LittleNipper wrote:Maksutov wrote:
You can make light of whatever you wish; however, Noah was 500 years young and the penguins likely existed rather close. You nor I have any real idea as to how the pre-flood world appeared nor what it was like. You simply spend all you energy in denial without any forethought. When God created the animals, He instilled in them an ability to adapt. God foresaw the entrance of sin and its effect on His perfect world. God created His creatures with an incredible ability to survive in various climates.
Some tropical animals can survive in cooler climates. And some animals that now live in Polar Regions can also survive in warmer temperatures. Today marsupials live mainly in Australia. Penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere, while polar bears live in the north. These diverse ecosystems did not exist prior to the flood. They are a result of it. And I do believe in a certain amount of "evolution." All the "races" descended from Noah's sons. All cats and all dogs are the end variations of their ancestors aboard the ark.
You may try to make the story seem trivial and foolish; however, it only demonstrates your lack of realization regarding God and His abilities.
Nipper, you have to become quite the fantasy writer to try to answer the problems. You multiply the "ifs" without any evidence whatsoever. We have fossils, Nipper. Actual fossils, not words in a book and imagination in a brain. We have the incremental deposits of microorganisms turning into limestone at a specific known rate over millenia. We have tree rings. We have geologic strata. We have microscopes. We have telescopes. We have maps. We have scans of the ocean bottom. We have spacecraft in orbit imaging the planet at every wavelength. All of these things can be checked.
All of them say that your story is wrong. People of the time that the stories were written couldn't have known about science. And so they made things up. Like you're doing now. And you can layer intricate fantasies and traditions on each other with all of the conditioning and passion that you want and it won't make Noah's ark real. It didn't happen. It was a story, just like the Book of Mormon was a 19th century story that many people have come to find meaning and inspiration in. But that was just a story too. Like Dante's Inferno or the Pilgrim's Progress or the parables of various religious figures, they are entertainments wrapped around lessons. Do you believe Star Wars really happened on a galaxy long ago and far away? Do you believe there is a Middle Earth? And yet people spend a lot of time and money and passion on these stories too.
There was no Noah and no Ark any more than there was an Atlantis. Atlantis was made up by Plato to facilitate speculation on the forms of government, just like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell did in the 20th century. The crackpots took it from there and made it "real". That's what you're doing with the Bible. It isn't history, especially the Book of Genesis. It didn't happen that way. It's a book of stories to teach, just like those of Aesop and the Brothers Grimm.
Making the argument that you can dismiss science because "God did it" is a childish cop out. You can do better than that.
