Posted on 02/09/2005 7:35:49 AM PST by PatrickHenry
You're right. The question really was off-topic, and perhaps a rhetorical one. But there were some misconceptions I was just driven to respond to.... :-)
Well, I always assumed he stocked it for his family, and as for meat, well, if you're surrounded by water, fish would probably be the choice. You could then feed that to the carnivorous animals. Feeding the herbivores seems to be a problem to me. You would need a LOT of grains/greens/etc that they eat to keep them alive (how long was it again? 40 days & nights?). I think the text itself said something about God putting them at ease, so there'd be no "hunger accidents" (say, a lion eating a horse or a cow, which would be a problem for species repopulation...).
Excrement would be a huge worry, I think. Also, the close proximity of animals that can catch diseases from other species (I think some avian flus can infect swine, and people) raises doubts. Fresh water just came to mind, too. I guess he could catch rainwater on a clean linen sheet of sorts, and drain it into a clay vessel.
You are correct, and it drives them nuts.
God invented evolution.
Men invented organized religeon.
What's the difference? What mechanism prevents "micro" from shading into "macro?"
It's micro.
>>Actaully, inefficient evolution. Left in place all sorts of stuff not strictly needed. However, when things change, having that collection of garbage rattling aroudn int he DNA allows for useful changes.<<
So, the stuff has a purpose after all? Adaptability, say?
That is what micro-evolution is all about.
>>They just can't live with the fact that all life came from old pond mud somewhere. Too scary and they can't use their myths to make up rules for everyone anymore. Weak minds, moral prudes in denial.<<
"Old pond mud somewhere?" Who is dealing in myths here? 8^>
It would not be all that difficult to include the less than 8,000 "kinds" of air-breathing animals
Right. But there are millions of different creatures, not just a few thousand. Besides, ever see a dinosaur, last I checked, they were quite large.
Its like my zoology professor said, 'that flood fable was written before they knew about dinosaurs and how big they were and before they knew there was not enough water to cover mountains'.
> So, the stuff has a purpose after all?
Not necessarily. Sometimes it's simply due to replication error.
> a water canopy encircling the earth high in the atmosphere .... blocked harmful solar rays
Indeed. None of that pesky "light" getting through. Noah obviously built the ark in the dark.
> The ancestors of penguins, then, may have lived anywhere.
Alongside the lions and dodos, presumably. Because we've all seen those nature films showing just how vicious an angered penguin can be when trapped by hyenas or lions or tasmanian devils, we can rest assured that such critters would have had *no* trouble dealing with a different set of threats than what they have today.
> I'd be interested in seeing fossil evidence of where penguin ancestors lived....
http://www.cadicush.org.ar/olivero/amn.htm
And I'd be interested in seeing just how just about all the marsupials managed to get to Australia, without stops elesewhere. And how the flightless Kiwi bird managed to cross Asia and the Pacific to get to New Zealand. And how the flightless dodo got to it's little island.
Let me clarify: So, the stuff may have a purpose after all? After all, with the exception of the ID claim about the origin of life itself, none of this is abolute beyond what we witness in the wild and in the lab. 8^>
> So, the stuff may have a purpose after all?
To a certain limit of the definition of "purpose," sure. Just as a rock *may* have a purpose, if a need is found for it at some point.
And indeed, I'd be further interested in the non-plate-tectonics non-evolutionary explanation of why marsupial fossils are found in antarctica as well as australasia (but nowhere else). Hint to the creationists: ToE in combination with plate-tectonics predicted marsupial fossils would be found on Antarctica, and they were. "Creation Science" has a very poor (non-existent) record of that kind of startling succesful prediction.
Indeed, it's that very type of extremely counter-intuitive prediction that really lends credence to a theory. After all, before the theories of evolution and plate techtonics, who would have expected to find fossils of animals on an icy continent like Antarctica? Other examples of this abound. My personal favorite is a model of diffraction of light proposed by Fresnel. His model predicted that if coherent light were shined on a very small circular obstacle, that the diffraction pattern thus produced would result in a bright spot right in the middle of the shadow of the disk. Contemporaries laughed at his model. That is until the experiment was performed and the bright spot appeared right where it was predicted.
Ah, good point! Not only did they have to walk & swim all the way to the other continents (eating the bloated carcasses of the drowned animals along the way, IIRC), not one of them ate a bad meal or dropped dead from exhaustion. And needless to say, they all had to get to their far continents within one generation. So, for example, all the small Australian marsupials had to have reached Australia within a couple years.
Now, a creationist could counter that we're only talking two individuals from each kind, plus their children & maybe grandchildren, making the trek across the Earth, so we shouldn't expect to find the fossils of those who died along the way. Problem is, we're talking representatives of 8,000 kinds making the trek. So it would still be hundreds of thousands of individuals in all. You'd think there'd be some evidence of a mass radiation outwards from Mt. Ararat at a specific point in time.
I predict that if a creationist con-man (but I repeat myself!) writes yet another creationist book, it will be purchased by a large number of idiots.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.