Gematria, First 7 words of Genesis, Odds of Flood Geology Being True
ED: Before inviting Vernon to consider what the odds of "Flood geology"
being true are, I'd like to reply to Vernon's disagreements with me
concerning his hypothesis that the "odds" of various mathematical
coincidences in Genesis prove that a worldwide flood in the "days of Noah"
literally occured.
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VERNON: The first verse of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures must be rated
the most remarkable combination of words ever written. Wouldn't you agree?
ED: "Most remarkable" you declare? How insistent of you and your
particular perceptions and suspicions above those of everyone else's.
Rather, "woudn't you agree" that no one can possibly be expected,
rationally speaking, to "agree" with you about such matters without having
first studied a zillion other combinations of words with the same purpose
of digging deeply through their gematric values to find any and all
possible coincidences with other numbers that exist in the world of
mathematics? Why not analyze the first few words of Enuma Elish or other
ancient creation myths, or the first words of a host of other ancient holy
books, why not the first words in the book of Mormon or Dianetics by L.
Ron Hubbard? How many of them have you examined after putting on your
thinking cap and working hard to dig up as many numerical coincidences as
possible? Did you ever hear the saying, "We are all greater artists than
we realize?" I suspect you lack the enthusiasm to pursue the analysis of
thousands of opening phrases and play with their gematric numbers as
intently or as longingly as you do with the Bible's.
And why limit yourself to gematrically hypothesizing about the numerical
values of the first "seven" words? (You never did tell me exactly what
the translation of those first seven words were. Is it even a complete
sentence?) "Seven" may be the one number that appears more times than any
other number in the Bible, and it may be the number of days of creation
plus the final day of "God's rest" added together, but when God was
actually creating, it was during "six" days, not "seven." Besides, the
numbers "six" and "seven" also are mentioned prominently in in
Babylonian/Sumerian sacred mathematics, astronomy and myths that preceded
the interest that the Hebrews showed such numbers later when writing their
creation myths and other holy books.
And speaking of your promotion of the literalness of the "Flood" story in
Genesis:
Catastrophic flooding occurs in most areas of the world. However, if
[flood] stories are gathered from around the world, one may be struck far
more by the divergencies than by their similarities. It is important that
such collections have been gathered without regard for their support for a
single universal flood. It would be easy to rule out those that sound
dissimilar and then to be amazed at how similar the remainder are!
Although flood stories from around the world vary widely in their content,
those from Syro-Palestine and Mesopotamia (the so-called lands of the
Bible) are strikingly similar. While it is difficult, if not impossible,
to believe that flood stories gathered from around the world descended
from a single source (or describe a single event), the reverse may indeed
be the case in the Ancient Near East. It is, after all, an area given to
regular and catastrophic flooding, for which adequate archaeological and
geological evidence has come to light. Furthermore, it is an area through
which the story of "the flood" could easily spread: it is geographically
small and well defined (the so-called fertile crescent), its inhabitants
spoke closely related Semitic languages, there was occasional political
unity of the whole (under Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians), and
commerce was widespread throughout at all periods.
- Lloyd R. Bailey, Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition
Dr. Howard M. Teeple of the Religion and Ethics Institute is the author of
The Noah's Ark Nonsense in which he traced the movement in space and time
of the "Flood" story in the ancient Near East from its first known
location and earliest version, uncovered by archeologists in
Sumeria/Babylon, to its subsequent appearance in a civilization just north
of Sumeria/Babylon. Then the tale apparently headed east, then south, and
finally continued east till a version appeared in ancient Greece. Each
civilization along the way adapted the "Flood" story to their culture by
changing the names of the people involved and which mountain(s) the "boat"
allegedly "landed on."
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VERNON: Ed, I have to say that, in the main, these questions are
completely off-beam. As far as I am aware there are no variants in respect
of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1.
ED: "As I am aware?" Nice way to put your doubts to rest. Mine don't
lie down and die as easily. And I don't mean to be rude here, since you
are so personally involved with promoting your particular gematria
hypothesis, but may I ask, "What ARE you aware of?" What about spelling
variants? Don't linguists know of some definite changes in Hebrew
spellings that took place sometime around the 3rd cent. B.C.? Or do you
suppose that languages never develop and change over time? "Hebrew" is a
mere dialect of the Canaanite language, "Hebrew" developed out of the
Canaanite language. Or take a look at the differences English went
through, Old English, Middle English, modern English. Do you suppose no
such changes ever took place in ancient Near Eastern languages and
spellings over hundreds of years? Read THE POWER OF BABEL to learn more,
a book about the evolution of human languages.
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VERNON: Thank you, Ed, for your very comprehensive review of many
interesting matters. However, you must appreciate that my interests and
findings are far more focussed.
ED: As "focussed"[sic] as you are on your spelling I presume. Not to
pick on spelling errors, I make gobs of them. But perhaps you need to
read a little more widely and be a bit less "focused" on your "baby." My
suspicions, having studied various forms of "Bible codes" from gematria to
theomatics, is that gematria is for the birds, it's been used to "prove"
untold numbers of things. In the end, numbers remain simply numbers, not
clues hidden in the Bible by God for two thousand years till they were
finally revealled one day to Vernon who uses them to try and prove that
everything Vernon believes about God, the Bible, science, morality,
history, is true.
Perhaps Vernon could use some of his mathematical skill to tell us:
What are the odds of a "Flood" sorting objects as fine as single-celled
fossilized organisms (specific to different geological layers), bones and
even bone fragments, could sort them all in "evolutionary" order, during a
single extraordinarily violent world-wide flood that zipped the continents
into their present places and raised mountains and deposited an average of
a mile of sediments on top of the land round the earth. (Neither are all
geological formations "sedimentary" rock, because some are paleosol
layers, layers of ancient soils exposed to air, some have layers of
rootlets, or dried cracked surfaces, or surfaces with tracks of
land-dwelling animals and their nests or burrows, or windblown desert sand
layers.)
For more info on the MIRACULOUS sorting ability of "Noah's Flood" that
DEFIES MATHEMATICAL ODDS please see
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/flood.html
MORE THINGS FOR FLOOD GEOLOGISTS TO CONSIDER
THAT MIRACULOUSLY DEFY THE MATHEMATICAL ODDS
What are the odds of representative rock layers of all of the major
geological epochs being stacked IN EXPECTED ORDER and found in 30
different basins around the world?
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Entire_geological_column_doesn't_exist
Creationists have relied in the past on the "mixed up layers" argument, to
"refute" the existence of a "geological column," but that argument had
already grown lame as early as 1938:
In 1938 Harold Clark (a disciple of the Flood geologist, George Macready
Price) was invited by a student to visit the oil fields of Oklahoma and
northern Texas, where Mr. Clark saw with his own eyes why geologists
believed as they did. Observations of deep drilling and conversations with
practical geologists gave Clark a real shock that permanently erased any
confidence he had left in Price's vision of a topsy-turvy fossil record.
Clark wrote to Price: The rocks do lie in a much more definite sequence
than we have ever allowed. The statements made in your book, The New
Geology, do not harmonize with the conditions in the field. All over the
Midwest the rocks lie in great sheets extending over hundreds of miles, in
regular order. Thousands of well cores prove this. In East Texas alone are
25,000 deep wells. Probably well over 100,000 wells in the Midwest give
data that has been studied and correlated. The science has become a very
exact one. Millions of dollars are spent in drilling, with the
paleontological findings of the company geologists taken as the basis for
the work. The sequence of the microscopic fossils in the strata is
remarkably uniform. The same sequence is found in America, Europe, and
anywhere that detailed studies have been made. This oil geology has opened
up the depths of the earth in a way that we never dreamed of twenty years
ago.
- Donald R. Prothero, "SnakeHandlers and Flood Geologists: A Review Essay
of The Creationists by Ronald L. Numbers," The Skeptic, Vol. 2, no. 2
Even today's most highly approved ICR creationists like Kurt Wise and
Steve Austin have admitted that the world's biggest case of "reversed
geological layers," the Lewis Mountain Overthurst, which Morris predicted
in his book, The Genesis Flood, would topple modern geology, turned out to
be a genuine overthrust. Wise and Austin both admitted that there is
evidence that the rocks on top of that Lewis Mountain thrust were
originally "cooked" at a much greater depth in the earth and under greater
pressure before they were later thrust over the rocks beneath them. So
don't expect the "reversed layers" argument to be topple modern geology
anytime soon.
Moreover see what Duane T. Gish of ICR has admitted: "When I asked Duane
Gish what were the biggest difficulties for creationist science... he
answered after a moment's thought that it was the apparently great age of
Earth as shown by the fairly recent advances in radiometric dating; and
that the the fossil record could be interpreted as showing ecologically
complete ages -- the age of invertebrates, the age of fishes, the age of
reptiles, and so on up to the present." [Hitching F., "The Neck of the
Giraffe: Or Where Darwin Went Wrong," Pan: London, 1982, pp.115-121]
A FEW MORE FLOOD GEOLOGY CONSIDERATIONS
THAT MIRACULOUSLY DEFY THE MATHEMATICAL ODDS
EXPERIMENT FOR NOAH ENTHUSIASTS:
1. Take one of your favorite household potted plants.
2. Water it like hell for 40 days and nights.
3. Observe rotted dead plant.
As a botanist I get extremely disgruntled when reading about Noah. You
see, God appears only to be interested in animals. Noah received no
instructions to take on board any plants (by plants I mean angiosperms,
gymnosperms, pteridiophytes and bryophytes). Talk about shortsightedness.
Could this be the root cause for Zoology always being more popular than
Botany? Dear Flood supporters, pray tell how did plants survive the Flood?
Waiting in anticipation.
- M. (Matto), University of Stellenbosch
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QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE SURVIVAL OF PLANT LIFE AFTER THE FLOOD
After a year at sea, what is the likelihood:
1) That more than a handful of seeds miraculously survived the violence of
“the Flood of Noah” -- a flood that allegedly reduced rock to fine
sediment overnight?
2) That such seeds did not sprout prematurely, which seeds often do in
water, doubly so when their seed coasts are abraised which prompts them to
begin sprouting.
3) That any surviving plant seeds would be dropped in an area where the
temperature, rainfall, soil, and light would be suitable for the growth of
that particular species?
4) Even after having reached a spot capable of supporting the growth of
that particular species, how long would their flowers have to wait before
the birds and insects arrived from Mount Ararat to cross-pollinate them?
Isaac Asimov observes that the ancient Hebrews did not regard plants as
alive in the same sense animals are; therefore they had less of a problem
than modern botanists do, imagining that an olive tree could endure a
year’s drowning and sprout immediately afterward. [As in the Biblical tale
of the dove that returned to Noah’s ark with a live “olive branch” in its
mouth. -- E.T.B.] Today’s creationists should have learned some botany
since then, but they still carry on about the “hardiness” of olives.
Creationists need to soak seeds in muddy salty water for a year [The water
should also be “boiling” if “Flood geologists” are correct about the
extent of the Flood’s rock-pulverizing violence. -- E.T.B.] and then plant
them in unconsolidated, briny silt in an unfavorable climate without
insect or avian pollinators to see what happens. Have their
mathematicians, so skilled at calculating improbabilities for protein
formation, ever determined the odds of plant survival?
- Robert A. Moore, “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark,”
Creation/Evolution, Issue 11, Winter 1983
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/8619_issue_11_volume_4_number_1__3_12_2003.asp
Received on Wed Oct 6 21:38:46 2004
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