Daniel's flat earth

The Shape of the Earth

Disregarding the dome, the essential flatness of the earth's surface is required by verses like Daniel 4:10-11. In Daniel, the king “saw a tree of great height at the centre of the earth...reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” If the earth were flat, a sufficiently tall tree would be visible to “the earth's farthest bounds,” but this is impossible on a spherical earth. 

https://lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm

That's a fallacious inference for two reasons:

i) Human distance acuity is limited. 

ii) It fails to consider how the prooftext is introduced: 

I saw a dream that made me afraid. As I lay in bed the fancies and the visions of my head alarmed me (Dan 4:5).

But dreamscapes are notoriously surreal. Because dreams are imaginary, they aren't bound by what's physically realistic or possible. 

Is Christian opposition to science artificially selective?

Other 19C Bible readers, while comfortable with the general idea "that the Bible was written in terms accommodated to human understanding" and while generally seeking "to reconcile apparent discrepancies between science and Scripture by careful reinterpretation of one or the other," were nevertheless uncomfortable with recourse to the idea of divine accommodation in Scripture when it came to the new biology. Scholars like Edward Pusey (1800-1882), Charles Hodge (1797-1878), and John Dawson (1820-1899) accepted the reinterpretations of Scripture that had arisen as a result of Copernicus' work on cosmology and even the more recent discoveries of the new geology–at least insofar as these established an ancient age for the earth…With respect to Darwinian biology, however, these same scholars were generally opposed to making a similar move–at least given the present state of scientific knowledge.

…there do remain in the modern world not only young-earthers who regard old-earthers as "unbiblical," but also geocentrists and flat-earthers who regard everyone to their "left" (including both old- and young-earthers) the same way–as dangerously liberal in their approach to Scripture. The Bible, these Christians insist, must trump in all cases what unbelieving scientists says; we cannot pick and choose. Those who no longer believe in geocentrism (or flat-earthism), they allege, have capitulated to science even while pretending that they have not. They no longer adhere to what the Bible clearly teaches–in passages like Joshua, for example, where the sun indisputably stands still. I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 408, 434.

1. This raises a legitimate issue that deserves to be met head-on. Theologically, evolution raises the stakes in a way that antiquity of the universe does not. Human anthropology is central to Christian theology in a way that geology or geocentrism is not. So it may well be that some Christians are inconsistent on this point. 

2. However, even if where they draw the line is driven by theological motives, and to that degree, arbitrary, it doesn't follow that such distinctions are necessarily arbitrary. Indeed, it begs the question to treat all cases alike unless they are alike. That's not something we an settle in advance, apart from exegetical scrutiny. So there's nothing intrinsically ad hoc about treating these issues on a case-by-case basis, because we don't know if they're all of a kind unless and until we examine them. Even if theological motives sometimes exert undue influence, it's logically fallacious to invalidate a position for that reason alone. We must still evaluate the interpretation on the merits, whether or not impure motives played a role in the conclusion. 

3. The theory of evolution remains scientifically–and not just theologically–controversial in a way that astronomy and geology do not. So at that level alone, the comparison is inapt. It's very difficult to turn evolution into a workable theory. You don't have to be a Christian fundamentalist to say that or see that. 

4. As I've often detailed, questioning flat-earth cosmography doesn't require any knowledge of modern science. The endlessly reproduced three-story mockup wouldn't jive for attentive observers in the ancient Near East. 

5. Modern readers don't come to the geocentric prooftexs as a blank slate. We're inclined to consciously or unconsciously filter that through Ptolemaic astronomy and the Galileo affair. But the OT wasn't using that paradigm. There's precious little evidence that OT writers shared the Hellenistic Greek theoretical interest in celestial mechanics. 

6. The meaning of Joshua's Long Day is far from straightforward. 

i) Joshua's statement is poetic. Notice the parallelism. 

ii) In addition, the narrator is summarizing a description from a book that no longer exists. So we can't compare his summary with the full text of the primary source. We lack the larger context. 

iii) The miracle is describe from the phenomenological standpoint of an earthbound observer: the position of the sun at Gibeon, and the position of the moon in the Valley of Aijalon. That's a perceptual, local frame of reference. 

At the very least it describes a supernatural or preternatural optical astronomical illusion. Maybe something more. But the details can't be reconstructed from the poetry or the summary of primary source that no longer exists. 

Hydrodynamics

One issue regarding the scope and historicity of Noah's flood is the depth of the flood waters. I recently ran some questions by a field geologist who specializes in fluvial geomorphology. Before reproducing our exchange, I'll quote something I recently said:

Regarding Gen 7:20, the text doesn't say the waters rose to a depth of 15 cubits above the mountains. The Hebrew text simply says the waters rose 15 cubits above, and the mountains were covered.

So "15 cubits above" may well have reference to ground level, which was sufficient to wash over the surrounding hillside. Think of a flood plain or river basin skirted by hills. Keep in mind that "mountain" isn't a technical term in Hebrew, but a synonym for "hill".

With that in mind:

Hays

Is this a correct understanding of the issues:

i) In some river systems, the riverbanks are higher than the surrounding terrain. Due to periodic flooding, which deposits silt and coarse gravel, the riverbanks build up over time. They become high ground in relation to the surrounding terrain. 

Geologist

Yes, the coarse material carried by rivers tends to settle out on the margins of the channel during floods, thereby building levees and high ground right next to the river.  This means that the surrounding valley bottom can readily flood to the level of the levees when the levees do (eventually) overtop in a big enough flood.  The Mesopotamian rivers are classic examples of this kind of river (which tends to be in estuarine environments).

Hays

ii) Is it the case that riverbeds acquire layers of silt? If so, does that mean riverbeds rise/become higher over time?

Geologist

Rivers can aggrade (fill in) or incise (cut down) over time depending on the balance of sediment they receive to the power of the flow to move it. 

A river with a balance between the two will just shunt sediment on downstream. 

Hays

If there was nothing to counteract the accumulation on riverbeds, would that make rivers shallower over time?

Geologist

The transport capacity of the flow keeps the channel open.  Most channels are adjusted (in the width/depth) to carry what is known as the “bankfull” flow, which tends to be close to the annual high flood.  Floods are events that overtop the banks and spill out on to the floodplain or surrounding terrain. 

Hays

iii) Is that offset by (i)? Do rivers retain the same general depth, even if the beds are higher, because the banks are higher? 

Geologist

In aggrading rivers (those with excess sediment) the bed can fill in and the river can shallow — unless the sedimentation on the floodplain raises it (which happens if the floodwaters can spread across the floodplain).  

Hays

iv) This seems to imply that the low ground becomes incrementally lower in relation to the river banks (or levees) as the riverbanks become incrementally higher due to the cumulative effect of flood deposition. 

Geologist

Yes, this can happen when a river aggrades.

Hays

v) The upshot, I take it, is that it takes less volume of water to inundate the surrounding terrain when the terrain is lower than the riverbanks. If the surrounding terrain was higher, it would take more water to submerge the area, or submerge the area at the same depth. 

Geologist

What happens when a river aggrades and builds its levees up higher is that when a big enough flood comes along to overtop the higher levees then the surrounding terrain is inundated under deeper flow.

Hays

vi) Not only depth but breadth. It takes less water for the scope of a flood to be on the same scale if the surrounding area is low ground compared to the riverbanks. 

vii) Is that intensified if there's something like a mountain range (or ridge of hills) to form a barrier that contains the water? 

viii) I've read the claim that "Noah's flood" couldn't be merely regional because Mesopotamian topography is a drainage system, so there's nothing to keep the water building up. It will pour downriver into the Persian Gulf. 

Geologist

I don’t understand the logic of the argument here; a big enough flood there will of course eventually drain into the Persian Gulf, but it could be a monstrous flood while doing so because it can take a lot of time to drain the whole valley bottom after if floods under tens of feet of floodwaters that the levees keep from flowing rapidly back into the channel.  So to me that claim you reference is simply nonsense that demonstrates the writer doesn’t understand what he/she is talking about.

Window or mural?

A quick follow-up to my previous post:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/09/flood-topography.html

This illustrates a limitation or weakness of many OT scholars. Most of them are trained in the literature and languages of the ancient Near East. As a result, they interpret passages like Gen 2-3 or 6-9 in abstraction from the physical would outside the text, which the narrator and his audience inhabited. This can lead to overly literary and generic interpretations that are cut off from the concrete world to which the text refers. They view the text as a mural rather than a window.

Despite his secular outlook, Montgomery has a realistic eye for the world of Gen 6-9 that's ironically missing in many commentaries on Genesis. That's clearly a problem for liberal scholars, but it can also be a problem for conservative scholars. 

We're scolded by scholars (e.g. Peter Enns, Paul Seeley, John Walton) on how we ought to construe Genesis in light of its ancient Near Eastern setting. That's an undeniably valid principle, yet they themselves suffer from a blinkered view of what it means, due to the tunnel vision of their training and interests. They fail to take their own principle as seriously as they should. 

Flood topography

Around the 19-20 min. mark, secular geologist David Montgomery has an interesting discussion regarding the topography of river deltas and flood patterns. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY

In big river deltas you'll find that the high ground is right along the river and the levees of the river, and the land slopes off to the side, [which is] why, when it floods, the coarse sand settles out right by the river and builds the high ground.

The far area though, when the river overtops its banks, as big rivers eventually do in a big enough rain somewhere upstream, basically the surrounding terrain fills up like a bathtub. Well, the delta of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers were very similar…flooding the valley wall-to-wall at a depth that you couldn't stand in and survive [might] have been the origin of the story of Noah's flood.

That's a model of a catastrophic regional flood. Standing water needn't be terribly deep to make an area uninhabitable.

Clock management

I'll comment on this:

https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/10-questions-to-ask-a-young-earth-creationist

Here are 10 questions I’d like to ask of young earthers:

1. Can we start by agreeing that the Gospel is more about the Rock of Ages than the ages of rocks?

The centre of the Gospel is the crucified and risen Christ, and everything in the Old Testament leads up to that. Jesus, and not the age of my rock collection, is the heart of the Christian faith. 

Cutesy but disingenuous–as is clear from the next question (#2). 

Eschatological earthquakes

 2 For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses plundered and the women raped. Half of the city shall go out into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be cut off from the city. 3 Then the Lord will go out and fight against those nations as when he fights on a day of battle. 4 On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives that lies before Jerusalem on the east, and the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from east to west by a very wide valley, so that one half of the Mount shall move northward, and the other half southward. 5 And you shall flee to the valley of my mountains, for the valley of the mountains shall reach to Azal. And you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him (Zech 14:2-5).

The gist of this oracle is a supernatural earthquake that provides an escape route for Jerusalemites while walling off their retreat from the invaders. The invading army is on the wrong side of the new hill to pursue them.

The oracle trades on the fact that parts of the Middle East are seismically active. To a modern reader, there's nothing surprising about the imagery. Seismologists and geologists study faults which preserve trace evidence of massive ancient earthquakes that reshaped the landscape. And they make projections about future earthquakes. 

But it's anachronistic to read the text that way, in the sense that while the original audience was acquainted with earthquakes (v5), they had no experience of earthquakes sufficiently cataclysmic to transform the topography in the way this text describes. An earthquake that massive would kill all the inhabitants. There'd be no surviving observers to transmit memories of the disaster. 

So the text reflects a knowledge of tectonic activity that's hard to explain if OT prophets were merely children of their time. They never witnessed an earthquake on the scale necessary to have anything remotely resembling the impact described in the text. So how could they extrapolate from lesser earthquakes? That's an issue whether we construe the oracle literally or figuratively. 

The earthquake at the crucifixion

http://ntweblog.blogspot.com.br/2012/05/more-on-earthquake-and-jesus.html

The law of superposition

The law of superposition poses a prima facie challenge to young-earth creationism. Here are two definitions:

His [Steno's] principle of superposition of strata states that in a sequence of strata, as originally laid down, any stratum is younger than the one on which it rests and older than the one that rests upon it.
Within a sequence of layers of sedimentary rock, the oldest layer is at the base and that the layers are progressively younger with ascending order in the sequence. This is termed the law of superposition and is one of the great general principles of geology. 

http://www.britannica.com/science/law-of-superposition

All things being equal, the law of superposition is a reasonable, commonsense principle. It is, however, easy to come up with examples in which that principle can literally be turned upside down. 

For instance, suppose I dig a grave. After I'm finished, I have a pile of dirt. Because I was digging down, the layers are now in reverse order. What was originally the bottom-most layer is now the top-most layer. Each layer is now older than the one on which it rests and younger than the one that rests upon it. The layers are progressively younger in descending order. 

Archeology frequently excavates mounds. But what was the order in which layers were heaped on other layers? Does it represent layers of progressive occupation? Or is this the result of digging into the ground to reuse old materials? 

Let's harmonize Genesis with a fake universe

BioLogos has a stable of scientists to defend deistic evolution, viz. Denis Alexander, Louis Ard, Francisco Ayala, Stephen Barr, Sean Carroll, Francis Collins, Darrel Falk, Karl Giberson, Denis Lamoureux, Clarence Menninga, John Polkinghorne, Dennis Venema.

Likewise, it has a stable of Bible scholars to reinterpret the Bible, or simply nix the authority of Scripture, to accommodate the scientific establishment, viz. Peter Enns, Kirk Daniel, Charles Halton, Tremper Longman, Scott McKnight, Kenton Sparks, John Walton, N. T. Wright.

They consider it essential to the survival and credibility of the Christian faith for theology to adapt to mainstream science. 

But when they labor to harmonize Gen 1-9 or Rom 5 with the hard scientific evidence, with the "real world," what's the frame of reference? Consider the following?

I began bemused. The notion that humanity might be living in an artificial reality — a simulated universe — seemed sophomoric, at best science fiction.  

But speaking with scientists and philosophers on "Closer to Truth," I realized that the notion that everything humans see and know is a gigantic computer game of sorts, the creation of supersmart hackers existing somewhere else, is not a joke. 

I asked Marvin Minsky, a legendary founder of artificial intelligence, to distinguish among three kinds of simulations: (i) brains in vats, (ii) universal simulation as pure software and (iii) universal simulation as real physical stuff. 

"It would be very hard to distinguish among those," Minsky said, "unless the programmer has made some slips — if you notice that some laws of physics aren't quite right, if you find rounding-off errors, you might sense some of the grain of the computer showing through." 

If that were the case, he says, it would mean that the universe is easier to understand than scientists had imagined, and that they might even find ways to change it.  

The thought that this level of reality might not be ultimate reality can be unsettling, but not to Minsky: "Wouldn't it be nice to know that we are part of a larger reality?" [Incredible Technology: How Future Space Missions May Hunt for Alien Planets ] 

For a reality check, I visited Martin Rees, U.K. Astronomer Royal, a bold visionary and hard-nosed realist. "Well, it's a bit flaky, but a fascinating idea," he said. "The real question is what are the limits of computing powers." 

Astronomers are already doing simulations of parts of universes. "We can't do experiments on stars and galaxies," Rees explained, "but we can have a virtual universe in our computer, and calculate what happens if you crash galaxies together, evolve stars, etc. So, because we can simulate some cosmic features in a gross sense, we have to ask, 'As computers become vastly more powerful, what more could we simulate?' 

"It's not crazy to believe that some time in the far future," he said, "there could be computers which could simulate a fairly large fraction of a world." 

http://www.space.com/30124-is-our-universe-a-fake.html

What if they are harmonizing the Bible with a cosmic computer simulation? 

Consider, too, how this theory cuts the ground right out from under historical geology or evolutionary biology. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that genetics and paleontology do indeed point to the evolution of man from microbes. Ah, but that's virtual evidence. The Grand Canyon is Virtual Reality. The population bottleneck is Virtual Reality. And so on and so forth. 

They scoff at mature creation, yet entertain a cosmic computer simulation as a realistic possibility. It's incredible that God would make the world "mature," but a serious scientific conjecture that an advanced alien civilization might simulate earth. 

I don't think it's true. I'm just responding to them on their own ground. 

The geological column

http://creationwiki.org/Geological_column

Scripture and the sphericity of the earth

Evidence of the earth's sphericity follows from the teaching of Moses himself, who stipulates (according to Philoponus) that the earth was initially entirely covered with water [Gen 1:2,9-10]. But for this to take place it would be necessary for its form to be spherical…Water tends to cover earth's sphere also in a symmetrical way, in a form of a sphere of larger diameter. According to Philoponus, the fact that earth was entirely covered by water necessities this theory, and so demonstrates earth's sphericity. E. Nicholaidis, Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization (John Hopkins U Press, 2011), 37. 

Correlating the flood

I'm going to list a few considerations regarding Noah's flood:

i) At the risk of stating the obvious, the Bible commits us to the historicity of the flood. I realize that there are hipster churchgoers (a la Rob Bell) who don't think the Bible commits us to anything we don't want to believe. 

ii) If the Bible teaches a global flood, then that's what we're obligated to believe in. I also think the global flood interpretation is worth exploring and defending. 

iii) Assessing the nature of the flood is an interdisciplinary task. On the one hand, a Christian geologist has no particular expertise when it comes to exegeting an ancient text. On the other hand, an OT scholar has no particular expertise on flooding.

iv) To some extent, these are mutually interpretive. There's the meaning of the text. Then there's the historical event outside the text. The real-world referent. On the one hand the text gives us some pointers on what to look for. On the other hand, we need to know something about the world to identify references in the text. Correlating the word with the world is a two-way street. To some degree, we can't know the answer to one without knowing the answer to the other, and vice versa. 

v) If young-earth creationism is true, then there's a tight timeframe into which to shoehorn the flood. If old-earth creationism is true, then there's more play in terms of when it might of happened, and what historical or prehistorical events might trigger or match up with the flood account.

vi) Noah's flood is sometimes dated by reference to Mesopotamian flood traditions. One problem with that inference is that ancient people tend to depict the past in terms of their present. They didn't know much about the past. So they update the past, using their own time and place to pencile in the details. 

vii) Noah's flood is sometimes dated to the Bronze Age or thereabouts by synchronizing Gen 4:17-22 with ancient Near Eastern archeological periods. One problem with that inference is that Gen 4:17-22 might be quite localized. 

viii) Underlying the question of how to synchronize that pericope with ancient Near Eastern chronology is the deeper question of how secure that framework is. As Noel Weeks recently observed:

The earliest historical records that we have, and here I mean written texts, go back to around 3400BC. (This is on conventional dating. There are huge problems in ancient chronology and we cannot be certain about dates that far back.) This earliest evidence comes from southern Iraq. Incidentally, we can’t read the text but it looks like writing. It’s not until about 3000BC or later that we can get anything that we can read, either from Iraq or Egypt. If you want to base evidence on things other than written texts, it gets rather difficult.  

http://ap.org.au/images/2011AP/AP0211.pdf

ix) How many commentators on Genesis have extensive firsthand experience of Mideast geography? When they comment on Ararat, how many of them have actually spent much time poking around hills and valleys in Armenia?

Seems to me that only an archeologist or geologist who's done fieldwork in the area is really qualified to comment on that. Otherwise, it's just a textual abstraction.

x) And, of course, we must also make allowances for changes in the regional topography. Indeed, the flood itself might have altered the terrain. So historical reconstruction is a bit circular.