Re: Making money from Java

Judson McClendon wrote:
> "Alistair" <alistair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Your starter for ten: If the Bible is correct (as you postulated) then
> > where did Cain's wife come from? And, as land is defined by its'
> > occupiers - who created Nod?
>
> His sister, of course, or perhaps a neice.

So the Bible advocates incest? I have three nieces and the thought of
fornication with either of them, or with my sister or mother, turns my
stomach. Don't take that personally, I know that incest is not
something that you would advocate.

> Adam lived 930 years, and the
> Bible does not record how many children Adam and Eve had.

Apart from the Bible, there is no evidence for a 930 year lifespan. I
give you that the world would not have been polluted as it is now, but
disease would have been rife and life would have been much harder than
it is today in the absence of modern comforts. I doubt if Adam and/or
Eve could have lived much beyond 36 years (more likely early 20s) so,
as a fervent infidel, I must disagree with you.

> The Bible covers
> only the part of history that God wanted to relate to us for His purposes,
> not the totality of history, even early history. With no birth control, no
> physical defects, and a healthy sex drive, there is no telling how many
> children Adam and Eve had, or their children.

With inbreeding there would have been plenty of birth defects.
Inbreeding doesn't just produce six fingers on each hand. Given a
lifespan of 930 years then they could have had huge numbers of
children.

> Within a couple of hundred
> years, there would have been lots of people.

Given the Bible's starting conditions, agreed.

> If people lived almost a
> thousand years, who cares if your spouse is 50 years younger or older than
> you?

I'm very fussy, personally.

> They may have kept youthful until near the ends of their lives, for all
> we know.

Unlikely, but possible if one suspends one's faculty to disbelieve. As
humans age they develop ailments and diseases often as a result of
early life incidents. One also loses muscle mass with age (above the
age of 40 years, humans lose between 0.5 and 2 percent of muscle mass
per annum) so I suspect the elder ones were probably more akin to stick
insects in their looks (ie a bag of bones).

>We do know that Abraham married his half sister Sarah. Adam and Eve
> were created with no physical flaws, including no genetic flaws.

As far as you know. The Bible doesn't detail the health, or lack of, of
Adam or Eve:

002:007 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became
a living soul.

One may presume, kindly, that God would have created a perfectly
healthy being despite the above lack.

> But over
> time the effects of sin (e.g. drug use) and genetic damage caused by
> radiation after the flood, when the protective covering over the earth was
> destroyed (lot of background info here, another discussion), made marrying
> close relatives more likely to produce genetic defects in children. Social
> and legal injunctions against marrying siblings and close cousins are
> relatively recent.

Sin does not necessarily induce genetic defects (But over time the
effects of sin (e.g. drug use....made marrying close relatives more
likely to produce genetic defects in children). I know that genetic
damage can be caused as a result of exposure to narcotics and chemicals
and even to the dust of the earth (eg asbestos) but that is not sin.

Genetic damage caused by a loss of the ozone layer (the only protective
covering we have)? I am not aware of anywhere in the Bible that it
mentions a loss of the ozone layer (what evidence do you have?). Given
that a flood occured (I could believe in a localised flood but not in
the global flood that the Bible speaks of, but that has previously been
discussed elsewhere) then a raise in sea level would naturally mean an
increased exposure to radiation and, assuming a global flood, then the
diameter of the earth's surface would have increased and the atmosphere
would be less deep and less protective. However, genetic defects in
children are more likely to have been caused by the particular abnormal
genes becoming more common and more likely to be paired in foetuses due
to matings amongst siblings and close relatives in closed communities
rather than to a Biblical flood exposing people to radiation.


>
> The word "nod" means "wandering".

Thanks.

> That it was a specific land named after
> someone is an assumption, though it may be true.

I asserted that there is a tendency to name land after it's occupants
therefore, in the absence of evidence either way, it was an assumption
that Nod was occupied (on my part but my assertion stands).

> As I pointed out above,
> there was time for many descendents of Adam and Eve to spread over the land
> and name places. The Bible simply doesn't give us these details.
>
> > I also have a problem with the Biblical location for Eden somewhere
> > between four rivers, one being the Nile (called Gihon) and others
> > including the Euphrates. Is this a description of Egypt and it's
> > conquored territories?
>
> I don't know. We can only guess at the antediluvian geology,

Geography, not Geology. I have GCE "O" levels in both subjects and they
are very different topics.

> and we have no
> way of knowing how place names translated from before the flood.

Not true. I believe that archaeologists do have some understanding of
place names prior to the flood.

> Noah's
> descendents may have been presented with a very different geography, or
> wound up far from home after being afloat for a year.

Agreed, assuming that it was a global flood and that we can trust the
Bible.

> Remember, there were
> only eight of them. They may have named different features with old familiar
> names. There's plenty of precedence for that; I live in Birmingham, Alabama,
> which was clearly named after Birmingham, England. There are many such names
> here in the U.S. Before the flood, the floor of the Mediterranean sea may
> have been above water. This is speculation, but there is some evidence that
> this may have been the case.

This only stands up if you assume that there was a flood. There is no
evidence beyond the Bible for anything other than a local flood. As for
flooded cities , there is plenty of evidence. On Malta there are
neolithic trackways that extend below current sea levels and, near to
Southampton, England, there is evidence of neolithic activity below
current sea levels. There is at least one Greek city which is now below
sea level and of course, much of Alexandria (Egypt) is below current
sea levels. The neolithic people would have been contemporaneous to
Adam/Eve if the Bible is to be trusted but their rising sea levels
would be due to post-ice age global warming. The Greek city (I can not
remember it's name) sank because, after the retreat of the ice, the
contents have flexed and whereas Scotland has risen, other areas, such
as Greece, have sunk (parts of England are slowly sinking because of
this). Imagine a cardboard *** fixed in the middle. If you raise one
end then the other sinks. For continents, imagine several fixing
points. As one end is raised, the middle might sink and the far end
might also rise. This is not a God-driven flood.

With regard to Alexandria, I believe that this was flooded by the
earthquake in 1375 AD causing land slippage. No global flood there.

> But we know there are fossils of sea creatures
> even on mountain tops.

Most of which pre-date 4000 BC, give or take a few years.

> The Noah Flood did not happen simply by lots of rain,
> there were almost certainly geological shifts involved. Genesis 7:11 says
> "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up", and in some Bible
> translations Psalm 104:5 seems to speak of the mountains being lifted up and
> the valleys being lowered after the flood. I speculate that the geography
> before the Great Flood may have been much flatter than today, and during the
> flood the floors of the oceans lifted, lowering the continents, and this may
> be what was meant by "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up".

I would suggest that this has to be read in the context of the time.
These people did not understand the structure of the earth nor could
they have conceived of the geological processes of which we are aware.
I think (and my memory is very clouded here) that they may have
believed in times past that the oceans arose from springs (or founts)
set far from land. If such founts were blocked then they would expect
it to break through elsewhere, much as a spring will find its own way
to the surface. They certainly would not understand tsunamis but the
Psalm seems to describe an earthquake, which is a factor of natural and
not Godly processes.

> After the flood, the continents and mountains were lifted up, and the water
> mostly ran off. If you examine the Grand Canyon, and compare it to
> Engineer's Canyon created by Mt. St. Helens in only a few days, the
> resemblance of the erosion features is striking.

And what of the (lack of) resemblance of the deposition features? The
mud, the poisoned lakes, the accumulation of dead trees? Are these to
be found in the Grand Canyon too? I would put it that 6000 years of
geological processes are insufficient to have swept that evidence away.

> You also see soil layering
> in Engineer's Canyon, just as in the Grand Canyon, on a smaller scale. The
> layering was created by laminar flow (air flow in Engineer's Canyon,
> probably water flow in the Grand Canyon).

I can not comment on any similarities as I am unfamiliar with
Engineer's Canyon and have no desire to rectify that deficiency. But
one tiny point, it is not flow that creates laminar deposits but rather
a lack of flow (hence the fact that deposits deposit).

I would agree that air and liquid flows do normally produce similar
effects as they are both examples of fluid flows. However, better
geologists than myself would be able to discourse at length about the
differences.

> I have driven around the Hoover
> Dam area, and the geological features there are clearly those you would
> expect from rapid erosion on a massive scale, such as piles of huge rocks in
> waves that go for miles.

Deposition, not erosion. This is similar to the differences between
osmosis and diffusion which often confuses those who are not
scientifically trained and allows the media to use such terms
indiscriminately (even BBC News, who should know better, have referred
to bacteria as viruses).

> Try this: half fill a large box with sand and
> gravel, level it, fill the box with water, then knock a hole in the side,
> and you see the exact same patterns formed on a smaller scale as the water
> runs off.

I don't have the facility to conduct t his experiment. You will have to
enlighten me. Are you referring to the fact that outwas sands carry
further than boulders or are you referring to terminal morraines formed
by retreating glaciers. Perhaps you mean conglomerates and breccias (at
last I have been able to put my "O" level Geology to some use!)


> One of the questions in geology is "why are there so many
> fossils?"

Not a question that I have heard. Fossils are a natural bye-product of
life and of those processes pertaining to formerly living forms. A
question that I have heard is: why do fossils tend to die in clumps and
large numbers? The large numbers can be explained by the various
extinction theories or by the vast periods that geologic time covers.
But if you believe the Bible then the world only started 6000 years
ago. As for clumping, this can be explained by herds, etc., being
killed by floods and swept to places of deposition where the bodies are
covered quickly by sediments.

> Fossils don't form under normal circumstances.

Fossils are an inevitability of happenstance. True, you do need the
right conditions to exist but given the size of the earth's surface and
the length of geologic time periods then they are inevitable. A great
proof of God's existance would have been if there were no fossils at
all. BTW, the oldest fossils date to around 3.8 billion years ago.

> Animals die or are
> killed, and scavengers scatter the bones. For a fossil to form, the remains
> must be covered almost immediately.

Not true. There is evidence on some (partial) fossil skeletons to show
that they have been subject to animal predation and that parts have
been scattered. Such evidence includes claw and tooth marks.

If the remains are covered immediately (or sooner rather than never)
then the corpse may be saved from predators/scavengers but the tendency
of a fossil to be formed is unrelated to how long after death that
sedimentation covers it.


> Then why do we see millions of fossils
> in some local areas?

Already answered. A personal example for you: when I did my degree in
marine biology, I assisted an Oceanographer friend to map a local sand
bar in Swansea Bay. As we were tramping through the mud flats I noticed
the thousands of dead bivalves exposed by wave action. As these were
lying on or close to the surface of the mud flats it came to my mind
that these would, in some future time, be discovered in uplifted
sedimentary rocks as fossils. I had previously encountered similar
bivalves (actually lamellibranchs but the distinction escapes me) in
rock strata elsewhere in south Wales.

> If you imagine a Great Flood where the ocean floors
> rapidly rise, there would be incredibly huge waves flooding over the
> continents, sweeping everything in their path up against hills and
> mountains, and into valley floors. This process would leave vast piles of
> vegetation and animal remains, which would be rapidly covered with silt.

And these vast piles would have been discovered by now. Unless, of
course, you mean the Burgess Shales?

> The
> pressure, combined with heat from geological fissures, could form crude oil
> in a short time. The idea that it takes millions of years to form crude oil
> is false. In the 1970's the U.S. Department of Energy did a demonstration
> where they placed compost and water in a drum, applied pressure and heat,
> and then extracted crude oil in 40 minutes. It just costs more to make crude
> oil this way than it costs from wells.

And some people believe that oil is produced by the earth in natural
processes acting only on CO2 gases in sediments (that is a serious
scientific theory BTW).

> We routinely manufacture clear,
> artificial diamonds using similar processes. In 1990, only 10 years after
> Mt. St. Helens eruption, the millions of trees blown into Spirit Lake by the
> blast were already beginning to petrify.

And I have seen a petrified pear produced by water rich in calcium
carbonate washing over the fruit.

> My point here is that the actual
> evidence we see can be interpreted as consistent with the Bible without
> doing damage to more than man's theories.

Sorry Judson. I disagree. Now if you said that God had created the
strata and oil deposits (I expect that George W Bush might swallow
that) then I could understand how you come to your conclusions. You
might even have said that God had created the earth and allowed it to
run on for 4.5 billion years before allowing man on to it's surface and
I could have understood that too.

However, your fundamentalist (sorry, not intended as an insult) beliefs
coupled with your very poor understanding of science cloud your
judgement (in my opinion) and do nothing to bolster your case. I shall,
therefore, remain an infidel.

.