Atheist Bible Study 1: Genesis

[Bucky Ball]

There is only one kind of science.
The scientific method does not have different methods for different things.

History is an academic discipline, with it's OWN rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method

Now, about “The editors/redactors/assemblers of ancient texts...” how can you make any assertions about them? Were you there? How do you know what they did or did not do? Your statement seems just a tad bit presumptuous to me - but I hope that you will excuse my errors as I am just uneducated.

Of course they do. You are totally ignorant of the subject.
Reading suggestions : "Who Wrote The Bible", Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman
https://www.amazon.com/Wrote-Bible-Richa...+the+bible
"How The Bible Became a Book, the Textualization of Ancient Israel", Dr. William M. Schneidewind.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Bible-Became-...ent+israel
"A Reader of Ancient Near Eastern Texts"
https://www.amazon.com/Reader-Ancient-Ne...literature
"The Ancient Near East: An Essential Guide"
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Near-East...KPA2S44FFN

"Duane Tolbert Gish was an American biochemist and a prominent member of the creationist movement. A young Earth creationist, Gish was a former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research and the author of numerous publications about creation science. Wikipedia"

LMAO. A BIOCHEMIST ... the very definition of the argument from authority fallacy.
There were countless LOCAL floods. There never was a world-wide flood, and science has proven that. There is no silt layer, and archaeology has excavated in countless sites around the world, and there is no silt layer or any layer that corresponds to that kind of flood.
There are countless other debunks of this subject .. I'll find them and post them.
Rocks and fossil layers have nothing AT ALL to do with what would expect from ONE world-wide flood.
I suggest you take Geology 101.

AMAZING - you state “DNA refutes the Adam and Noah stories,...” but here again I beg your indulgence to my ignorance. I was under the obviously misguided conception theat the genome project had come to the conclusion that all of mankind CAN be traced genetically to one original set of humans.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
Mitochondrial Eve lived about 150,000 years ago, and was THE MOST RECENT COMMON ANCESTOR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recen...n_ancestor
That does not mean she was the ORIGINAL common ancestor, and BTW thanks for telling us you accept the concept of common ancestor.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...ked-liked/
Science knows the general mutation rates of various genes. They can CALCULATE a general time range.

“Claim 8: Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam probably weren’t an actual couple. - What does the evidence say? The evidence suggests that all humans trace back to a single female and a single male ancestor. Whether the molecular clock evidence suggests these two individuals lived at the same time is another question, although some Darwin skeptics (such as Reasons to Believe) argue that they could have lived contemporaneously. Whether molecular clock data is trustworthy enough to make a precise estimate on these issues is still another matter. For more details, please see “Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam, and Adam and the Genome.”

No doubt copied from a Creationist web site ... no supporting documentation. A mere assertion.
Adam and Eve were both figures in Babylonian mythology. We know where they came from.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlWKp44T50&t=209s

Thanks to goodwithoutgod, we have the flood myth debunked, with science.

The Great Global Flood myth
Egyptian civilization is probably familiar to most of us. Egypt’s dynastic history started with the uniting of Upper and Lower Egypt by King Menes, around 3100 BCE. The Egyptian period known as the “Old Kingdom” lasted from 2800 to 2175 BCE. During this time many of the pyramids were built. There is no record, written or archaeological, for a monster flood destroying and completely interrupting this countries infrastructure or it’s monuments such as the Sphinx, the Step Pyramid, or the Great Pyramids, which were built before ‘The Flood’. Neither were they wiped out.

China has a reasonably accurate history starting around 3000 BCE. According to texts from a Chinese book called “Shu King” and verified by archaeological records, China was undergoing a prosperous period around 2400 to 2200 BCE during the early Yaou Dynasty. They have no record of a cataclysmic flood interrupting their whole civilization and destroying the infrastructure of the country. Neither were they wiped out.

The Indus valley civilization has a well-known history dating back to perhaps 3100 BCE. By 2500 BCE there were two major cities, Mohendaro (or Mohenjo-Daro) and Harrapa, which rivaled Egypt and Mesopotamia in population and technologies. This great Civilization also encompassed maybe 100 smaller cities, towns, and villages, and didn’t fall until about 1500 BCE. They have no record of a worldwide civilization-destroying flood. Neither were they wiped out.

The Minoan civilization was probably as old as Egypt. Based on the Island of Crete, this civilization grew quickly and was highly advanced by 2500 BCE. By the middle of the second millennium it had an alphabet, used bronze tools, had pottery, textiles, advanced architecture, and had established cities around the Islands. It continued to grow and was a center for trade and culture until about the mid-1400′s BCE when it was suddenly destroyed by the violent eruption of the Thera volcano. There has been no evidence unearthed from this civilization that shows a flood destroying their whole infrastructure, at any time in their existence. Neither were they wiped out.

Trees that were completely submerged in salt water would have died, so when we look at trees that are say 10,000 years old, and not only did they live past the "mythical flood' but they show zero evidence of a flood. Can you find trees with flood evidence ? Sure, that shows there was a local flood, not worldwide, submerged flood that killed all life including vegetation. you are familiar with barometric pressure of course so you understand introducing that much magical water into our system would have wrecked it right? There is not enough water on or in the earth to cover the planet under 40 feet above the highest mountain.

The conventional flood story states that the flood waters came from rain that lasted 40 days and 40 night right? Rain appears when the atmosphere can no longer support water in the vapor phase and it becomes saturated. So normally, the atmosphere is on the brink of saturation, and the variations in temperature and pressure caused by weather fronts are capable of altering the threshold at which precipitation will form quite easily. What about the amount of water vapor suspended in air needed for the 4.5 billion cubic kilometers of water needed for the global flood? The water vapor currently in the air is only around 2-3% on average, with a maximum of 4% limited by temperature and pressure.

The change in atmospheric conditions required to support enough vapor for 112 million cubic kilometers of rain per day - about 120,000 times more than the current daily rainfall worldwide - would have rendered the air unbreathable.

Indeed, the atmosphere really couldn't sustain that much water even under the most extreme temperature and pressure conditions the planet can produce. If the conditions were right for that much water to be in the atmosphere, humans and virtually every other animal would have drowned through the simple act of breathing, as well as turning the earth into the equivalent of a pressure cooker with atmospheric pressure at nearly a thousand psi instead of the standard 14.7 or so that we have today.

How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?

Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?

How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions. The fact that Greenland even exists single handedly refutes the flood.

Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up?

Repopulation issue

The global flood story requires that only eight people were left alive in 2349 BCE. This does not allow enough time for humans to repopulate the earth. In 2000 BCE only 350 years after the flood the population of the world was 27 million. To go from a population of eight to a population of 27 million in 350 years would require a population growth rate of 136.07%. That is 133% more than the fastest growing portions of the world today.

The Bible also places the date of construction on the Tower of Babel roughly 100 years after the great flood. Saying a population could go from 6 people (Noah and his wife don't count, they didn't have any more children) to enough people to build the Tower of Babel as it is described in the Bible is absurd. This tower was so great that it threatened God, so it must have been greater that the pyramid of Khufu which took 30,000 people to build. Even a growth rate of 500%, which is absurd beyond all imagination, would only produce about half the required people to even begin to think about such a construction project.


The Ark

I won’t get into the issue of how pandas, and polar bears, and ants, and anteaters, and sloths etc etc all animals from all over the world from different continents somehow swam/flew/crawled across massive oceans to line up for the ark cruise…or what they ate, or where the poop went, or how they breathed from that tiny window, or how the different species survived from various climates and requiring specific foods. I will dabble into some building issues however;

Noah's Ark was a great rectangular box of gopherwood, or perhaps some combination of other woods colloquially referred to as gopherwood. Its dimensions are given as 137 meters long, 23 meters wide, and 14 meters high. This is very, very big; it would have been the longest wooden ship ever built. These dimensions rank it as one of history's greatest engineering achievements; but they also mark the start of our sea trials, our test of whether or not it's possible for this ship to have ever sailed, or indeed, been built at all.

Would it have been possible to find enough material to build Noah's Ark? When another early supership was built, the Great Michael (completed in Scotland in 1511) it was said to have consumed "all the woods of Fife". Fife was a county in Scotland famous for its shipbuilding. The Great Michael's timber had to be purchased and imported not only from other parts of Scotland, but also from France, the Baltic Sea, and from a large number of cargo ships from Norway. Yet at 73 meters, she was only about half the length of Noah's Ark. Clearly a ship twice the length of the Great Michael, and larger in all other dimensions, would have required many times as much timber. It's never been clearly stated exactly where Noah's Ark is said to have been built, but it would have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, probably along either the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. This area is now Iraq, which has never been known for its abundance of shipbuilding timber.

Whether a wooden ship the size of Noah's Ark could be made seaworthy is in grave doubt. At 137 meters (450 feet), Noah's Ark would be the largest wooden vessel ever confirmed to have been built. In recorded history, some dozen or so wooden ships have been constructed over 90 meters; few have been successful. Even so, these wooden ships had a great advantage over Noah's Ark: their curved hull shapes. Stress loads are distributed much more efficiently over three dimensionally curved surfaces than they are over flat surfaces. But even with this advantage, real-world large wooden ships have had severe problems. The sailing ships the 100 meter Wyoming (sunk in 1924) and 99 meter Santiago (sunk in 1918) were so large that they flexed in the water, opening up seams in the hull and leaking. The 102 meter British warships HMS Orlando and HMS Mersey had such bad structural problems that they were scrapped in 1871 and 1875 after only a few years in service. Most of the largest wooden ships were, like Noah's Ark, unpowered barges. Yet even those built in modern times, such as the 103 meter Pretoria in 1901, required substantial amounts of steel reinforcement; and even then needed steam-powered pumps to fight the constant flex-induced leaking.

Mythical Global Flood date IAW the Bible

I love when creationists posit that the "global flood didn't neccessarily happen in 2348 BCE"...Atheists don’t posit the mythical flood happened in 2348ish BCE…The date for the mythical flood is part of Xtian’s fable, we just deal with the myth as it is presented...for example:

"Paul, a university trained Jew, well skilled in the Hebrew language, the religion of the Jews and the writings of Moses, wrote in the early years of the Christian era, a letter to the church at Galatia (Galatians 3:17). He stated that the Israelites left Egypt to return to the promised land 430 years after God gave the promise to Abraham, the founder of the Jewish race.

According to Acts 7:4 and Genesis 12:1-4, Abraham was 75 years old when God gave him the promise and in the same year his father Terah was 205 years old and Abraham was born when Terah was 130 years of age (Gen.11:26-33).

The statements of genealogy in Genesis 11:10-26, are father-son statements and link Abraham to Noah’s son, Shem. The statements list the persons by name. Their year of birth against their father’s age is listed and their father is named. These chronologies do not have missing generations; there are no gaps.

If we add up the figures mentioned between Shem’s 100th year (Gen. 11:10) and Abraham (Gen. 11:26) we get 350 years. Since 9 names are mentioned it is 350 years ± 9 (9 margins of error of up to 1 year each).

Genesis 11:10 tells us that Shem was 100 years old, 2 years after the Flood had finished. When was Noah’s Flood? 1,981 years to AD 1 plus 967 years to the founding of Solomon’s Temple plus 480 years to the end of the Exodus plus 430 years to the promise to Abraham plus 75 years to Abraham’s birth plus 350 years to Shem’s 100th birthday plus 2 years to the Flood. The Biblical data places the Flood at 2304 BC ± 11 years."

http://creation.com/the-date-of-noahs-flood

Now I can eviscerate this "doctors" BS based on facts like...the exodus didnt happen either, but why bother. The point is, I have seen some variations, but all Xtian myth points to the area of 2300 BCE...which is what I said. Lets look at more delusion..

Our good friend Ken Ham from the Answersingenesis misinformation site says..

Calculated BC date for creation: 4004
Calculated AM date for the Flood: - 1656
Calculated BC date for the Flood: 2348
Current Year (minus one2): + 2011
Number of years since beginning of Flood: 4359

wait there's more...

"First-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus used manuscripts available during his time to calculate that Noah's Flood occurred 1556 years after the creation of Adam. By adding the ages of the patriarchs listed in the Bible, other scholars have come up with roughly similar dates.

Irish archbishop James Ussher calculated that the creation of the world took place in 4004 BC. If 1656 is deducted from 4004 then the worldwide flood of Noah's time was around 2348 BC (if both chronologies are correct; but please note that there is some disagreement even among conservative Bible believers on these dates).

Josephus, Ussher, and other scholars disagree slightly on some of their dates. But most agree that a straightforward reading of the Bible indicates the Deluge must have taken place in the third millennium before the birth of Jesus Christ — probably between 2500 BC and 2300 BC."

http://www.creationtips.com/flooddate.html

Well what do you know...it would seem those that sell the myth, all seem to say it occurred around 2300-2400ish BCE....so when I say weather conditions haven't existed in the last 10k years to create Greenland, that would be check mate.

Literalism is total bullshit.
Now, can we please get back to the text in question, without any more of this Fundy ignorant nonsense.