Henderson can remake the text to say whatever he wants, apparently. Highest mountains weren’t really the highest. Probably just some small hills. Destroyed ‘all flesh under heaven’ just meant … most? some? And so forth. This is the folly of the ‘local flood’.
I don’t think that’s credible physically, and there’s no geological evidence of such a thing, which there ought to be.
Anyone reading the thread can see that you provided multiple sources that, while they said the arches were recent (though not as recent as you said), actually did explain how they formed without a global flood.
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Your inability to explain the world’s actual geologic formations is proof your authority is not the text.
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The tree of life was a visible symbol of life.
The exile was a reminder of the need for Jesus.
Both together preached what was to come.
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Would you please explain your accusation against @cwhenderson in the context of this text? IIRC it’s from the Bible.
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Was the OP in this thread open and honest? It asked for answers to specific questions, but you had already decided your position, and that no conceivable answers to the actual questions posed could be entertained at all. They were all in-principle ruled out, from your perspective, before they were given. So the efforts of the people, including myself, who made honest attempts, were wasted.
Waving PhDs around is less impressive than you seem to believe. I know, I have one. I seldom wave it around, because I know that it means I know a lot about what happens when teachers who had formerly been either senior secondary school or primary school teachers try to teach middle years science for the first time in a school in Perth in Western Australia in the early 1990s… and a little bit about a lot of other things. Simply having a PhD is no guarantee at all of relevant scientific expertise, nor of intellectual honesty.
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Actually two of your sources referenced the unsupported first source. You also ignored the multiple pages of evidence arches are still forming which directly contradicts your earlier claim. Your science denial is on display in virtually every thread you post in. This is where you start to lecture us on intellectual honesty again, right? 
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And waving a PhD around instead of actual competence is a staple of pseudoscientific deception.
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You might test this theory by actually presenting answers to the questions.
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I don’t see how archaeology could to that even in principle, let alone in practice.
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I literally did. Leave on the side of your plate my comment that the evidence doesn’t support a global flood, and read my reply again.
I answered each question as clearly as I could. And rather than engage in good faith, you rejected all answers out of hand as you had already intended to do when setting the traps.
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I don’t see where you attempted to answer my questions in good faith. You picked and chose a couple you wanted to address, but ignored the rest.
Unfortunately, your studies today will contain only the evolutionary bent regarding origin of religions. You must dig on the internet and through old libraries of books to get the truth about how polytheism emerged from monotheism and not the other way around.
“the history of the oldest civilization of man is a rapid decline from monotheism to extreme polytheism and widespread belief in evil spirits.”
Stephen H. Langdon, Semitic Mythology, Mythology of All Races, Vol. V, Archaeol. Instit. Amer., p. xviii, 1931; in Arthur C. Custance, Evolution or Creation? The Doorway Papers , vol. 4, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, p. 114, 1976.
“The first departure from monotheism seems to have been in the direction of nature worship. Sun, moon, and stars, the great representatives of nature, and fire, air, and water, the great representatives of earth, became objects of popular worship. At the first they were merely personified; then men came to believe that personal beings presided over them. Polytheism has a strong affinity for fallen human nature.”
Henry Clarence Thiessen, Lecture in Systematic Theology, revised by Vernon D. Doerksen, William E. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, p. 38, 1979
" Rev. Wilhelm Schmidt, has provided us with a valuable book entitled The Origin and Growth of Religion , which has as its basic thesis the concept of a monotheistic faith being the first religion practised by men. Schmidt offers many powerful arguments showing the original belief in one God and shows the inadequacies of theories that are often evolutionary. He shows that the evolutionists often have almost no evidence for their theories, or they use only selective evidence to support their opinions. Such theories as animism, ghost-worship, totemism and magic’s being the origin of man’s belief in God are all refuted, and this is done by constantly referring to evidence found from studies of primitive peoples."
Wilhelm Schmidt, The Origin and Growth of Religion , Cooper Square, New York, p. 158, 1971
OK, here goes, just for you:
Didn’t answer this one in my first reply post. The fact that the Australian Aboriginal people did not even notice it in their 60,000 years on that continent strongly suggests that it did not kill everyone on the whole globe with the exception of those on the Ark.
Edit: missed this one in my first post too. Within reach of oral history, prior to the time it was written down. Somewhere between 2500 and 1500 years BCE. I’m not sure the dating is a point of difference between local and global interpretations of the Deluge story.
See above. For me at least, the answer is not all the people on Earth. It may have been all the people in the region. Later in the thread I commented:
Treating these two together:
So, fair enough, there were two related questions in your OP which I did not explicitly answer in my response. The answers were implicit in other things I said, but perhaps I should have laid them out like this right from the start.
Now that I have explicitly answered each of your questions (or demonstrated that I already had), it is incumbent on you to engage seriously with those answers.
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Question for any of the Hebrew buffs on this thread; what is the etymology of the word Charabah in Genesis 7:23? Does it necessarily have to refer to dry ground in general or is there any precedent for it possibly referring to a geographical extent? Could therefore the totality of the Flood’s destruction be limited to this “Charabah” locality?
You mean v. 22. It comes from a root that means “to dry up.” It’s few occurrences are always used explicitly in contexts vs. waters/seas (Exod 14:21; Josh 3:17; 4:18; 2 Kgs 2:8; Ezek 30:12; Hag 2:6). It seems to be used in a pretty limited way, but the emphasis is on the “dry” ground vs. something covered by water, not with geographical extent.
It’s an interesting question, b/c Gen 7:22 would be the only reference that would assume a large area (regardless if global or regional) (though Hag 2:6 is pretty general).
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I wonder if Charabah and Araba, the word denoting the region south of the Dead Sea Basin, have a common root. For that matter, I wonder if a similar root can be found between Charabah and Havilah or Arabia.
Yes. When the tsunami hit Aceh in late 2004, water entered from the coastline up to 5-10 kilometers into the city of Banda Aceh.
I was fortunate not to have been hit by the running water and survived to the city border.
Video footage from the beach is widely circulating and the water is rolling up in pitch black from afar as high as a hill.
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Your response does not deal with my point. I asked specifically how archaeology could establish whether monotheism or polytheism came first. Your quotations are just sheer assertions that monotheism came first, without any archaeological justification.
Archaeologists dig up buildings, pots, excavate in caves, etc. How can they tell what the worship of the earliest man was from that? Can they tell from the cave paintings of oxen etc. whether the artists worshipped one god or many? And what about cultures that have left no remnants, other than the bones of their members, cultures predating Egypt, Babylon, the cave painters, etc.? How do we know what those silent men believed?
It isn’t within the power of archaeology to determine whether the first religion was monotheistic or not.
My point is not to assert that monotheism was a late development. My point is that we have no way of telling, from archaeology, what the earliest religion of man was.
Your sources, being from Zondervan, are likely written by people who have decided, for reasons of theology (not archaeology) that monotheism came first. They have the right to their opinion, but if they expect the world to believe that archaeology has shown this, they need to provide the steps in their reasoning, from artifacts that have survived. I suspect that if they tried to provide such steps, they would fail, because archaeology can’t take us into the minds of the most ancient peoples, the peoples who lived in periods before we have any archaeological data to go on.
If you want to say that the earliest people were monotheist, you can do so; but when you claim that archaeology has proved this, you are going beyond what you or anyone can demonstrate. You’d be better to make a straight faith claim – that you believe the first men were monotheists because the Bible depicts Adam and Eve and monotheist – than to pretend that science supports that claim, and be embarrassed when someone challenges you.
Bad Christian apologetics does more harm to Christianity than good.
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