David Montgomery’s Book On Noah’s Flood

We discover in David Montgomery’s book, an argument on secular scientific reasoning being compatible with religion, in his view there is no “false dichotomy” as long as a certain interpretation of the data prevails.

In science daily he reveals pretty much the same arguments against the flood that have been used by others who were skeptics…

“For nearly two centuries there has been overwhelming geological evidence that a global flood, as depicted in the story of Noah in the biblical book of Genesis, could not have happened. Not only is there not enough water in the Earth system to account for water levels above the highest mountaintop, but uniformly rising levels would not allow the water to have the erosive capabilities attributed to Noah’s Flood, Montgomery said.

Some rock formations millions of years old show no evidence of such large-scale water erosion. Montgomery is convinced any such flood must have been, at best, a regional event, perhaps a catastrophic deluge in Mesopotamia. There are, in fact, Mesopotamian stories with details very similar, but predating, the biblical story of Noah’s Flood.

“If your world is small enough, all floods are global,” he said.

Firstly, what evidence did David Montgomery interpretation of the data comes up with that demonstrate the millions of years age in the rocks? His answer is this, “I believe in millions of years, therefore when I look at the rocks, I see millions of years.”  This is not hard evidence based on observations that he is making his argument against the global flood but rather uses circular reasoning.

What about the large fragments of sedimentary rock which include strata that are broken from a parent rock? Since the global flood happened, couldn’t the existence of folded strata show that hardening had begun underwater and if so, is there sufficient evidence to conclude that 100% hardening can be achieved underwater or is some sort of drying out process required?

Good question! How many of you are familiar with man-made cement? Water is an important ingredient which triggers the reaction in the mixture of dry cement and sand so that the cementing process not only relies on water, but can take place underwater! Many natural cements are similar in that they can achieve sufficient hardening under water without needing to dry out.

Even when the waters of the flood was still rising, the drying process was well underway, as a result of two causes, one normal global tidal rises and falls.  And the second involves giant tsunamis generated by the many destructive earthquakes that were repeatedly occurring during the Flood due to catastrophic earth movements.

No human being living today or in the recent past has ever observed what happened during those earlier years in earth’s history, therefore no nobody knows for sure what all went on during that time which we will get into in more dept shortly.  We also discover in David Montgomery’s book, a claim about being “open” which is generally always used as an attempt to sway people of faith to a worldly viewpoint.  Back when I was in college, my professor taught this very idea of being “open” in order to try to mold my values into his. And those who rejected his values were considered, “narrow.”

But let’s posed this to him.  Has David Montgomery read papers by creationists who are geologists or even talked to them with an “open mind” as they want people of faith to do with their conclusions on the data? Did he ever consider thinking outside the box?

One doesn’t think so, in fact he just goes along with popular fallacies among secularists by lumping Tibetan locals in the same camp with Bible scholars as “people of faith.” If he had done his homework, this is what he would have discovered…

According to accounts of the global Flood, there were extensive ruptures of the earth’s crust, rapid plate movements, and a reworking of the continents from low relief to high mountains and deep ocean basins.  These clearly would have caused catastrophic deposition and erosion, rather than a placid sea rising over post-Flood mountains as described in Montgomery’s book.

And the memories of locals were true accounts of the global flood rather than local floods in their area as he suggests.  Also, the memories which were taken during the time of the tower of babel by other groups eventually got distorted over the years while retaining some truth that eventually found its way to Mesopotamia.

The thing is this, it’s not who doesn’t have faith in coming to these conclusions, it’s whose faith is better interpreting the data that suits reality better! If you believe in millions of years as Montgomery stated, you are going to discover a billion of missing years between the bedrock granite and the Tapeats Sandstone or 100 million missing years in the Muav and Temple Butte limestones.

What Montgomery failed to observe, were the fault lines passing through the whole canyon from bottom to top, then one sees twists and folds of strata (strata supposedly separated by millions of years) showing soft-sediment deformation as a unit, along with evidence of high-velocity current flows in the Tapeats sandstone, also the pancake-flat strata over thousands of square miles arguing against long ages, the billions of nautiloids buried in a single layer of Redwall limestone, the evidence of sheet erosion over the continent, the rapid downcutting of the canyon, and so on!

His book and world view seems to be a bit outdated as well because many secular geologists no longer believe the Colorado River carved the canyon, but instead use catastrophic flooding in their theories. What evidence does Montgomery really have when he couldn’t observe it first hand that says a global flood couldn’t have carve out the Grand Canyon?

David Montgromery should stop his bandwagon jumping with using the assumption that a secular world view uses no faith while people of the Bible do.  It’s a matter of which faith uses solid reasoning based on observations. Biblical geology does use solid reasoning from what is being observed along with a recorded account of it happening, but secular geology has no such account but rather goes by blind faith and bias which is created by their peers for them to believe.

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Talk Show Host Attacks Christians For Not Believing

Former writer and producer of CNN,  radio talk show host since 1987, Mike Malloy made a derogatory comment in light of the storms which ravaged the South where he suggests that those storms were God’s way of punishing Christians for not believing in science. In reality, it is not “science” in which he alludes to but rather “evolution.” All too often, many liberals interchange the wording which tries to create an illusion of a riff between Christianity and science.

The real riff lies with Christianity and Evolution! Science is merely a tool to expand knowledge, it a defined method which includes carefully controlled experiments with provisional conclusions that are discussed and debated. Studying DNA for example would be hardly anti-biblical but to say it evolved into man over many millions of years, then it becomes anti-biblical.  So this is hardly being “anti-science” rather it’s “anti-evolution.”

In light of his comment going viral over the internet, Mike Malloy made this comment…

“During my program last Friday night, I commented on the potential for destruction caused by the tornadoes that were moving through the south with historic fury. First and foremost, I sincerely apologize for the inflammatory language that I used, and for the anger and pain that came as a result of my comments. “

“Those comments, as published on various blog sites, were lifted out of context from a larger point I was making about the hypocrisy of many political leaders and commentators who refuse to acknowledge science, logic and fact in assessing disasters such as this one. That said, my language was unnecessarily harsh in light of the lives that would be lost later that evening.” 

“I have nothing but the most heartfelt sympathy for those families who were devastated by those tragic storms. I will say again I am sincerely sorry for the pain and anger my comments evoked. I made a mistake, I was wrong, and I will not let it happen again.”

Despite his own mistake on his little known talk-show, he tried blaming blogs who carried his story to the mainstream before taking his own responsibility.  No Mike Mallory, we refuse to worship evolution which takes more faith but embrace science as a great tool which confirms the Bible, science which improves the standard of living such as medicine, technology in general and so on.

Live Science Takes Up A Question About Jesus

With Easter approaching, secular science joins in on the celebration of this particular holiday with their own take on Christ.  This is a classic religion-vs-secular science confrontation found in Live Science.

“Jesus Christ may be the most famous man who ever lived. But how do we know he did?

“Most theological historians, Christian and non-Christian alike, believe that Jesus really did walk the Earth. They draw that conclusion from textual evidence in the Bible, however, rather than from the odd assortment of relics parading as physical evidence in churches all over Europe.”

“That’s because, from fragments of text written on bits of parchment to overly abundant chips of wood allegedly salvaged from his crucifix, none of the physical evidence of Jesus’ life and death hold up to scientific scrutiny.”

Does this sound familiar? Reporter Natalie Wolchover writes about distinctions between scientific evidence and belief – as if the evidence requires no belief or assumption or interpretation. She also eliminates eyewitness testimony by demanding the evidence must only contain the physical.  After reviewing relic stories, she turns her attention to textual evidence.

Let’s compare other textual sources in the ancient past such as Herodotus’s historical works, whose originals were written in 480-425 BC. How many copies were documented from this source? A mere eight copies! Aristotle’s writings have found their way to the 20th century have only five copies. And there are 20 copies of the historian Tacitus as well. What about the Bible? Over 6,000 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, 10,000 Latin Vulgates, and 9,300 other early versions (MSS), giving us more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today! In other words, the Bible is the most documented book in existence today!

Wolchover tries to include non-canonical gospels as though they were equal to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John which by the way they are not! She also failed to explore the early Christians criteria for authenticity nor the social dynamics of heretics and cults who might have reasons to write distorted or inaccurate accounts, nor the science of textual analysis, concerned with the authenticity of texts.

She put herself in middle ground on the historicity of Jesus, quoting Marcus Borg, a secular scholar at Oregon State: “We do know some things about the historical Jesus – less than some Christians think, but more than some skeptics think.” The conclusions however rests on what particular texts are viewed as credible. Borg did not question the fact that Jesus lived, but from the textual evidence, presented a synopsis of Jesus’ life sanitized of the miraculous.

“He was executed by Roman imperial authority, and his followers experienced him after his death.  It is clear, Borg said, that they had visions of Jesus as they had known him during his historical life.  Only after his death did they declare Jesus to be “lord” or “the son of God.”

No philosopher of science would affirm that the opinions of Borg and Wolchover presented were dictated to them by the scientific evidence itself.  Clearly a different set of authorities would produce different conclusions. Understand what goes behind these writings, it is critical for Live Science to try and debunk Jesus therefore could also claim that creationism is not a science, that making conclusions about a young earth based on the evidence is a religion not science even though many of their theories have been debunked by advancements.

Some Biologists Claim Evil is Good

Is moral corruption bad for society or does it pay to be corrupt? According to these particular evolutionary biologists corruption is actually valuable in order to maintain “societal cooperation”.

In science daily…

“A report of their research is published in the journal Evolution. Using game theory, Úbeda and Duéñez looked at what causes individuals in society to cooperate even though those in charge display some level of corruption. They developed a model that allows individuals who are responsible for punishing noncooperators (e.g., law enforcers and government officials) to fail to cooperate themselves by acting in a corrupt manner. They also considered the possibility that these law enforcers, by virtue of their positions, are able to sidestep punishment when they are caught failing to cooperate.”

This study is actually political, extreme left leaning, like criminals having more rights than victims than it has to do with science. Rather than giving law enforcement as one of the key roles in cooperation and order in society, this study gives credit to moral corruption (sin according to the Bible)  in the scheme of evolution and mention police breaking the law as an example. “Law enforcers often enjoy privileges that allow them to avoid the full force of the law when they breach it…Overall societal cooperation is maintained — as long as there is a small amount of power and corruption”.

Interesting enough, when evolution is kept out of the explanation, an economist who found an old saying very shocking after all serious crimes are blamed on a lack of a decent income, “money doesn’t buy happiness” did a study among 37 countries that vary from rich to  poor, ex-Communist and capitalist.

“In contrast to shorter-term studies that have shown a correlation between income growth and happiness, this paper, to be published the week of Dec. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the happiness and income relationship in each country for an average of 22 years and at least ten years.”

“This article rebuts recent claims that there is a positive long-term relationship between happiness and income, when in fact, the relationship is nil,” explained Easterlin, USC University Professor and professor of economics in the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.”

Darwinism is not just superfluous; it is downright evil.  The Bible warns about this very thing…

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

-Isaiah 5:20

By turning good and evil into amoral illusions with creating people as pawns of a mythical society of a evolutionary past, evolutionists open the door for all kinds of vices.

More Evidence for Flood Baffles Geologists

Uniformitarianism is a particular framework which goes by the assumption “that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.”

This framework has been used to reject a one-time occurrence of a global flood, known in the Bible as “Noah’s flood.” So things like noticing rocks which had been moved 3,000 miles across whole continents becomes baffling to secular geologists. Nothing of course remotely happens like that today! This would be a falsification of  uniformitarianism and what is interesting a team of geologists investigating the phenomena admit to it…

“The causes of such a pattern might be unique to time and place, and may include a combination of (1) lack of continental vegetation, (2) clustering of continents near the equator, (3) increased continental weathering rates, (4) widespread uplift and erosion associated with regionally extensive and relatively synchronous orogenesis [mountain-building] recording supercontinental amalgamation, and (5) production of significant relief, providing stream power for large-scale river systems.”

What is even more interesting to note, none of the mentioned mechanisms contradicts a worldwide flood; in fact, they would each appear to be the result of one which of course would confirm what the Bible says. Another interesting factor, the geologists avoided trying to explain with reference to natural law and observable, repeatable processes.  They did however avoid considering a flood. Rather they built up complexity (like in many other evolutionary theories) of five different explanations or a certain combination of them to their theory which makes it considerably weak.

When a scientific method is able to explain one cause for multiple effects it’s pretty strong. For example, your lawn is flooded, explanation one says, “a neighbor’s pool leaked and then a truck rode by with water and it leaked also” or “your neighbor’s pool just leaked or “it rained a lot causing the sewers to back up, flooding your property.”

A worldwide flood would produce all five effects mentioned by the geologists…

1) Lack of continental vegetation, because it had been stripped away by the water.

2) Widespread uplift and erosion associated with regionally extensive and synchronous mountain building occurred.

3) Weather rates increased dramatically.

4) Clustering of continents near the equator, then the continents split apart as the fountains of the great deep opened.

5) Production of significant relief, providing stream power for large-scale river systems, because new mountains produces runoff as the waters receded, transporting soft sediments over vast distances.  A worldwide flood would also explain the “high degree of sediment mixing and homogenization” of sediments they observed. On the other hand, because secular geology has denied a one-time event for so many years claiming it couldn’t happen, it’s not surprising to see their explanation move into a chaos complexity level while avoiding an explanation for increased weathering rates, widespread erosion, homogenization, synchronous mountain building and large-scale river systems. Their story remains in a special-pleading scenario which leaves much to be desired as a scientific explanation.

Ancient City Discovered In Syria

A highly developed city burst onto the scene about 4,000 to 6,000 years ago in the evolutionary time frame. Early indications reveal a society rich in trade, copper metallurgy and pottery production but supposedly, the wheel hadn’t been invented yet…

“Covering about 31 acres, Tell Zeidan was situated where the Balikh River joins the Euphrates River in modern-day Syria. The location was at the crossroads of major, ancient trade routes in Mesopotamia that followed the course of the Euphrates River valley. The Ubaid period lasted from about 5300 to 4000 B.C.”

“This enigmatic period saw the first development of widespread irrigation, agriculture, centralized temples, powerful political leaders and the first emergence of social inequality as communities became divided into wealthy elites and poorer commoners,” said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute and a leader of the expedition.”

The dating of 6000 years is questionable. What about it being an enigmatic period? It’s not enigmatic at all, in fact if one follows Biblical history after Babel, it’s quite logical.  Intelligent humans in a complex society spread out and build cities rapidly. Observational data shows humans can migrate at a pretty fast rate. The funny part of this discovery and it goes along the line of overusing the hypothesis first method which they rely very heavy on, how do they know the wheel in this particular society wasn’t invented yet? They still have a ways to go as far as uncovering the ancient city of Tell Zeidan.

Evolutionists have a real challenge on their hands, falsifications of simplicity is the norm in other fields in this story but in this chapter, you have a society all of a sudden burst on the scene before urban cities came into existence with anatomically correct modern humans who were able to organize their own habitats, decorate themselves, cook with fire and even play music, but for one to two million years straight they could only hunt, gather and dwell in a cave before an idea of planting came to mind. This is when according to the evolutionary time line, cities appeared with irrigation, commerce, metallurgy and a stratified society.

There is a pattern, just like in other areas of science, for example, the Human genome. Evolutionary scientists held to the idea (hypothesis first) was that signalling pathways were fairly simple and linear but what they have been finding is networks of complex information!

Ancient man was found to be more complex, now we see an ancient city more complex than they ever imagined, one would think they would expect more complexity with their discoveries…This is what happens with an unbelief in God’s word, you get a confusing story that makes no sense whatsoever in light of the evidence.

Minimalist Viewpoint On Bible Debunked

Minimalists in Biblical Archaeology claim the Bible was written in Greece, hundreds of years after the events took place.  One of their claims mentioned there was no kingdom of David and Solomon. Here is what they considered as evidence for their position,  necessary archaeological evidence to prove there was a state is missing, therefore according to a minimalist viewpoint, 2 Samuel and 1Kings are not accurate. Also, no administrative documents have been found which again means to them, there was no such government.

But Minimalists do not deny the existence of David and Solomon, but rather have their own historical time frame and story about them which puts David and Solomon in a primitive society.

But their skepticism about the historical account from the Bible has been debunked! An ancient Hebrew pottery inscription that was found back in 2008, it has been dated as the oldest known Hebrew text. This certainly one of more amazing discoveries of our time! Recently it had been deciphered for public viewing.

In the EurekAlert article…

“Prof. Galil also notes that the inscription was discovered in a provincial town in Judea.  He explains that if there were scribes in the periphery, it can be assumed that those inhabiting the central region and Jerusalem were even more proficient writers.”

“It can now be maintained that it was highly reasonable that during the 10th century BCE, during the reign of King David, there were scribes in Israel who were able to write literary texts and complex historiographies such as the books of Judges and Samuel.”  He adds that the complexity of the text discovered in Khirbet Qeiyafa, along with the impressive fortifications revealed at the site, refute the claims denying the existence of the Kingdom of Israel at that time.”

So what did the inscription have to say? It was about caring for the disadvantaged in society! The English translation went like this…

“you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].  Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow].  Judge the orph[an] [and] the stranger.  [Pl]ead for the infant; plead for the po[or and] the widow.  Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.  Protect the po[or and] the slave; [supp]ort the stranger.”