[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

PP: Yet there is no physical evidence for a world wide flood, ever. Remember that the flood supposedly happened during a 1 year span, had these civilizations been damaged by the flood it would have had to have happened within that year. We do not have that acccurate a date for the fall of the civilizations, nor the flood .It would also have taken many centuries for the earth to re-populate enough to have civilizations develop in the same areas. Had the flood been the reason for the fall, those cultures would never have continued in the same or similar direction that they were heading before the putative flood. Historic documents would be in different languages, architecture would be unrelated and in fact we would have no records of their fall, since it would have all been destroyed.

The article link and excerpt that I offered to the discussion at post 243 does not make a supernatural presumption.

It does however point out that evidence shows the centers of civilization around the world were destroyed by “natural” causes evidently simultaneously (as compared to war, etc.). The articles suggests the cause was cosmic debris – floods, tidal waves, volcanic activity, earthquakes are all mentioned as evidence. The article however indicates that the causation is not fully resolved and leaves the subject open for further speculation. Flooding is specifically mentioned in the middle east.

It is interesting that the timing mentioned in the article (” 2300 BC, give or take a century or two”) is correct for the Noah flood. It is also curious that the actual Hebrew word used for “breath” in Genesis 7 and 2 refers to a particular kind of creature, Adamic man. None of the other creatures were made with that breath of life, i.e. made a living soul (neshama).

All of this may be much ado about nothing to you and Young Earth Creationists who believe that Genesis 1-3 occurs at our space/time coordinates. However, some traditions believe that Adam was the first ensouled man, not the first physical man. And some believe that Adam was created in heaven and banished to earth, thus being a peculiar type of man among men.

Why make a supernatural assumption when there are many natural processes which could have been the cause.

You are raising the classic Plato v Aristotle argument and taking the side of Aristotle. Aristotle and Plato couldn’t resolve it, neither could Einstein and Godel, neither could Hawking and Penrose. We will not solve it either.

It is a matter of worldviews. I am on the Plato side of the argument (especially as it pertains to mathematics).

For Lurkers, Aristotle gives priority to the senses and experience, he sees physical reality as fundamental and mathematics as an approximation. He would say that the mathematician invents the geometry to describe the physical world.

Plato on the other hand gives priority to the ideal or the forms, he sees the mathematical structure as the true reality and we are the imperfect observers. He would say that the mathematician comes along and discovers the geometry, e.g. pi, Reimannian geometry, etc.

The Aristotle-minded person is satisfied when the experiment meets the prediction, the Platonist-minded person wants it to make sense, e.g. ”why pi?”.

The Aristotle-minded person’s curiosity ends with the becoming whereas the Platonist-minded person is keenly interested in both the being and the becoming. Or to put it another way, timelessness as well as space/time.

This has been an on-going and very respectful discussion among the brightest mathematicians, physicists and philosophers and it continues even here on Free Republic. The latest thread on the philosophical discussion is: On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation

But getting back to your question…

Why make a supernatural assumption when there are many natural processes which could have been the cause.

Answers coming from the scientific materialism corner alone are incomplete by definition to any Platonist and as evidence I assert four Aristotlean materialistic points: a) that regardless of cosmology (big bang, cyclic, epyrotic, imaginary time, multi-worlds, multi-verse) there is always a beginning, b) the unreasonable effectiveness of math especially with regard to geometry, duality and mirror symmetries, c) the highly improbable values of the physical constants, and d) the presence of information (defined by Claude Shannon as the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver) in both the universe and biological systems (e.g. DNA is literally as good dead as alive).

We Christians are even more keen on these issues than mathematical Platonists such as Max Tegmark, Roger Penrose and John Barrow. BTW, Tegmark's Level IV Multi-verse is the only closed theory because of its radical mathematical Platonism, i.e. that all existents are mathematical structures in higher dimensionality (mathematical structures are non-corporeal, non-spatial, non-temporal).

To illustrate the difference, Plato saw the “beyond” as unapproachable, whereas we Christians have the indwelling Spirit – thus, for us, there is revealed Truth (both personally from the indwelling Spirit and in the Scriptures) which cannot be apprehended by reason alone.

For those who are metaphysically naturalist (atheist) and also Aristotlean – neither Plato’s “beyond” nor Judeo/Christian Truth exists in their definition of “all that there is”. Whereas for us, reality or "all that there is" does not begin or end within space/time coordinates.

If you wish to engage on any of these subjects, I welcome the debate - but preferably not on a thread consigned to the "smokey back room" since there would be a great deal of research required and a wide interest in the subject matter.