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Author | Topic: Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood | |||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
I found I couldn't read the review until I broke it up into paragraphs, that's why I edited it. Then I tried to find the book on the web and discovered that wmscott (aka William Scott Anderson) is the author. The book is listed at Amazon where Mr. Anderson has listed the identical review:
Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood Authors are more than welcome to plug their books here, but please reveal you're the author when you do so. So, William, can I presume that the paragraphs divisions in the review were lost in the cut-n-pastes and that the book itself has paragraphs? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
What do you think of the theory of William Ryan and Walter Pitman that flood mythology is based upon a real event, the flooding of a then much smaller and freshwater Black Sea by the Mediterranean about 7000 years ago through a breach at the Bosporus. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, uncovered support for this theory when he located an ancient freshwater shoreline at a considerable depth.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
You're going to have to fill me in more on what your book says. I got the impression from your review that the end of the most recent ice age plays a significant role, but that ended 10,000 years ago, while the Black Sea flooding only occurred about 7,000 years ago. Does your book somehow draw these two events together? Or is its source of the flood water not glaciers?
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
Hmmm. I've seen estimates ranging between 10K and 11K years ago, never 30K. The 10,000 years-ago figure for the end of the last ice age and the 7,000 years-ago figure for the Black Sea flood are in normal years, not radiocarbon years, so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. And aren't the uncertainties of radiocarbon dating tiny compared to the 3,000 year difference?
I can see how that might happen, but how do you address the issue of where this water is now, since we haven't returned to an ice age and refrozen all the water into glaciers? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
I'm not so sure about this. Most laypeople aren't aware of radiocarbon years, and at a minimum I'm certain that articles written for laypeople are rendered in normal years. The National Geographic article about Ballard, Pitman and Ryan's work in the Black Sea says: By studying core samples of sediments and dating seashells, they determined that the flood most likely occurred about 7,500 years ago and that the shoreline of the ancient lake could be found 500 feet (150 meters) below the surface. I'd be pretty surprised if these were radiocarbon years. And regardless whether they're both radiocarbon years or normal years, they're obviously both in the same units, and so you have, at least according to this article, a 4500 year gap. About the sinking of the ocean basins and rise of mountains, is there any corroborating evidence? I can think of a few non-confirming points. First, rapid deformation generates heat, and in the case of the world-wide deformations you propose it seems likely the heat would have been pretty devastating. Second, geological studies indicate that mountain ranges are underlain by a much thicker mantle. The tectonic movements which push up mountain ranges evidently push down, too. This thicker mantle underlying mountain ranges is inconsistent with your view that the land in general, particular that most covered by glaciers, was pushed up by pressure generated from a sinking sea floor. Third, shouldn't continental shelf areas around the world show signs of the repeated deformation of stretching and compression as various ice ages came and went? And don't you have the same problem with the lack of evidence for extensive flooding that YECs have? For instance, shouldn't there be global signs of flood retreat? --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
I believe that outside the technical literature years are rendered in regular years, not radiocarbon years. Where the excerpt from National Geographic says 7,500 years ago and 12,000 years ago it means regular 365.25 day years. Don't you have the same problem as YECs, namely no evidence of a sudden global flood ever, let alone in the last 10,000 years. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
I want to revisit radiocarbon years.
If articles written for laypeople indescriminately mix radiocarbon and calendar years without making clear which is which, then rampant confusion can result, and according to Scientific American, this occasionally happens: The distinction between radiocarbon years and calendar years is important. A report earlier this year described a 13,000-year-old skeleton found in California and compared it to 12,500-year-old Monte Verde, without mentioning that the former date was in calendar years and the latter, radiocarbon years. Some readers understandably thought that the California skeleton was older than the campsite at Monte Verde. But in calendar years, Monte Verde is 14,700 years old. (Scientific American, September, 2000, Error – Scientific American - it includes a conversion table) When writing your book I assume you didn't just throw up your hands and say, "Radiocarbon years, calendar years, who knows?" You took the time to investigate and you compared calendar years to calendar years or radiocarbon years to radiocarbon years, and you therefore know that by the most recent estimates you have a gap of some thousands of years between the end of the ice age and the estimate for the Black Sea flood postulated by Ryan and Pitman.
Experimental error is understood, but three points. First, radiocarbon researchers have not been sitting on their hands since Gwen Schultz wrote Ice Age Lost in 1974, which seems to be where your impressions of the efficacy of radiocarbon dating originates. If you visit The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit website and click on Radiocarbon in the sidebar you'll read about the tight calibration back 11,000 years that's been achieved using tree ring data. Second, radiocarbon error is coming to be reported in the manner you describe, ie, a range with a confidence factor, though the Oxford unit provides a 95% value, not 90%. But you would be wrong to conclude that there's a 5% chance dates are off by the thousands of years required for your theory that the Black Sea flood was caused by the end of the Wisconsian ice age. Three, the confidence factor increases dramatically as you make more measurements, and the number of dated samples relevant to the end of the last ice age must be very large by now. While researching this post I found no mention of a trend toward lower dates. Your Gwen Shultz quote is an honest assessment of the uncertainty of dating techniques in 1974, but while it's a caution to be conservative she's optimistic about the future because she goes on to say, "It can be foreseen, though, that as absolute-dating techniques are perfected they will reveal enlightening and startling results." And this is just what has happened. You also cut her short with your quote, "Will the trend someday change, shrinking the tape measure, requiring us to shorten our time scale?" While she bemoans the search for antiquity being reduced to a contest to find the oldest, she balances her comments by continuing, "Or are we in for still more staggering surprises about the antiquity of our world and the age of its people?" --Percy [This message has been edited by Percipient, 01-12-2002]
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Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
I'm moving a copy of this thread to The Great Debate forum.
--Percy
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