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Originally posted by PinkHaired Mudokon CWR:
Oh My Gosh, your an immature man!1 You can't prove a thing that the flood was a theory! Which it was not a theory2. Don't destroy people's belief's, that's not right!3
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Hi, Pinky, here we are again, trying to keep things clear so that you can digere them easily. Your posts always amuse me, and no scentific/religious discussion are the same without your contributions full of good intention. I really hope you read my post until the end, as it is mainly directed to you.
(1)First of all, I cannot see how you are able to judge me as an immature man, and I guess everyone can't either, by simply reading what I've written while in this topic. (2)Second, when I said that about trying to elaborate a complex, yet totally WRONG theory about the great flood, I was
clearly refering to
My Own Theory Based on The Tectonic Plates (3) not Stattik's theory or belief. I have not even examined his idea of the atmosphere full of water sufficient to make a great flood. Have you ever read my first post? There you can see that I elaborated a theory that sounded good, but it was wrong, I already made that clear in the end. It was only for fun. And finally: can you make the difference between what the word "theory" means, and what the word "fact" means?
THEORY is an explanation to a given
FACT. I'll give you an example (remember, please that it is only an example, it isn't directly related to our particular discussion about the great flood described in the holy bible):
Take a little rock in your
hand and throw it as high as you can. What happens? It falls. Try with several rocks, from different sizes, shapes, textures, materials. Try from different places on Earth. What always happens? All the rocks keep falling. It leads you to this observation, or belief:
FACT: IF you throw a rock using your hand, from any point on the surface of Earth, it always falls.
Now, let's try to elaborate a theory: we can argue that a strange and invisible force tends to make the rock and the surface of the Earth to clump togheter, because they are made of the same matter. This invisible force we can call "gravity". we can even measure it using unities of mass, time and lenght. The magical average "gravitational" force on the surface of Earth is aproximately 9,8 Kgm/s
2. Although this theory is obvious now, people spent a good couple of thousand years to achieve that. Simplifying:
THEORY 1: there is an invisible force called gravity that makes different amounts of mass to clump togheter after a given time and it is directly proportional to their masses , and diversily proportional to the square of the distances that separate each other
Let's make a step further, and elaborate another theory to explain the same fact.
THEORY 2: there are invisible beings, called elementals, that inhabit all the portions of mass that forms the Earth, from the air, plants, animals, rocks , the water, the magma from the inner core of our planet, and everything else. They share a strong affininty that makes them tend to stick togheter explaining how a rock throwng into the air tends to fall back to Earth, where there is the higher concentration of these little elementals. This affinity makes objects to accelerate at a ratio of 9.8 m/s2 close to the surface of Earth.
Here we started with an observation of a fact, then described that fact in order to explain its behavior, and also to predict future observations. From now on, if we throw a rock, we believe it will fall based on our theory of gravitational force, or even in our theory of the elementals(this particular one could be more easely accepted in some primitive culture, though).
Finally, getting back to our specific discussion. The first step is to accept "The Great Flood" as a
FACT. How can we do this? By finding evidences that show it is a fact, in the same way we did to accept as a fact that all rocks keep falling if we throw them with our hand..
Once we accept it, we can go and try to find a
theory, i.e. an explanation of how it happened, just in case we are curious to understand a little about what kind of physical mechanisms were involved in the process of making The Great Flood. Here we can cleary see the difference between FACT and THEORY. A Fact is an statement, an observation, while a Theory is an explanation of given facts, and a prediction to new ones.
However, if we cannot accept "The Great Flood" as a
fact, we cannot make the further step, that is, to find a
theory to explain how it happened.
This is the main issue when we are discussing Religion and Science. Often, people forget that
theories explain
facts, but don't create them. They existed previously.
[ December 28, 2001: Message edited by: Lampion ]
