LanDroid wrote:The Ark Myth does indeed extoll the virtues of genocide and incest.

Your phrase ‘extol the virtues’ is a bad misinterpretation. The aim of the Bible is to provide an accurate though metaphorical description of reality.

With the constant mythological politics indulged in by the church, the real message is largely buried beneath the cultural rubble of human interests. With the flood story, the idea is that life on earth is very fragile, at risk of collapse. That is an entirely ecological idea, building upon the immediately preceding idea in Genesis of dominion, which should be understood in terms of wise stewardship, not control and domination.

The Toba catastrophe of 72,000 BC that I linked to was a real genocidal natural incestual genetic bottleneck for humanity, similar to the mythical flood. Saying it is bad does not mean it is not real. With the flood, sea level actually did rise by 125 metres from 20,000 BC, providing ample time for memetic mutation to embroider the real events into a moral fable, blaming people for what was a purely natural thing.

Saying it is bad that all that fertile land got flooded does not change the reality that it happened. Saying we would like a God who only does nice things distracts us from the question of working out what it might mean in purely scientific terms to say that God is real. Equally, we can today see that people like to imagine a God who is intentional and personal, even though that imaginary construction completely conflicts with all scientific evidence.

The idea of wrath is not about God magically punishing humanity, but rather should be seen as a purely scientific theory of cause and effect, that if people try to disobey the laws of physics they will fail.

LanDroid wrote:A Diety killed every living thing on earth save what was housed in the ark, damn near a total life extinction event.

See? Even the Deity can break the received laws of grammar! (I before E except after C). Pardon my quirky obscure humour, and my Australian spelling.

Seriously, I do like to think of Genesis as somehow collecting together some extremely old myths which had structured collective human experience. The Peopling of The World by Stephen Oppenheimer is an excellent scientific account of how humans crossed the Red Sea in about 83,000 BC to move from Africa to Asia, and then how population collapsed when the Toba volcano in Sumatra dumped six feet of ash over the whole of India in 72,000 BC, splitting humanity into east and west and bottlenecking the genetics. See http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ for a superb graphical presentation of the scientific understanding.

Even though these events are unimaginably long ago by our generational time scales, there has been an unbroken memetic and genetic chain of human life transmitting oral stories about the nature of the world ever since. People could speak when homo sapien evolved, as language is the only explanation of our large brains. What did they talk about back then if not the story of leaving Africa and then a massive collapse?

I like to imagine that the real Exodus of 83,000 BC, analysed by DNA data, and the real catastrophes, of volcanoes and sea level rise, were the evolutionary memetic origin of the Bible stories, which are just fantastically mutated myths of deeply accurate original shared experiences of all humanity outside Africa.

LanDroid wrote: Repopulating the earth required lots of incest. Since that Diety is viewed as just and compassionate, those events must also be seen as such. Any alternative view of that Diety and those events is too horrible to contemplate, so it never enters the crania of believers.

Volcanoes are not compassionate, except in the long term sense that volcanic soil is the best farmland on earth. Volcanoes are not just, except in the abstract stoic sense that everything natural is just, an old idea which humans find appalling.

Jehovah was portrayed in the Bible as a god of volcanoes. Nahum 1:5-6 says “The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him.” Exodus 24:17 says “To the Israelites the glory of the LORD looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain.”

Converting this sense of the divine as the real force of nature into the comforting contradictory magic of gentle Jesus meek and mild who saves all believers by whisking them up to heaven has been a triumph of imagination and fantasy over experience of reality.

LanDroid wrote: What meaning did the lives those who were exterminated have? None. There was "nothing special or exceptional" about them except perhaps as a disposable warning to others. Same with the coming extinction event when Jesus returns: the oceans will be poisoned and billions of people killed. You decry the lack of meaning provided by science, but what meaning does religion provide for believers? "Yay! We're not gonna be slaughtered then eternally tortured"??? And again what meaning does religion provide to those who didn't join the correct one?

The aim should be to consider the Bible stories of Adam and Noah and Moses as parables for what we really understand is the history of humanity as revealed by scientific evidence.

When we start with the evidence, as seen in the Oppenheimer material, there is a direct and coherent match, although on an almost unimaginably long time scale. It is reasonable to ask, with events as massive as leaving Africa and having 95% of people on earth killed by a super volcano that darkened the sun for several years, how long would it take for the memory of those structuring event to just fade away to nothing? Along the way would it gradually mutate into new mythological forms? My view is that we are still within the mythical influence of these big old events.

LanDroid wrote:

A basic problem in the debate about popular Christianity is that fundamentalists don’t seem to recognize the basic message of Jesus, replacing ‘eye for an eye’ with ‘love thy neighbor’. The revenge ethic of Moses is not the proper standard to judge Christianity by.

No, I think you know better – here's how that actually works..

You are just cherrypicking in typical atheist fashion, against the political agenda of shocking naïve believers into realizing that they have been badly deluded.

Some Christians like the Old Testament because they think the Ten Commandments endorse slavery (don’t covet your neighbour’s slave). However, there is a stumbling block in describing that as a Christian idea, that the New Testament says Jesus brought a New Covenant which renders the Old Covenant obsolete, with anti-slavery lines like ‘in Christ there is neither slave nor free’, ‘the last shall be first’ and ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.

Just because some dumb Christians think that having a divine blessing on slavery is all peachykoo does not mean that is a coherent or moral way to read the Bible. Similarly with the ethics of revenge and forgiveness, the Sermon on the Mount could not be clearer that forgiveness supersedes revenge as the core theme of the New Covenant.

As we look today for a new covenant for the world, a way to address moral problems through science, a new way to describe reality to explain how our life is connected to ultimate truth, the pale blue dot is a good starting point.

LanDroid wrote:I understand what you're saying about the pale blue dot highlighting a total lack of meaning. However that "myth" should provide significant meaning with a better interpretation. It emphasizes how all of the world's wars, discoveries, and complications occur on one insignificant planet. So let's keep that perspective - we're the only intelligent life known in this vast universe - let's get our crap together, unify, and build something spectacular on this miniscule spec of dust.

Rather than “a total lack of meaning”, I would read the pale blue dot as saying the only real meaning is the in the world of ideas that we construct in accordance with the laws of physics, and that fantasies that conflict with physics only have symbolic meaning at best, or anti-meaning at worst. And just because earth is small on cosmic scale does not make humans insignificant. The sun pumps out ten billion times as much power as the light that falls on earth, like an orange shining on a lentil ten yards away, but only that tiny fraction of sunlight has managed to enable the evolution of complex life. If our solar system out to Pluto was the size of a quarter dollar, the next star, Alpha Centauri, would be a hundred yards away. But what that means is that the orderly stability of the solar system has to be considered as the real framework of terrestrial evolution and significance, with everything else just too far away to have material effect on us. This is a topic that I have researched in considerable depth, exploring how what Copernicus called the third motion of the earth after the day and year, namely the wobble of the axis, actually provides the long term structure of time at the scientific foundation of mythology.
On human scale, the earth is not miniscule, but immense. The oceans contain nearly a billion cubic miles of water, and we have barely scratched the surface of that new marine frontier as the basis of universal sustained abundance, as our main industrial engine to sustain biodiversity. Sure, Carl Sagan could imagine himself as a cosmic Lord Vishnu, resting the earth in the palm of his hand like William Blake with a grain of sand, but that imaginary divine scale is misleading in terms of how science can provide moral guidance.

LanDroid wrote: The tree of life could also become an inspiring "myth." In contrast to Judeo-Christian values, all life is precious. If any one of your ancestors human or animal going back billions of years in an unbroken chain had been killed before giving birth, you would not exist. Consider the inter-dependencies of all life and that of innumerable future generations.

The tree of life already is an inspiring myth, bookending the Bible in the first chapter of Genesis and the last chapter of the Apocalypse, albeit as symbolic myth rather than as Darwinian description. The point of the fall from grace into corruption according to the Bible is that before it happened humanity lived in harmony with the tree of life, and that the restoration of a state of grace is described as the return of the tree of life. The definition of the state of alienation and sin in the Bible is separation from the tree of life.

All ancestors have descendants. In terms of the unbroken chain of evolution, that applies to ideas as much as to genes. So when we look at the real history of humanity in the peopling of the world, we do find real stories of catastrophe which it makes scientific sense to consider as the memetic cause of the Bible myths.

Robert Tulip wrote:

LanDroid wrote:The Ark Myth does indeed extoll the virtues of genocide and incest.

Your phrase ‘extol the virtues’ is a bad misinterpretation. The aim of the Bible is to provide an accurate though metaphorical description of reality.

The aim of the bible is to control people. It has NEVER had nor EVER demonstrated that its purpose was a metaphorical description of reality. It has demonstrated countless times, however, that its purpose is to control people and kill those who do not submit to control or even those who simply don't fit in. If I conquer your people and my god says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" then I have to commit genocide because I cannot convert your people or I have sinned and your people cannot be saved anyway because you already worshiped other gods. There is no redeeming feature to any kind of scripture as this. It offers nothing that enlightens. Its purpose is to darken the minds of those who follow it.

With the constant mythological politics indulged in by the church, the real message is largely buried beneath the cultural rubble of human interests. With the flood story, the idea is that life on earth is very fragile, at risk of collapse. That is an entirely ecological idea, building upon the immediately preceding idea in Genesis of dominion, which should be understood in terms of wise stewardship, not control and domination.

It has never demonstrated any purpose other than control and domination. The idea that I need to be told to be a good steward of the earth is absurd. Once a book tells me what I should already know and then proceeds to tell me how is a book whose purpose is to control not to enlighten.

The Toba catastrophe of 72,000 BC that I linked to was a real genocidal natural incestual genetic bottleneck for humanity, similar to the mythical flood. Saying it is bad does not mean it is not real. With the flood, sea level actually did rise by 125 metres from 20,000 BC, providing ample time for memetic mutation to embroider the real events into a moral fable, blaming people for what was a purely natural thing.

Bah! Rubbish! Any attempt to link flood myths to an actual volcanic super eruption is not going to be very convincing. Flood myths are influenced by the obvious thing--floods. Genetic bottlenecks have happened throughout our history and, in tens of thousands of years ago, when human communities were isolated, they could happen on local scales without affecting the rest of the world but since people back then had no idea how big the earth was it might have seemed like the whole world was affected. That likely gave birth to flood myths and not a memory of a volcanic super eruption tens of thousands of years before they were born.

Saying it is bad that all that fertile land got flooded does not change the reality that it happened.

That's ALWAYS happened and still happens. Doesn't it make more sense that a recent flood catastrophe was what gave birth to a flood myth than a volcanic catastrophe tens of thousands of years older than the myth itself?

Seriously, I do like to think of Genesis as somehow collecting together some extremely old myths which had structured collective human experience.

Obviously some of it is. The flood story goes back to ancient Sumeria but that doesn't stop it from being a load of old cadswallop.

The Peopling of The World by Stephen Oppenheimer is an excellent scientific account of how humans crossed the Red Sea in about 83,000 BC to move from Africa to Asia, and then how population collapsed when the Toba volcano in Sumatra dumped six feet of ash over the whole of India in 72,000 BC, splitting humanity into east and west and bottlenecking the genetics. See http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ for a superb graphical presentation of the scientific understanding.

You can't arbitrarily make this event the origination of our flood myths! Our flood myths arose from real experiences of floods which were far more common and much more recent. It's goes without saying.

Even though these events are unimaginably long ago by our generational time scales, there has been an unbroken memetic and genetic chain of human life transmitting oral stories about the nature of the world ever since.

Where's your proof of this???

People could speak when homo sapien evolved, as language is the only explanation of our large brains. What did they talk about back then if not the story of leaving Africa and then a massive collapse?

Language is the only explanation for our large brains? What's your proof? And what did they talk about? Oh, maybe about unimportant things how to hunt for animals, where to fish, how to make fire, how to find edible berries and roots, how to fashion tools, how to make clothing, how to heal illnesses--little things like that.

I like to imagine that the real Exodus of 83,000 BC, analysed by DNA data, and the real catastrophes, of volcanoes and sea level rise, were the evolutionary memetic origin of the Bible stories, which are just fantastically mutated myths of deeply accurate original shared experiences of all humanity outside Africa.

[/quote]

So the Jews fleeing Egypt was a mutated tale from 83,000 years ago? I kind of think maybe a few exoduses of various types may have occurred in the intervening time gap that may have been better remembered.

DB Roy wrote:The aim of the bible is to control people. It has NEVER had nor EVER demonstrated that its purpose was a metaphorical description of reality.

Thanks for your forthright reply DB Roy. I think what your comments illustrate is a prevailing secular assumption that moral and political progress requires the abolition of obsolete errors. That is on the surface a very reasonable point of view to justify disdain for any attempt to rehabilitate Noah, even as myth.
However, rather than simply campaign against ideas which are literally impossible, I am interested in how those ideas evolved, what good functions they served, and how they can be repurposed to fit a valid modern secular ethical framework.

It is not the Bible itself that overall promotes an ethic of social control, although obviously that is a key element through the Pentateuch and Kings. The social control motif sits alongside another deeper prophetic theme, that a divine power controls the world, and that humans should be humble in asserting secular control.

I think that this divine power has wrongly been accorded human attributes in the description of God, especially the dominant idea that God has personal intent. The laws of physics have no intent, but they are our only real candidate for ‘divine power’.

Seeing God as metaphor for science is just the start of the analysis, since there is a meaningful discussion of divine purpose, understood scientifically as evolutionary potential. Our purpose is to achieve our potential.

DB Roy wrote: It has demonstrated countless times, however, that its purpose is to control people and kill those who do not submit to control or even those who simply don't fit in.

You are ascribing to the Bible problems which are properly ascribed to the church, or to God. Again, I consider God to be a metaphor for the laws of physics, which do totally control people and kill those who do not submit, such as delusional people who try to fly out of tall buildings in defiance of the law of gravity.

The corruption that you seem to allude to arises when the church say that all dogma is infallible and must be obeyed. To use a real example of metaphorical divine power, it is reasonable to say we must obey the law of gravity, but wrong to extrapolate that to a human law like circumcision.

DB Roy wrote: If I conquer your people and my god says, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" then I have to commit genocide because I cannot convert your people or I have sinned and your people cannot be saved anyway because you already worshiped other gods. There is no redeeming feature to any kind of scripture as this. It offers nothing that enlightens. Its purpose is to darken the minds of those who follow it.

Now you are drifting from the Noah story to the later Biblical justification of the conquest of Israel. Again, that is a very complex story, set against the evolution of culture under the sway of growing empires, and the inability of previous autonomous small tribes to obtain security.

Monotheism served to unite disparate communities, often in a harsh way, but recognizing that the context of Palestine as a small land in between big hostile empires required hierarchical military unification for stable security. My view is that a main purpose of the myth of Jehovah was to provide military security for Israel. Now it is fair to say that is a morally ambivalent purpose, but we should not condemn it out of hand.

DB Roy wrote: It has never demonstrated any purpose other than control and domination. The idea that I need to be told to be a good steward of the earth is absurd. Once a book tells me what I should already know and then proceeds to tell me how is a book whose purpose is to control not to enlighten.

Absurd? Why is that? I think it is a very good thing to tell people to be good stewards, since their natural instinct can often be the reverse.

Such ethical language is key to effective human group selection today. With respect DBR, it is rather difficult for you to imply that everyone should already know to be good without being told. Absence of explicit cultural transmission is a main cause of delinquency.

As we can see in monotheism, people often ignore the stewardship language and instead assume a self-serving interpretation of dominion as control. Saying we should be good stewards of nature is highly controversial, since global warming denialists want to send us extinct, blithely rejecting stewardship in favour of selfishness.

DB Roy wrote:

The Toba catastrophe of 72,000 BC that I linked to was a real genocidal natural incestual genetic bottleneck for humanity, similar to the mythical flood. Saying it is bad does not mean it is not real. With the flood, sea level actually did rise by 125 metres from 20,000 BC, providing ample time for memetic mutation to embroider the real events into a moral fable, blaming people for what was a purely natural thing.

Bah! Rubbish! Any attempt to link flood myths to an actual volcanic super eruption is not going to be very convincing.

The explicit link I draw above is not with the volcano but with the actual massive sea level rise that flooded all coastal land in the Mesolithic historical period preceding the Holocene. The much older and more massive catastrophes have a more tenuous place in mythological formation, but I will come back to that in response to your later points about it.

DB Roy wrote: Flood myths are influenced by the obvious thing--floods.

It is far from obvious what the cause of the flood myths are, since scholars attribute them to various events.

My personal opinion is that the global sea level rise of more than 120 metres that disrupted all coastal communities before the stabilization of the Holocene sea level and temperature is the obvious main cause of the Noah story of the flood, rather than any more localized or older events.

DB Roy wrote: Genetic bottlenecks have happened throughout our history and, in tens of thousands of years ago, when human communities were isolated, they could happen on local scales without affecting the rest of the world but since people back then had no idea how big the earth was it might have seemed like the whole world was affected.

Perhaps you did not read the link I provided on the Toba genetic bottleneck? It was far and away the biggest and most important one in all human history, and it did affect the whole world, sending the sky black for years.

DB Roy wrote: That likely gave birth to flood myths and not a memory of a volcanic super eruption tens of thousands of years before they were born.

I am not talking about a “memory” of a volcano. We have to try to think realistically about how such an event would influence humanity. Have a look at the Toba link and the Oppenheimer link I provided to understand the scale and timing, if you do not know much about this deep prehistory of humanity.

The Toba eruption split humanity into east and west, with the eastern genome giving rise to east Asians and the western genome giving rise to Europeans. It caused global volcanic winter for years and population collapse to below ten thousand people worldwide.

If we think today about how we remember something from a long time ago in ordinary terms, say the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066, it is not so much “memory”, passed consciously from generation to generation, as “influence”, seen in language, battlements, institutions and so on.

There is a material continuity in England since William, much as on a global scale there is a material continuity from the time of Toba to now. Stories that were told in William’s day, such as about King Arthur, are still part of the shared cultural heritage, but have constantly evolved without break as each generation retold them, in an evolutionary process of cumulative adaptation, just as French language brought across the channel by William has a mutated place in modern English.

Flood stories are the same, reaching back thousands of years in an unbroken genetic line. Continuity is a key law of evolution.

DB Roy wrote: Doesn't it make more sense that a recent flood catastrophe was what gave birth to a flood myth than a volcanic catastrophe tens of thousands of years older than the myth itself?

My point is that universal stories shared by all of humanity who left Africa have a durable memetic imprint.

People could talk from before the emergence from Africa. Their conversation would not have been restricted to practical matters, but must also have included discussion of main events and efforts to explain reality. Over centuries such stories as the departure from Africa and the massive Toba catastrophe would achieve a mythical supernatural status. But then, would those stories just fade away and disappear? No, I don’t believe they would. The genetic (ie causal) process means that a tree grows from its seed, and does not shift to something else. Our seed is the emergence from Africa, stunted by Toba. We can see the traces of our origin in mutated form in the Bible.

DB Roy wrote: The flood story goes back to ancient Sumeria but that doesn't stop it from being a load of old cadswallop.

Sumer was on the Persian Gulf, which at the last glacial maximum 18 KYBP (kiloyears before present) may have been an abundant fertile jungle paradise.

The inundation is not “cadswollop”, it is an actual main global event, very recent on geological timescale. (btw, nice neologism – are you talking about walloping cads? My sense from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/codswallop is that you are mutating the term codswallop, which looks to mean masturbation.)

DB Roy wrote: You can't arbitrarily make this event the origination of our flood myths! Our flood myths arose from real experiences of floods which were far more common and much more recent. It's goes without saying.

You are simply asserting without proof that human culture sprang de novo like Athena from the brow of Zeus within the last ten thousand years. Frankly, that is an absurd hypothesis, since the whole emergence of human intelligence over the last three million years or longer since we split from the chimps involves a gradual creation of higher faculties, including the sapient creation of cultural myths. Of course flood myths would be a big part of that gradual cultural evolution.

I am not saying anything arbitrary. I am asking what are the real biggest events in human history, and postulating that those real biggest events have an enduring presence in human myth. That is an entirely reasonable hypothesis which cannot be refuted just by asserting that you find it implausible.

DB Roy wrote:

Even though these events are unimaginably long ago by our generational time scales, there has been an unbroken memetic and genetic chain of human life transmitting oral stories about the nature of the world ever since.

Where's your proof of this???

Now it is my chance to use the argument from obviousness. Consider a tree that grows from a seed. Where is your proof that while you weren’t looking the tree did not turn into a fish? You can readily see that this absurd example has an obvious answer. The tree was always a tree and never a fish. Life is continuous.

Similarly, with human cultural identity, if we assume that people could speak from the time sapien became sapient in Africa, it is reasonable to assume that people always talked about things they thought were important. Big structuring ideas of identity do not just go away, but they do mutate. It is like how a tree sprouts branches and leaves, which look different from the roots but nonetheless keep the genetic link unbroken from the seed.

Your skepticism about the “unbroken memetic and genetic chain of human life transmitting oral stories about the nature of the world ever since” is implausible. Challenging such a memetic account would need to postulate some means of breakage in the chain. War and upheaval do break culture, but it seems to me entirely possible that with such big structuring events their memory would have morphed over time into stable enduring myths.

DB Roy wrote: Language is the only explanation for our large brains? What's your proof? And what did they talk about? Oh, maybe about unimportant things how to hunt for animals, where to fish, how to make fire, how to find edible berries and roots, how to fashion tools, how to make clothing, how to heal illnesses--little things like that.

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4141.full explains that “Once they had accumulated data on innovation, social learning, and tool use from 116 primate species, Reader and Laland tested whether the frequency of such behavior was correlated with brain size. They found significant, positive correlations between brain size and all three behaviors… The selective forces that favored large brains before language evolved may be just as important in understanding human cognitive skills as the selective forces at work after language appeared.” The examples you give of practical skills do explain large brains, but language involves something more.

http://www.indiana.edu/~brainevo/public ... in-evo.pdf notes that human brains are three times bigger than ape brains, and explains this increased size largely as due to language: “an increasingly large proportion of the neocortex is devoted to more complex and interesting kinds of processing: the integration and combination of basic sensory information in ever-increasing degrees of sophistication.”

I think of the Exodus in comparison with Australia’s exodus from Britain. My grandparents’ generation referred to “going home to the old country”. Talk of England as the mother country is now frowned on by the politically correct, but all our institutions date to the settlement of 1788, even while previous indigenous cultural practices are reemerging after the genocidal British suppression.

Similarly, for the anatomically modern humans who undertook the real exodus from Djibouti to Yemen across the temporarily low Red Sea (when sea level was reduced due to cyclic power of precession of the equinox), Africa would have remained the mother country, and stories about Africa would have remained part of the cultural framework thereafter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Horns is a modern proposal on the same route that all our ancestors except those who stayed behind took.

That seems a more plausible memetic explanation of the Exodus than anything else, just as the Noah flood stories can be explained by memetic evolution from the real world flood, explained scientifically as driven by precessional orbital factors.

DB Roy wrote: So the Jews fleeing Egypt was a mutated tale from 83,000 years ago? I kind of think maybe a few exoduses of various types may have occurred in the intervening time gap that may have been better remembered.

Look, I recognize that this is just speculation on my part. It is about framing myth in a scientific way, re-purposing existing myths to explain reality. It is not an argument readily amenable to proof, although it could potentially be falsified. I do not know if there are exodus myths in other cultures apart from Judaism, but my hypothesis would suggest there should be, just as there are numerous flood myths.

To toss another cat in the ring, the Abraham story looks to me like a mutant version of the real events of the emigration of the Jewish people from India after the massive earthquake of 1900 BC. The evidence for this is that the Jewish trio Abraham, Sarah and Hagar has clear etymological correlation with the Vedic trio Brahma, Saraswati and Ghaggar, and the collapse of the Saraswati River caused the Abrahamic migration.

This is a highly vexed topic, since its main proponent Gene Matlock http://www.hermetics.org/Abraham2.html is hotly attacked, but I cannot see where his logic or data are faulty, and the article I link here appears to me to provide excellent scholarship.

Same with the Noah and Exodus stories, we should look for their origins in our real genetic inheritance, and not just dismiss analysis with peremptory disdain. I am certainly not aware of any better explanations than the ones I provide here.

I do believe that the biblical ark that Noah built did float, I am not really sure if they were adult or young animals that Noah placed in the ark. There has been some discussions that he may had baby dinosaurs on the ark. This seems like a really interesting discussion. I only know a little about the ark that someone was trying to duplicate.

hlawrence wrote: he may had baby dinosaurs on the ark.

Hi hlawrence, welcome to booktalk. I think it is most unlikely that Noah actually had baby dinosaurs on the ark.

Not "had" in the sense that Noah personally "gave birth" to baby dinosaurs, but assuming you mean he carried two of every species. Noah was pretty miraculous, but not that miraculous!

Don't you think it would have been far simpler to have dinosaur eggs than baby dinosaurs?

Just imagine if some of those mean velociraptors got into the ark henhouse. Mayhem! Jurassic Park on the high seas! They are cruel dudes from the moment they hatch. Far safer to carry them onto the ark as eggs, and it would take up less room and feed. Probably even God would be happy with that, since dinosaurs are not cute and cuddly when they are babies.

But your suggestion makes me wonder how the dinosaurs went extinct after leaving the ark on Mount Ararat.

Why would God go to all that bother of arranging for Noah to collect dinosaurs just 5000 years ago at the Great Flood, especially two babies of every species, if there are none around today?

Just imagine if some of those mean velociraptors got into the ark henhouse. Mayhem! Jurassic Park on the high seas! They are cruel dudes from the moment they hatch. Far safer to carry them onto the ark as eggs, and it would take up less room and feed. Probably even God would be happy with that, since dinosaurs are not cute and cuddly when they are babies.

IIRC, everyone spent a year to 1.5 years aboard the ark. So unless those eggs took an extraordinary amount of time to hatch, baby velociraptors would have eventually been "in da house!"

You raise a common question about extinction. 99.99% of species are extinct*. Why did Yahweh bother to create them?

*OK I'm winging that number, but you get the point.

LanDroid wrote:

Just imagine if some of those mean velociraptors got into the ark henhouse. Mayhem! Jurassic Park on the high seas! They are cruel dudes from the moment they hatch. Far safer to carry them onto the ark as eggs, and it would take up less room and feed. Probably even God would be happy with that, since dinosaurs are not cute and cuddly when they are babies.

IIRC, everyone spent a year to 1.5 years aboard the ark. So unless those eggs took an extraordinary amount of time to hatch, baby velociraptors would have eventually been "in da house!"

You raise a common question about extinction. 99.99% of species are extinct*. Why did Yahweh bother to create them?

*OK I'm winging that number, but you get the point.

Yes, I found this fantastic scientific paperwhich argues that it was 364 days. And the clay tablet pictured below was recently unearthed on Mount Ararat, colorized by the archaeologists.

If you read Job 40: 15-18 Job talks about a creature I believe may be a Brontosaurus. It is something to think about because I am not a biblical scholar. It does make you think that there were dinosaurs walking around after the flood. Only God and Noah knows the real truth.

Brontosaurs and most dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago. Is that when the flood was?