The point is that Rutherford made dogmatic pronouncements about things of which he knew nothing. Same as he did in the religious arena.
There is no question about that. The Society still is burdened with some of his mis-interpretations of prophecy. Some of his ideas are totally indefensible.
The only mammoth remains in tar pits that I know of are some bones and nearly complete skeletons dug out of the La Brea Tar Pits near Hollywood in Los Angeles….The only reason I mentioned this is that it shows that until I mentioned it explicitly, you did not seem to understand that there is a dramatic difference between the frozen carcasses of animals of Siberia and Alaska, and the tar preserved bones of animals from places like the Rancho La Brea tar pits. These tar pits, by the way, are found in a number of places in the world, but the La Brea ones are by far the most famous.
Okay, having already read your entire post I see why I remembered you as having ascribed all the mammoth remains to clumsy beasts tumbling into pits of tar. In actuality, essentially, you do believe that the preserved beasts all randomly fell in pits and holes and crevices and some were over taking by “mud flows.” That is an absurdity. Obviously tar pits took their toll, but that cannot explain the hundreds of thousands of animals that have been entombed in various stages of preservation.
The Flood explanation is impossible, and as we will see, this is not a mere "theory". It is very hard to prove that some historical phenomenon occurred due to one specific cause, but it is fairly easy to prove that the phenomenon did not occur due to some proposed cause.
The flood is quite possible. When all the evidence is taken together, a pattern emerges that points to the inescapable conclusion that there was an unforgettable flood.
For example, suppose a team of forensic pathologists is given a corpse to figure out how the person died. One pathologist proposes, "I think that he died by fire." But when the team examines the corpse, they find no burned or cooked flesh, and no smoke particles or other fire-related evidence in the lungs or on the corpse. That mindset They can properly conclude that the man did not die by fire, even though they might never establish the actual cause of death.
But let’s suppose that our forsenic pathologists have a particular bias and that their very training as pathologists instilled in them a predisposition to interpret things a certain way and overlook certain possibilities? That’s really what we are up against. Since the time of Charles Lyell geologists have been indoctrinated with an evolutionary mindset and a deeply set bias against the Biblical flood. This so-called Lyllian view is the flip side of Darwinism and pervades all science to the extent that all geologic phenomenon are interpreted according to certain unproven theories about the past. Of course, Bible believers, so-called, have a mindset too, I am not saying that we don’t. But, we start from the premise that the Bible is right and work from there to interpret what the rocks are telling us. Generally, scientists work from the opposite bias. It’s important to establish that factor from the beginning because we are talking about how each interprets the facts at hand. There is a definite human factor.
It is similar with Noah's Flood. A cataclysmic, worldwide flood, covering mountains up to some thirty thousand feet high, would necessarily leave tremendous gouges and scourings over the entire surface of the earth. What would these gigantic scourings look like?
Indeed, there are numerous scourings and gouges. The Grand Canyon is the most notable and famous “gouge.” It stands as a magnificent monument to the deluge. The fact that this canyon is some five miles wide, and more in places, and a mile deep, stands as a testament to the fact that there was a tremendous amount of water that moved rapidly through a sedimentary rock. After all, what river on earth is five miles wide? That’s how wide that tiny little Colorado River would have had to have been however long ago you assume that the river began cutting its way through the underlying rock. To have that volume of water, the interior of the continent would have had to have been an ocean, which of course it was during the deluge.
Geologists have a pretty good idea from the impressive landscapes of eastern Washington and Oregon, the Columbia Gorge, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Here one finds lava bedrock stripped bare of everything, and massive areas where the bedrock itself was stripped away to depths up to 400 meters. This was caused by a series of huge, but local floods some 12-15,000 years ago, called the Missoula or Bretz floods. The source of the water was an ice-damned lake called Glacial Lake Missoula, which formed behind a dam of ice caused by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet plugging the mouth of the Clark Fork River of Idaho and Montana. When the lake reached a depth of some 2,000 feet, and held about the same amount of water as Lake Ontario, the ice dam broke and the water spilled out at a rate 10 times greater than the combined flow of all of today's rivers.
That’s interesting. I have heard that ice jam theory too. It may well have occurred after the big flood as the ice sheets receded. But what is also interesting is that there are the numerous LOCAL flood theories. I am sure you are familiar with the latest local flood theory about how the Straits of Gibraltar was once a solid landmass and that it supposedly gave way and flooded what became known as the Mediterranean Sea. Also, I believe there is a similar theory that has the Black Sea busting through the Bosporrus Straits and flooding that region. And I think it demonstrates the predisposition to dismiss a global flood by all these local flood conjectures. It seems reasonable that since there are evidences of many gigantic “local” floods, that only the aforementioned prejudice prevents some from coming to the conclusion described in the Bible of a global flood.
Now, if a relatively tiny amount of water like the volume of Lake Ontario could do that much damage to the earth's surface, just imagine how much more damage thousands of times that volume would have to do to the entire surface of the earth. Yet we do not find such damage anywhere, except in local regions where floods from specific local sources have been identified.
What you are overlooking is this: In a global deluge of the magnitude described in Scripture, we are going to find such extraordinary geologic phenomenon that it can’t be compared to local flood models. Consider what you said about there should be evidence of gouging and scouring. If the whole earth where flooded would we reasonably expect the entire earth to be gouged and scoured. No, for the simple reason that in the places where there are scourings there must of necessity be places of disposition. The earth and soil went somewhere, right? It was washed from certain parts and deposited as sediment in other places. And that of course is exactly what we find. According to the Scriptures the waters overwhelmed the earth for a whole year. During that time, and no doubt for many years afterward, the hydrodynamic forces moved trillions of tons of earth from one place and laid them down elsewhere. Even some places that may have been scoured down to bedrock during the initial phase of the flood became covered again with sediment and silt as the waters receded. In other words, the damage is so massive that it is just not recognized as flood damage.
That is of little import. A monstrous, earthwide flood must necessarily leave monstrous, earthwide evidence. The fact that such evidence is nonexistent proves that the proposed event never happened.
On the contrary, the evidence is there of a monster flood. It is just not recognized as such for various reasons.
Some Bible believers support the notion of a local flood, but this also has huge problems, unless you understand that the whole thing is a myth probably based on real and large floods so far back that the actual facts are lost.
When enough local floods are put together, it establishes a pattern of something bigger. You brought up the idea of the flood being based upon a myth. But many myths and legends have a foundation in fact. One of the most common legends that has persisted to this day is that of a massive flood that wiped out humanity. There are over 200 flood legends that have survived among greatly diverse peoples. A true detective sees some underlying commonality among the many evidences of huge local floods as well as the indelible impression that an ancient flood has unquestionably left on the collective minds of primitive peoples.
Numerous beasts were peacefully grazing on a warm balmy day, and suddenly they were caught up in a cataclysmic event and preserved in ice down to this day.
Wrong. This is a myth that has been constantly repeated in Watchtower literature since Russell's day. Ivan T. Sanderson wrote about this myth, as if it were fact, and expanded upon it in the January 16, 1960 Saturday Evening Post. No reputable geologist holds to it.
“No reputable geologist holds to it” because any geologists that holds a different view is attacked, dismissed, and discredited, which is what we just admitted is done to those who don’t bend to the popular opinions of the majority of geologists.
There was no "heavenly ocean". Such a thing is physically impossible under present laws of physics.
That’s not true. What is true is that no heavenly ocean could form under the present conditions. But if God originally created a water canopy then it is possible that it could have been held aloft by the presently understood laws of physics.
]You might posit that there were different laws of physics pre-flood, or that God somehow miraculously held up this "ocean" for the entire "creative week" time prior to the Flood, but that's quite out of the realm of the evidence we are discussing. With miracles at your disposal, you can posit anything you like, but it's pointless to discuss it.
God’s creative acts always supercede the laws of physics, but afterwards are governed by those laws. That’s what an act of creation is all about. God does something that cannot be done by ordinary means and hence cannot be duplicated except by extraordinary means. That’s why it is not possible for any sort of living thing to come into existence under the present laws of physics. If it were possible then it would be at least demonstrable in a lab. The fact is, that no one can explain the existence of life according to the laws of physics. Life goes against the laws of physics. So, unless you can explain how photosynthesis works, or any of the other mysterious wonders of creation, you are not in a position to say what God did or didn’t do on his 2nd day of creation when the Scriptures reveal that God caused the oceans to divide so that a water canopy came in to existence by the word of God, the same as everything else.
From at least as far back as 1904 the Society taught that the flood theories of one Isaac Newton Vail were correct.
From at least as far back as the middle of the 1800’s science has taught that the theories of one Charles Darwin were correct. Many of his ideas have since been dismissed although the evolution theory remains the central doctrine of biology and geologic sciences.
By roughly 1980, the Society had abandoned most of this "flood geology" nonsense but retained some of the more silly notions, such as that huge numbers of pre-flood animals were caught and frozen by Noah's Flood.
It is not a “silly notion” that such a thing occurred. There are estimated to be at least 5 million carcasses of frozen mammoths in the Siberian regions. The fact that it covers such a vast area of the earth and is so sparsely inhabited and inhospitable and yet has yielded many carcasses of frozen beasts is like finding a needle in a haystack, indicating that the unearthed animals are merely the tip of the iceberg. It is thought that there have been at least 50,000 ivory tusks exhumed from the frozen tundra, so much so that the ivory trade a hundred years ago was dominated by mammoth tusk traders and not elephant tusks. Not to mention the fact that there are literally trillions of fossils of all sorts of plants animals and fishes, as can be observed presently, fossils are only formed under the circumstances of floods and lava flows. To have such enormous numbers of fossils all over the earth leads thinking people to the conclusion the flood is much more than a silly notion as you would have us believe.
How old do you think the Hawaiian Islands are? Less than 5,000 years? If so, the notion that they were created during the supposed 4400 years since the Flood creates impossible problems for such believers. The amount of volcanic activity necessary to create just the Big Island alone from 2370 B.C.E. to the earliest habitation, about 1000 C.E., would have put the entire earth into a massive "volcanic winter" for the entire time period.When the Scriptures mention the springs of the watery deep burst open, it likely included enormous eruptions of magma. Certain geologic formations today give evidence of super-volcanic activity. For example, the Columbia Plateau covers some 200,000 sq. miles of the Northwest and is thousands of feet thick. There is no way that a mere volcano could have spewed that amount of lava out, some of which by the way is laid over sedimentary rock, indicating that such an erpution occurred after or during a flood. So, you are laboring under the uniformitarian mindset, thinking that the rates of volcanic growth are at a constant steady rate, when the evidence proves otherwise. It is possible then that the igneous rock that form the Hawaiian Islands erupted in an enormous fountain during the deluge and that afterwards slowed to a relative trickle to this day.
The fact that we find no such weather phenomenona recorded in any pre-1000 histories proves that the Hawaiian Islands did not form within the last few thousand years.
It proves no such thing. You assume that the volcanoes put out at a steay rate, which of course is mere assumption. Furthermore, if the eruption occurred during the flood it would have been underwater anyway for a good bit of the time.
So you then have the problems of, Where did all that water come from and where did it go? It certainly doesn't exist on the earth today, so where is it? Obviously, yet more miracles are required, which is again out of the realm of evidentiary discussion.
And yet the evidence shows that the whole earth WAS under water, which is why sea shells are found on mountain tops. But yes the Bible does describe God’s miraculous intervention during the flood, in that he caused great depressions in the earth in order to deepen the sea basin and also cause up-thrusts of land so that the water would run off. Whether this was actually caused by the weight of the water upon the earth’s crust or whether Jehovah actually caused it to occur, we don’t know. But the 104th Psalm describes that very phenomenon whereby the valleys descended and the mountain ascended.
: in any event, it is possible that these creatures in that part of the world were initially overtaken by subterranean waters.
Not at all. Any kind of flooding massive enough to flood the interior of Siberia or Alaska would be extremely violent. Many frozen animals have been found that show no evidence whatsoever of violent burial. On the contrary, the evidence proves that they were buried quietly, in the place in which they died. They were certainly not "swept away" by a massive flood.
In some places the frozen muck is several thousand feet deep and when thawed reeks of rotting flesh. Obviously in such an enormous catacylism most animals would have been shredded limb from limb but it’s also possible that some could have been preserved more or less intact.
::What lends weight to this idea is the fact that in Siberia, for example, the beasts are not frozen in pure ice, but it is described as frozen muck, consistent with what we can imagine might happen during a flood::
Actually this evidence is only consistent with the various demonstrated burial mechanisms at work today: mud flows, burial in barely-thawed pockets of mud, and so on. For such mud to freeze "quickly" in the manner promoted by the Society, based on Ivan Sanderson's fantasies, requires extremely low temperatures that are not producible by present-day physical mechanisms. That blows away the Society's claims.
The fact that you admit that mudflows even existed in the now solidly frozen Siberian tundra is evidence of an enormous flood at a time when the weather was much more moderate than now. The reason the extremely low temps are not producible now is because the earth is not longer shrouded in a water canopy. When that insulating blanket was suddenly removed from the earth it would have released huge quantities of heat. It apparently has taken thousands of years for the oceans to warm back up so as to thaw the glaciers that would have quickly formed during that time and afterwards. But of course the catastrophe that produced the glaciers in the first place can’t be repeated.
The only way to produce copious numbers of carcasses quick frozen in "muck" is for the animals to be caught in mud and then for a miraculous mechanism to freeze the entire Arctic solid in a matter of hours.: And it is not entirely out of the question that the waters from above actually fell as ice and snow in some parts, causing a more or less instantaneous ice age.
The evidence indicates that they were quick frozen because some still had undigested food frozen in their four-inch thick gut.
Any physically plausible mechanism for holding up massive quantities of water or ice necessarily results in a massive release of heat if for some reason the water/ice decides to plummet to the earth. That's pure physics. If you don't like it, you're back to meaningless miracles.
That would explain the quick freeze phenomenon.
Depending on where the cores are drilled, this can yield ages for Arctic ice in Greenland up to about 200,000 years. In the interior of Antarctica, ice ages at the bottom are up to about 250,000 years. Up to depths of roughly 2-3000 feet, the annual layers are easily distinguishable..
And that branch of science is also based on the assumption that the snow accumulation was constant. More uniformitarian thinking. Whereas, in the aftermath of a global deluge we would expect to see reverberations continue on for centuries. Likely the Polar Regions experienced near perpetual blizzard conditions until the earth established some sort of equilibrium, which it appears is still an ongoing process. I would like to look at that ice drilling business a little closer though.
Also, if the ice cap existed before the Flood, then it certainly would have been floated on the surface of the waters that are said to have completely covered the earth. It is inconceivable that a cataclysmic, surging global flood would not have completely broken up even such a mass of floating ice, especially considering that the Flood is supposed to have lasted the better part of a year.
I suppose that’s true.
So no matter which way you turn, the physical evidence disproves the notion of a global Flood.
That’s not true. You have dismissed the evidence to the contrary. Evidence to the fact that the earth was covered with water; that there was a warm climate in the Polar Regions; the existance of fossils in such enormous numbers. Tremendous canyons and huge coal deposits all over the earth. That is physical evidence of a global deluge.
You already conceded that frozen animals are always found in muck, not pure ice. It is also a fact that the muck is always found as massive deposits of mud/sand/gravel unaccompanied by massive deposits of pure ice. That is completely inexplicable in the Society's traditional scenario.
No. That is the very evidence of a flood accompanied by freezing temperatures.
: the weather patterns moderated, which incidentally explains the rise in the ocean levels that swamped the land bridges that connected the continents, which bridges apparently existed after the flood.
Really. Just what mechanism caused this, and what evidence do you propose to support your scenario?
The flood waters would have been cold. The ocean’s temperature may have taken centuries to warm back up. So, the glaciers that formed during the period immediately after the flood would have then began to thaw raising the ocean levels gradually and submerging the land bridges that once connected Australia as well as the Bering Strait, etc.
: At any rate, perhaps the ice was mountain-high in some places during the flood period, and that the reason many of these carcasses are turning up now is because over millennia the ice has now slowly retreated far enough to expose the remains.
There is no evidence whatsoever for this idea.
True. I was just offering that as an idea.
The evidence from the report is clear: the mammoth was frozen solid when found, and therefore had rotted before it was found. There is absolutely no evidence of "quick freezing". The fact that it had rotted before being found is proved by the simple fact that solidly frozen ground cannot absorb the stench of rot that is not occurring because the associated about-to-rot meat is not yet rotting.
Well, it could be that the carcass was subject to thaw after it was frozen, since it was partially exposed, perhaps an unusually warm summer or two had taken its toll in the beast in years past. Or, perhaps, the creature didn’t freeze instantly during the flood but some days later after it was entombed in the muck. It by no means disproves the flood if the beast didn’t instantly freeze to death.
More later / You Know