News-Record.com

Why do these people feel it's necessary to accept Genesis as a factual history? These YEC (young Earth creationists) keep looking for ways to warp science to fit in their pre-conceived notion of what "the truth" is, and they ignore the most basic of natural facts that contradict their assumptions.

All they have to do is look up in the summer sky on a dark, clear night and see the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2 million light years away from us. It's nothing short of mind-boggling.

And the Indians speak of a great water which covered the earth (that known to them) and then the Great Spirit walked about when the waters receded and where he stepped great valleys and mountains were formed.
And to direct the waters the Great Spirit used his finger to make deep caynons and rivers for the waters to flow away from the land where much game was to live so His children would not go hungry. (American Indian Story of the Great Flood as told long before the white man came to his land)

So what? Obviously, it would be sensible to associate just about any canyon with erosion. Attributing it to a supernatural agent, be it YHWH or The Great Spirit, runs afoul of Occam's Razor.

Eric, must you always take what one post as an attack or something to be refutted?
The purpose of my post was as an addition to the original article by Nancy. It seems that all cultures that have been around for any long amount of time have some record of the "the flood" which covered the earth and did make great changes in the surface of the earth. My post of the story according to the Native American Culture was simply and addition to the one the folks who toured the canyon received, nothing to dispute not to add validity to, only another view.

Using Tom Vail's logic: Is it God's work that people died in Pakistan? It was, after all, caused by an earthquake, in the way that the floods carved out the beauty of the Grand Canyon.

The only truly disturbing thing in the article is the very end, where you hear Mr. Vail call implicitly for the end of science taught in public schools. At least any science that conflicts with the Bible. Also, the woman who felt she couldn't go against Genesis if Jesus believed it was literally true. Come on, Jesus used the vocabulary and concepts of his time, as we all do (yes, even creationists!). If Jesus had some advanced knowledge of light-years, quantum mechanics and the like, he wasn't about to spring it all on his fellow 1st century Jews.
Gotta reach people where they are before you bring them anywhere.

Creationists unwittingly speak in 20th/21st century ways, whether they recognize it or not: Marshall McLuhan's "medium is the message" mantra (pardon the alliteration) reverberates in Pastor Crotts' and others' humorous desire to fly out to Arizona, use a few modern conveniences (did he take digital pix?), and talk about a world flood 2500 years ago.

Can he say "Mespopotamian culture"? Or ancient China? Or did all that get swamped, too? How come we don't find artifacts from Ur drifting up on Mt. Everest? Or from the Yangztse on Mt. Ararat? Or did the Akkadians, Sumerians and others just pop up out of the blue after Noah? Who needs fossil evidence when there's art to disprove the creationist line?

Many like him believe recent catastrophes including floods, tsunamis and earthquakes are signs of the end of times. Trouble is, they would never have instant knowledge of them without science.

Yes, Nancy, those dastardly Kashmiri Muslims (women and children at their school desks, too?) deserved God's wrath; they could not just utter saying the magic words and submitt not to Allah, but to his "son" (an abomination in their tradition, as God is absolutely singular); as for the Kashmiri Hindus: they were woefully confused, with their polytheistic notions, even if Brahman is all-pervading and beyond reckoning. Nope, gotta choose the all-too-human, all-too-mysteriously-also-divine Jesus.

And the all-too-ridiculous-as-literal-truth of a universe devised in six days despite incontrovertible logic and measurable data to the contrary.

It's the 100th anniversary of Einstein's E=mc2. Tonight on PBS is a documentary on his discovery and the thinkers who laid the path before him. He famously said he could accept the idea that God would play dice witht he universe, because the micro-physics oif quantum mechanics would not gibe with his macro-physics of the space/time continuum; but when pressed which God he did belive in (Einstein did not pray), he replied, "Spinoza's God".

By a fundamentalist Christian (even mainstream Christian!) measure, Spinoza was agnostic or at best a Deist, like Jefferson.

"Eric, must you always take what one post as an attack or something to be refutted?"

Okay... i'll lighten up. I have to admit that the Native American myth has a certain charm to it. I rather like it better than the blood-soaked story of Noah...

Err Eric that would be water soaked story of Noah. hahahhahahha.

Sure... if you ignore all the human child corpses and animal carcasses the ark would have had to sail through. Just a nice, pleasant multi-month cruise. Erk.

Of course, the typo above was supposed to read "Einstein could NOT accept that God palyed dice with the universe."

This still did not make him a theist. Or a creationist.

In some minds, Einstein started his own "church". So far, his "theories" are sounder than anyone else's before him (and most since). Science continues to question its own theories, which is its strength. Would that religion were as open-minded.

The Great Pyramid of Cheops was built about 2589-2566 BC, about  230 years before the flood, yet it has no water marks on it.  Also, the Egyptians have continuous historical records for hundreds of years before and after the time of the flood that make no mention of a great flood.  This shows that they were not only not aware of a global flood, they certainly were not greatly affected by one.

Where did the water needed for the flood come from?  Where did it go?  The atmosphere only holds enough moisture to account for about an inch of water worldwide.  To cover even Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark supposedly landed after the flood, in 40 days would require a rainfall of over 400 feet per day.  That's not 400 inches, but 400 feet of rain a day.

Some propose a massive vapor canopy existed in the times before the flood.  But, the pressure at the base of such a canopy would be so high that it would need to have a temperature of over 500 degrees Fahrenheit.  Any cooler and it would come down as rain.

The evidence against a global flood is massive.  This is only a sampling, more can be found at http://www.epicidiot.com/evo_cre/noahs_flood.htm