You can spend trillians of dollars trying to "proove" that the entire universe was a huge accident that just happened out a vacuum, OR you can read Genesis 1 and have a brief idea where everything comes form.
And how did you arrive at the conclusion that this particular
creation myth is the right one?
Just read the entire "debate". Hilarious stuff for 1909, forget 2009. You should have asked him how the billions of species all fit on the boat, and why if god wanted to kill all the animals in the entire world he chose to do it by flooding which wouldn't have killed most of the fish or any of the whales. Why spare the fish and whales, every one I ever met was a bastard.
Actually the change in salinity of the new global ocean (mostly freshwater now) would likely result in the deaths of many marine wildlife.
1) Anchored plant and animal life formerly at shallow depths would now be under tens of thousands of feet of water. That would all die just from the pressure, not to mention the lack of light.
2) Animals that rely on rapidly moving water would suddenly find themselves in a vast, calm sea.
3) Eggs laid on rocks and such would suffer the same problem as in #1 - pressure.
4) A much larger ocean would mean that there was much much more volume in which life could live. Prey animals could become exceedingly scarce due to this fact alone, not to mention the fact that everything's dying in general due to altered salinity and environments.
So yeah, marine life would be pretty much screwed too.
And then at the end of the 40th day, all the water magically went away, I guess from the same mystic realm that God conjured it from in the first place.
Good point. But I wish that were applicable to *all* discussions that try to prove creationism (or it's cousin, ID) using the scientific method. These people are essentially the modern equivalent of those that thought the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. At least at that time, they had the excuse of rudimentary science and a despotic authority that threatened to torture and execute them if they believed otherwise. Creationists have no such excuse.
It's the good old God of the Gaps.
At one point in time, Ra carried the Sun across the sky.
Nope, we orbit the Sun. Sorry pal, you're out of a job.
Atlas once held up Earth. He's unemployed too, Earth doesn't go anywhere because it is responsible for its own gravity, not some external source.
A giant whale was once responsible for creating the tides (some Native American folklore). He's done gone and beached himself, because the Moon is responsible for the tides.
Supernatural beings once had a booming job market. Unfortunately, the better our technology gets, the less of them we seem to find. Either they're getting better and better at playing hide and seek, to the point where no one believes they exist at all, or else they never existed in the first place.
They've sure got a hell of a union though, because it seems like some of them just won't give up and officially be relegated to the category of "mythology," along with thousands of other deities and the like.