Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Creationism vs Evolution

If there was a flood large enough to cover the earths surface with water...wouldn't either all saltwater or all freshwater (or most) species of fish and plants have been killed? Ever put a salt water fish in fresh water, or vice versa?? Not pretty....I doubt it rained salt water, but, if the earth was covered in water, sea/ocena water would mix with fresh water killing species in lakes and rivers..no??

A quick to answer to jim would be that the reason we see similar things in different species across the globe, and in different environments is really straighforward.

The arguement has only one of two answers...
common ancenstry, or
the biblical answer. Common designer.
It is not uncommon for a person to notice a picaso, or a da vinci... common designer.../artist
Well, that is the short answer. What you have suggested.. common ancestry posses more questions than it answers. This means, that in species that are not related... you would have (i beleive its called) convergent evolution? That is.. for example... the eye evolved in two or more completley different species, simultaniously.. as we have previously talked about, the beleif in such a chance occurance happening once, let alone twice, or mutliple times is something that strains credulity. Once is hard enough to imagine..
REcently read an article in creation mag about a family in australia that went to a natural park. There, they heard a tall tale of a shrimp, that aparently "evolved the ability NOT to see"
This is a survival advantage... These types of stories... admitadly not first hand... are something that I could beleive come from an evolutionist. It has evolved the ability NOT to see. Imagine that.. first it gets the ability against all odds, and then it looses it (as a benefit)... I just can't seem to grasp the logic in that...Another real sticky problem.. explain how animals could evolve to live in certain "un-livable" conditions. "sulfolobus solfataricus can survive to 88deg C near fuming sulfurous volcanic vents... Pyrococcus furiosus tolerates 100DegC..
Ferroplasma acidarmanus thrives in acid mine drainage pH 0, in california - a brew of sulfuric acid and high levels or arsenic, cadmium and other toxic chemicals."
These types of organisms called extremophilos have only recently "last few years" been discovered and studied... How can they evolve the ability to survive in those harsh conditions.. if they were there to begin with, they would have died without the survival ability. If they were exposed to only small amounts, reason would dictate they would die from it. How can you evolve the ability to survive and thrive in that type of environment. (Read carefully) Humans for example can take small doses of poisons and build up immunity to it, however.. that is not the same as coming into contact with acids, and bases.. You can't develop an immunity to muriatic acid. Trust me. I worked with the stuff for 3 years... 3 vats, filled with 60% (based on volume) @ 130 fahrneheit. You don't get used to it. Again, if this type of immunity is possible, then we should be starting to see our lungs getting used to all the chemicals in smokes. Instead the only thing we see is cancer, and crap in our lungs.
(This should not be taken as an anti smoking campaign. We should have the right to smoke if we want. We do still have the freedom to make wrong, and harmful choices, that may not be in our best interests)

Mystique svt.. the reason being that age is not the answer. Ability to escape flood waters is the answer. We see in the upper layers animals that would have been able to seek higher ground during the world wide flood of noah's day. They didn't escape the flood (obviously.. it was world wide) but they did get to higher ground. They still died. But not in the same valleys, and lower lying areas, that would have been filled in first and quickly, by large amounts of water, and sediments...
Basically to sum up the fossil record.. we see billions of dead things.. buried in rock layers.. laid down by water... all over the earth!

Jim.. the problem with your idea is that your understanding of the noahican flood is not very good. (not ment to be derogitory)
I would suggest getting a copy of John Woodmorappe's book entitled noah's ark, a feasability study.
Excellent resource to answer tough questions.. and remember this tid bit.. even the largest dino's were babies... Noah did not need to take 50 ton psoropauds on the ark.. smaller "Teenage" animals would have done the trick!

Great one.. excellent question.. You know.. I have never thought about that.. and have never seen any studies or ideas solving that.. I am not saying there aren't any.. but i have never come across one. I am sure the problem is not insurmountable. I will make a point of getting some answers for you! I presume it will have something to do with certain fish types today being highly specialized, and that in the past, their dna would have been less specialized. Just taking natural selection backwards. (This is by no means a creationist scientific answer) Just an off the cuff stab at one, before going to sleep... Darn night shifts...

This is a quote from Dr. Kent Hovind:

During the flood, how did the fresh water fish survive?

Answer:

"This question assumes the oceans were salt water during the flood like they are today. I believe the entire world was largely fresh water. Today about 30% of the rain water washes into the oceans, bringing mineral salts with it. The oceans are getting saltier every day. Today's oceans are about 3.6% salt. Between the salts washing in from ground water and the salts leaching in from subterranean salt domes, the oceans could have gone from fresh water to 3.6% in the 4400 years since the flood. If the earth were billions of years old, the oceans would be much saltier – like the Dead Sea or Great Salt Lake.
Many animals have adapted to the slow increase in salinity over the last 4400 years. We now have fresh water crocodiles and salt water crocodiles that are different species but probably had a common ancestor. This is not evolution. It is only variation. Changing from a fresh water croc to a salt-water croc is not a major change compared to what the evolutionists believe. They think it changed from a rock to a croc! That would be a major change!

Several years ago, a man in Minnesota told me that he had two large aquariums in his house, one fresh water and the other salt water. He wondered if he could mix the fish together so he figured out how to slowly raise the salt content in the fresh water aquarium a little each week for 10 years until it was 1.8% salt. At the same time, he was lowering the salt content in the salt water aquarium to 1.8% salt. After 10 years he mixed all the fish together. He told me they adapted fine.

Noah had no problem with drinking water during the flood and the fresh-water/salt-water problem does not exist. Attempting to force the way the world is today onto the questions involving the pre-flood world is a common problem."

:p

cpurser

You raise good questions.. And not a fact that I'll dispute.

As was mentioned those are not Homo Sapiens.. they are a different species. In fact some of them are examples of early Hominoids.. ancestors of the orangutan and gorilla and Macaques..

Your pictures do show a fairly good cross-section of a progression thruogh time. And yep there is some question as to the validity of a few.

Now it's given that evolution is a theory.. that's why there is doubt as to it's validity. I still have seen no evidence presented other than the Bible that points to creationism.

What's fascinating about this, is that your doubts and the points you make are not dissimiliar to those of the Flat Earth Society.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flatearth.html

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm

But I don't want to digress.. I just find those links humorous.

Unfortunately, I have seen doubts about evolution, but no proof for creationism. And I take the interpretation of the Catholic Church on it the most serious. Literal interpertation of the Bible (namely the old testament which covers the creation of the world) isn't enough it's only 1 peice of evidence. I'll need a lot more than that.

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By Dave Andrews:
Hmmm.

Dave Andrews.. Your links are extremely interesting. Everyone, whether lay person or scientist in the modern creationist camp agrees that the earth is not flat. We have evidence (that is not in dispute by either creationist, or evolutionis) pointing to a round earth. thinking 2 dimensionally the arguement could be made that the earth need be flat in order for an up and down. But with the thrid dimension, up can still exist even with a round earth! This person you are linking to is one of the reasons creationists aren't taken seriously. Likewise there are people on "your" side that use silly arguements for evolution that have been discarded years ago, or never even beleived in the first place..

take vestigal organs.. over 100 at the beginning of the century.. now.. not a one...
ohwell... Both sides of this debate suffer seriously from bad publicity by folks such as this flat earther. We should all be able to agree to this!

The measure.. baseline if you will, for all of our thinking is the bible. Four corners.. ask anyone looking at a map.. NESW... four corners. not 90 degree, square, cast in stone corners. Nowhere in the test is that implied..
However, this is not to say that the text is not to be read in a straightforward manor... genesis starts with

bere'shi-th in the beginning
beginning of universe, and for humans that live inside a time frame, a general start to everything.

Another thing I wanted to add was to those that say millions of years fits with the bible, and that you can have long days... if you read an interlineary bible, it will help dispel those myths.. In hebrew, you can't have the word day, followed by a number,(and a saying) evening and morning, and have that mean an indefinate time. These ?adjectives? that modify the ?noun? time give it a specific meaning.
someone earlier said that day could mean a million things.. as in
in my fathers day, it took three days, travelling during the day, to get to florida from here.
however, when you apply the grammar laws, your idea falls apart.. you can't say that

in my father's day(vague time.. perhaps era), it took 3 days (twentyfour hour days) travelling during the day(light) portion of a day ...

If grammar rules and context applied, and the word day was to mean 24 hour literal, then the above sentence falls apart. It just doesn't make any sense.. you can't use the word day interchangably when it has a specific set of rules it needs to follow in context, and grammar. That is not to say that outside of a given context, and grammar law, you couldn't use the word differently.
Hope this is clear..

Hang on a second. First off, there was not a world wide flood. If there were, that means that the earth was very, very warm. You see, a melting of ice caps would cause a world wide flood. Think about it, how would the world flood? That would mean there would be excess water.......excess water would have to come from the polar ice caps. In order for the polar ice caps to melt to cause such a flood, temperatures around the world would have to significantly increase. This would not be rain of 40 days and 40 nights. Think about how a pump in a fountain works.......no matter how much water comes out of the fountain, the water level remains the same. So does the ocean when it rains.

So, there would have to be a "global event" for such an occurance to take place. For example, an asteroid striking the earth and causing mass exctinction and possible significant heating due to a "greenhouse" effect.

I just don't buy the "great flood" as it is completely illogical from the environmental perspective.

Well Cpursor I answered your question on thermodynamics and (I understand the tiredness) Just waiting on an answer on the genetics side of it.
Taxed to Death. The idea of deevolving is actually evolution. The shrimp that evolved to have little or no eyes has come into a different environment. (presumably dark) as a result its eyes were no longer needed so it slowly started to lose its eyes as this was no longer needed (much like humanity is losing it's hair and brow ridges) As for the creatures and abundance of life in the magma vents on the ocean floor, they can provide evidence that evolution exists also. The primitive conditions of earth a couple of billion years ago would have been similar to the conditions found there. No oxygen existed so the organims were anarobic and used chemosynthesis to supply themselves with energy. As time moved on and the planet cooled other organisms producing oxygen as a by product evovlved, eventually an orgamism took advantage of the high energy that oxygen can yeild and became aerobic.
As for Noah's ark. You still haven't answered my question of how the animals, namely predators were fed. Also if Noah just kept the juvenile or infant animals who taught them how to do things? Numerous species of animals teach their young how to survive in the world, this also included dinosaurs. And I woudl like to add, how did Noah go and collect the thousands of species that exist on this earth today? Even if he had collected all of them adn was abel to put them on a barge or other craft (this I can see as being unlikely though possible) How did the small number of humans on the boat feed all of the animals. Infant animals are extremely time consuming, a zoo needs many more people then what were on the ark to feed its relatively few species, most of which are adults and can feed themselves.
As for my knowledge of the flood story, what about the theories I presented?
In modern day history dams break and flood entire regions, couldn't the mediteranean flooding a large section of the middle east created a rather well spread and accepted legend?
Anyway I woudl still like someone to discuss the mitochondrial eve evidence that I suggested.