Well, do you know what's under the ocean? Land. We still have pangaea :) Cept, the Pangaea you're talking about removes about 30% of Africa

Care to explain in a reasonable, practical and believable way how Noah got 2 of every species of animal into the ark?

Bear in mind that there would have been many more species than there are today due to species becoming extinct over the years and remember that there are still thousands upon thousands of species still likely to be discovered in the future.

I ask because this is one of the major reasons that for me discredits the entire bible.

Why? Why are you skeptical of carbon dating? It's just as reliable and accurate as most other scientific methods.

As a scientist, one thing that makes me so mad is the fact that everyone assumes that 14C is the ONLY dating method out there. It's great, but it won't work for anything to do with plate tectonics, because tectonic processes generally take millions of years.

Just so you know. No scientist would use carbon dating for something like dating Pangaea.

Also, fun fact for today, Pangaea was not the only supercontinent in the history of Earth. Wilson cycles, it's all Wilson cycles.

I have no clue as to what you are talking about.

There is no land under the ocean, there is sea floor. Basalt, to be preicse, which is denser than continental crust so it gets covered by ocean. If it was land, it wouldn't be covered by the ocean.

I liked that interview, it was funny!

Dawkins is a smart fellow. I enjoyed his commentary regarding Blair, too.

I have so much respect for the man because he's humble enough to admit he could be wrong and there could be a god(s), though all evidence points towards an absence of any.

6.9 on a scale of 7. That's where I am, too!

It's funny because I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of an unseen force that started off the process of life on earth if it could be proven, which is why like you, I leave open the possibility of a creator until it is proven one way or another.

I am however opposed to the idea of God as a caring, loving identity that cares about humans. I'm also opposed to the idea that the bible is a factual, accurate and divinely inspired book.

You only have to look in detail into the bible and it becomes blatantly obvious that it has no scientific, logical groundings at all. If you can discredit portions of the bible as being inaccurate then the rest of it is also spurious, to put it politely.

OH! Ok, now I understand what you're saying. Yes. I agree.

*slow clap*

That is completely what atheists believe. It makes religious people too angry if we say it all the time, but if you don't believe in god because of a lack of empirical evidence, you pretty much have to think anyone who does is an idiot in some respect.

I consider myself an Atheist if I had to put a label on what I believe but I just want to distance myself from the comment you just made.

I don't consider anyone who believes in whatever they want, be it fairies, Santa Claus or the man on the moon, to be idiots in any way shape or form. I might consider them naive, ill-informed or gullible if they blindly follow and belive without a good knowledge of what they are putting faith in.

But Idiots? Sorry, no.

I am an atheist, and this is not what I believe. Please do not make stereotypical remarks about an entire group of people based on the beliefs of a few people from that group.

Can anyone deny the power of myth?

Richard Dawkins is my 16 year old son's favorite atheist. My boys went to one of his lectures at UC Berkeley a few weeks ago.

Really? My favorite atheist is Douglas Adams.

We see, here's how I can explain it.

IF there is a God, and IF he created the earth, and IF he said he would cause a worldwide flood, don't you think He'd have the power to move every animal to the ark?

Plus, there may not have been as many species back then as speciation has occurred for many years.

So your reasonable, believable and practical way for explaining how two off all the animals on earth got to Noah's ark is basically "Dunno, magic or sumfing"

This comment is probably one of the most asinine that I've heard you come out with. To verbally shrug off someones questions about the account of Noah's Ark with a comment like this is ridiculous.

Ridiculous on so many levels.

It was an if statement. IF A then B. So I said, IF there was a God that created the entire world, and IF he knew in advance he was going to flood the earth, wouldn't you assume he would have the power to get every animal on the boat?

No, it's not ridiculous.

Everything (ok not everything), but most everything that deals with numbers will be a bell curve. Evolution, actually, works more with a bell curve than Creation.

So, when the world was created, there were a set amount of animals, they started reproducing with each other, and speciation started to occur. It is entirely reasonable to assume that there were many more species of animals 1000 years ago than there are today. It is also entirely reasonable to assume that there were many more species of animals 1000 years ago than there were when the flood happened.

It's all based up the IF statements to be honest with you. The Bible is a very self-contained and self-preserved book.

IF there is a God that can create the entire world, would you not say that the same God could allow anything to happen that he wanted?

Yeah, you'd have to believe there was a God first, but the idea is that if there is an all powerful God, then he can be all powerful.

I'm not going to start arguing with you on that point as you only seem to have a surface knowledge of the subject so I'm just going to address a couple of simple point.

Are you saying that God magically subdued all the Dinosaurs and all other species of animal (however few or numerous you want to argue they were) to allow Noah to get them all in the ark?

Where did he get enough food from to feed them for a year? Bearing in mind the specific dietry needs of each species.

Is it reasonable to believe that at least one of the species pairs wouldn't have died and therefore render said species incapable of further reproduction?

How did Noah and his small family cope with keeping order between so many different species, cleaning, feeding? Have you any idea how much work would have to go into keeping 2 elephants alive and healthy for a year let alone hundreds of thousands of animals.

I've heard this one before. It's code for "Cannot be verified, has no basis in reality so best not to even question it. It just is"

IF there is a God who could have created the whole world, why was he also not powerful and intelligent enough to not screw it all up? Christs sake, according to the bible God's plans got f**ked up by a talking snake! That doesn't smack of an all powerful God but rather of an inept screw-up. IF he's so powerful and amazing and benevolent and loving why the crap we see today in the world? (rhetorical question, please don't start preaching to me about God's love and Jesus sacrifice)

All evidence points to IF there is a God, he's not "all powerful" he's a bit crap.

Like I said before, if He had the capacity to do everything else, why not this small little detail?

Plus, the animals didn't have to be adults. And the flood lasted for 150 days, not an entire year. Nevertheless, that's a moot point.

If he gave us free will to sin, I don't see how it's his fault. I'd blame the humans that sinned.

I won't preach to you. But, the reason why we see crap today in the world is because of sin. It's because we're allowed to wrong. God gave us a free will, and many use their free will for bad, not good.

If you're talking about natural disasters and stuff, I don't have answer for you, because I am not going to even try and explain why God allowed natural disasters to kill people.

I wasn't trying to provide evidence, I was just trying to prove empirically the Bible.