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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Have you read Mick's 'Prime Mover Movie', Aurelius? It's in the Geophysics thread.
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Hatty wrote: | Have you read Mick's 'Prime Mover Movie', Aurelius? It's in the Geophysics thread. |
No, there's so much to find on here - and in my limited free time I am really enjoying reading The Megalithic Empire which is beautifully written and by force of argument, very persuasive. I've got to the 'paying for' section...
Thanks!
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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aurelius wrote: | Or is it that, before the Flood, it had simply not rained in living memory in the region where the OT story is set...? |
It happens today in coastal areas that are officially desert for lack of rain, yet are rich in plant life. The Bible says that in antediluvian times, "a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground." Indeed, such areas are called "fog deserts" as the moisture in the air is from a mist, not from rain.
However, other translations of these verses give this alternate meaning; "but water would come up from beneath the surface and water the ground."
Some suggest this is meant only as a very short, post-creation state for the Earth but it is interesting that the rainbow makes its appearance only after the flood. As a principle of physics, it would be impossible to have rain never any rainbows. It seems implied that the quantity of water on the Earth was greatly increased after the flood.
This has long been one of those mysterious details of the bible that have stuck with me. This one particularly as the detail seems superfluous. Why would it have been included if invented from whole cloth? Is it possible that there was an antediluvian world, inhabited by human beings, that was without rain?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I should add that the Bible appears to imply that the existence of rain is the very thing that prevents the Earth from flooding!
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Ok. Now this is just getting silly.
Dinosaurs Mingled with Cousins of Ducks and Chickens
Evolutionary cousins of chickens and ducks roamed the Earth with dinosaurs more than 65 millions years ago, according to a new study that runs counter to a key assumption about when birds got their footing on the planet.
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Knowledge based on the fossil record has always been, and remains patchy. This is due to the circumstances in which a fossil can form - they have to be ideal (e.g. tar pits) or extraordinary in the way they have been revealed (e.g. Burgess Shale).
If one took the standard 'family tree' of all living things, and threw a few darts at it randomly, the nearest species - or even genus, to where the darts stuck would then constitute a very incomplete representation of the full tree. I suggest this illustrates the central difficulty of palaeontology.
It is made worse by available fossils, though formed under ideal conditions, being obscured or destroyed by subsequent geological upheaval, glacial action and human settlement.
Many species are 'identified' by just a few bones and we all know how extrapolations based on minimal remains have fooled scientists in the past.
We are still joining up the dots. That Avian fossils have been assigned to Cretaceous times is not new,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cretaceous_birds
but these latest discoveries to which you have drawn attention are still interesting and fill in some more of the detail.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Stunned by the absence of imagination.
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Ishmael wrote: | Stunned by the absence of imagination. |
Imagination and consolidation of what has previously been imagined both have their place in developing understanding.
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