The Ark and shells/creatures

by wantstoleave 15 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Leolaia
    Leolaia
    Seashells are often found high on hills or mountains. Bones of creatures found high in the mountains. You get the picture. So does this prove the flood really happened? For those that say no, can you tell me how you dismiss these finds?

    I find the way you phrased the question rather interesting. Evidence is not dismissed in scientific explanations; evidence is the very basis of those explanations. What are dismissed are inadequate explanations that fail to explain all or even a preponderance the evidence.

    Today we know that the earth's crust is not whole but fragmented into a jig-saw puzzle of different moving continental plates. The evidence for this came initially from seafloor mapping and study of ocean sediments, which indicate that the seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean has been spreading outward from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The ridge rises above the ocean at Iceland and the gradual drifting apart of the Eurasian and North American plates can be observed on land. Fossil evidence in South America and Africa also indicate that both continents originally belonged together (and one can easily see how Brazil fits into West Africa on the map). Faults between different plates can be observed on land, such as in East Africa and the San Andreas fault in California (which incidentally I saw and took pictures of from the air yesterday). Plates may slide against each other as is the case in California; the Pacific Plate is moving northward against the North American plate, and earthquakes occur when the plates slip past each other. The mighty Colorado river which carved out the Grand Canyon used to empty into the Pacific where Santa Barbara is today but the actual piece of land that bears the scars of the river is Monteray Bay, which is about 200 miles further north. Plates move only an average of centimeters each year (there are about 32 million centimeters betwen Santa Barbara and Monteray, which gives some idea of the amount of time this movement involved), although the movement can be in the matter of meters in major earthquakes. At other plate boundaries, one plate may slip under another plate; this is called a subduction zone. The western Pacific Ocean and Indonesia contain several subduction zones and the massive 9.3 earthquake in 2004 that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami (which moved the plate upward by some 20 meters) was produced via subduction.

    And at other plate boundaries, one plate may crash into another and fold into it. This produces the thrust and folding that created mountain ranges like the Alps and the Himalayas. Rock that once was underwater may thus be thrust upward. During the Mesozoic Era, there was an ocean called the Tethys Sea between the continents of Laurentia and Gondwana and the movement of the Indian Plate into the Eurasian Plate closed up the sea and forced deep-sea sediments (containing fossils of sea creatures from the Triassic and Jurassic) to fold into continental rock along the the belt of plate convergence. From the Wikipedia article on the Tethys Ocean:

    Between the Jurassic and the Late Cretaceous (which started about 100 Ma), even Gondwana began breaking up, pushing Africa and India north, across the Tethys and opening up the Indian Ocean....Today, India, Indonesia and the Indian Ocean cover the area once occupied by the Tethys Ocean, and Turkey, Iraq, and Tibet sit on Cimmeria. What was once the Tethys Sea has become the Mediterranean Sea. Other remnants are the Black, Caspian and Aral Seas (via a former inland branch known as the Paratethys). Most of the floor of the Tethys Ocean disappeared under Cimmeria and Laurasia. Geologists like Suess have found fossils of ocean creatures in rocks in the Himalayas, indicating that those rocks were once underwater, before the Indian continental shelf began pushing upward as it smashed into Cimmeria. We can see similar geologic evidence in the Alpine orogeny of Europe, where the movement of the African plate raised the Alps.

    The Himalayas are still rising and Mount Everest rises about 5 mm a year. But gravity and water erosion wear them down as fast as they are built up; about 4 miles of vertical rock are eroded per million years (compare with the height of Mount Everest at 5.5 miles above sea level, and it took about 55 million years for the range to rise above sea level to their present height) and thick sedimentary deposits are found around the Himalayan Range among its foothills (such as the Siwaliks) and plateaus. This erosion is just one indicator that the formation of the Himalayas was not a rapid, sudden event. The thousands of miles involved in the drift of the Indian Plate from Gondwana to the Eurasian Plate is also several orders of magnitude beyond what the strongest earthquakes can muster. The Society claims that the Himalayas rose only in the past few thousand years after the "global Flood", as there would be no way that the existing waters in the world's oceans could cover such heights. The "superearthquakes" necessary to raise about 225 vertical miles of rock (over 40 times the height of Mount Everest) into the sky over a few centuries and the water erosion needed to keep pace with this thrust are physically impossible, nor could any civilization survive this centuries-long catastrophe in ancient India, much less in neighboring lands. And elsewhere the Society itself has labelled such an argument as absurd:

    *** g83 3/8 p. 14 Creationism—Is It Scientific? ***

    Geologists can point to their measurements of geologic processes that extend far beyond that narrow time frame. Ocean sediments have accumulated over far more than 10,000 years. The time to build mountains and wear them down is measured in millions of years. For continents to drift apart and form oceans takes hundreds of millions of years. To say that all of this goes back only 10,000 years is simply absurd in the eyes of geologists.

    The previous issue of the Awake! even had an article on geological strata and how it subdivides into eras and periods in an orderly manner, with creatures confined to some eras and not others (which it takes as evidence in support of the biblical creation narrative), accepting the conventional geological divisions of time, such as the Protozoic, Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic. The 3/8/1983 article even criticized creationists who rejected this evidence on account of their interpretation of the Bible. The Society also has relaxed the older claim that the "creative days" were epochs lasting only thousands of years; it now leaves open the possibility that they do cover many millions of years. But the formation of tall mountains like the Himalayas is still a major problem for the Society's doctrine about a global Flood. The biblical Flood narrative, if accepted as literally true, would require such mountains to rise in the few centuries or millennia after the Flood, and not over the millions of years that the 1983 Awake! article noted that it took. And the history of the Himalayan Range can easily be located in geologic time via the strata and fossils contained therein. So in order to maintain their doctrine on the Flood, they have to have a "double standard" when it comes to geological strata: In all other cases, the strata may be cited as evidence in support of "creative days" as epochs attesting the order in which living things appeared on the planet, but when it comes to high mountains, none of that evidence counts anymore; such mountains could not have formed during the "creative days" like all the other geological features, they have to be formed after the Flood because Genesis 7:19-20 requires this. And if the Society were actually consistent on their view about geological strata, their favorite argument in favor of a global Flood — seashells on top of the highest mountains — would go out the window.

  • cantleave
    cantleave

    Detritus from tectonic shifts, glaciers, localised floods and other physical events can result in anomalies and unexpected artifacts.

  • wantstoleave
    wantstoleave

    Thanks for your input everyone I'll give it more thought.

  • kriptonian7
    kriptonian7

    this is kind of odd...i, as of 3 mintues ago, just opened an emial frommy mother about a guy in the netherlands that built an Ark to the exact specifications that the bible says. he has it on display...

    I have been intrigued by the possiblity of a great flood and an Ark watching shows on it and reading things on it from time to time. but seeing this email made me feel like it was just not possible. In plain terms and common sense just says that it was just not big enough to house 2 OF EVERY ANIMAL. And even if they got the main ones...elephants, zebras, lions, tigers and bears oh my.....where did all the odd ones comes from...Dodo birds, wolverines, ferrets, panthers, bob cats, that crazy think that looks like half norse half zebra, water buffalo, geez the list just goes on and on.

    All it does it make me more of a beleiver of the evolutionary process.

  • sir82
    sir82

    I'd recommend a good high school geology textbook as a start.

    The seashells, bones, etc. on mountaintops are fossils, deposited there 10's or 100's of millions of years ago - when the mountaintop was not on top of a mountain.

  • JWoods
    JWoods

    I have posted it here before, but once again: When catholic missionaries went to China and taught the flood (saying it had occurred in around the year 2300 BC based on the bible's age dates)...the Chinese dismissed this as impossilbe.

    They had their own written history (provable by observations of celestial events) which went back hundreds of years before this date.

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