Thread: old flood stories

reading this on wikipedia, its the flood stories of various civilizations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogygian_Deluge#Ogyges

especially the ogyges section is interesting, because of the rise of the sea levels by as much as 130 meters, and in one instance it rises with 25m in less than 500 years.

Five hundred years is a long time for a people who probably only lived 40 years on average. A couple of feet though might have been enough to notice in the course of a lifetime.

Originally Posted by Lynx_Fox

Five hundred years is a long time for a people who probably only lived 40 years on average. A couple of feet though might have been enough to notice in the course of a lifetime.

well, yeah, but then again, things tend to work itself up in fits and starts, and not gradually and neatly.

and you have the relatively shallow bering strait.

http://www2.cnr.edu/home/araia/MedStudiesSem/medmap.gif

some geological activity there, coupled with rise in sea levels... and you just have a catastrophy waiting to happend.

to use your own source, this fact kind of makes your argument moot:

Humans live on average 31.99 years in Swaziland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

one cannot get an accurate read on life expectancy because it does not figure in unnatural untimely deaths due to natural disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, vocanoes and then man made catastrophes like war, poisions and soon.

last year an earthquake hit china and killed most of the students at one school, that would unnaturally lower the life expectancy rate. at best such ideas are just ideals and do nto relfect the reality as some nations people live longer than others.

in the ancient world i would say they lived longer than people give them credit. average age means nothing and does not prove that ancient people di dnot live long lives.

*oh and unless you are talking about Noah's flood, then floods do not belong in the religion section for ther majority are NOT religion originated.

p.s.-- this is a good reason why you cannot do a scientific study of religion for it takes not God orientated events and extrapolates a reason why Noah's flood could not happen, leaving out important details which helps come to the wrong conclusions.

local floods do not disprove a global one nor hinder it from taking place. all local floods do is expose the reasons why the global flood evidence is so difficult to locate--please try to tell the difference between local flood evidence and a global one.

please make a list of scientific evidence to support your position.

ANY religious flood story, not just the christian one. Archy, are you really so pompous that you think christianity is the ONLY religion??

Archy, nothing you said there reall made sense.

Life expectancy is jus that; how long one would be expected to live. It is affected by any factor which changes the length people live.

what i am saying is that 'life expectancy' is not a valid measure to rely upon as it will give false impressions.

as you see by the exanple, japan has one for 81 +/- years while swaziland is 31. which will you choose to represent the modern age? this standard is as subjective as one wants it to be and one cannot depend upon it to make sweeping generalizations.

comparative to the region, I'd choose both

Originally Posted by archaeologist

what i am saying is that 'life expectancy' is not a valid measure to rely upon as it will give false impressions.

as you see by the exanple, japan has one for 81 +/- years while swaziland is 31. which will you choose to represent the modern age? this standard is as subjective as one wants it to be and one cannot depend upon it to make sweeping generalizations.

You simply take all deaths and the age it happened at all over the world and work out an average. Everyone who cites average life expectancy knows how it works and the uncertainties involved. Obviously you can't use the global average for individual countries, but looking at contributing factors can give you a pretty good idea, not to mention the existence of skeletons and records for direct analysis. When there is doubt, it is represented in the original paper by error margins.

Originally Posted by archaeologist

what i am saying is that 'life expectancy' is not a valid measure to rely upon as it will give false impressions.

as you see by the exanple, japan has one for 81 +/- years while swaziland is 31. which will you choose to represent the modern age? this standard is as subjective as one wants it to be and one cannot depend upon it to make sweeping generalizations.

What's subjective about a simple mathematical average? If you want more detail they're readily available, such as: rate of child mortality before age 1; percent of population above 60, medium age etc.

Do you know what subjective means?

Originally Posted by archaeologist

p.s.-- this is a good reason why you cannot do a scientific study of religion for it takes not God orientated events and extrapolates a reason why Noah's flood could not happen, leaving out important details which helps come to the wrong conclusions..

What do you mean by extrapolates a reason? It's simple falsification, a requirement of any valid hypothesis. For the hypothesis of a world flood, we look and except for the great river valleys and along the coast there's simply no geological evidence of a global flood in the past few hundred thousand years in which humans have been around. The evidence does not match the hypothesis and therefore we reject the hypothesis that there was a world flood. Where we did find evidence of flooding one can than compare to the oral Hebrew story and perhaps form new hypothesis about the scale of that flood--given what a man of that age would know about the world, where were the ancestors of the Hebrews before about that time, what other cultures tell of highly destructive floods, does the dubious nature of the rest of the story (e.g. size of the wood ship) cast doubt on the entire story's credibility etc.

Just the tip of the iceberg about how to apply reason to such things.