Originally posted by ScienceisforFools
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Attempting to stay on topic, let's take the claim of mountains being covered with water. When exploring other claims, the laws of motion, say, what do investigators actually do? I'm thinking of my sewing machine but any other example would do and it's quite an old machine but hasn't worn out despite several owners. The wheel spins around and the needle goes up and down and the thread gets fed in but the needle doesn't continue in motion at the top of its stroke and fly through the ceiling. The reason is because whoever designed the thing could check Isaac Newton's work and I guess do some sums and come up with a sufficiently robust thingy to constrain the needle's trajectory towards the ceiling and reverse its motion. I could go and read Newton but that is superfluous because the design works very well. There are similarities between Newton and Archimedes but any sewing machines back then would have come from Heron, the Alexandrian, some of whose designs are still in use.
When we consider the flood, there are a number of factors to include and multiple sources, so rather than filibustering within our own system of perceiving reality we indeed do the same as when investigating the sewing machine from a scientific perspective. For doubters I could trace the path of knowledge and experience from Archimedes to Heron to Newton and on to Isaac Singer and in the same way, stepping outside one's own system of perceiving reality and comparing the witness and experience and learning and knowledge of others is imperative. This has already been done, with a similar time frame covered leading up to Heron's era and addressing even more authors' contributions than from Heron to Singer.
Peter was writing during the life of Heron and had investigated many false claims. He was able to determine from his study and from his instruction that the earth existed in water and that there was sufficient available historically for by the world that then was to be overflowed and to perish.
One of his sources was Jesus Nazareth. The same information is available to us, indeed more information as the discovery of whale bones verifies what Peter confirmed and what Jesus taught. In His lectures the testimony was consistent and recorded for us to investigate. We don't just have to take Peter's word for it! Luke was a doctor, an educated man, a fluent writer, an eyewitness and collator of evidence in two published works we have available to investigate. He recorded Jesus’ information about the period in question. Humans at the time ate and drank, produced offspring, but did so in an ill-considered way. Jesus confirmed that during the time of Lot similar activities were underway. But we don't need to stop there either.
Moses recorded events from an earlier period and just as Newton could have read up on Archimedes had his work been available at the time, so could Jesus or Luke or Peter refer to Moses. We can do that too. What we find is a consistent description exactly matching the archaeological record, for those interested, with ruins around the Dead Sea just as described from the time of Lot, massive sedimentary layers from the time of Noah and water creatures that had swum to mountain tops but become stranded. That would need a fairly rapid abating of the water, just as recorded by Moses and confirmed by Jesus centuries later.
These multiple sources, published works, teachings and even archaeology all concur. The flood is confirmed. When considering how many cubic miles of water are involved here it's possible to glean the magnitude of the turmoil. Perhaps the bones of sea creatures remaining on mountains suggest how dire the turbulence was deeper down! But to claim that scoffers, identified by Peter, should carry the day after so disparate a legacy as they've produced between them contradicting one another, proposing theories and fancies such as their phlogiston malarky not so long ago or the idea that alkyl nitrites engendered AIDS (both debunked now) not to mention a motherlode of nonsense in the "pending" basket – well, you might as well have said my sewing machine would never work due to the momentum of its needle!
And yet it does.
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