Kirby D. P.
Member
Yes. Just keep in mind that's different from really wanting dinosaurs around.
EXTINCTIONS AND THE FLOOD
- Thread starter Kirby D. P.
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Kirby D. P.
Member
Oo! Job! My favorite! BRB...
Hekuran
Faithful Brother in Christ
Oversimplistic in that I butchered 1000 years of history and thought into a couple of sentences.
Good talking with you.
Kirby D. P.
Member
Ya. I don’t know it by chapter number, but I have always loved Job: 41. Not surprisingly, my favorite novel is Moby **** and I read it once every two or three years.
Thank you most sincerely for a good reason to go to those splendid verses.
Lanolin
Active
Also reading a bit before it is about behemoth.
I dont know what exactly a behemoth was but from the description does sound like a really giant animal.
I am glad most all the dinosaurs died out because I dont think I would be happy living near hungry t rexes.
From the ones that are left like crocs, alligators and komodo dragons I would keep a safe distance! As for serpents I find it interesting that God would curse it to crawl on its belly, it must have had legs at some point.
In revelation 12 there is mention of the dragon cast out of heaven which to me is talking in spiritual terms about the flood that hearkens back to Noah. But the woman is not on an ark..shes given wings of an eagle.
I think you can look at it two ways.
1) God made creation but it became corrupt and He wanted to start over and the way he did this was with the flood while saving those who were righteous
2) the serpent became the enemy of mankind and also tried to destroy creation with the flood
In both cases there was war in heaven over creation...I suppose the weapon really was fhe flood. But look there are no dragons or dinosaurs today threatening to eat us and we actually are burning the remnant cos they got turned into fossil fuels and plastic bags.
I dont know what exactly a behemoth was but from the description does sound like a really giant animal.
I am glad most all the dinosaurs died out because I dont think I would be happy living near hungry t rexes.
From the ones that are left like crocs, alligators and komodo dragons I would keep a safe distance! As for serpents I find it interesting that God would curse it to crawl on its belly, it must have had legs at some point.
In revelation 12 there is mention of the dragon cast out of heaven which to me is talking in spiritual terms about the flood that hearkens back to Noah. But the woman is not on an ark..shes given wings of an eagle.
I think you can look at it two ways.
1) God made creation but it became corrupt and He wanted to start over and the way he did this was with the flood while saving those who were righteous
2) the serpent became the enemy of mankind and also tried to destroy creation with the flood
In both cases there was war in heaven over creation...I suppose the weapon really was fhe flood. But look there are no dragons or dinosaurs today threatening to eat us and we actually are burning the remnant cos they got turned into fossil fuels and plastic bags.
Lanolin
Active
I mean just thinking on the topic, why was it a serpent that tempted Eve, and not a kitty cat?
How is it that serpents are now personifications of evil. Giant cats like lions can eat people too. But few people keep lions as pets but many people have smaller cats.
Note that God cursed the serpent above all the other animals and told the serpent to eat dust. Thats pretty harsh punishment. And what do people find when they go digging in the dust, fossils of dinosaurs pretty much. You dont find other types of animals fossilised...only these types of creatures.
Another interesting thing is how in chinese culture dragons are revered even when they do not exist anymore, and also witches and wizards love dragons. They think they are clever and crafty, but really they are sneaky and wicked. Criminals that get tattoos done often depict dragons and snakes in their designs.
But they aint ever going to bring those dragons back to life no matter how many times they try and carve them on their skin.
How is it that serpents are now personifications of evil. Giant cats like lions can eat people too. But few people keep lions as pets but many people have smaller cats.
Note that God cursed the serpent above all the other animals and told the serpent to eat dust. Thats pretty harsh punishment. And what do people find when they go digging in the dust, fossils of dinosaurs pretty much. You dont find other types of animals fossilised...only these types of creatures.
Another interesting thing is how in chinese culture dragons are revered even when they do not exist anymore, and also witches and wizards love dragons. They think they are clever and crafty, but really they are sneaky and wicked. Criminals that get tattoos done often depict dragons and snakes in their designs.
But they aint ever going to bring those dragons back to life no matter how many times they try and carve them on their skin.
Kirby D. P.
Member
I think conventional understanding has it that leviathans are whales and behemoths are elephants, and I tend to agree.
Also, though I accept that most Christian sects consider the serpent in Eden to be Satan, I agree more with those who, finding not contextual reference to any devilish being in Genesis, think the serpent is just the first snake.
In addition to the lack of any Satanic reference in Genesis, part of my reason for this opinion is Job 1:7 (told you I love Job). This is the first time the character Satan is explicitly identified and where that character speaks his first words: “Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
The “walk” component in the original Hebrew word for “walking up and down” here, וּמֵֽהִתְהַלֵּ, stems from the root word הָלַך (phon.: haulach), “to walk,” referring to (bi)pedal locomotion, as opposed to any generic sense of “going” or “travelling,” as in the first part of Statan’s response.
Forgetting for the moment God’s clearly complicated relationship with Satan (though if you like, I do LOOOOOOOOVE studying that), an upright walking Satan does not sound like any sort of being whom God has cursed to “crawl on [its] belly and… …eat dust all the days of [its] life.” (Genesis 3:14)
What I love about the whole serpent of Eden affair is its suggestion the snake had legs until God cursed it. This might actually agree with an evolutionary understanding of snake biology. It’s not just that science speculates snakes “must” have evolved from leggy ancestors. Snakes actually possess the genes that induce leg growth in other reptiles. However, they have a mutated gene that represses the leg gene. AND… wait, wait, it gets even awesomer… the mutated gene is called the Sonic Hedgehog gene… because someone in some laboratory had a sense of humor.
By the way, this mutation and its role in snake leglessness is not any particular evidence AGAINST intelligent design. It is real and it has been confirmed repeatedly in laboratory settings. If I were an intelligent design scientist, I would cite it as clear evidence for the Genesis creation story: the snake HAD (still has, even) the biological instructions to grow legs. But at some point after those were set down, a new instruction to override snake legs was added to the recipe. Sounds like a curse to me.
Instead, I have seen a few websites where believers wring their hands about whether the snake ever had legs or not because Genesis says God cursed the serpent to crawl, but animal “kinds” are never supposed to change or “evolve.”
Honestly, I don’t see what the controversy is. If God set down the laws of nature, it’s HIS rulebook. If there is a law that animal kinds never change, the being who made everything can make a single exception, especially to punish a creature who really gummed up the works, in my opinion.
Finally, occasionally some snakes ARE BORN with diminished, vestigial legs. (When this happens in evolutionary biology it is called an atavism.) But, so far as has been observed, these never develop well enough to keep the snake from crawling on its belly and eating dust. So God’s curse is safe.
But, check out the lower picture in this article. CREEEEEEEE-PY! (But weirdly cute, too, no? I don’t know how you feel about ratophagy.)
Why Snakes Don't Have Legs (For Now)
PS – I know atheists like to make fun of Kurt Cameron’s infamous, “How come there’s never been a crocoduck?” (see picture) But Crocodiles actually possess the exact genetic instructions found in birds for growing feathers! They are suppressed by mutations very similar to Sonic Hedgehog. So, in a sense, TECHNICALLY speaking, crocodiles are just as much crocoducks as snakes are tetrapods.
Not saying this is any evidence against God. If God made life, he worked in genetics. Crocoduck is just how crocodile genes work.
Hekuran
Faithful Brother in Christ
Fascinating. A great read. I've always thought that the Nile crocodile fits the description of leviathan in Job better than a whale due to the mention of scales and nostrils. But who can say for sure?
May I say that you are unusual for an atheist in that you clearly have a great appreciation and understanding of the Bible? What's your story?
May I say that you are unusual for an atheist in that you clearly have a great appreciation and understanding of the Bible? What's your story?
Lanolin
Active
yea why do you call yourself an athiest?
It just seems really weird, because atheists I know always want to pick holes in the Bible which they are really rude about. But they don't succeed, because God is always going to trump them. It's his Word, it's not as if we made it up! lol.
To me leviathan sounds more like a dragon and behemoth could be any large animal. Maybe a mammoth.
People seem to get confused over genetics, which has solid scientific and replicable basis, and evolutionary theory, which does not. Mendel did a lot of work on peas and natural selection, but Darwin just had these weird theories which are obviously not ever going to link up, because nothing is there to suggest that species jump around, DNA has a lot of variation, but its not like a dog can ever evolve into a cat. A dog is a dog no matter if it's a poodle or a dalmation.
It just seems really weird, because atheists I know always want to pick holes in the Bible which they are really rude about. But they don't succeed, because God is always going to trump them. It's his Word, it's not as if we made it up! lol.
To me leviathan sounds more like a dragon and behemoth could be any large animal. Maybe a mammoth.
People seem to get confused over genetics, which has solid scientific and replicable basis, and evolutionary theory, which does not. Mendel did a lot of work on peas and natural selection, but Darwin just had these weird theories which are obviously not ever going to link up, because nothing is there to suggest that species jump around, DNA has a lot of variation, but its not like a dog can ever evolve into a cat. A dog is a dog no matter if it's a poodle or a dalmation.
Bendito
Loyal
Kirby! This is a fascinating question. I'm too wiped out to answer my answer tonight. I will answer you tomorrow though. I like a thoughtful question. Already I have some interesting information for you and some things to make you think more. Have a wonderful and blessed night. Thank you for the challenge. Something exciting
Bendito
Loyal
Hey Kirby
Let me begin here at your five points I know that you have written more but I see that as preamble to your points. So…
You said “I wonder because the reason God charges Noah with his mission is explicitly “to keep them alive,” or, in other words, to stave off extinction.”
I believe that’s precisely why God brought the animals in those numbers into the ark. Obviously Noah did not have the time nor the uh tools to do that part of the job, so God did that. And yes! He did it to save life. You are going to ask how He was saving life when He allowed so many to die? I’ll get to that. Watch for it.
First Point
1. These animals became extinct BEFORE the flood. But this conflicts with notions that the fauna of the Earth is eternal from generation to generation, etc. And it conflicts with assertions like, “Dinosaurs accompanied Noah and his family in the ark.”
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
(He created the Earth. It was complete, filled with wonderful plants and animals)
Then the Earth became unformed, and void, (The planet was actually wobbly, like a big ball of Jello, dark, lifeless.) darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. Who knows how long it stayed that way. But it did, until finally God turned on the lights.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light..
So what really happened here? God created the heaven and the Earth. Ok We know that in Heaven, Lucifer rebelled against God. He and a full third of all the angels rebelled and left heaven..
They occupied this planet, again no one knows for how long. One of Satan/Lucifer’s objectives was to make himself a place higher than God.
Ok. They lived on the planet, They had great technology. And they eventually destroyed the Earth. And it became without form and was void…. God turned on the lights. Then He began to reassemble it. Everything was already there. Oh this is so Cool! I have to stop and circle around. I hope I don’t confuse anybody. My thinking can get kind of wild. LOL Ok
In the beginning God created the heaven (singular) and the Earth.
That’s all there was! He was the source of the light for that little planet! Quite literally He was the light of the world!
Then Satan took over the planet as his abode..and in the course of time, chaos ensued. They, the fallen angels destroyed the planet…They destroyed it so bad that even the sky was wrecked.
I’ll put in right here that there is evidence for an ancient nuclear war. We can look at that later if you want.
First Point
1. These animals became extinct BEFORE the flood. But this conflicts with notions that the fauna of the Earth is eternal from generation to generation, etc. And it conflicts with assertions like, “Dinosaurs accompanied Noah and his family in the ark.”
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
(He created (past tense, the job was complete) the Earth. It was complete, filled with wonderful plants and animals)
Then the Earth became unformed, and void, (The planet was actually wobbly, like a big ball of Jello, dark, lifeless.) darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. Who knows how long it stayed that way. But it did, until finally God turned on the lights.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light..
So what really happened here? God created the heaven and the Earth. Ok We know that in Heaven, Lucifer rebelled against God. He and a full third of all the angels rebelled and left heaven..
They occupied this planet, again no one knows for how long. One of Satan/Lucifer’s objectives was to make himself a place higher than God.
Ok. They lived on the planet, They had great technology. And they eventually destroyed the Earth. And it became without form and was void…. God turned on the lights. Then He began to reassemble it. Everything was already there. Oh this is so Cool! I have to stop and circle around. I hope I don’t confuse anybody. My thinking can get kind of wild. LOL Ok Continue....
In the beginning God created the heaven (singular) and the Earth.
That’s all there was! He was the source of the light for that little planet! Quite literally He was the light of the world!
Then Satan took over the planet as his abode..and in the course of time, chaos ensued. They, the fallen angels destroyed the planet…They destroyed it so bad that even the sky was wrecked.
I’ll put in right here that there is evidence for an ancient nuclear war. We can look at that later if you want.
And Gods Spirit hovered (as an action of love, to cherish) over the water.
So God turned on the lights..Let there be light. (The word light there means in the Hebrew..”A revelation of God”) Let there be a revelation of God, and there was light. The first day.
Now, back to the reassembling of the Earth. God did not need to recreate the Earth. It was already there. He had already created it. He called for a firmament, dome, divider between the water above and the water below. And made the sky. The second day.
For my friends reading this, If you’re choking on me saying that God reassembled the Earth. Tell me this..Where did God get the dry land? Yup…It was already there…And God commanded the waters to divide and the dry land to appear. The waters moved aside and the land rose into the light. Wow! Earth and seas.
God commanded the Earth to put forth fruit trees, grasses, and seed producing plants He liked the way it looked Third day.
Now God did some creating…He created the sun, the moon, planets, stars To light the day and the night. There was the fourth day.
This is wonderful! Then God said. “Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open dome of the sky.” God created the great sea creatures and every living thing that creeps, so that the water swarmed with all kinds of them, and there was every kind of winged bird”. God liked what He saw… So He put into motion a thing that still works today.. “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the water of the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” A fifth day!
“Let the earth bring forth each kind of living creature — each kind of livestock, crawling animal and wild beast”; and that is how it was. 25 God made each kind of wild beast, each kind of livestock and every kind of animal that crawls along the ground Oh He liked it!
Then God did something big, something really radical! He said. “Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; and let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the animals, and over all the earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the earth.”
Then He said something to humankind. The first words God ever spoke to humans was….Blessing! God blessed them: God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and every living creature that crawls on the earth.” Blessing indeed! Day six.
Then on day seven God rested. Why? His work with the Earth was done. And He had passed the baton, the rule of the planet to mankind.
Sorry for going on like that. I got kind of excited…
Ok. Later, I don’t know how long later, it came to pass that the children of men multiplied, and beautiful, and fair daughters were born unto them. The angels, the sons of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another, “Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men and beget children.”
There were two hundred of these angels who did this thing. They came via Mount Hermon. Each of the two hundred chose a woman for himself, and they began to go in unto them, and to mate with them, and they taught them sorcery and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. These women became pregnant and gave birth to great giants, whose height reached up to three thousand ells.
These giants consumed all the food; and when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
They also began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood.
So they bred with the women of humans, they bred with every animal on the planet, and the result was Nephilim. Giants (Raphaim) Chimera, animal cross breeds. Griffins, centaurs, fauns, name it. All the mythical creatures you ever read about were, and are real, and yes dinosaurs were another chimera…
Man did share the planet with the dinosaurs. They were still around in the days of Noah. You can see paintings of men and dinosaurs together. Sorry, no photos. If dinosaurs died off before the ‘age of man’ Nobody would have drawn pictures of them, because they would never have seen them. The pictures are too accurate to be only imagination.
So….God had Noah build the ark. At that time, Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives were the only humans left on the planet who were not polluted by fallen angel or nephilim DNA. Only eight people out of millions. They were the only humans left on the planet. God called them to go onto the ark. God had to bring in the animals too, because Noah, and I said earlier, didn’t have the resources to do that job. And too, God knew which ones were not polluted. So only unpolluted went into the ark. All the rest died. Nephilim, and animals…..Well not all the nephilim. But that’s another chapter.
Here it is… And yes! He did it to save life. You are going to ask how He was saving life when He allowed so many to die? Gods goal is to preserve the life He created, That’s why he destroyed the life that Satan made.
Second Point
1. You said “These animals became extinct AFTER the flood. But this would seem to conflict with God’s omniscience and/or omnipotence. If he knew they would become extinct after the flood, he did not mention it to Noah. There is no mention in the rest of the Bible that God reconsidered he decision to keep such species/kinds alive, nor does/do the author(s) of the Bible mention nor even seem to notice the vanishing of such a vast diversity of wildlife (several times more varied than what we can observe today). Indeed, there is no extra-Biblical evidence that humans noticed this striking decimation of huge swaths of the animal kingdom over the brief course of 4000 years. And this great extinction is even more dramatic. To the best of my knowledge there is no record of any mass extinction since the time of Christ, so these creatures must have almost all perished in just the two millennia between Noah and the crucifixion. It seems inconsistent that God deliberately saved all kinds of animals just 2,000 years after creation without either knowing that they were all going to go extinct in the subsequent 2,000 years, or without being able save them during those 2,000 years. Or choosing (without informing any humans) to allow them to become extinct.”
This one is easy to answer. And much quicker too. All that was not inside the ark perished…Save the ones who escaped…. The animals were no longer the animals that God had created. All of them were corrupted. You can change the DNA but you can’t change it back.
It’s like taking the salt out of butter. It’s a one way deal. A deer was no longer a deer, it was something else. And elephant was no longer an elephant….Mammoth? Maybe. And the people that did not enter the ark, were not humans either. All fleshly life had been corrupted by the fallen angels. Eight humans left to reseed the human race. A close call indeed.
Third and fourth point..
You said “3. Specific “species” may have become extinct since Noah, but representatives of their “kinds” still survive. If this is the case, then we should be able to identify extant representatives today of every “kind” of animal thought to have been extinct. So, Triceratops might be extinct, but its “kind” survives. One could argue that Tricerotops and rhinos are of the same “kind,” but not any more persuasively than claiming a surviving relic of Ticeratops’s “kind” is the Nile Crocodile. And, I would argue, any definition of the term “kind” that would include any two of rhino, croc and Triceratops is so ambiguous as to be meaningless, and that the diversity of wildlife it is suggested Noah took onboard the Ark exceeds his instructions of between 2 and 7, and NO MORE THAN 2 and 7, pairs of each kind of creature.”
The interesting thing here is this….Animals have gone extinct. That is true. And it happens far too often. But note….The Passenger pigeon. Extinct This bird once darkened the skies from sheer numbers. Now there are none…Did pigeons die out? No…Only a branch of the family. The Dodo ..Extinct….Dumb bird….Did birds die out? No. Only one branch of the family. All of the extinctions I can find are where one branch of the family died out..A genus but not the species. So yes..All of the animals God created can probably be accounted for. Here are other animals that have gone extinct. Yes mans fault.
West African Black Rhinoceros There are still rinoceros’s
Pyrenean Ibex. There are still deer.
Quagga. There are still zebras
Caribbean Monk Seal. There are still seals
Sea Mink. ... There are still mink
Tasmanian Tiger. ... We still have dogs
Tecopa Pupfish…and we still have fish.
These are just examples I am sure there are many more.
Fifth point
All evidence of extinct species are forgeries. It would be easy to scoff at this as absurd, but even if we refrain from doing so, proponents of young Earth creation would have to go back and entirely re-jigger what theories they have developed till now. Did Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops ever actually exist? If so, why are they not around today? If not, why assert they rode in the Ark with everybody else. And why haven’t young Earth creation scientists successfully debunked such hoaxes?
Have you ever visited the Johnson Farm in Utah? If not, google it. Its fascinating. They have found that lifting footprints from the river bed on their property is more lucrative than farming. I don’t know how many footprints they have on display, but they do have footprints in their original places too. They have dino prints with human prints close by. That seems to be evidence of dinosaurs living as contemporaries of man.
That seems to be evidence of dinosaurs living as contemporaries of man.
Evidence of extinct species are forgeries. I spent a couple hours searching on the net, I found genus after genus extinct…
Bendito
Loyal
but genus is only a branch of a species. No species are noted as being extinct! So, Yes! Evidence of extinct species IS fake.
Did Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops ever actually exist? If so, why are they not around today? Answered above.
If not, why assert they rode in the Ark with everybody else. I believe that they speculate that the dinosaurs were on the ark because they have no other answers that are acceptable to them.
And why haven’t young Earth creation scientists successfully debunked such hoaxes? I’ll answer this way…Why do 99% of universities on the planet insist that evolution is the key of life on this planet when they cannot produce one single shred of evidence? They cling to their fairy tales tightly in order to deny the existence of intelligent design. In order to deny the God that gives them life.
Did Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops ever actually exist? If so, why are they not around today? Answered above.
If not, why assert they rode in the Ark with everybody else. I believe that they speculate that the dinosaurs were on the ark because they have no other answers that are acceptable to them.
And why haven’t young Earth creation scientists successfully debunked such hoaxes? I’ll answer this way…Why do 99% of universities on the planet insist that evolution is the key of life on this planet when they cannot produce one single shred of evidence? They cling to their fairy tales tightly in order to deny the existence of intelligent design. In order to deny the God that gives them life.
Bendito
Loyal
And still, interesting...There have been many reports of flying creatures closely resembling Pterodactyls reported in New Guinea. The native Americans have legends of their old ones hunting mammoth. So even there, there had to be a few survivors. I believe that ALL legend and myth is based on fact.
Kirby I took most of what I said from my bible, Which I know you read or have read. Some of this content comes from the Book of Enoch, Have you read that book?, and a little bit comes from Google. (The extinction material)
Lanolin
Active
Good points bendito sort of what I was trying to explain with crocodiles and the like. There are still them around today just not the giant kinds because of the flood and subsequent climate change. And possibly humans killing them off. I mean stories of humans vs dragons abound its not like they didnt exist together and that man is like the last one on the planet and all the animals that we dont find today are lesser evolved or something. I dont know, if you try and be in mindset of Darwin you just end up chasing your own tail really that Darwin insisted humans once had, we just evolved from monkeys. Well if thats true why are there still monkeys,
Some people really have the wrong end of stick maybe too much peering in the microscope and not enough common sense.
Some people really have the wrong end of stick maybe too much peering in the microscope and not enough common sense.
Bendito
Loyal
People do tend to take the myopic view of everything. We prefer to complicate everything because if its simple it just can't be the right answer. Funny humans!