said: This is not a problem at all. You are confusing the creation science term micro evolution (what you meant in your post and not disputed.) and the creation science term macro evolution. (Which obvioiusly doesn't happen) These terms are often confused with the real science terms. I think. I give up I dont' understand creationist either.

Rod Wilson said: If every population of vertebrates was founded by just 2 individuals a few thousand years ago that would mean that pretty much all of the genetic variation we see in them has occured SINCE that time. This would imply that mutation and evolution occurs at a breakneck speed!....a bit of a conundrum for the creationists I would think.

MikeMa said:

Robert Byers said: YEC here. A lot of posts about different things. I never heard before the denial that all insects went on the Ark. I thought they did. Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker ...

Lost the argument right there. Ken Ham is a fool and a charlatan.

Robert Byers said: YEC here.

stevaroni said:

Leszek said: This is not a problem at all. You are confusing the creation science term micro evolution (what you meant in your post and not disputed.) and the creation science term macro evolution. (Which obvioiusly doesn't happen) These terms are often confused with the real science terms. I think. I give up I dont' understand creationist either.

Rod Wilson said: If every population of vertebrates was founded by just 2 individuals a few thousand years ago that would mean that pretty much all of the genetic variation we see in them has occured SINCE that time. This would imply that mutation and evolution occurs at a breakneck speed!....a bit of a conundrum for the creationists I would think.

This is always the weirdest part to me. To prove that slow, gradual, evolution doesn't exist, they posit that very fast evolution does exist, and runs much faster than mainstream science thinks it does - but only for a very limited time till it stops of it's own accord.

Well, that's sort of the gist. It takes some time to decipher reasonably what an ancient text is specifically saying without knowing a bit about the culture, its language, and its comparative world view of that time period.

Historians, archaeologists, scholars, and theologians spend years evaluating such things. It isn't impossible though to get an idea of what might may being conveyed. This isn't saying that ancient documents are purposefully lying or 100% wrong, so much as they are communicating the vernacular of the time which we don't quite fully understand.

Adding a "modern" literal interpretation on an ancient text would be like trying to plug an Atari joy stick into an X-Box 360.

b allen said: Adding a "modern" literal interpretation on an ancient text would be like trying to plug an Atari joy stick into an X-Box 360.

I wonder what the termites ate while on the Ark…

well, why do you think they've never found the damn thing?

;)

Huh. I never thought of that...

To take the question seriously about "kinds" in the Bible, consider these possibilities about what common sense taught people in the pre-scientific era.

Small animals could arise spontaneously, from non-living matter, or from decaying matter. The Bible seems to reflect that view in Genesis 1, where it describes fish and birds as arising from the waters, and land animals as arising from the earth; in the story of the Exodus, where some of the plagues have frogs and flies being generated, as well as the magicians turning their staffs into snakes; and in the story of Samson, where he observes bees forming in the carcass of the lion.

Outside the Bible: The idea of metamorphosis could be taken to tell us that certain animals arose from totally different animals: frogs from tadpoles, butterflies from caterpillars, and there even were beliefs about geese coming from barnacles which in turn grew on trees (search on the word "anatiferous"). Crosses between different animals were accepted as the origins of certain animals - the old name for the giraffe was "camelopard", in the belief that it was a cross between a camel and a "pard" (that is, some member of the cat family).

People believed that one's physical appearance could be influenced by lots of things other than just being a copy of one's parents: the influence of the stars, bad things that happened to one's mother in pregnancy. Remember the story of Jacob getting the right kind of goats by what the nanny-goats were looking at (Genesis 30).

When giving instructions as to what were clean and unclean animals, note that the distinction was not simply what we today would call taxonomic. Animals which were injured in certain ways were unclean.

While we today find the elements of genetics obvious, it took a lot of work to get to that point.

And it isn't at all clear that the expression in Genesis 1 (and elsewhere) "according to its kind" is based on a concept of "kind" such that: each animal belongs, forever, to one and only one unchangeable kind which is determined by the kind to which its parents belonged. It isn't clear what the Hebrew word translated as "kind" designates, if it designates anything at all. (Not all nouns are names of things.) It didn't occur to anyone for about 2000 years to mention that "kind" referred to a taxonomic category something like what we call a "species" today.

Historians call this the Whiggism Fallacy--interpreting a text from another time or culture only through the eyes of the interpreter's own time and culture.

As for how this plays out for creationists, read Conrad Hyers, "The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science" (John Knox Press 1984).

Thanks Olorin, I am always up for another trip to Amazon.

Paul Burnett said:

Robert Byers said: Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker...

That comment is an insult to all thinking beings.

Ham could be right.

And pigs could fly.

For example i see dogs and bears and perhaps seals as the same kind.

Even baraminologists aren't this ignorant.

I see marsupials as just placentals.

Biology isn't exactly your strong suit, is it, Robert? No wonder you think Ken Ham is a thinker.

I imagine that just two centuries after the flood there was hundreds of species of horses for example.

You imagination is obviously not limited by your ignorance. Horses are ready to breed at about a year and a half, and gestate almost a year. So you're hypothesizing more than one species change per generation for two centuries here. What made that rapidity of species change stop?

harold said: I'm confused by the comment of Robert Byers. He says that he and Ham differ on a fairly important issue, but concedes that "Ham could be right". WHAT!!!!???? The whole point of rejecting reality for "Biblical literalism" is that one interpretation has to be right. If you're going to allow that insects might not have been on the ark, why don't you just admit that the whole thing could be metaphorical? Look at it - two people who insist it's "literal" saying it means different things. That's essentially proof that it can't be interpreted literally.

Robert Byers said: Other methods are going on as the fossil results and biblical boundaries insist.

He means "kinds" as far as it is possible to translate Byerbabble into English, I think.

YEC here. A lot of posts about different things. I never heard before the denial that all insects went on the Ark. I thought they did. Ken ham is a great creationist and thinker but still would have to persuade me any living thing with breath survived on land. i think the nostrils thing doesn’t need be seen as actual nostrils. Just brearthing air is good enough. Ham could be right.

I also think there is a problem with kinds. For example i see dogs and bears and perhaps seals as the same kind. I see marsupials as just placentals. in facxt i think most creatures can be reduced into a smaller number of kinds.

Yes diversity would of exploded after the flood. The example is the cichlid fishes of africa or modern Amazon. Diversity is the true nature of life. It is quick and fills all niches. I imagine that just two centuries after the flood there was hundreds of species of horses for example. just like the cichlids.

Robert Byers said: . . . a reading can allow some insects etc need not of been on the Ark.

Yeah, I tried to teach him English, too. Didn't work. It's not just science he's incapable of learning.

Kaushik asked the question I was interested in about ape-kind, so I'll just link to a Cuttlefish poem.

Seriously, ‘I see marsupials as just placentals’!? Didn’t you bother to Google those two terms before you typed that?

Nope. We both see the bible as true but he is suggesting a reading can allow some insects etc need not of been on the Ark.

Robert Byers said: Nope. We both see the bible as true but he is suggesting a reading can allow some insects etc need not of been on the Ark.

John_S said: since about the 4th century.

Maybe that Ham guy just thinks his interpretation will bring home the bacon?

Henry J said: Maybe that Ham guy just thinks his interpretation will bring home the bacon?

Well, as Forrest Gump once put it: "stupid is as stupid does".

John_S said:

Robert Byers said: Nope. We both see the bible as true but he is suggesting a reading can allow some insects etc need not of been on the Ark.

So why can't somebody else's "reading" allow the whole thing to be metaphorical? That's what most of the Christian world has done with Genesis since about the 4th century. Why are you OK with Ken Ham inventing an ad hoc hypotheses out of thin air to justify his interpretation of the Bible, but not with, say, the Roman Catholic or Anglican church?

Actually, if the Ark were a Tardis (and the story became distorted by the local nutcases), ALL the animals could have fit in.

Really, the Biblical account makes no sense, but *the Doctor* could have done it.

(And we know that *the Doctor* has an inordinate fondness for Earth and Earthlings....)

In that case, I'll post the straight line for the next related joke that somebody can post when they have time:

Who is the Doctor?

Henry J said: In that case, I'll post the straight line for the next related joke that somebody can post when they have time: Who is the Doctor?

"The Doctor is Who?"

"That's what I want to know. Who's on first?"

"No, Who's on second."

"What?"

"No, he's on first. Who's on second."

"That's what I want to know."

Which Doctor? Doctor Who.

He's from Gallifrey.

Don't forget the following argument when considering the Flood. Mount Everest is roughly 9000 meters high. The shallow oceanic regions are within a kilometer or so of being at sea level. The pressure increases by roughly 1 atmosphere with every ten meters of depth. So, if in fact the oceans rose by 9000 meters and stayed there for almost half a year, for almost half a year things like the coral reefs would have been in an environment where the water was:

a) Completely dark -- very little light penetrates to 9 km of depth. All plant life would have died.

b) Roughly 1/3 as saline, perhaps a bit less. This is assuming that the rain or comet or whatever was fresh water, and if it was salt the salt would still be there.

c) At a pressure between 900 and 1000 atmospheres. While animals have evolved that can live at these pressures, if you take animals that have evolved to live at near-surface pressures UP to these pressures, everything changes -- oxygen exchange across gill membranes, cell biochemistry, the whole nine yards.

d) At the wrong temperature. In fact the effect on ocean dynamics and heat transport (see wikipedia pages on the "conveyor belt" transport of heat with salinity that drives the world's great currents and keeps the temperature reasonably stable) would have been enormous, no matter what the temperature of the new water as it fell, welled up, rained, whatever.

e) And if it rained, it would have had to rain at 5+ inches a minute on every square meter of the Earth's surface for all 40 days. Mammals would drown standing up in this, and no ship ever made would an inch of rain or more falling every 12 seconds. To be honest, falling as a comet is no better -- it is even worse. At least rain doesn't come in at or near terminal velocity. On the other hand, the latent heat of fusion of a layer of water that covers the earth to 9000 meters would be, um, "large".

There are so MANY absurdities it is hard to keep count. How long would it take to load the 5 million species, per species, into a Wal-Mart sized wooden boat? Only 86400 seconds in a day... Where exactly did they put the saltwater aquarium containing every saltwater fish that couldn't stand the salinity shock or thermal shock (which is pretty much every saltwater fish)? Where did they put all of the freshwater fish that very definitely can't tolerate salt water? How did they get enough fresh air in and out of the tiny little window? How did they remove all of the HEAT generated by all of the warm bodies? How did they collect penguins in the first place, and keep them cold enough to survive once they collected them? Where did they put all of the desert species that couldn't survive the enormously high humidity. How did poison dart frogs that reproduce only in the water caches of bromeliads high in the rain forest of south america get on board, and get back to their rather specialized niche in time to reproduce?

The flood is one of the biggest jokes in the world. It is so absurd that it cannot be justified even IF one invokes God and Miracles at every turn. The simple arithmetic of the described events is impossible long before one considers the details.

rgb

rgb said: Don't forget the following argument when considering the Flood... [Lots of science stuff] The flood is one of the biggest jokes in the world. It is so absurd that it cannot be justified even IF one invokes God and Miracles at every turn. The simple arithmetic of the described events is impossible long before one considers the details.

eddie, the reason why it reminds you of the Santa accounts is because it's an exact parallel. Santa doesn't exist any more than the Noachan Flood did, and you have to invent any number of events outside of the order of nature - ftl travel, suspension of the law of gravity, whatever - to make it work. The Flood is justifiable if you have enough miracles, yes. But anything is justifiable then.

But your point about narrative is well-taken. Both stories are powerful narratives armed with all the formidable weapons of figure and metaphor that humans have always used to explain the world to themselves. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and in the sense spoken of in that famous piece, there actually is one. Yes, we have limited powers over nature, and we may use those powers. They may save us even from our own folly. See how that resonates even today.

If Santa Claus doesn't exist, then how come Italian sailors stole his bones during the 11th Century?

Stanton said: If Santa Claus doesn't exist, then how come Italian sailors stole his bones during the 11th Century?