>Dear Glenn,
>
>Please let us focus on what I said that corroborates a recent,
>local flood. Those are the points I want to establish, not who
>said what. By your acting as if I committed some offense deflects
>from the message.
>
>However, since you did ask, this is EXACTLY what you said on
>Sat, 13 Apr 1996:
>
>"This is why Ramm says of his view of the flood,
>
>'...we would not expect to find any specific evidence of
>it...' Ramm, The Christian View of Science and
>Scripture, p. 163.
>
>In this way he is protected from any contradictory
>observation; he will always be right."
>
I stand corrected. While the statement was not in the post you quoted you
were correct that I had said that. My apologies. My statement on the
13th was wrong. Thank you for catching that. Let me amend that statement
of the 13th. If a view has no observational support, then it is is
difficult to prove it wrong. Ramm's statement was directed at the
geological evidence Of course Ramm uses lack of observational support to
criticize all the other views and then designs his to avoid that problem.
Ramm says:
"(iii) There is no known geological data to support those
who defend a universal flood. A local flood could come and go
and leave no trace after a few thousand years, but could a
universal flood be a tracelss flood?"~Bernard Ramm, The Christian
View of Science and Scripture, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing
Co., 1954), p.165
The Mississippi Floods of 1993 have left a trace in geology which will
last many many thousands of years.
>Perhaps I made a bad assumption, and if that is true, I
>sincerely ask your forgiveness. But since you said "he
>will always be right," and the only quote you provided
>was that Ramm said, "we would not expect to find any
>specific evidence of it," that you were saying he was right
>about what he said.
>
I think I need to ask your forgiveness. You did nothing wrong. I think I
did.
>But the point I wanted to make is that Ramm's knowledge was
>limited, just as mine is, and I presume yours is too. The
>"specific evidence" which Ramm thought would never come,
>emerged in profusion almost immediately after Ramm published
>his book.
I agree that everyone's knowledge is limited (obviously since I can't
even remember what I wrote on the 13th my knowledge only extends back
about 7 days) but at the time Ramm published, the knowledge that large
floods left evidence in the geologic record for far longer than 6000 years
was already known. The Lake Missoula Flood deposits had been
scientifically described as a flood deposit since 1923 (see J.H. Bretz
1923 "The channeled Scablands of the Columbia Plateau Journal of Geology
31:617-649 and Glacial drainage on the Columbia Plateau Geological Soc.
Amer. Bull. 34: 573-608.) I would agree that it took a while for Bretz's
view to be accepted but it should have served as a warning. Besides that,
the the flood deposit at Ur itself had lasted many thousands of years so
to say that a flood deposit couldn't be preserved violated what he must
have known about Mesopotamian events.
On Apr. 20 you wrote:
>>>Also, the water-laid clay layers at the excavated city sites found
>only those elements that could be expected from the waters of the
>Euphrates. No remains of any salt water creatures were present
>which indicates none of the floods in that region involved sea water.
>
This also has been know long before Ramm wrote. I would expect that it was
known when Woolley engaged in his expeditions in the late 20's. So why
did Ramm say that there was an incursion of sea water up the valley? The
major problem is that a person who is unfamiliar with geology is trying to
develop geological theories. I do not think a person has to be a
geologist to do that, but he had better be very well read in the subject.
Geology is a very huge subject and I would agree that no one man can
encompass it all. But one with little reading in the topic has no hope.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm